Vincent and The Starry Night

After a period of mental instability which may have been brought on by his friend Paul Gauguin’s decision to leave Arles, Vincent Van Gough agreed to enter the St. Paul Asylum at Saint-Remy in May of 1889. It was there in the asylum, while waiting for the sunrise through the bars of his window, that Van Gogh got the idea to paint The Starry Night. "This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big," he wrote to his brother Theo. This was the genesis of the painting that he worked on for two days in June of 1889.

The Starry Night was not a document of what Van Gogh saw outside of his window on that early morning. As he mentions, nothing was visible except the morning star. Since he was not allowed to paint in his bedroom, the painting was largely painted during the day in his studio room below. Much of it is from his imagination – an “abstraction” as he called it. Abstraction in painting as Van Gogh meant it, was something he and Gauguin had discussed as being a painting which was painted from the mind without looking at nature. Van Gogh had decided that such painting was a dead end. In fact, both he and his brother Theo had concurred that The Starry Night was a failed experiment in “abstraction” that should not be pursued. They both agreed that Van Gogh’s paintings from life were much stronger and that life was the proper inspiration for a painting.

Many analyses of The Starry Night attempt to identify the village buildings, and the astronomical objects pictured in the sky, to what Van Gogh would have seen outside of his asylum window. There have been studies tracking back the astronomy that would have been visible on that Saint-Remy June night in of 1889. Trying to look for a documentation of reality in this painting takes away from the artist’s intention of finding a way to see beyond the walls of his confinement, beyond the bars on his window, and out into the freedom of the openness inside his mind. Van Gogh tried to take a blank dark sky with only one visible star in it and paint a dynamic visual impression of it. To that end, none of the astronomical depictions has any basis in what was happening in the artist’s creative vision at the time. The landscape of village and trees are invented. The swirling forms near the center of the painting were put there to create a sense of movement and add visual interest, while echoing the roiling action of the mountains and trees. The entire painting is alive with this flaming, nervous energy tumbling about, that creates a mesmerizing experience of the invisible forces of the universe.

What is interesting to me is that both Van Gogh and his brother decided that the painting was a failure, but it has now become an icon of Impressionist art. It is now one of the most recognized paintings in all of western art. It has also become as much a part of the mythos of Van Gogh as his letters and unsuccessful career. By all contemporary accounts, Van Gogh was a difficult person, who had bad hygiene, drank to excess, experienced personality swings and a needy desperation for companionship. Theo had to pay Gauguin to stay with him in Arles. Despite all of this, a romance has built up around Van Gogh as the epitome of the true suffering artist. This has been crafted from his dedication to his art, his intense letters written to his brother and various film depictions. I must also include his large body of work which although it was not appreciated during his lifetime, has become revered mostly through the mythos of the artist, and has become the ideal of what art should be.

I have a skepticism of the romantic ideas of Van Gogh have been perpetuated in the years since his death. The suffering artist is a destructive stereotype which puts the driving force of an artist’s career into the control of others. There is persistent fallacy that Van Gogh was self- taught. He was not. He was taught drawing and painting by his uncle, who was an art dealer. He attended art classes and ateliers while living in Paris with his brother. In fact, he discovered the style and bright color of the Impressionists while in Paris, which helped him to shed the dark, muddy palette he had developed during his first phase of painting. It was his personality that caused him difficulties. Whether his anti-social behavior was the result of mental illness or just an adversarial attitude toward life has yet to be determined. While employed by his uncle as an art salesman, he refused to sell a customer a painting because he believed it was inferior. This resulted in him being dismissed from the position. It could be argued that he had high standards. It could also be argued that he was acting outside of his role in the job. But it is telling of his difficult nature that he would not compromise on certain ideals regardless of the consequences.

