Richard Avedon: beauty and beholder

Submitted by Susan Weber on May 27, 2009 - 08:23

Image of a woman in a corset The New York Times recently featured a retrospective article and slide show of Richard Avedon’s photography from 1944-2000. Looking at twig shaped models sprinting in high heels across a voyeur's stage, I wonder.

How would we react if a highly acclaimed photographer glamorized the foot binding that once kept Japanese women's feet petit and therefore desirable? Would we recoil in horror? Would we rationalize it as a cultural norm of another time, focus on the stunning quality of the photography? Ignore how the women suffered?

How do we separate art from abuse? Self abuse, perhaps. A model chooses her profession. But if I, the viewer, ignore repression in art, am I culpable of that repression, or the message it sends?

What bothers me is the obliviousness of Avedon’s time and also of this time. Take the 60s, purportedly all about liberation and human rights. To his credit, Avedon was ahead of his time when he included women of color and women of emotion (including laughter!) in his work. But for me, equating beauty with the impoverished bodies of his subjects doesn't bode freedom for women of his day.

I think of Scarlett O’hara getting her corset tightened up by the parlor maid in Gone With the Wind. Miniscule waistline. Poor little belly. Poor diaphragm trying to breathe. Poor Scarlett.

Telling, that when searching for a photo of foot binding, I had to choose between macabre and sanitized. Corset images ranged from present day erotic to peppy newspaper ads from 1894 admonishing mothers not to corset the children! Avedon's photos? Copyrighted masterpieces, of course.

Aesthetic. Morality. Breaking free of flawed preconception. Sacrificing our desire to see starved beauties in exotic turns of black and white.

For the sake of, what? Maybe for the sake of our own souls.

Image of woman in Au Bon Marché corset, public domain

Susan Weber's blog
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closer to the heart

Submitted by Jay on June 3, 2009 - 12:27.

Well that certainly turns towards the tragic.
Philosophy has always seemed a part of art to me, whether overt ("How many times can a man look up, before he sees the sky") or instinctual ("you don't miss your water, til the well runs dry").

It has been said that all of art, philosophy and religion has to do with humans wrestling with their own mortality and "life eating life" as the world's method of operation. Philosophers and spiritualists couldn't be taken seriously if they shied from tough subjects, the best artists seem to feel the same. Picasso's Guernica or Penderecki's Threnody certainly are not "beautiful" to behold, yet Mozart found beauty enough and to spare for his Requiem mass. Guess it takes all kinds of processing. "Beauty" is not a very useful term, I try to make and experience an art whose goal is closer to "connection." That leaves me open to whatever needs to be said.

Mirrors are infamously unforgiving. I suppose that leaves the forgiveness up to the holder and the viewer.
In any case, today's turkey sandwich is a bit harder to choke down.

Context matters

Submitted by Susan Weber on June 3, 2009 - 21:02.

The internet is a weird medium for sharing art isn't it? You may be having lunch while I'm describing a dead bird. In a concert setting, I can craft my show, build a context for sorrow or tragedy, care for my audience members.

I'll think of this next time I post. We who are living should live!

Don't hold back

Submitted by Walt Campbell on June 5, 2009 - 15:28.

Oh, Susan, please don't hold back on our account!

Back in high school I ate lunch through all kinds of stories and poems that made me queasy: "Teddy" by J.D. Salinger; "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell; "Dracula" by Brom Stoker; and Daphne DuMaurier's "The Birds." Great works all.

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I once made a similar point

Submitted by Jay on May 29, 2009 - 08:06.

I once made a similar point to a college prof regarding dancers maligning their feet by working en pointe (plus other physical effects). He infuriatingly admonished me that that is the way dancers have shaped the art and that one must sacrifice for one's art.

Pompous, but he had a point. Trumpeters develop scar tissue from wailing high notes for too many years. Writers...well, what do we pay phsychically for all those thoughts we sow?

Free will runs rampant here, on the part of the artist (the model), the presenter, the beholder. The interaction of all of these wills makes a clear moral picture very hard to find. But answers that are true/false, black/white are not necessary. Holding up the mirror and discussing the view are.

On my walk home

Submitted by Susan Weber on May 29, 2009 - 15:22.

I like what you say about holding up a mirror to questions of morality in art. Does an artist's intimate interaction with life attune her to asking questions, making philosophy part of the art process?

The same day I published this post about Richard Avedon, I had the following experience, which enters my art journal in the form of a (somewhat graphic) poem.

On my walk home

I see the blackbird

fluttering lamely

into the wet street.

I stop to look,

afraid

to get too close.

This very day

I questioned the artist’s urge

to glamorize

stick figurines of fashion.

Would I exploit

this wounded bird

to film its tragic crawl?

Some compulsion

pushes me

into the house.

Returning,

with my camera,

I find a lifeless mound

of wings and talons.

A car has been

a quicker draw than I.

This time I creep closer

to see its eyes

squirted from its sockets.

I keep the camera shut.

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