On Gustav Metzger and the Uses of Photography: Times Critic Misses the Point (Again)

"Frankly, I am mystified. How does it happen that the international art world intelligentsia has rallied around such punishingly obvious, politically banal, morally bullying and aesthetically enervating work?" - Ken Johnson

"Assuming that the critic writes a lucidly as he can, what is the proper subject? . . . What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing? . . . To put this another way, our best critics have the courage to take what seems to the the biggest risk: To forget themselves." ~ Robert Adams

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To Crawl Into – Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938 (1996).
Photograph © Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images (2009).

Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 28 1943, (1995/2009).
Photograph © Linda Nylind/The Guardian.

Ken Johnson, the fellow who passes for a photography critic at The New York Times, is risk averse. This is the second time I have commented on his work. A couple of years ago I posted this longish response to an especially obtuse and mean-spirited review he published of a retrospective exhibition of work by Susan Meiselas. Now he has written this review of two exhibitions of work by Gustav Metzger that are on in NYC. And, once again, Johnson has placed himself, his spleen and resentments center stage.

Let's start from the ground floor. I generally am not a big fan of art world taste makers or the institutions they inhabit. So, I am not here to defend the curators and impresarios from the ire Johnson spews at them. I am more interested in Metzger, his work, and Johnson's sheer, seemingly willful inability to even attempt to take it on its own terms.

Johnson describes Metzger's work as "blunt, heavy-handed and trite" and as "unusually overbearing." Here is his reaction (an appropriate verb) to one of the pieces:

"A yellow tarp is laid out on the floor in the middle of the room. I asked the helpful young museum guard what it covered. He said that the artist wanted people to crawl under it to find out for themselves and to experience “public humiliation.” Under I went and discovered a big photograph of people on their knees, scrubbing a street in Vienna in 1938 under the direction of members of the Hitler Youth. Yellow, you may recall, was the color of the armbands that the Nazis forced Jews to wear. I am sure that I felt less humiliated and terrified than the people in the photograph did."

Johnson, of course, succeeds here in talking about himself. And that seems to be his concern more generally - he poses as the representative, however unauthorized, of all those New Yorkers whose refined historical awareness and aesthetic sensibilities will be assaulted by Metzger. Here are his concluding queries:

"Is the New Museum’s audience really as dim as this show implicitly assumes? Is it a European thing to think that any art about the Holocaust must be important?

Finally, I wonder, what purpose and whose interests are served by an exhibition that treats its viewers with such contempt?"

Johnson attributes responsibility for this assault mostly to those denizens of the art world he seems to resent so much. He pays scant attention to Metzger or his intentions or, indeed, his work. He is more intent, it seems, on venting his disdain. So let's diverge from Johnson's script slightly in hopes of seeing clear of his resentments.

Metzger is in his late 80s. His formative years revolved around the rise of Nazism and the extermination of the Jews. His parents and brother were shipped to the camps and killed. He escaped to Britain, a refugee. As he said of his early childhood in this interview with The Guardian* occasioned by an earlier exhibition of his work in London: "I recently had this clear thought, that those 12 years totally dominate my life, and will do to the last moment of my life."

Johnson addresses this experience brusquely: "The son of Polish Jews who died in the Holocaust, Mr. Metzger escaped from Nuremberg, his birthplace, to England in 1939." And he then moves on. Surely, none of this biographical detail insures that Metzger's work is "important," uniformly or as a whole. But it suggests that we might at least consider that possibility, that we might take it seriously. Johnson seems unable to do so. (Ironically, he ends up treating potential audiences with contempt, assuming they are equally incapable.)

As I read Johnson's review I could almost hear him sneering impatiently: 'Come on Gustav, get over it! You are bumming me out.'
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* The two images I have lifted above are from a slide show that accompanies the interview. They depict two works that, in his review Johnson, mentions as especially objectionable.

Robert Bergman and "the democracy of universal vulnerability"

Untitled © Robert Bergman.

