The question therefore is why a novel or a film or a work of art that strives to reach everyone, in itself a laudable aim, is found to be unworthy of liking and indulging in, whereas in the case of the fairy tale, the saga, the myth, and the religious text the opposite is taken to hold? It is hard indeed to think of any Hebrew two and a half thousand years ago removing themselves from the Book of Genesis for being too mainstream and pandering to the wants of its audience, or a seventeenth-century inhabitant of the Setesdal dismissing the Draumkvedet (Ballad of the Dream) as being too full of clichés and platitudes.
Can it have something to do with the legitimacy of the we, that in our day and age it is something authors invoke, speaking with the voice of the we, whereas in those days it was a genuine, collective we speaking, and which perhaps also, quite probably in fact, was the very formative force of that we? Or is the we of today radically different, after the coming of the scientific age, after industrialization, after globalization? Has our almost insanely ballooning population over the past hundreds of years, and the mass production of all things, made the we into its opposite, something in which we no longer find our identity, but in which our identity vanishes, the we having transformed from comfort into threat? I think so, though not without reservation, for we are nothing without the other, and so it will always be, but in our time we may be no one together with the others, and quite without resistance, and this no one, with no personal responsibility, can, as we know from the two great wars of the past century, be a dangerous creature indeed. Resistance, criticism, idiosyncracy are not merely matters of aesthetics, but also of ethics.
Literature, however, knew this long ago; sameness was a threat as early as the Romantic period, in its conception of the genius, who personifies un-sameness, and its cultivation of the horror tale, for what were they afraid of in those tales? E. T. A. Hoffmann, who sensed more clearly than most the depths of the collective nightmare, wrote about automata so human in their appearance one could fall in love with them, and moreover about doppelgängers; Bram Stoker wrote about a person unable to die; Mary Shelley wrote about a scientist who created a human.
This is where we are now: the more people who like a work of art at first sight, the more people who read a novel, the poorer the work of art, the poorer the novel. But also: the better the work of art or the novel, the more it is permeated by resistance, and since that resistance can be surmounted only by means of some large measure of intellectual effort, feelings are all but eliminated. Feelings come cheap in our culture, pervading our TV channels – which are without reflection, our cinemas, and bestselling books. Are these phenomena mutually exclusive? Reaching all, addressing all, is the highest to which any writer or artist aspires, because literature and art are not about books and paintings, but about people – and human life is for all, not for the few. And at the center of our human existence are our human feelings, we meet the world with our feelings, not with our thoughts, which are our means of understanding the world, and, as all of us know, understanding is relative, which is to say it might be valid now, in the time to which it belongs, but not in a hundred years, and never fully for everyone, which would be a meaningless thing to postulate about feelings – that joy, for instance, or anger or love or hatred, did not exist for as long as people existed, or only existed for some, or were only partly true.
And yet: the shame I feel when I look at a picture that fills me with emotion, the thought that it cannot possibly be a good picture, cannot possibly be art. When I look at paintings from other periods, the Romantic age, say, or the Baroque, the fact that they are simple and figurative and pervaded by feeling is not nearly as shameful, they possess a historical value, they express their time. That I find them more valuable and relevant than most paintings from our own day and age is something I tend to keep to myself, since it alters the person I am, the preference transforming me into something Nerdrum-like, quasifascistic even, a tone in my identity almost screaming out whenever I feel drawn toward pictures of that kind from our own time – what sound is that, why this alarm, what is it warning against? The picture shows a tree in a flat landscape, what can be wrong with that?
One artist who explores this borderland is the American photographer Sally Mann. Her pictures are simple, naturalistic, and immensely alluring. What rescues her as an artist, and what makes it possible to rate her artistic practice so highly, and moreover in public, without losing esteem or revealing oneself to be unsophisticated, is the controversy surrounding the series of photographs she took of her own children, published in her book Immediate Family. These were photographs activating provocative issues associated with private life and the sexuality of children, and by taking and publishing them she involved herself in a very contemporary problem, whereby paradoxically it became legitimate to like and approve of her work.
Personally I love her photographs, especially the landscapes in her book Deep South. In contrast to two other well-known women photographers of the same generation, Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman, the appeal of Mann’s photographs is immediate. They are beautiful in a profoundly romantic way, the landscapes very often mistily bathed in soft, dreamy light and devoid of anything that might connect them with our time: no cars, no gas stations, no playgrounds, no hay bales wrapped in plastic. Not a person anywhere in sight. Only trees, grass, vegetation, rivers, skies, sun, and the occasional ruin, a broken-down wall or building.
And is that not essentially a lie? A nostalgic dream of a world instead of the world, an escape from our own? Such places, untouched by modernity, still exist of course, but they are no longer representative.