The Starry Night resides in the Museum of Modern art where it is on permanent display in the gallery dedicated to the birth of modern art. These days, there is always a small crowd gathered around it, not so much admiring it, as consuming it for its notoriety – and taking selfies with it providing the backdrop as proof it was duly seen. On one recent afternoon, while wandering the Museum of Modern Art galleries, my partner Raymond and I noticed the crowd surrounding the painting. Drawn by the quantity of persons, we soon realized that most of the people were standing there to absorb the romance of the artist and his work and be photographed in its presence. In a moment of whimsey, Raymond took out his cell phone and called up a video of Don McLean’s sentimental song “Vincent” to provide a soundtrack to the mood and provide a statement on the consumerism that has been constructed around popular art.

View the video we were playing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrNFDxCRzU

“Vincent” was composed by Don McLean in 1970 after being inspired by a biography of Van Gogh. The song was released a year later and became a hit in 1971. The song has had a strong influence on the public perception of Van Gogh as the misunderstood artist at odds with an insensitive public and added to the artist’s mythic reputation. It was in this state of mind that we decided to play the song in front of the painting that it memorializes. Our playful intervention on the commercialization of art did not last long, as the guard who is stationed near the painting for its protection informed us that we needed to be quiet and to please silence the sound on our telephone while in the gallery. We complied and turned it off – MOMA is not very relaxed when it comes to impositions on its collections, but the misinterpretation of Van Gogh and his art still stands.

The self-taught genius is a potent archetype in human society. There is an ideal that greatness can be achieved without the expense of University and the study of getting a degree. If we must suffer, the hope is that our suffering is not arbitrary and useless. There is the belief in the myth of a savior coming to discover our talents and make them known to the public. What we see in Van Gogh is someone who suffered for his art, found a savior in his brother, and eventually found redemption from those who doubted him by his present international renown. What we dismiss is all of the hard work Van Gogh poured into his art – it is estimated that he created three paintings a week to account for the number of works that exist by his hand today. We discount his education in art. We choose to forget that much of his suffering was of his own choosing because he decided to be difficult and contrary. Van Gogh’s contribution to western art has been immense. Ignored in his lifetime, he now brings in crowds to his exhibitions and his paintings command among the highest prices at auction. Because of this it is profitable to encourage the mythos that surrounds Van Gogh. For me, it is the work that withstands the scrutiny, not the embellishments of his life.

© 2019 Arthur Bruso

On Photography by Susan Sontag

The six essays Sontag collected and published under the title On Photography, were first written for the New York Review of Books, appearing there between 1973 and 1977; as she writes, “one generated another. And that one another…”. One of Sontag’s through themes in On Photography, is the democratization of photography and how its omnipresence has been affected by this phenomenon. Sontag saw this expansion as a good thing because she sees a power in photography to capture the past, elevate the mundane to importance, and gives us the belief that the photograph is a document of evidence. So, for Sontag, photography’s chief importance is to document what is, because it serves as a historical record. This becomes one of the most important conclusions of her essays in this book.

A lot has changed in the process and practice of photography since the 1970s, not the least has been the diminishment of darkroom craft, the proliferation of digital photography and the ubiquitous presence and use of the I-phone camera. In the 1970s however, there were no mobile telephones that fit in your pocket, let alone with a camera built in. Telephone handsets were just becoming mobile, there had to be a hard-wired base for the telephone somewhere for it to work, further the range was just a few feet from the base. Cameras were totally separate machines, with no connection to the telephone at all. George Eastman in 1888, through the Kodak company, dreamed of making photography accessible to everyone and thus was the originator of Sontag’s declaration of the democratization of photography. Eastman created the first commercially successful popular camera for personal use with his Kodak Black camera. The Kodak Black camera was preloaded with roll film and could take 100 frames. Once the film had been exposed, the entire camera would be sent to the Kodak laboratory for processing. By 1889, Eastman began offering roll film stock and cameras that could be loaded at home with just the film returned for processing. This ability for the user to change the film proved the catalyst for the beginning of the American obsession with taking pictures.

