My sister's first birthday, 1939. This
photo became the source of The Birthday Party,a painting that was important
to me as I began to work out for myself some of the relationships between art,
photographs and memory.
When I first began to use photos as source material for painting, it seemed to me
uncomfortably fraudulent, like cheating on an exam. I still held a secret conviction that
representation was a kind of visual means test. Yet, photographs had been used by artists
from the beginning, even daguerreotypes, as hard to read as they were, and used by great
representors like Manet, Eakins, and even more surprisingly the throbbing Gerricault. But
none of this entirely quelled the guilt of one whose mother taught him never to lie.
Though I knew, or thought I knew, that art, as Plato said, is always a counterfeit, a kind
of lie.
I showed The Birthday Party in 1985 at Plug-In, as part of a group of
paintings based on old family photographs. At the entrance to the gallery I hung a set of 8
x 10 reproductions of the photographs I'd used. The idea was not to lie, and part of not
lying was to show what was there and not there in the shadows and degraded details of the
black grains of silver.
The impulse behind many of the paintings was the nostalgia that family albums inspire for
moments of time that have been stopped, the impulse to fill in what is missing and to
perfect the moment, to create and recreate a memory, even of things we never knew, a
kind of magic circle, luminous and deathless. But this wasn't true of The Birthday
Party, where figures seem to disappear into the canvas and seep away, like my
mother and my aunts: Ethel, whose husband I saw only once that I can remember, nine
months before The Birthday Party, at a
Sanatorium
in Colorado, dying of tuberculosis.
Betty, who died years later at 86 or 7. And beside my father, on the other side, Bessie,
who'd be dead a few years after this photo was taken. All the adults are now dead except
for my father and Jenny, far left, who's outlived not only her husband Morris, my father's
childhood friend, but three of five children, two of her own and one of two foster
daughters, war orphans, one of whom I loved, when I was ten, Trudy, and she was
twelve.
In The Birthday Party I succumbed to the anxiety of the real, allowing death
and its ghosts to take over the surface of my world, as though this were somehow less a
falsification than nostalgia. The immediate solution was to give up the family album and
its distracting connection between art and memory, to use impersonal sources like archives
and newspapers, and to make paintings of photographs as photographs, simply as bits of
paper and image. Photographs soon became part of the painting itself, and then I stopped
painting altogether. Finally, painting was just too personal, too subjective, for someone
who felt that art had to struggle against its own essence, which is to counterfeit. But by
letting actual photographs enter into the space of the painting itself, I had found a form
about which I could feel that the aesthetic was contaminated by the real, enough at least
that my work was no longer merely a lie. But what was missing, as my work became
increasingly photo-based, was the numinous, the nostalgia and dread, luminous moments
that returned in lightboxes of multi-paneled works, like the brightest memories or
television screens staring at us their wide-eyed disasters.