Indeed, but I don’t think those pictures are meant to represent the places in them, but the way we relate to them. We live in a world that is in constant flux, and these are pictures of things seemingly immune to change, that have looked the same for thousands of years, and their elegiac aspect, the sense of grief and darkness to which they give rise, has partly to do with all the generations that have come and gone there, among those trees, lost to us as we once will be lost to those who come, I think to myself – and this is a Romantic perspective, which led to the development in the Romantic Age of the notion of the sublime – but also with the fact that the time these pictures display to us, which is time beyond us, nonhuman time, is in the process of being lost too.
This play with time is made all the more intricate by Mann having taken these pictures using old-fashioned equipment and techniques employed in the first landscape photographs of the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the same nineteenth-century patina, from the time of Nadar, Flaubert, and Balzac, radiates from them all. They are magical. Together with antique photography came industrialism, which resonates too throughout these landscapes; what captures the nonhuman dimension of time is what humanized it and made it vanish. The irony is almost Orphic: he has her, but if he looks at her she vanishes. At the same time, this time too has vanished. This is what we see in Mann’s photographs. And we know that they are taken in our own time, which has left its own traces: the old technique is imperfect, large areas of light and shadow have leaked into the images, stemming from the moment the pictures were taken, belonging to the accident of that time, yet emanating something ruin-like, something of the past, as if there was an antique quality about even the moment.
The picture I like best in Deep South seems near defaced by the technical imperfections of the apparatus. It shows a hillside, almost completely dark, etched with murky, mineral-like markings here and there, which belong not to the landscape, but to the light, and halfway above the sharply defined horizon, where the dark landscape becomes dismal gray-black sky, hangs a dark semicircle, an inky sun shining over an inky world.
The sequence to which this picture belongs is entitled Last Measure, and the landscapes in it are all battlefields of the American Civil War. One of the best-known photographs of the nineteenth century, by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, is of such a battlefield, strewn with c
orpses, and this image is present in all of Mann’s battlefield images, which are quite without the innocence of her other landscapes, for although they too are about death, in the shape of decay and loss, death in this instance is concrete, physical, of the body – which moreover is absent and so in a certain sense dead too.
Nothing of what I have written here, apart from the concrete description of the dark landscape, is found in these pictures. They evade meaning, the way the world evades meaning, being simply what it is. The photographer’s interpretations of it emerge in the picture, but in the form only of the picture itself, intuitively understood by the beholder in the emotions, feelings, moods the picture awakens. The fact that they do not speak, wordless and yet expressive, is what makes them so powerfully alluring. When I look at a tree in one of these photos, it is as if it holds a secret, as if it contains something unfamiliar to me, standing there draped in its dense cloak of foliage, shimmering almost, weightless and yet heavy, and in this light almost submarine, as if it were the sea and not the wind that washed among its branches. The tree is a living organism, alive through perhaps four hundred years or more. It is a simpler organism than us, and we know everything about what it comprises, what happens inside it and why, and still it bears a secret, is a part of something of whose nature we are ignorant, for the only thing we can see is surface; even when we examine its constituent parts, they become but surface. Oh, what do we need with knowledge? Cells and mitochondria, atoms and electrons, galaxies at the farthest perimeters of space, what does knowledge give us when the secret, which only art can express, the voice of the trees and the song of the soil, the very mystery itself, is indivisible?
This latter point may seem hysterical, and many people will perhaps read into it some kind of disturbed religiosity, but why write, why paint, why photograph, or why read, why visit galleries and museums, if not to probe into the essence, where the utmost issues, those from beyond our human sphere, are accentuated – death, life, the red blood in the green grass?
Sally Mann’s photographs in Deep South are definitely not hysterical, they rest in their own particular calm, yet in this they are definitely veiled in mystery. They are nostalgic, too, and seek the identity and peculiarity of a certain place, values no longer cultivated where meaning is shaped. That their form and symbolism belongs to the standard repertoire of the Romantic Age makes them teeter perilously close to what we call kitsch, which empties content from forms by reproducing them without consideration for the surroundings they once were from or incorporating them in the new, which is what infuses any work of art with life. This is not the case with Mann’s photographs, where the past and what belongs to it is a theme in and for the present, which, as its light falls on the glass plate, is also past.
When I look at Sally Mann’s breakout photographs, those of her children, I cannot help but see the same forces at work in them. Nearly all are taken outdoors, either on the porch, which is neither outside nor inside, neither nature nor culture, but somewhere in between, on the lawn outside the house, or at the river below. A striking number of them show her children, the youngest girl in particular, asleep, which is to say contained within themselves, where what is left for us to see is the body, its powerful yet blind presence. Other pictures capture the children in situations in which they appear not to be aware of themselves or the photographer. These photographs seem to me to have something in common with Per Maning’s photographs of animals, which capture the presence of another creature and its distinct nature without any semblance of awareness as to that nature being visible in its eyes or body. As if to reinforce this similarity, or perhaps to establish a difference within it, Mann’s photographs also include a number of images of children together with animals – one of the girls posing in a dress next to a dead deer hanging out of the trunk of a car, the boy asleep on the ground next to a dog, which is also asleep, the children playing with a dog, the boy posing with two skinned squirrels, holding them out in front of him, the girl doing the same with a stoat in another picture. Sleep and the somnolent, the absence of attention from the surrounding world, becomes a kind of vanishing act, the subjects drift from the world and at the same time come closer to it, this near-vegetative or biological-bestial state that connects the children with the animals and the trees comes to the fore only then. Against this tendency stands another, far more evident and direct, consisting in the many portraits of children looking extremely self-assured, their individuality gleaming in their eyes, or posing almost in the way of actors or models. The posing is interesting, they enter into a role, most often with something adult and thereby also sexual about it, in stark contrast to the otherwise dominant innocence of the child, but also to the aforementioned naturalness: these children’s frames, as children’s frames have looked through perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps more, and which in that sense are timeless, step in these photographed moments into the contemporary age, imitating its poses, which are a kind of cultural language of the body.
