Arbus
I haven’t been able to shake the well-circulated image from Walter Benjamin of history as a dream; it makes more sense to me to believe that I am awake and the past that inflects my consciousness is a dream. The orthodox Marxist paradigm proposes that we live in a dream of false consciousness where critical engagement/interpretation struggles awaken us. The visual counterpart of this is the orthodox desire to “penetrate the mask” of the subject to reveal the substance underneath; the unorthodox alternative suggests that the mask is the true reality, the substance “underneath” largely a dream.
I attended most of the events when the Diane Arbus exhibition Revelations came through town a few months ago, and it was interesting to listen to Neil Selkirk attempt to explain the nature of reality/perception interrogated by Arbus’s photographs to those who were used to the more conventional take on “revelation.” Selkirk suggested that what was in play in Arbus’s work was the inexact nature of the fit between inside/outside, clothes/roles, belief/actuality. It was striking among the ordinary and unusual people she chose to photograph, the discomfort being palpable in both. In short, she came not to strip the mask but to celebrate it as a revelation of what the subject truly is. At every turn, Selkirk was forced to deal with questions regarding Arbus’s suicide—did the depressing/freakish nature of her subjects drive her to it? I admired his restraint—the only answer worth giving is that life is complicated— there was no reason to believe that her death was in any way connected with her work. The obsession with masks/guarded selves in her work has little in common with postmodern identity politics/dress-up games.
Selkirk produced (and showed) a film reconstructing a slide show Arbus gave shortly before her death that he hoped might dispel the image of her as a “tortured soul.” A new online photographic magazine has released the audio portion (complete with an irritating set of copyright disclaimers at both ends—we get it, it’s copyrighted!) of that slideshow on the web. It’s well worth a listen. I’d like to comment more about some of the other work at Almanac, but I’ll have to save that for later.
Revisiting the Revelations catalogue, I was immediately seized by a quotation from Arbus’s brother, Howard Nemerov, that she had copied into a notebook. It’s from a poem “To Cleo, Muse of History” — “As with the dream interpreted by one still sleeping/ The interpretation is only the next room of the dream” (165). How many rooms do we really need?
