Memory: Lapham's Quarterly XIII-1

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIII-1: Memory (2020) Another wonderfully wide-ranging collection of snippets, pictures, and essays. Most of it is memoir and reminiscence, usually accompanied by musings on the nature and power of memory. The common-sense but mistaken concept of memory as some kind of record that can be played back dominates these musings. We now know that remembering reconstructs the memory, often so vividly that only careful recording of different instances of the same memory will convince one that they were mistaken.
     A secondary thread is strung on the assumption that a good memory betokens intelligence and wisdom. That makes about as much sense as assuming that good spelling betokens writing talent.
     So what charmed me most were the memoirs, and the attempts by the writers to make sense of their lives by telling their stories. ****

Michel Lambeth, Canadian Photographer

Maia-Mari Sutnik. Michel Lambeth Photographer (1999) Lambeth (1923-1977) was a Canadian photographer with strong socio-political convictions, which at times interfered with his willingness to take on bread-and-butter assignments. His work as sampled here shows not only technical skill and a sensitivity to the human narratives surrounding his pictures, but also an aesthetic based on understanding the possibilities of black-and-white photography. He did work in colour too, mostly on assignment for Star Weekly, a newsprint magazine distributed with the Toronto Star and available separately as well.
     Sutnik clearly believes that Lambeth is a neglected figure in the history of Canadian photography. I think she’s right. He was one of many 1960s Canadian artists who objected to colonial reverence for British (and European) art, and neo-colonial diffidence vis-a-vis American art. Was he a great photographer? No, but he was a pretty good one, as the cover photo shows. He understood the power of black and white, and preferred prints with a short mid-range. He also had the gift of attracting his subjects’ trust, so that they did not feel the need to mask themselves in conventional poses.
     A worthwhile monograph. Sutnik wrote it accompany an exhibition of Lambeth’s work at the AGO. She asked some of his friends to write reminiscences. An online search will yield many images of his photos. **½

Ivan Eyre, not your Group of Seven acolyte

Don Bain. Ivan Eyre Pavilion Gallery. (1999) Eyre was Born in Saskatchewan in 1935, but spent most of his life in Winnipeg, where he taught art at the University of Manitoba from 1959 to 1992. He’s best known for his landscapes, and his blending of surrealism and abstraction in his figurative paintings. I find his work very interesting, but oddly unmoving. Perhaps there’s something in them that’s alien to me, and which I therefore cannot see. That would be Eyre’s take on my response, since he claims that we see only something of ourselves in any painting, and can’t see whatever else is in it. His figurative paintings (whose figures are often himself and his family members) seem to me to be coded expressions of his hidden self. That’s what makes their content interesting. I kept thinking “Freud”, which isn’t a compliment.
     The pictures are often striking in their collage-like layering of imagery and deliberately off-kilter composition. Their enigmatic signs and symbols make them suitable for the kind of public art that proclaims corporate support for culture. They don’t threaten easy social or political readings.
     His landscapes are, he claims, wholly imaginary; at any rate, he doesn’t paint from photos or plein air sketches. Several times on his travels he has discovered a landscape that looks like one of his paintings. He attaches a mystical significance to these coincidences. He’s also made a number of sculptures, which like his figurative paintings combine surrealism and abstraction.

     He’s definitely not a Group-of-Sevenish artist.
     We bought this book on a trip West, when we spent a day at Assiniboine Park and the Pavilion Gallery. Look up Eyre online, the available images cover a much wider range than in this book. It’s a well done summary of his life and work. **½

Flower Guide from 1927

Chester A. Reed. Flower Guide: Wild Flowers East of the Rockies (1927) Revised edition. With 320 Flowers in Color, Painted by the Author. A charming pocket guide, 5-1/2 x 3-1/4 inches, bound in buckram. The pictures are well done, the descriptions thorough, and clearly based on personal observation. The attached scans of pages will tell you more about this book than I can.

Lapham's Quartely XIII-3: Scandal

Lapham’s Quarterly XIII/3 Scandal (2020) Another collection of (mostly) unconsidered trifles adding up to a considerable anatomy of scandal. Scandal violates convention, not morality. Immorality is ignored or condoned to the extent that conventional manners ignore or condone it. But violate a convention, and the whole of society will gasp in horror, clutch their pearls, and avidly gossip about the fall of the great man or woman who stubbed their toe on a pebble of convention.
     True, immorality now and then violates conventional mores also, but since mores change almost as quickly as fashion, what was once enough to cast you out of polite society a few years later may well raise you to the pinnacle of current approbation. And if you flout convention with style and wit, the fashionable people will envy your ability to get away with the most heinous crime.
     The stories told here, most of them in contemporary texts, range from what we would consider minor transgressions of etiquette to major violations of morality and law. The range of present-day judgements on the sins of the past should warn us against facile assumptions of our own moral superiority. Moral behaviour for the most part is mere conformity to the prejudices of the time.
     Another excellent collection. Recommended. Subscriptions and back issues available online. ****

