The Chase
Every since Helen Liggett referred to a quote regarding Lee Friedlander’s “excess of fact” I’ve been trying to chase it down. It really bugs me when people don’t follow up on their sources. The trail on this one is long and silly. It starts here (approximately), in this passage from Liggett:
Street photography is a procedure that connects daily life to representation and thus it is characterized by what photographer Lee Friedlander calls an “excess of fact.” “It’s a generous medium, photography,” he writes (Armstrong 2005,293). In part this is a description of the type of photography he produces. But it is also an acknowledgement of how crowded the referent in un-staged photography necessarily is. Photographic space is more complex than a photographer’s interest in a single object or viewers’ tendency to think of images as being about a single subject. The complexity of any site generates a photographic space that leads to the proliferation of meaning in much the same way that urban life is not fixed, but constantly in motion. The visual cacophony produced by street photography evokes a radical urban aesthetics by pointing to the gap between the work and an audience’s reading of it. What is radical about the excess of fact is that a space is both presented and unfinished.
The Armstrong article is an Artforum review of Lee Friedlander’s 2005 exhibition at MOMA. I drove to Minneapolis and picked that up. It lists the source of its quote as an interview with Friedlander by Peter Galassi in the exhibition catalogue. That massive tome was checked out, so I recalled it. I picked it up yesterday. It cites the source of the direct quote as an article called “excess of fact” in Friedlander’s monograph The Desert Seen. Did Friedlander even utter the phrase? I’m beginning to have my doubts. The University library doesn’t seem to have that monograph; I’ve requested it via interlibrary loan. So close, and yet so far!
Waggery
The first consequence of the retreat of art upon itself is the ban on all pathos. Art laden with “humanity” had become as weighty as life itself. It was an extremely serious affair, almost sacred. At times—in Schopenhauer and Wagner—it aspired to nothing less than to save mankind. Whereas the modern inspiration—and this is a strange fact indeed—is invariably waggish. The waggery may be more or less refined, it may run the whole gamut from open clownery to a slightly ironical twinkle, but it is always there. And it is not that the content of the work is comical—that would mean a relapse into a mode or species of the “human” style—but that, whatever the content, the art itself is jesting. To look for fiction as fiction—which we have said, modern art does—is a propositon that can cannot be executed except with one’s tongue in one’s cheek. Art is appreciated precisely because it is recognized as a farce. It is this trait more than any other that makes the works of the young so incomprehensible to serious people of less progressive taste. To them modern painting and music are sheer “farce”—in the bad sense of the word—and they will not be convinced that to be a farce may precisely be the mission and virtue of art.
José Ortega y Gasset, “The Dehumanizaton of Art” (1925)
With a deferential nod to Waggish.
Dehumanizing for profit
What is it the majority of people call aesthetic pleasure? What happens in their minds when they “like” a work of art; for instance, a theatrical performance? The answer is easy. A man likes a play when he has become interested in the human desires presented to him, when the love and hatred, the joys and sorrows of the personages so move his heart that he participates in it all as though it were happening in real life. And he calls a work “good” if it succeeds in creating the illusion necessary to make the imaginary personages appear like living persons. In poetry, he seeks the passion and pain of the man behind the poet. Paintings attract him if he finds on them figures of men or women whom it would be interesting to meet. A landscape is pronounced “pretty” if the country it represents deserves for its loveliness or grandeur to be visited on a trip.
It thus appears that to the majority of people aesthetic pleasure means a state of mind which is essentially undistinguishable from their ordinary behavior. It differs merely in accidental qualities, being perhaps less utilitarian, more intense, and free from painful consequences. . . . As they have never practiced any other attitude but the practical one in which a man’s feelings are aroused and he is emotionally involved, a work that does not invite sentimental intervention leaves them without a clue. . . .
Sloppy
Larry "Wild Man" Fischer
Watching the documentary Derailroaded last night, I was pondering the relationship between space and creativity. Bill Mumy described following Fischer around on the city streets recording him with a stereo microphone as he composed his songs. He would take them back to the studio later to create backing tracks and clean them up. One of the things I always remembered about Slim was his resistance to “cleaning things up”— Slim always wanted to leave the dirt there. It wasn’t just a matter of sloppy craft (as some people took it). It was more a matter of maintaining the genuine article rather than simulated perfection—it was a punk attitude.
Looking at this picture today, I keep thinking about the tendency of photographs to provide an “excess of fact” (a phrase from Lee Friedlander I keep trying to track down). I got it wrong when I wrote about Helen Liggett’s presentation at C&W 2007, calling it a “surplus of fact.” I do think excess is better. Surfing around looking at discussions of Friedlander, I’m amazed by the large number of people who just don’t get him. I suppose it’s a search for a simple message (like the one displayed above) rather than a complex construction that people are often drawn to. But there’s another way these questions might be framed.