The drive to popularize photography and make it accessible to the masses since Eastman’s invention of roll film, has been to address the complaints the populace had about photography and its perceived complicated processes: exposure settings, focusing, lighting, film loading and developing the film. By the 1970s, ninety years after the invention of roll film, cameras had progressed to Instamatic point and shoot cameras with drop in film cartridges and portable lighting available when needed via attached flash cubes. These simple cameras addressed all of the consumers complaints about photography except processing the film. Then at the same time, in conjunction with this new ease of taking pictures, a company named Fotomat began dotting the American landscape with their small blue and yellow kiosks and filled this demand with convenient and inexpensive photo developing.

Concurrently, Polaroid cameras offering instant print developing also became widely popular in the 1970s. Polaroid had been perfecting instant developing film since the 1940s, but it was clumsy and expensive. By 1965, Polaroid introduced the Swinger, which was a cheap ($19.95) alternative. Its gimmick was to tell the user when the correct exposure for an image was correct by showing “yes” or “no” in the view finder prior to pushing the shutter. Marketed to youth who were being groomed to instant gratification, it became a sensation. Then in 1972, Polaroid came out with the SX-70 instant camera that offered a larger format image that was color and instant developing, and this for the most part eclipsed all other cameras and processes. What kept the other non-instant cameras from becoming obsolete altogether, was the fact that instant photographs could not be duplicated easily.

However, these ease of use cameras and the subsequent pervasiveness of the photographic image diminished the world into banality and repetition, “the general furniture of the environment” as Sontag describes it. Not only were photographs everywhere, now everyone could take them. But without the modern systems of the internet or social media, distribution of images was still limited to books and printed media - her essays do not consider television or film as photography, only still images. For her “the book has been the most influential way of arranging photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality … and a wider public.” She does not discuss magazine or advertising in her assessment of photography, nor these commercial uses of the medium on the influence of psyches and pocketbooks of the people. On Photography focuses on photography’s development as a popular medium of expression and the growth of it as a profession.

Photography was invented by scientists and amateur tinkerers who were trying to devise a permanent way to fix the images created by the camera obscura and other optical instruments which had been known for centuries. It was a solution to a science problem, that as it was refined was discovered to have commercial appeal. Photography was never developed as an art medium. The first photographs were artless celebrations of what magic the camera could achieve. These deadpan images of landscapes, people, sculpture, and architecture delighted the public with their life-like realism. “The pencil of nature,” said Henry Fox Talbot one of the early tinkerers, offering the idea that photography was about copying nature, not interpreting the world. Says Sontag, “Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.” What Sontag seems to be inferring here, is that photography was artful, like a craft, a skill that could be learned. It had no pretensions rising above a certain skill set into the heady ideas of fine art. It was quickly commercialized, and mass produced, then offered to the people as a diversion and a way to preserve a souvenir of the past. However, it did not take long for artists to see the potential of self-expression or for photography to be used as a tool to assist their painting. Still, the first photographers did not consider themselves artists – despite the labels we may give them now. Throughout these essays, Sontag talks against photography as art. She pursues her idea of photography as democratic and continues the affectation to include that no special skill is needed to use a camera and no special training is needed to compose a photograph. She considers that the process of painting inferior because it is slow and tedious resulting in few images in an artist’s lifetime, while photography is superior since it is quick and can produce hundreds of images in little time. Sontag seems to believe that somehow in art, quantity equals quality and photography should concentrate on documentation.

The dichotomy of documentation versus art in the practice of photography has been a long standing argument. Sontag address this schism in the fifth essay in On Photography, “Photographic Evangels.” She discusses the argument by citing photographers like Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, and Robert Frank, who insist that they are not artists, but presenters of the reality of the world, calling their work “realism.” She also gives time to photographers who do consider themselves artists: Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams. They advocated for a more nuanced and contemplative way of image making, more akin to painting where there is an idea that the media gives form to. She discusses two museum shows featuring photography, which in different ways sealed photography as an art form in the public’s mind. The Family of Man exhibition was a celebration of the positive power of photography to uplift, connect and enlighten. But the second exhibition of Diane Arbus photographs, was an expose´ of voyeurism and showed photography as capable of darkness and of showing the vulgar. Each exhibition in their opposite ways, demonstrated photography as a means of expression, and Arbus more than The Family of Man, a personal way to communicate a vision, since it seemed that Arbus could apply her personal taste for the lurid into all of her images. In the end, after discussing both sides, Sontag tells us this, “Although photography generates works that can be called art – it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure – photography is not to begin with, not an art form at all.” She goes on to explain further that fine art is elitist – a single work produced by an individual. Photography is democratic, it weakens the role of the specialized producer.

