Picture Show
Earlier today we went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s new exhibition of contemporary African-American photography. It was jammed with people, most of them doubtless brought by our mayor’s recent reprise of his Outrage Concerto, first performed as a response to the BMA “Sensation” show last year. My friend Eric remarked that once he’s no longer Mayor, the museum is going to have to hire Giuliani if they want him to keep doing this great publicity work for them.
Incidentally, if you want to see the pic that Rudy's so excercised about, Nerve has it here.
Given the crowd, however, it’s difficult to say what I thought of the exhibition as a whole – there wasn’t the sense of leisure one would need to capture that. Ultimately, I saw some things, not everything, and as is usual with photography was drawn to the things I was drawn to more for reasons it would be difficult to articulate in terms of aesthetics. (I’ll mention one, which was a photo of a group of three midwestern white kids, who seem to be skinheads – they all have nearly shaven pates, and each has an American flag patch on the shoulder of their jackets. But the one in the center, the one the photographer is paying attention to, is wearing a kind of stylish porkpie hat, pulled rakishly down over his brow, and is about to draw on a cigarette with a half-inch of ash sticking off the end. He gazes into the camera from under the hoods of his eyelids, and he seems for all the world to be copping his pose from some jazzman, emulating a very specific kind of Black Cool. His compatriots, in the background, are ciphers, neither smiling nor scowling, unreadable as to their attitude. But the kid in the center is INTO it. It’s a great picture.)
As for the “Last Supper” staging which drew Mr. G’s ire…it didn’t seem very interesting by comparison to the huge variety of attitudes and techniques on display all around it – but this is, as I say, perhaps a matter of taste.
One curious thing that happened to me while I was there did take up a lot of my attention, and gave me some cause to think. Whether it’s all the recent screen-staring I’ve been doing, or simply that it’s time for me to change my prescription on these damned spectacles, I have been noticing that my eyesight seems less sharp in recent months. At the museum, I was shocked to discover that I had to get quite close to the photos in order to make out the titles and other written details – much closer than I’m used to. I started in on a real anxiety moment – the oh-shit-I’m-going-blind sort of thing. It took quite a little while to relax and remind myself that it’s not a big deal to need stronger glasses. Why, though, right there? Something about the fact of the exhibition being about photography, and therefore about seeing, is suggestive to me; moreover, the fact that it’s about blackness, about seeing through the lens (possibly) of race – and here suddenly my anxiety about physical blindness overtakes me and makes me almost literally shake in my shoes! What is it that I am really worried about not being able to see?
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We also saw Traffic this weekend. An interestingly mixed experience – so satisfying in terms of its early approach to the story, in the way the Mexican sequences are filmed, and in the way Benicio Del Toro seemed to embody both ordinariness and heroism at the same time. But… why the flurry of speeches? Why the bad-TV-movie plot about Michael Douglas’s daughter? Why the almost embarrassing lapses in believeability as Douglas goes hunting her down? Or as Catherine Zeta-Jones excercises her mysterious “gift for survival” and manages to go from knowing nothing about her husband’s drug business to bringing Benjamin Bratt state-of-the-art smugglable coke? In the end it wasn’t the afterschool-special didacticism that got me down, it was the shoddiness with which the story played out that left me kind of sour.
Sorry, Mr. Eggers. I guess I should be more grateful to Mr. Soderberg for deigning to make a movie which doesn’t primarily feature Mel Gibson tomahawking the British.
Posted by B T at February 18, 2001 11:38 PM