What could make a photographer happier than to have two high-profile critics arguing over her work in a high profile venue? Of course, the premise is that 'it doesn't matter what they say, so long as they are talking about you.' Have a look at this exchange between Andy Grundberg and David Levi Strauss occasioned by a review the former wrote for Aperture of a recent exhibition of work by Robert Bergman.* The exchange (which links to the original review) is located on the Aperture blog "Exposures." I doubt Bergman finds it edifying.

In his review Grundberg devotes many of his column inches to channeling Susan Sontag's moralism and directing it at Bergman. This is a critical approach that I wish Sontag had taken with her. Here is the gist of his criticism:

Nevertheless, there’s a temptation to dismiss Bergman’s pictures as latter-day Bowery Bum photography. Most of his ink-jet-produced, moderately sized prints show us the faces of people he encountered on the streets of major cities in the Midwest and eastern United States. They are posed portraits: the subjects gaze down or away into the distance, or else stare confrontationally at the camera. For the most par t, the people appear to be downtrodden or at least on the outs with conventional society; more than a few seem afflicted with a wasting disease. Unfortunately it is impossible to verify any of the questions a viewer might have about these people, since Bergman calls each image “Untitled” and provides it with only a date. No name, no location, no facts except those given by the lens—presumably Bergman wants his subjects to be open to whatever preconceptions and prejudices his viewers may project onto them. In the context of the gallery, though, this denial of extra pictorial detail seems less a social statement than an aesthetic position: we are forced back on Bergman’s compositions, his use of color, the consistency of his choices of framing, even his decision about which subjects to shoot.

[. . .]

Beyond this, though, it is really Bergman’s motives for choosing to photograph the people he does that remain the central question. Surely he can’t be concerned that these pictures in any way improve the lives of the people they portray, since we don’t know where or who they are. Perhaps the ambition is for our regard of the pain of others to make us more attuned to human suffering in general (come back, Susan Sontag, please), but this aim is attenuated by our prior experience of pictures in the same vein. We might expect anyone conversant with recent photographic practice to know this as an existing critical problem, which leaves us with a far less ennobled idea of what is afoot here: that Bergman is out to convince us that he is a great photographer.

Compare what Grundberg says here with the nearly identical complaints Sontag levels at Arbus in On Photography or Salgado in Regarding the Pain of Others. Pretty remarkable. Pretty banal. Moreover, in the current context this complaint is especially perplexing. Bergman hardly has been self-promoting, at least successfully so. Until recently (and he is in his mid-sixties) he has not sold his work or had gallery representation. This exhibition is, I believe, his first solo show at a prominent venue. As Levi Strauss points out, while his work is not "new," he has not been a denizen of the photo/art world.

Like Sontag, Grundberg seems to miss the point entirely. Maybe Bergman has, as he says, simply been trying to make great photographs. I recommend this interview in The Brooklyn Rail. That is different from trying "to convince us that he is a great photographer." Perhaps in his portraits Bergman is attempting to depict what, in a phrase he takes from a poet who was the mother of his late friend Danny Seymour, he terms "the democracy of universal vulnerability." Perhaps that is a naive view - we are not all equally vulnerable, after all. But still, we all are vulnerable. And it doesn't take much. What I am suggesting here is surely difficult to sort out. I grant that. But it seems likely to be considerably more useful than following Grundberg and Sontag's ghost down the path of moralism.
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* You can find other reviews of the exhibition, which ran last fall, here at The Washington Post, here at npr, and here The Wall Street Journal.

Is Photography Over?

I find this sort of stylized symposium pretentious. This one, which seems to have taken place a few weeks back, hardly disappoints. But if you are the folks at SFMOMA you can do what you like. In any case, they hosted the event, inviting a baker's dozen of noted critics and commentators* to answer the question.
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* Vince Aletti, George Baker, Walead Beshty, Jennifer Blessing, Charlotte Cotton, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Geoff Dyer, Peter Galassi, Corey Keller, Douglas Nickel, Trevor Paglen, Blake Stimson, and Joel Snyder. You can find their brief opening statements at the symposium web page.