My favorite pictures of Mann’s children are however not in Immediate Family, but in another book entitled The Flesh and the Spirit, and in contrast to the former, which are better known, they are in color. Photographs in black and white are always more stylized, for the world is in color, and when we remove the color we heighten the solidity of the motif, making it more concentrated, a tree, for instance, being drawn that little bit more toward the idea of a tree, which is to say away from its physical, concrete, and material reality in which ideas are nonexistent. In a certain sense, transferring this to literature, all novels are written in black and white, details being strictly regulated, never allowed to flood freely, because if they did the novel would be unreadable, as formless as the world it seeks to describe or capture.
In Sally Mann’s imagery, so strictly centered around constant phenomena, body, culture, quasinature, nature, color brings with it a kind of interpretive freedom, the child sleeping in black and white is so obviously a child in a work of art, whereas the child sleeping in color is sleeping in reality, on which a door has suddenly been opened, and what is striking about sleep and the child becomes less striking, as if set free in the world.
One of these pictures in particular finds its force in its colors, it shows a boy, perhaps twelve years old, shirtless, in shorts or long trousers, it’s hard to tell, for the image has been cropped, his eyes also invisible to us. He is standing against a background of foliage and his nose is bleeding. His arms and hands are covered in blood, and he holds them awkwardly apart in front of him, the way a child with a nosebleed does, for the blood is sticky and strange, and moreover his chest and stomach are smeared with it, chin and nostrils too. His mouth is open, but it is impossible to tell if this is in excitement at all the blood or simply horror. The boy’s nonsymbolic, unposingly realistic and therefore trivial presence stands against the green of the foliage. The red of the blood so bright in color, seems to say: blood is not “blood,” but blood, a red fluid that flows in all living animals and humans, neither more nor less.
The same relationship between color and black and white applies to another of Mann’s well-known series, in which corpses have been photographed during all stages of decomposition, from the relatively fresh body with its faintly discolored skin to the gaping, almost clean-picked skull. Mann photographed these images at the Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, where donated corpses are placed out in the woods so that researchers can study the processes of decomposition, primarily for use in police investigations. Some of these corpses are dressed, others naked, some have been buried, others left under bushes or in open land, some have been wrapped in plastic, others placed in shallow ponds, as John B. Ravenal describes in his text accompanying The Flesh and the Spirit. Mann’s corpse images were first published in her book What Remains, in which she is concerned with exactly what the title says, what remains when the human being or animal has died, which is to say the physical body and what happens to it. They are pictures more all
uring than disconcerting, possessing the same aura of elegy, the same grief, darkness, and beauty as her landscapes, death revealing itself to be the reconciliation of man with the soil, for this is what happens, and what Mann shows us, the way the bodies gradually sink into the earth, becoming a part of the landscape, for in these pictures there is no difference between branches and skeletal limbs, both are matter, or between skin and leaves, hair and grass. When the skull seems to scream from where it lies on the ground, it is the ground that screams. Time in these pictures is that of eternity, the perspective that of the immutable, the mood that of harmony. In the color photographs from this place, which has been given the alarmingly prosaic name the Body Farm, quite different things are going on. One of the images shows a man lying on his back in a shocking red jogging suit with a white logo across the chest, he is wearing socks, gray as his hair, and he seems to have been placed out in the open very recently, only a slight yellowing of the skin indicating that he is dead. The ground on which he lies is covered in gravel and leaves, a bit farther away, perhaps ten meters or so, is a wooden fence, some leafless trees cut back below the crown are growing there, and behind them lampposts line a road. A wintery morning light with glinting sun above the road makes everything sharp and concrete. This is a picture of our modern death, a body laid out in the woods of a research center, and the very realism of the present erases any sense of harmony, any sense of beauty, any feeling of reconciliation of man and soil, culture and nature: this is a collision. The head with its dark ear above the purple neck, under a thin branch with green leaves, gives no sense of any unity between human being and the vegetation that surrounds it: never can the void between them be shown to be greater. And another image, of a puce-colored head with white hair, the facial features eaten away, obliterated by hundreds of fat, white maggots, likewise contains no tone of the elegiac.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 5