Thomas Struth
I have been staring out my window again when I
should be writing. I know: it happens every weekend, every time to I
want to encompass in words the idea of a work of art. It would happen
even without the snow—or the slyly composed chaos of Thomas Struth's
photographs at the Met.
Looking at the swirl
I work too slowly, and I hate the screen. I hide
from Word's illusion of a blank page, framed by the dirty, white monitor
and again in gray. Then I face its image anyway, just as neatly framed
in near monochrome, in the sky.
A blizzard eliminates distractions, like people.
It redefines each branch and the edge of every rooftop, and yet they
almost vanish behind the swirl of snow. The weather service gives the
visibility a deceptive precision, three miles, but from my chair,
everything looks white. Up close, half-frozen water covers the window,
reiterating and hiding its transparency. The drops have grown much too
large for rain, too soft and clear for ice or snow.
Even without the snow, the parking lot out back
tempts me to find an unobstructed view. Walls to either side offer an
open space. The building across the street cuts that off that opening,
but light traffic escapes along the side street to nowhere I can see.
The rooftops promise a view above it all, to an imagined infinity, but
their parallels converge on a perfectly real skyscraper. It could almost
recover focus and symmetry, but for pipes and water towers off in every
direction.
I could follow the parallel lines into the scene,
if not for the minor details of a glass pane and a nine-story drop. I
could look on it all, objective and apart, if I could only separate
myself from its geometry or explain where it begins and ends.
Obviously I am seeing my surroundings differently
now, after a two-part retrospective at the Met. Upstairs, two small
rooms take it to the street, with the street scenes that so stick in my
mind. Downstairs, a fittingly maze-like gallery encompasses Struth's
career. It moves rapidly to his more well-known work—huge,
preternaturally crisp color photographs of plants, families, and people
taking in famous art. The smaller show, mostly his early work in
black-and-white, makes a great introduction, and it turned my head
around.
I had long dismissed Struth. I had seen only his
recent photos and their harshly casual compositions. I took their large
scale for a cool rehash of late modern painting within quotation marks,
as I often had for Jeff Wall. As for the tourists in churches and
museums, those people looking at people looking at art looking at
people, how glib and how knowing. I was looking too fast for closure and
not looking hard enough at the swirl.
Snapshots of Modernism
One can forgive me for seeing the chaos, because
Struth intends it. His family portraits border on amateur photography,
like the snapshots one's friends never stop sharing. They minimize
equally a sense of belonging and individual tensions. People line up as
best they can, from left to right. I imagine Struth waving his arm again
and again to get everyone into the frame.
These families cling to each other and their
possessions. Their lineup, but not only their lineup, hints at symmetry.
Gerhard Richter holds his young son, his wife their daughter. Behind
him, one sees his painting of a skull, and the photograph recalls its
blurred photorealism. To her left a flower evokes Richter's painted
portraits, with their appreciation of her youth and beauty. Struth's
casual arrangement almost discards it all, but he cannot stop finding
more to cast aside.
Struth flirts with conventions of mass culture and
high art, but with awareness and with style. Outdoors, he shoots a
forest canopy as one big all-over painting. Dense vegetation pushes
everywhere, in and out of the frame. The more Struth travels the world,
the less he evokes a firm sense of place.
He shoots directly into the sun, giving space
between the trees the reality and potential of a drip painting's bare
canvas. Again one thinks of Richter. Like his abstractions with a
squeegee, Struth coolly mechanizes the Abstract Expressionist brush
while reinventing its impulsive beauty. Besides, do forests all look the
same, and how should one take the series title, Paradise?
One wonders how little remains distinct in an age of globalization.
One wonders even more at one's own untrained eye.
The viewer takes on responsibility, too, for the obsessive, controlling
symmetry—and for its refusal to add up. If the camera faces the scenes
frontally, like in late Modernism, so does the viewer. Struth uses a
twin frame to turn one forest into a diptych. One might be seeing it all
through a picture window, as much a private possession as Richter's
flower.
In practice, I find most of the portraits and
landscapes too pat. The first try too hard to flatter the wealthy
subjects. The second try too hard to flatter the viewer. However, they
make Struth's best photos that much better. They make it easy to
understand his fascination with how one views a work of art.
Art history as tourism
The church and museum photos sure look clumsy
enough. Think of all those vacation pictures in which other tourists
keep getting in the way. At the Vatican, they pack in front of Raphael,
his altarpieces, and his Madonnas like subway ads at rush
hour. In Venice, they look everywhere but at the S. Zaccaria altarpiece.
Their comings and goings almost parody the majesty, timelessness, and
introversion of Giovanni Bellini's saints.
Then again, Struth tempts one to imagine the
artist at work. He needed a long exposure to pack in those tourists. In
Venice's Frari Chapel, they flutter like ghosts in front of the Titian.
One thinks again of the skill and art behind Richter's blur. Then, too,
almost lost in the immense interior, two seated visitors to the Frari
mark the frame's edges. Like the altarpiece, they remain perfectly
clear, a reminder of the photograph's own inhuman scale and precision.