I was surprised at these statements. Sontag, in the face of her own contrary evidence, still clings to her idea of photography as not art. Many artists today and at the time of these essays, including myself use photography in their work. In her own essay, Sontag identifies those photographers who are artists. How can Sontag make statements that are so blatantly troubling? Throughout the six essays of this book, Sontag is continually contradicting herself, often arguing for an idea, then against it a few paragraphs later. This makes for schizophrenic reading. But, as I explained earlier, photography was fast becoming a popular hobby at the time of her writing. The marketing of photography was focused on equipment and it proposed the notion that the better your equipment, the better your images would be. Some painters adopted a photorealist style which came to a brief prominence during this time, as if to legitimize and elevate the photographic image to the fine art. Hobbyist photographers however went for the shinier, fancier equipment that promised better results rather than to learn the heady ideas of fine art.

Since Eastman showed us with his simple to use cameras in the 1880s, photography was not only possible with the press of a button, it needed no special education to “master” it. Because of this there is the cultural belief that photography is something anyone can do. The person behind the camera is generally believed not to make a difference and that photographs have no author. Many photography magazines often published all of the information needed for anyone interested in recreating the image featured as if this is all the information needed to achieve the same results. Photography was marketed to consumers as part science and part craft, not art, and available to anyone given the correct equipment and settings. Sontag spend much of the On Photography expounding on this mindset. Even so, she admits that certain individuals did make better photographs than others. She explains this is more to their seeking out particular subject matter more than anything else. She singles out Diane Arbus (Sontag is particularly interested in Arbus. She devotes one entire essay to her), with her fringe characters; Clarence John Laughlin southern gothic; and Charles Van Schaick, who documented the citizens Black River Falls, Wisconsin between 1885 and 1900. Schaick was brought to the attention of the public through the publication of the controversial book Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, who edited the Schaick oeuvre to give the impression that 19th century life in a frontier town was psychologically difficult and peopled with gothic characters.

Not all of the information in the essays of On Photography is erroneous or confusing. Sontag shows insight in discussing the global preoccupation of taking pictures. She understands the voyeuristic impulse inherent in making and viewing photographs. She is conversant with the major photographers that were important at the time of her writing and shows a knowledge of the history and development of photography. She is prescient with the schism that was happening between photography and art in the 1970s. It may have been better if she had taken the time to understand more of general art history, and photography’s place in its development. Having a greater grasp and more insightful knowledge of the various painting movements she cites would have given her responses and declarations more depth. Instead she dismisses a major movement like Surrealist painting with, “Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.” Aside from being eminently quotable, this statement shows little insight into the way Surrealism affected Western art as it grappled with the dark ideas that Poe and Freud opened the door on.

