Anodyne
Thursday, December 01, 2005
 

Untitled (Arrow), 2005

The Untitleds don't come with extended captions, but if this picture had one it would simply read, "For Walker Evans."

There is a terrific Lee Friedlander portrait of Evans in the big retrospective catalog on my desk (fig.388, "Walker Evans, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1972," p.229). Evans sits upright in his hospital bed, hair askew and bleary-eyed behind his trademark hornrims. You get the impression that he's pulled himself together for his visitor, that he's acting better than he really feels. His striped housecoat is open to reveal a creased undershirt beneath. He's smiling, neat white teeth in the scraggly white beard that he affected as he aged.

I was thinking of this portrait yesterday while shifting books in the apartment. Then I ran across the catalog Walker Evans: Polaroids. A nice bit of serendiptity. There's a lot of good late work in this book, a startling number of new approaches from a man in his late sixties or early seventies, a man whose career and place in art history was secure and who thus had no need to reinvent his relationship to every major pictorial genre with what was then considered a novelty camera for amateurs.

As Frank Stella says of Morris Louis, "If his promise were read rightly -- if the structural potential of his spatial dynamics were understood and the disjunctive intensity of his color appreciated -- his [pictures] could lead to a new beginning."

There are lots of sidewalk arrows among Evans' Polaroids. Also painted signs, a decrepit watercolor paint kit, young Yale cuties, overgrown shacks and clapped-out trucks. I admire the street signs most of all, for their indecipherability, and for their strange blunt plainness.

I suppose this image is also a kind of half-assed attempt to make a black and white picture. You can't look at Evans or Friedlander (or Hill & Adamson, or Wall's Volunteer, or Adam Harrison's recent night scenes) and not be drawn to black and white. Yet to me b&w still seems something to work against, not toward.
- posted by cjb @ 9:40 PM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }