Everyday Monuments: The Photographs of Jerome Liebling, at Yale University Art Gallery until September 7
Yale University Art Gallery sometimes hosts exhibitions curated by students, and this is one of them, although I couldn't find the names of the students involved. Sorry, guys!
As you likely knew, Jerome Liebling is a filmmaker, photographer and teacher. From his website:
While a professor of film and photography at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Liebling began what was to be a longtime collaborative relationship with filmmaker Allen Downs; over the following two decades, they produced several award-winning documentaries, including Pow Wow, The Tree is Dead, and The Old Men.
The only film to which I could find substantial external reference was Pow Wow, which is described on Boston Public Library's website thusly:
Using concealed telephoto lenses, the University of Minnesota band is photographed while rehearsing. They wheel and careen to form the figures which look so effective on the playing field, but are more like a Mack Sennett comedy at close range. A film by Allen Downs and Jerome Liebling.
That, and the fact that successful documentary filmmakers such as Ken Burns have trained under Professor Liebling, suggests an interest in documenting and re-contextualizing events. It's interesting how this interest can be seen in the images selected here.
The photographs in this exhibition seem to provide an overview of Liebling's work, a sampler of sorts. If memory serves, they're not arranged chronologically or by subject. As for any continuity that bridges the five decades covered in forty-plus images, the handout suggests an emphasis on surface, in a single paragraph that borders on artspeak gobbletygook. For example:
Although grounded in tactility, the rawness of Liebling's photographs departs from mere physicality and begins to reveal the more intangible underpinnings of his artistic endeavor. As Liebling depicts (a variety of subjects), he reframes surfaces as creative spaces that reveal the range of human productivity and the depths of the human capacity for creativity itself.
The illusion of tactility is present here in abundance, but all rawness is subsumed, in my opinion, by the artist's masterful technique and his obviously very careful selectivity. All images are plumb, posed, and, in the case of photographs documenting the homes of famous New Englanders such as Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson, they're dusted, polished and ready for ticket-holders. As for reframing surfaces as creative spaces that reveal the range of human productivity, I suspect it may be the caffeine talking.
What interested me most about this show is the way that many images either echo or prefigure various personalities and developments in the popular and fine art of 20th century America.
The children in Liebling's photographs from the 1940's are well-dressed and well cared for, and remind me of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedies from the 30's and Hummel figurines, those made-in-Germany decorations common to American homes of the time.
Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy, New York City, 1949, from the artist's website
Butterfly Boy, New York City, is adorable in every which-a-way. I want to give this dapper guy an ice cream, tell him a funny joke and make him laugh. If there's any hint of the intricacies of growing up in the city, perhaps it's his coat 'wings,' extended as if to try them out for the first time; they're more bat than butterfly, and portend adolescent dives through the glow of streetlamps.
Some relationships between Liebling's work and American painting are glaring. The subject of Miner's Wife, Hibbing, Minnesota, from 1983, sits perfectly within the wooden frame of a screen door, her every feature flattened by the worn screen into a Grant Wood painting. The image seeks a worker's socialist revival, but the woman's expression betrays the realization that this is not forthcoming. Morning, Monessen, Pennsylvania, out-Hoppers Hopper. The shirtless Counselor, Camp Taconic, Hinsdale, Massachusetts, photographed in 1980, is an image worthy of Paul Cadmus, complete with erotic undertones.
These similarities come off almost as homage, and strike me as an interesting counterpoint to Post-Modern appropriation, particularly its photographic incarnation with its attendant cynicism, that drove the previous story of art to its end. Clearly this is a body of work that maintains a faith of pictures, and this, for me, is the one point of continuity that rides effortlessly through the five decades shown.
In spite of the exhibition's title, Liebling's photography, at least as represented here, hardly monumentalizes the everyday. But, much more in keeping with its small scale, this work is quiet, masterfully self-assured, and, at its best, like the small barn in Barn, Foliage, Hadley, Massachusetts, it casts a long and interesting shadow.
don warner saklad Said,
Where is there a DVD of Pow-Wow !?…
Bill Gusky Said,
Good question, let me know if you find it. But in a way it kind of paints itself into your head through that description, doesn't it?
Thank you Bill Gusky!
Any contact information for Allen Downs?… or for any galleries' collections of his works?…