From 1847 to 1857, Charles Baudelaire was engaged in translating the works of Edgar Allen Poe into French. Making Poe available to the French, would have a lasting effect on European culture. The Poe stories influence the young Odilon Redon, who produced his noirs lithographs in the 1870s in reaction to them. Both Baudelaire and Redon, as well as many other artists of the late 19th century became part of the Symbolist movement who were attempting to portray states of mind, rather that objective reality taking a first step toward Surrealism. Redon would reject the Symbolist movement by 1899, but the Symbolists influenced the DADA movement of art. DADAists coming after Impressionism and the Fauves, became the avant garde in art. They decided that art should have no rules and it should be artists who decided what art was. DADA was a period of spontaneity and anarchy in art. But this open freedom of expression, soon became tiring for some painters who longed for some discipline. DADA like the name, was becoming meaningless. Those artists went searching for something else. The recent Freudian theories of psychology, dream analysis, free association and the unconscious mind were taken up by artists as the new movement. After World War I, the writer Apollinaire coined the term Surrealism and the new movement had a name. Surrealism was not only a return to naturalistic style of painting, to better describe the vivid dream imagery, it encompassed all media. Within the visual arts, it incorporated collage, assemblage, automatic drawing and a wide range of visual media to form a deep and rich iconography and expression. If Sontag now finds that photography is a better medium for exploring the concepts of Surrealism, it is because of her limited view on what Surrealism was and the rich territory that it wanted to embrace.

On Photography can be contradictory in its conclusions and erroneous in its commentary. It is not a book to explore the history of art, nor even the history of photography, although there is some of that. On Photography is a book that is best read as one person’s opinionated interest in a visual medium. Some of it is short sighted in its understanding of the larger picture of popular visual art and a lot of its ideas are now dated. Still, it was ground breaking when it was written, because it was one of the first scholarly examinations of photography criticism to be published.

© 2019 Arthur Bruso

Beaver Kill Ravine Botany

Beaver Kill Ravine Botany 9 1/2" w x 2 1/2" h x 6 3/4" d (closed), wood, acrylic disks with embedded leaves, cotton fabric, oil paint on panel, archival mat board paper, varnish

Tucked in the north west corner of Lincoln Park in Albany, NY is a small stretch of wild land officially named Beaver Kill Ravine. As a boy growing up only a block away from Lincoln Park, I knew about this place, only we children called it The Gully. It was an area of the park that had gone wild, either because it had been set aside by the Albany Parks Department as a nature sanctuary, or perhaps it was a wasteland through simple municipal neglect. Whichever the reason, the place had an aura of mystery and threat about it. We were warned by adults not to walk through it because of some perceived danger regarding an open sewer hidden someplace in the trees and the possibility that a child could fall into the rushing water and be swept away and drowned.

To get to my Middle School, I had to walk past The Gully on a daily basis, usually taking the street that followed the northern perimeter of the top of the steep slope that fell away into the ravine. On one side of the street, there was a wide lawn maintained by the park, that separated the sidewalk from the drop. This manicured green space and the blank Victorian row houses that lined the other side of the street, made the taboo Gully seem benign, almost safe. The tops of trees could be seen growing from the sides and bottom of the rent in the ground, yet you could see unobstructed across the gap to the elementary school built on the other side. You had to walk to the edge of the ravine and look down into it to have an understanding of its unruly presence.

After school, most of the boys who had to walk back home through the park took the short cut through The Gully disregarding all of the adult warnings we had been issued. During my first year of Middle School, I didn’t. I was walking to and from school with my older sister, who always wanted to be “good,” which was really an excuse not to mess up her clothes with burrs and because of her uncultivated sense of exploring. However, by my second year in Middle School, I was walking with my brother younger by one year, and we began exploring The Gully together just like the other boys. It was an expedition into the unknown and who knew what we would find.

Although travel through The Gully was supposed to be forbidden, there was a small, but well defined path worn directly through the center betraying the others who had traversed there. After a brief hacking through last summer’s weeds at the entrance, we were swallowed into the ravine by the walls made up of a crumbly shale and the canopy of trees which hid any secrets happening at the bottom. About halfway through there was a low, circular brick wall, covered with an iron lid. Rushing water could be heard from under the lid. This was the mysterious and dangerous sewer we had heard about. At some point during my three years of Middle School, the lid was pried off, reset, then disappeared to be replaced with a few crossed pieces of rebar embedded into the brick. There really was fast, rushing water running through The Gully, which at the time we believed was a sewer line. The lid had been pulled off by other boys who wanted to see the water flowing and would throw things into the brick lined shaft to see what would happen. What usually happened was that the objects were swept away. To where, we did not know, but we imagined all sorts of places where the water went, some farfetched or imaginary, some more logical. Still, we enjoyed our fanciful speculations, while the final destination of the sewer water remained a mystery. Our own falling in and being swept away, like the sticks or paper boats we tossed, never seemed to be a concern for us.

