An Informal Approch to Formal Relationships

In a stunning display of clean, medium mastery, Catherine Opie takes over the axillary galleries of the Guggenheim museum for a mid-career retrospective in Catherine Opie: American Photographer, which spans nearly the last twenty years. The work is capricious, contradictory and complex but never ambivalent. This show may make a lot of different statements, but it doesn’t back away from any of them. With each work Opie addresses not only a hyper detailed, often color intense world full of formal relationships, but the power photography has to offer up the very moments of our lives as a work of art.

Each floor of the four organic, bright, cave-ish galleries that spawn off the main spiral of the Guggenheim could be the work of a different artist. The few things that hold together a body of work as varied as Opie’s are: medium, intensity, and a strong grasp of design. For this reason the show’s title is slightly problematic. While what it means to be an American photographer is certainly a topic worthy of varied discussion, it seems like a cheap label for a photographer more interested in making exceptions than making rules. Undoubtedly the headline is an attempt to grasp at this conflict and add a sense of authority to the subject matter; but the work neither needs it nor embraces it.

The first two floors of the exhibition are the earliest and the most disparate. On floor one, a collection of ghost town photographs in black and white shift from large mantle piece sized prints, to collections of small snap-shot gatherings. The city and freeway locations are indicated only in the subversive subtitles to their dogmatic numbered and untitled status. Prints such as Untitled #14 (Wall Street) offer a deafeningly silent linear perspective at pedestrian view, while the series of arabesquing, fluctuating, slithering lines that make up the miniatures of the Los Angeles freeway ramps sing softly in violin. Each photograph rings of Lee Freelander’s intentionally formal observations on landscape, Charles Marville’s less intentional documentation of street forms, and Charles Sheeler’s majestically linear factories; in short an appropriate addition to the proud tradition of formally observant photography.

The following floor’s offering of portraits is a totally new game, not only with its lurid, high gloss color, but its unwavering documentation of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender community. In the early to mid nineteen nineties when these photographs were taken and displayed, no doubt they struck the eyes of more resistant audiences. The figures of Vaginal Davis (1994), a nude, African American drag queen whose naughty bits are obscured by a patch of neon green pubic hair and Daddy Irwin and Mark (1994), a Gay couple decked in leather, the younger of the two clinging to his master’s leg; now actually seem just a little passé. This selection is arguably the least interesting of the show. The portraits reduce each subject to a type, sometimes a just a stereotype, plastered against a candy colored backdrop; which says more the anti-gay culture that inspired the photographs than the subjects themselves. Now, they seem a little comical and unnecessary in an era when everything is shocking and everything has been done. Reduced to the outlandishness of their physical appearances, they can’t stand the test of time devoid of the nuances that would make them individuals.

On the third floor, Opie departs yet again, this time to the expanses of Minnesota tundra and California ocean. Creating the ultimate photographic meditative space, Opie incited her curators to position a series of stills from either landscape in a succession on each side of facing walls in a long corridor gallery. Both the tundra and the ocean are populated with tiny forms that create a greater contrast to the vast expanse they inhabit. On one side, surfers cluster together against the swells and on the other ice houses huddle in a blizzard. The effect is tender, or as Opie calls it, “human”; a gentle reminder in two acts of our insignificance to the whims of this world.

On the final floor, Opie ends the retrospective with grand gestures and personal insight. In the immediate gallery off the elevator is by far one of the most devastatingly beautiful photographs I have ever seen in my life. Ron Athey/The Sick Man (From Deliverance) (2000), is transcendence on all planes. This looming, one of a kind, Polaroid rushes deep sinking blue-black, down to the base of its nine feet where a great, dark figure emerges, as if from a surrealist’s dream or a mythical Louisiana bayou, to cradle the ghostly, tattooed form of a man in the throws of some terrible affliction. The intense compassion of this unconventional pieta is never more evident than in the subtle gaze of the dark man, which radiates sorrow, and the mercy in his gentle embrace.

Across the hall is Opie’s most recent work, a collection of photographs that document her personal relationships. In this context, the photographs or her son and partner, which are really nothing more than glorified snapshots, do not feel out of place. Having looked in so many other directions it seems only fitting that the collection should leave off on a note of introspection. Included are formal studies of her neighborhood such as Abandoned TV (2005), small Polaroids that serve as satirical impressions of the president, and a Rainbow Kite (2005). Introspection is just the place to end a show that has included Gay couples from multiple states, Opie breast feeding her baby son, people plastered in needles and tattoos, and the front doors of Beverly Hills homes. It is an appropriate reminder that while a mind and a lens can encompass an endless variety of ideas, the forms of them always take shape from a mind influenced by the things that happen in and around home.