Final thoughts on the MFA (05/07/09)

 

Nobody doubted it was really Art, except maybe for me.

The dust has settled, and the nail holes spackled. The photographs were up on the wall for one short week, a synerginistic academic exercise of social consciousness and aesthetic presentation. The thesis abstract has been written and is in the process of being bound. In a few days from now, I’ll put on the suffocatingly hot black robes for the third time, to be awarded (“with honors”!) a Master of Fine Arts. Ah, A. D. Coleman, how presciently cynical you were when writing, some 30 years ago, “As almost anyone who has bought one will agree, the M.F.A. degree has only one practical application: it is a work permit that qualifies its possessor to seek employment in the photographic-art establishment.” Coleman also asserted that the MFA serves as a gateway into Artworld acceptance and, hopefully but not necessarily, success. How valuable a prize that turns out to be depends of course on how badly one wants to teach, or how keen one is on Becoming Known. In my case it was always– and exclusively– an imperative step toward tenure. And, under the Fee Waiver program at our university, I hardly paid for the trouble. So lest I come across here as an ingrate and a snob (another incongruous synergy) I’d like to categorically state that I am ultimately glad to have gone through the experience. It provided the impetus to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort stalking and exploring the Historic Theater District of Broadway . . . For most of 2008, I was The Man With The Camera, and the experiences, while ocassionally harrowing, were largely enriching. I met a lot of interesting people, some who always seemed happy to see me. The thirty or so photographs that ended up on the whitewashed walls of the revolving-door rectangular space known as the CSUN West Gallery, while a small percentage of the hundreds I took, ARE representative of SOMETHING essential to the nature of Broadway and its people. 

Real people eating real cake . . .

I think the most essential thing I’ve learned about Art is that it is a never-ending struggle between Form and Content. From the Western Civ perspective, it’s also an often rocky marriage between Commerce and Aesthetics. Working on the MFA did force me to consider questions of style, and to present the work according to definitions laid down by historians and critics. Yet after all is said and done, I still seek refuge in the philosophies of documentarians such as Lewis Hine, who believed– not entirely unlike the so-called Primativists– that people’s lives are the real Art. I remain steadfastly convinced that photographs such as the ones taken in this vein are more about the people in them than the people viewing them or making them, or any particular method or theoretical approach. Agee of course went to the extreme, imploring readers of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that above all else, “Don’t think of this as Art.” Echoing Greenberg’s theory on Art and Kitsch, Agee lectured the ivory tower crowd with a stern reminder that throughout history, great works of personal expression that challenge the zeitgeist are “thus castrated” by social acceptance. (He mentions such illuminaries as Beethoven, Cezanne, Kafka, and Jesus Christ as examples).

 

Special thanks to members of the CSUN Arts Council. Their enthusiasm for the work was sincere and gratifying.

As much as I love some of the images, I don’t consider the Broadway street photography  ”great” by any stretch of the imagination.  They can only be as good as you find them to be interesting. I don’t think my MFA show did much more than entertain and perhaps educate some of the visitors, all of whom I’m grateful to for their time and commentary. I was as pleased by the reactions the photographs evoked as I was dissapointed by the lack of real interest shown by some of the faculty and administration. Ultimately, as I stood in the gallery over the course of a week, watching and talking with visitors, it occured to me that by presenting Broadway as Art I was subjecting the people in the photographs, and the social concepts as a whole, to the kind of leveling that requires Artworld adherents to view the work as a Form/Content/Commerce/Aesthetic entity. This is what must have led W. Eugene Smith, when asked how he felt about his work being up on gallery walls, to comment, “I don’t want them to be seen as pieces of Art. I want them to be seen as pieces of life!” There’s something demeaning in that equation, a nagging sensation in my gut that has been with me since I started seriously making photographs nearly thirty years ago. It appears that all the education in the world isn’t going to expunge the feeling that Documents as art only really matter, as Art, when they are for sale. For this collection of images to resonate and serve some more significant purpose, it has to be catalogued or published as some form of visual anthropology, which is why I hope to donate a large selection of the images to an organization interested in maintaining a photographic history of Los Angeles. Central Library, perhaps . .  . dear readers, I’m open to your suggestions.