After the explorations with my brother, The Gully was no longer the place of trepidation and wonder it had been when I was younger. For me it became a place of refuge, a place where I could forestall reentering into the chaotic, turmoil of my family life with five other siblings. It became a place where I could begin solving the mysteries of nature I was interested in learning about. And as I was in the middle of my adolescence, it was a place where I could try to understand the changing of my body, indulge in my loneliness, and wonder about where this new yearning for a special someone came from. Even with three sisters and two brothers, I felt alone in the world. My siblings were either too young for me to relate to or headed off into their own lives and chafing at the bonds of family. The Gully was where I could think about what was this life everyone was so interested about that lay in the future.

At some point, I brought my camera to The Gully and photographed it. Those images became the series An Adolescents Appropriation of Eliot Porter. At another time I collected autumn leaves from the trees there. The leaves were collected to embed into resin disks we made with a kit that my brother and I had each received as a gift one Christmas – we usually got gifts that made things. With this plastic casting kit, we were embedding everything we could think of, like rubber insects and small Halloween toys, and insisting that we were preparing scientific specimens. Leaves seemed like a particularly scientific thing to prepare.

Beaver Kill Ravine Botany is a new work that I have recently constructed out of those resin embedded leaves I made while I was in Middle School. After rediscovering them while looking through items I had in storage, my memory of my adolescent insistence on their being scientific specimens sent my mind in the direction of nineteenth century scientific presentation and mid-twentieth century scientific illustration of young adult books. The painting on the lid identifies the trees from which the leaves belong, along with their flowers and seeds. It also identifies the location of where the leaves were found – in the Beaver Kill Ravine, Lincoln Park, Albany, NY.

Part of this project was to research this particular place which had become a refuge for me. What I discovered was that in the original landscape that was found by the Dutch settlers of Fort Orange, there was a torrent and waterfall that ran through that part of the territory which eventually became Lincoln Park. The Dutch named this rushing water Beaver Kill and the water fall, Beaver Kill Falls. For a while, the fall was used to power a mill, but eventually, with growing urbanization after many decades, the kill was covered over by the construction of the park. Although hidden and forgotten, it still rushes its way underground to the Hudson River. The place with the iron lid (and later rebar) was where human eyes could get a peek at the vestige of the hidden Beaver Kill and travel back to pre-settlement days. The ravine itself was cut by the flow of the torrent and waterfall. It is the last remnant of the original landscape. I once came across an early twentieth postcard of the ravine where the parks department had landscaped it as a rustic ramble to encourage tourism. That was long gone when I was wandering its overgrown and neglected paths.

Postcard Marked 1911 Looking Down Into The Ravine In Lincoln Park (Then Called Beaver Park)

Postcard Of The Ravine Marked 1913,

We often think of the ground under our feet as something permanent and immobile. It provides us with a sense of security to believe in the permanence of the ground. But what we perceive as the solid earth on which we walk has layers of history buried under it. There are now plans for the city to fill in the ravine altogether to make a level foundation where a sewage treatment plant is proposed. This latest developmental proposal makes me sad that the loss of so rich a landscape should continue to be desecrated under the banner of progress.

The hand of man has transformed the landscape we take for granted in ways that we do not understand and have even forgotten. A stream gets bricked over or diverted. It becomes buried or filled in and in one generation, what is left are rumors and faulty memory. The buried stream continues flowing its course and eroding along its way buried in the darkness , or no longer bound by its own channel, the undirected water finding a new path, will mysteriously flood basements or streets until angry citizens and sheepish civil engineers figure out that the hidden stream must have its way. Nature does not care about the needs of men or the safety of their children. Nature follows its own laws that have been set before the mind of men began to interfere.