Surface tensions: Judith Butler on Diane Arbus

In this last piece, the two men cast their gaze somewhere between each other and the camera, and they seem to break through a stark solitude by which so many of the other figures, embracing or no, are bounded. Perhaps the homoerotic scenes open up some place of ease for Arbus, since they more fully relieve the photographer from the scene or provide an articulation of pleasure that is something other than "achieving" oneself as sculpture or synthetics. These are figures who do not attempt to achieve an impermeable surface but who become tangled up in touch and motion in obvious pleasure before the camera.

In Two boys smoking in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962, the figures face each other and the camera at once, as if undecided between the two objects. They smoke in tandem and their feet are close enough, miming one another in proximity. The knees point to each other, though, and the boys stand alone amid an expanse of dirt and trammeled grass and a set of trees that suggest a certain worlding. Unlike the burlesque comedienne, they are somewhere, not only in themselves; and they are with each other, and clearly they have plans (what is in that bag? and why does it shine?). As opposed to the bags that so many women carry (see Woman with a briefcase and pocketbook, N.Y.C., 1962), this one is portentous. It will be mobilized for some purpose at some time, even though it also allegorizes the luminous moment that is the photograph itself.

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Among Arbus's last photos are those of mentally interned patients or of people with Down syndrome. In Untitled (6), 1970-71, three such subjects are playing on the lawn, taking pleasure in their bodies, performing that pleasure. If Arbus is subject to the criticism that she casts psychological illness or developmental challenge as utopic, perhaps a rejoinder ought to be that it would be equally wrong to conceive of psychological disorders as producing lives that can only suffer. Arbus insisted that these photos were "beautiful," and she clearly portrayed the pleasure in the body that could be taken in partial obliviousness to the norms by which it is governed. Her photographs "grant" the bodily tricks and performances of these subjects their dignity.

In most of these photographs there is little wind. The world is very still, and the looks people give each other and the camera are fixed, as if they have been in that position for a very long time. One exception is Child in a nightgown, Wellfleet, Mass., 1957, a relatively early photograph in which the breeze lifts the hair into a set of horizontal streaks and wisps and the sorrow in the child's eyes works in tension with a slight smile and a subtle look of expectancy. She has not yet become the bright white nightgown, and she has not yet gone inside from the weather of the night to compose herself into a statue to be registered by the photographic gaze. The catalogue accompanying "Revelations" lets this photograph fill one of its introductory pages, and, of course, it is a much more reassuring image than most of what Arbus offers. There are reasons to be permanently skeptical of any effort to excise the negativity from Arbus. It seems equally important, though, to notice that she gives us a way of understanding how the body only sometimes becomes resolved into its impermeability, its objectness, its surface, and its solitude. She gives us counterpoints along the way, showing that this surfacing of the self happens over time and through poignant foreclosures. Although we never get behind any of these surfaces (and this may well be a reason to exonerate Arbus from the charge of "capturing" her subjects), we do see in this constellation of photographs how the surface is achieved, interiority refused, but not because of some existential generalization about all subjects. The performer, the freak, the bourgeois couple in their stasis, the bow and the bag in their finality, all emerge against the background of a lost world of touch and motion, one that nevertheless, surprisingly, continues to make its appearance.