L.A. bodies - photography exhibitions in Los Angeles galleries

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1998 by M.A. Greenstein

To lose faith in the human body is to deny the mystic process of life and death, says French photographer Lucien Clergue. Clergue, a native of the archaelogically rich city of Arles, delights in fetishizing the human body as something more than ethnographic - it is for him preternatural, magnificent, divine. Strangely enough, the mounting of his work at the California Museum of Photography (CMP) in downtown Riverside coincided with the exhibition of corporeal imagery produced by Arthur Tress at Stephen Cohen Gallery and Victor Skrebneski at Couturier Gallery, two photographers who hardly share Clergue's Romanticism but who have also earned respect for their handling, so to speak, of the human figure.

Three guys photographing human bodies. "What's the big deal?," one might ask Everyone knows that the city of angels is a hustling, image-making, image-managing town and one more show of female nudes (Clergue), condoms and bare buttocks (Tress) or bosomy bustiers (Skrebneski) merely adds to the debauched Hollywoodesque aura expected by viewers of CNN and Baywatch. But let's not pass over the banality too quickly.

In an era when postmodern critique has ironically become the reigning analytical approach to photographic images and ideas, Clergue's metaphoric nudes seems ripe for ridicule. Who today can abstract the naked female body as an archetypal symbol of Nature and not expect to be scolded, if not for an indulgent male fantasy, then for pudgy intellectuality? The CMP seems to think Clergue is their man. What is baffling is to think that after several years of post-modernist discussion of contemporary photographic practice, the CMP now seems to be leaping "back into the future" with its fall show on Clergue's anachronistic Romantic-Modernism. Director Jonathan Green explains that in keeping with an intellectual and curatorial mission to challenge both immediate town and gown communities, the Clergue exhibition (compared to the museum's Mapplethorpe-Weston display two years ago) is clearly a deadpan rejoinder to censorial pedagogy. Playing to historiography as much as to its own sense of curatorial priority, the museum goes to great effort to put Clergue's metaphysical questions in a big iconographic light by including them in a large exhibition that covers the photographer's unfettered fascination with the archetypal sensuality of the female nude, his dedicated interest in Gypsy life, his Picassoesque obsession with death captured by the bullfight, a group of buddy shots including Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and his recent, uneven study of John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Maybe the most stunning aspect of Clergue's photo practice is that as a disciple of the remarkable semiotician Roland Barthes, he paradoxically remained true to his nineteenth-century sensibilities, embracing photography as an intuitivist psychology of signs and a poetics of the primal and the mythic. Clergue not only rebelled against one master but bucked 1950s documentary photography and is said to have opened the door to the Franco-modernist practice of symbolic photography. Thus, with Clergue's work we are asked to reconsider a "maverick," celebratory attitude toward corporeal form and presence and read it as pre-Existentialist, pre-French nausea and now post-po-mo.

Still, beyond the issue of politically-correct censorship, I do find it hard to grasp the "now" power of Clergue's dowdy pictorialism. In a "been there, done that world," the Frenchman's idiosyncratic brand of modernity looks passe, even in his desire to pay hyperreal homage to the abstract austerity of Edward Weston's biomorphic landscapes. Unfortunately, Clergue's reverence for Weston's photographic biomorphism seems powerfully retrograde and nostalgic after decades of deconstructivist, feminist and queer photographic inquiry into the nude or naked body. To think that Clergue doubts the postmodern cynicism is to say he simply dismisses the parodied desecration of his own metaphysical inclinations and appears shamelessly uninterested in arguments that contest the mythologizing phantasms of his male-dominant gaze. Still, there are moments when his gushing nineteenth-century perspective is wholly forgivable - not for the Greek mythic inferences to muscled water that early critics seem to favor, but for his sensitivity to large-format spectacles of light. In his best visual moments like Nude Among the Stars, Point Lobos (1981), Clergue lures us with his black and white landscapes of twinkling light that dances across smooth skin of unclothed bodies - in this case, pure Playboy setups that frame the female body as the lyrical container of natural mysteries, a surface upon which the Gods plays out their earthly delights. At his imaginative worst, Clergue's voluptuous nature nudes from the '50s and '70s, sprawled out over rocks and foamy seas, remind us of nineteenth-century kitsch Germanic fantasy painting that now repeats itself in digitally affected centerfolds. Clergue seems to think that lounging women superimposed over stormy waters resonates with some preternatural mythology or deep cellular memory of our original amphibian state. Sadly, the photographic simulation reads thinner than the ontological idea. I'm not sure this work would even pass as Lesbian fiction, but I will bet money on a soft porn crowd who ogles the leggy bods.