Gotham Diary:
Surplusage
9 January 2015
I went to the Museum yesterday. I had to: I needed a desk calendar for 2015. Ordinarily, I order calendars for the coming year in the early summer, but I missed out on this year’s membership offer, if there was one, and in the crush of events from Labor Day on failed to stop in at the gift shop. I visited the Museum once during that time, in October, but I remember staying away from the gift shop, lest I be enticed to buy books.
I could have done an in-and-out at the gift shop without admission to the Museum proper, but the thought of my poor little passport — a small Field Notes notebook in which I paste admission stickers, as if saving up enough stickers would entitle me to the meiping vase that I’ve got my eye on — obliged me to start off the new year with a new sticker, and simple decency required me to put the sticker to use before pasting it in the passport. What to see, though? I was in the middle of running errands, not idling away the afterenoon. I scanned the posters for current shows, and decided on Thomas Struth.
Thomas Struth is a photographer who plays at being a conceptual artist. He takes stunning photographs, many in large format, and there is really no need to know anything about his subjects beyond gratifying the mortal itch to learn dates, locations, and perhaps the names of people. But the title cards on the wall are stuffed full of what lawyers call “surplusage” — no matter how interesting it might be, this information is irrelevant — irrelevant to the consideration of photographs, that is.
Take, for example, Struth’s photograph of a group of men and women standing in front of ranks of old-master paintings. The composition is still and grave but not without a certain winking wryness; the photograph could pass for a minor masterpiece by Irving Penn. We’re told that the people are art restorers, and that they’re shown in the old refectory of a monastery attached to the Italian cathedral in which the paintings normally hang. The restorers are not named, but we are also told — and this is where the surplusage begins — that Struth photographed only those restorers whom he had gotten to know, whatever that means. As I recall, the card blathered on to tell us that this personal familiarity with the people he shoots adds world-historical significance to his work.
You will have seen his large-format portrait of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. I daresay Struth believes that he got to know them, too. To the extent that such a belief wasn’t fatuous — all good portraitists “get to know” their sitters, not in the way that you and I might know one another, but as visual expressions of character — it would be impertinent, as Her Majesty, qua queen, is not there to be known. Some viewers, her subjects among them, might regard her as the heir of minor German aristocrats who have been imposing themselves on the people of Britain for centuries — an old lady with astonishing pretensions. It is arguable that Thomas Struth might actually get to know this woman. But most of us see a long-reigning monarch, the visual expression of a very grand sense of duty. We will allow this exponent of regality to have a measure of private life, but we will define that private life as something that we can never see. As Helen Mirren said of The Queen, we’ll never know how Elizabeth and her family felt about the film — even if they all write about it in their private diaries. Elizabeth Windsor might keep a diary, but Elizabeth Regina does not and can not.
In the middle of the Struth exhibit, there is the arresting photograph of a body cinched to a gurney and tethered by a multitude of cables and tubes to a menacing block of equipment. The situation is presumably medical. The card tells us about the cancer that was oppressing the patient’s optic nerve, about the successful outcome of the surgery that took place after this photograph was taken, and it even assures us that Struth had the patient’s permission to take and to exhibit the photograph. The card adds that Struth was interested in showing the vulnerability of the body in modern medical environments, as though the danger were coming not from a tumor but from the equipment. It is true that equipment can malfunction and cause death, and that many medical procedures are plainly dangerous. But equipment is never attached, nor procedures undertaken, gratuitously. Medicine is our defense against illnesses that are no less dangerous.
Struth’s photograph necessarily misses this point. We don’t see the cancer. If the patient were bleeding, we might well conclude that the equipment had induced it, not some trauma experienced elsewhere. We can see that the patient is helpless, but we can’t tell why, not from the photograph. And that is what is wrong with this picture. Charité, Berlin (2013) is a fantasy image that exploits and renders sensational a moment that is not meant to be seen, just as the Queen is not meant to be known. What I mean by this is that the only people who are allowed to see patients in this patient’s circumstances are family members and medical personnel. The family members will not be seeing a helpless mass of flesh on a gurney, but a known and perhaps deeply loved human being about to undergo a perilous trial. The medical personnel, knowing what every wire and tube is there for, will see just the opposite: someone who, for the moment, is not in distress. The surgeons will probably not see the patient at all, but only a challenge. All of these people — wives, children, nurses, technicians, and surgeons — will be too heavily invested in the patient’s welfare to see what we, the museum-goers, see. The power of what we see, moreover, stems directly from our ignorance of all the things known to doctors and family members. All we see is a body.
Having been such a body myself, having passed through similar circumstances prior to neck surgery, I feel the utter meaninglessness of Struth’s photograph, and its borderline obscenity, very keenly.
At one end of the Struth show, there is a superlative photograph that, in its extraordinary clarity, precludes any need to peek at title cards. The photograph is large, but not as large as other by this artist. It shows a group of tourists standing in the Pantheon. More eloquently than any schematic diagram or architectural rendering, it illustrates the near-perfection of classical proportions. The height of the drum supporting the temple’s dome — a height that is given quasi-human expression by the pillars at the niches — is such that it exalts those who stand inside it, and does not overpower them. The Pantheon materializes the potential for greatness that we all feel inside ourselves; it does not, despite the building’s notional purpose, crush us with the power of extraterrestrial gods.
I have never set foot in the Pantheon, and although I should very much like to do so, it wouldn’t matter if I had a very different sort of experience in the event. I have seen Struth’s Pantheon, and it tells me something as wonderful as it is beautiful.
Bon weekend à tous!