Perhaps the subject imposes its own mix of
symmetry and chaos, quite as much as the photographer. At the Louvre,
visitors drift off to the left. But then, so do the masses huddled on
Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, people again mark
left and right edges. A woman stands almost dead center, caught in
Impressionist Paris in the rain. The three can hardly avoid it. The
curators, after all, lines up the paintings to either side of a central
partition. Struth calls attention to museums and churches as
institutions, while asking whether power, markets, and ideology can ever
entirely control art history.
The woman in Chicago stands just to the left of
center. She breaks the pattern while also balancing Gustave
Caillebotte's figures coming forward. She looks down the half-empty
street to where it converges on a distant building. She could serve as a
viewer of Struth's own early street scenes. One might be looking in a
mirror and seeing one's back, as in a René Magritte.
Like her, Struth's viewer takes it all in but
without standing above it. At the Art Institute, Caillebotte's ornate
frame parallels the partition's molding above, Struth's photographic
frame, and now the Met's own architecture. Struth obliges one to see
past and present, composition and chaos, space and object, viewer and
viewed. He poses them not as opposites, but as necessary components of
art and human history. It is time that I got back down to street level
myself.
Human and inhuman traffic
Since the late 1970s, Struth has photographed
cities from Europe to Asia and America. Soho was a crumbling residential
and industrial neighborhood back then, not yet a decaying gallery
district and shopping mall. Europe was a sprawl of quiet histories.
Either way, however, Struth prefers a residential life all but devoid of
people.
Struth plants his camera right in the street. The
vantage point makes the artist and viewer part of the scene. The dearth
of life and hint of danger take one out of it. So does the
larger-than-life catalog of the world.
From the middle of the street, buildings to either
side exaggerate perspective. So do the frequent lane markers and train
or trolley tracks. Often, something at the end of the street fills in
the vanishing point, like a church steeple in Düsseldorf. However, one
can never quite separate the geometry of vision from the actual
convergence of winding streets. One lingers instead over the variety and
the details, from facades to the aerials angling every which way. Even
the steeple, sticking awkwardly out of a row of housing, lacks an
explicit foundation or position in space.
Some streets lead to a dead end, and none stretch
on for all that long. Most simply veer off somewhere in the middle
distance. They come to an end as casually as a life. Struth shoots the
World Trade Center from West Broadway. New Yorkers these days talk about
recovering the urban grid after disaster. Struth prefers an obstacle
course.
With such a connoisseur of chaos, should one
remember most the connoisseur or the chaos? Struth holds out the promise
of artistry and the threat of randomness. He offers up urban space as
neither closed nor open. He suggests the deep past of an older Europe
and the transience of modern life. In other words, he models city
streets as public squares.
His more recent street scenes make that model
explicit. In keeping with his tourist shots, he takes an urban nexus
filled with human and inhuman traffic, and he blows it up to poster
size, in full color. People frame the action—while they head out of it.
Marking the edge
Struth owes his documentary impulse to Bernd and
Hilla Becher. Year after year, the litany continues of water towers and
other remnants of Germany's industrial landscape. They make grids of
photos on large sheets of paper. Not long after they began, Jan Dibbets
started printing contact sheets as exercises in geometry and ambiguity,
leaving one unsure how much he composed in advance.
Struth's urban scenes, like some challenging art
installations on the fringes of New York's own urban experience, keep
the insatiability but drop the grid. They keep the suggestions of
randomness and completeness but forget the formalism. They refuse to
settle on objects alone or the present moment. Even objects, like
history and institutions, blend into the human traffic.
The turn to color and scale echoes other German
photography form the 1990s. Thomas Ruff's larger-than-life head shots
translate Chuck Close's debt to Modernism and photography into actual
photographs. Andreas Gorsky's architectural photos, such as library
interiors, show life itself as a beautiful, chilling catalog of
experience. Struth keeps the self-reflection, but in an implicitly human
space.
Images of the city have haunted modern art. To
Baudelaire and early Modernism, cities isolated individuals in dark
places and crippling processes. In guidebooks, cities stand for the old
world and, by contrast, the fear of a new one. In the twentieth century,
cities became industrial marvels and functional creations. Today, they
may instead mean an abandoned space between sites of suburban sprawl.
Struth, strangely enough, hardly distinguishes these understandings.
Minimalism has come to stand for abstraction's
detached geometry. All along, however, it was working through to
something more postmodern. Site-specific work needed the viewer to
complete it. It refused completion anyway, giving way to time and
chance. Robert Smithson and others even made a fetish of the word
entropy. More recently, feminists and others put history and its
politics back into the idea of time.
Struth diverges from the Minimalism of his roots,
but he keeps open the question of time, chance, history, and the place
of the viewer. Even its lingering nostalgia does not ring entirely
false. One can always step outside the scene, so long as one stays aware
of having marked its edge along the way. As I get this far, rain is
washing away memories of the snow. |