February 14, 2007
Across Media at the de Young
A few days ago, I visited the de Young in San Francisco to see “Charles Sheeler: Across Media,” a new exhibition of Sheeler’s work. “Across Media” is not a traditional retrospective. Instead, it focuses on the relationships between the different media central to Sheeler’s art—photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting. I find the exhibition fascinating not only because it offers an exciting approach to Sheeler’s art, but also because it constitutes an interesting starting-point for thinking about the contemporary.
Sheeler seems indeed to have been concerned with creating relationships across media—both within a particular image, and between series of works. The exhibited 1943 painting, “The Artist Looks at Nature,” is a case in point. It is based on a 1932 photograph that portrays Sheeler in the process of making a drawing, which was in turn based on a 1917 photograph. Although the drawing Sheeler is working on shows a dark interior, the painting has him seated outdoors in a somewhat peculiar landscape. It does not depict one particular location, but is forged together of a set of diverse scenes that Sheeler had carried out in previous drawings.
In a talk on Sheeler, Timothy Anglin Burgard (curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) claimed that thinking “across” media is the key to understanding Sheeler’s development as an artist, and to appreciating his art—particularly works like “The Artist Looks at Nature.” I agree that instead of approaching this painting as a display of already existing significances (in the motifs represented in it, or of the media used to produce it), it seems more interesting to consider how, by bringing them together, Sheeler reconfigures the meaning of motifs and media alike. Yet, while the exhibition’s emphasis on thinking “across” media focuses our attention on relationships between, say, photography and painting, the meaning of these media seems mostly to remain stable. The concept remediation arguably allows us to push the focus of the exhibition further. It lets us think about how, through his work, Sheeler actually leaves neither photography nor painting unchanged.
Of course, no artist steps out of his or her time—and no critic does either. Actually, “Across Media” conveys a perspective which is decidedly timely. For instance, during most of Sheeler’s career, when photography was not generally accepted as art, its approach would have been inconceivable. In the early 1930s, Edith Halpert, the founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York City, explicitly advised Sheeler to avoid all references to his photography, and to exhibit only his paintings. Indeed, during the nine single-artist exhibitions she organized for Sheeler, not one of his photographs was included. After Sheeler’s death, Halpert and Sheeler’s patron, William Lane, even made sure to acquire the artist’s photographic prints and negatives—only to conceal them. At that particular point in time, as Charles Brock notes in the book accompanying the current exhibition, Halpert’s decision to promote Sheeler as primarily a painter proved to be highly successful. According to Brock, however, the present perspective brings us closer to Sheeler’s work.
In some sense, we must engage with art in order to appreciate it. This is perhaps particularly true when approaching an artist like Sheeler, who, as Burgard put it in his talk, “shows everything but reveals nothing.” Yet at this point, I think we should pause to redirect our reflection away from Sheeler and his art to the particular approach for conceiving art that “Across Media” conveys—and to its timeliness. Like Halpert’s concealment of his photographs, the current method through which Sheeler’s works become available as art is itself informative. Especially since “Across Media” really seems to make sense, I think it offers an intriguing starting-point for thinking about the contemporary, and the particular forms through which it emerges.
The way Sheeler’s dealer hid his photographs in order to maintain his status as an artist reminds me of the way that, during a certain moment of academic anthropology, women and men who wanted to write ethnographic accounts that incorporated elemnets of autobiography were told to publish it–if they must–under a pen name, so as to gaurd their status as “serious” anthropologists.