Photography in the mid-20th century: The Picture Universe

Tom Maloney, ed. The Picture Universe (1961) 25th Anniversary collection pf photos from US Camera. At one time, there were many photo magazines, most of them like US Camera thinly disguised monthly catalogues of photographic equipment. The photo captions always specified the camera, the f-stop, and the exposure, and usually also the film, and sometimes lenses and filters. The implication was clear: Buy the technology, and you, too, can be a world-class photographer.
     Well, if this collection is reliable evidence, world-class photographers were few and far between. Most of the photos in this book are safe compositions of safe subjects, including cats. A handful are images we’ve seen in many anthologies, such as David Duncan’s “1,000 yard stare” portrait of a US soldier in Vietnam. The text consists mostly of mini-bios of the more prominent photographers, most of them employed by newspapers and magazines. The notion that photography, even news photography, could be more than a technically excellent record of some momentary event, is beginning to influence picture-taking. There are hints of how photography would change in the 60s and 70s, when photographers began to exploit and extend the aesthetic vocabulary implicit in the medium.
     As a record of US photography, this is unwittingly a pretty good book. It shows us the many then-current competent photographers and images that have been all but forgotten. Then as now, working photographers made pictures that served their purposes, sometimes very well. The limitations of half-tone and letterpress on glossy paper don’t hide the technical excellence of the images. These people knew how to get the pictures they wanted.

    Then as now, a handful of photographers were moving photography beyond the workaday expectations. The few images made by Adams, Steichen, Lange etc seem to jump off the page, in part because they have been seen so often, but mainly because they are so different from the surrounding well-made competent craft.
     Nowadays, photography has become just another medium for image-making. Digital cameras are everywhere, and their built-in algorithms make technical perfection common-place. The emphasis, even for amateur photography, has become the memorable story, the astonishing event, the gob-smacking image, the exotic subject. Images and videos go viral when they confirm the viewers’ suspicion that the world out there pullulates with the weird and appalling, and only the misfortune of being stuck in a dreary backwater prevents one from living a vastly more exciting and terrifying life.
     Has this inundation of pictures done much good? I doubt it. We have lost the ability, or rather the patience, to look. In 1961, good photographers still aimed at making people look again. I think they achieved that objective. That so much of their work now seems merely competent should remind us that they had not yet discovered the full range of the medium. Nor have we.
     There were many other compendiums of contemporary photography. This is an interesting book, but not a keeper. **½

Esther Warkov: the Universal in the Personal

Beverley J. Rasporich. Magic on Main: The Art of Esther Warkov (2003). I bought this book some years ago at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and read it over the last two or three days. Warkov’s technical skill is astonishing. Her inventiveness even more so. This book is an attempt to come to terms with her work, but the author, wisely, I think, doesn’t over-explicate the pictures. She gives us a blend of biography and artistic development, which together with beautifully reproduced images of the pictures show us Esther Warkov as she is, or rather, as she allows herself to be seen.
     Warkov’s drawings are collocations of many images, some layered over each other, others transforming from one into the other. Subtle colouring achieved with coloured pencils over graphite add a feeling of dream and half-forgotten memories. Warkov makes art deliberately, she wants her imagery to mean and to signify. But exactly what they signify she leaves up to the viewer to decode. Allusions to her Jewish heritage, to contemporary anxieties, to modern life, to objects of personal value, these create a dense mesh of – something, which leads the imagination into unexpected byways. Every time you look at one of her pictures, you see something other than what you recalled of it.
     Warkov moved from precisely composed paintings, many on shaped canvases, to drawings on paper, to three-dimensional assemblages of folded, rolled, creased, cut-out drawings. She dubs the latter “three dimensional drawings,” made almost entirely of paper, but looking like wood, rusty metal, decaying clothes, faded photographs, bits of vegetation, vases, gloves, body parts – an exhaustive list would take some time to concoct.

  Tea House. Collection of Winnipeg Art Gallery.

     I like her work as presented here. Partly it’s the sheer craft skill of her work, but mostly it’s the unapologetically personal vision. She doesn’t make art to satisfy some current fashion of subject or style, or to accommodate some perceived demand of the art market. She makes art to make her own life meaningful. She shows us that the intensely and plainly personal is the universal. The book is available on the web, but there’s very little information about her. ****