Today Mark and I went to a gallery talk at the Dreaming California photography exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum. Bill Owens, Larry Sultan, and Pirkle Jones, the husband of the late Ruth-Marion Baruch all spoke about the work on display. I like the work of all three photographers, and I enjoy thinking about the complex issues revolving around the pictures. Despite the rainy weather, there was an excellent turn-out for the talk. I was so happy to see so many people enthusiastic about their work, and it was great to see the pictures on the wall, larger, and some in color (a far cry from when I discovered Owens’ Suburbia at the art library in Bloomington). I was also very happy that Bill Owens seems to have a great personality, and not the ego of a “typical” artist!
Ruth-Marion Baruch documented hippies from Haight Ashbury and women shopping in San Francisco in the 1960s. The shopping pictures, which I find very interesting, are from the Illusion for Sale series. The expressions of the women are remarkable – they are unsure, they are hoping for something, and they look sharp and ridiculous at the same time. They are often contemplating the illusion, and determining whether they will buy it. Other times, they have bought it, and it is obviously an illusion. One picture showed two older ladies from behind with fox fur collars walking a poodle. They looked ridiculously extravagant and foul. Yet a younger version of those women, from a different angle, would look like an ad you might see to sell fashion today. Pirkle Jones pointed out that these pictures could only be taken by a woman, and I agree that women have a particular sensitivity to these issues.
Bill Owens took pictures of his neighbors living in the suburban communities of Livermore and Walnut Creek in the 1970s. The photographs present the people and places – new houses, new lawns, people living the American dream. Is he making fun of his neighbors? Of course he is, but to leave it at that is too simplistic. The people are often happy, or aspiring to a dream. He presents this happiness. At the same time, we know a nice lawn, a bedroom with a mirrored ceiling, or extravagant manicured nails will not give you a very fulfilling contentment. Maybe the people are truly happy, or maybe they’re not. We don’t know, but what I take from these images, and as Larry Sultan brought up, is ambivalence. There are good times, as a woman smiles standing watering the lawn with her baby in her arms, but we know there are bad times, too, as they stand isolated in an other-worldly suburbia. His photographs do a great job of presenting the weirdness of ordinary suburbs of the 1970s.
Larry Sultan’s work includes some images from suburbs, akin to Owens’ work, and he had an interesting series of pictures about the pornography industry in suburbia. Apparently, in suburban LA, regular houses are rented out to shoot pornographic videos. These large color photos were well-done and somewhat disturbing. They reminded me a little of Cindy Sherman. I preferred the suburban photos. One showed a man inside his house practicing his golf swing on green carpet. Sultan described what took place leading up to a picture he took of his parents in their Palm Springs home. He was fumbling with his camera, and his father grew impatient, so he sat down to watch TV. His mother felt bad about how his father was being insensitive, and “posed” for Sultan by putting on an apologetic face. The resulting photograph is very interesting, and very uneasy. You see the father from behind, sitting watching a baseball game, and you see the uneasy mother, dressed up, against the wall, facing the camera, trying to smile.
What I enjoyed most about going to this gallery talk is that other people see some of the strangeness that exists in modern suburbs and cities. There are questions about identity that are complicated by fashion and advertising. Culturally, we have dreams to buy big houses and have big yards. Isn’t that strange? Why should ownership bring so much happiness, and does it really? Culturally, we have to work a lot so we can buy a lot. But does having a lot bring contentment? Sultan noted that as a culture we look to the pornography industry for passion and intimacy, rather than in our own lives. The dream presented in this exhibition is mostly an empty illusion. And the illusion truly is for sale in many ways. We face pressures to buy and pressures to live “the dream.” This creates problems for the way communities develop, by encouraging suburban sprawl, and it creates all kinds of psychological problems. A promising alternative, promoting conscious living and thoughtful buying, is described on the New American Dream site.
I have always enjoyed the intense color combinations and contrasts of form in Hofmann’s paintings. He is known for paintings where shapes and colors push and pull, often with sharp rectangles combined with expressionist brush strokes. He is a painter’s painter. Classic Hofmanns stand strong on their own, as painting objects with forms and colors that give life to the two-dimensional picture plane.