This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under ejecta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
25.11.2008
This is a bit of a tangent from our usual mission, but last week I saw Zoe Strauss’s show America: We Love Having You Here at the Silverstein gallery on 24th Street in Chelsea. (Follow the link above to see some photos on her website.) The photos are of desolate, wrenching Americana; an old subject, which made it surprising that they were so fresh and startling. They were pictures, I thought, of loss.
The first image you see, walking in, shows a half-expired inflatable Titanic, canting at an angle that makes it appear to be sinking into the grass. A little girl slides down the deck. The picture is not of the girl, though, but of the girl as a ghost of all the people who sank with the real Titanic. She marks the spot where those lives vanished.
In other images, the subjects look out from their own bodies as if they were conscious that those bodies were slowly devouring them. The body appears as a seething nest of soft, quiet animals. Once they eat their fill they crawl off, one by one.
I thought of America’s interest in superheroes: the idea that our secret identities, and the secret bodies that go with them, are stronger, faster, lovelier, and more coherent than the bodies we present in everyday life. It’s a protective fantasy, an inversion of the truth: Clark Kent’s real secret body is diabetic, dissolute, loosely assembled from sentient rats; he keeps it stuffed in a closet while he goes out to paint a mural of the New York skyline on the side of the local drycleaners. (Another Zoe Strauss photo shows a mural like that: the absence of a city, and of whatever dreams the city might represent to the painter.)
If there’s a hollow in the grass, a pothole in the street, it’s safe to assume that somebody disappeared there. That empty space is the image of their departure.