Positive Focus / Discuss

colorstalker    says:

My brother was in town last week & we went down to Chelsea & looked at the Loretta Lux show at the Yossi Milo gallery. The work I’m talking about is all from the past 2 years; go here & click on Works IV to see a sampling.

Have you seen her pictures of children? What do you think?

The gallery had mounted her pictures in a single square room, in simple elegant frames on plain walls. The floor was unbuffed wood , swept clean; there were a few old antique chairs & a love seat against the walls, but everybody knew better than to sit down. It was a room that made me think of New York or New England WASP haut bourgeoisie style – chilly, but in its own way beautiful. Most of my friends live much messier lives, but a few over the years have aspired to this austere style. Lux is of course German & I don’t know what the equivalent might be over there. I go on about it because the unmistakable sense of tradition & order made the pictures of the children more authoritative & somehow conservative – as though they were oil paintings of famous ancestors.

In fact they’re eerie & otherworldly. They’re about the future not the past. And the medium is not paint but photographic pixels wound through the most sinuous of photoshop treatments. They’re shockingly perfect – & a little off. Seeing them in person frightened me. No kidding.

My brother & I argued about whether the artist had changed the proportions of the children. I said yes, the heads were enlarged. My brother talked about medieval painting & how not until the Renaissance did the artists get around to showing the Christ child with a big head. Babies have big heads. But these Lux children aren’t babies. I’m no good at this, but I figure the heads are maybe those of 10-year-olds. Just before adolescence. The bodies are younger than that by perhaps a year or two. But beautifully dressed, again in that supremely confident upper-class style – your jacket can be a little frayed or even stained because the material is so beautiful, so expensive, & it’s the “right” jacket.

Am I making this up about the heads & bodies? I don’t think so, I’m not sure. Here’s a shocking truth about this work. The pictures have enough power to make me doubt my own experience!

The website says, “The artist executes her compositions using a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation, favoring simple backgrounds over the more elaborate backdrops that characterized her earlier work. Trained as a painter at the Munich Academy and influenced by Old Masters such as Goya, Bronzino, Runge, and Velasquez, Ms. Lux works the entire surface of the photographic image in the computer over the course of many weeks. Props and vintage costumes are carefully selected, as are her subjects. “

I’m struck by the passage “…works the entire surface of the photographic image in the computer over the course of many weeks. “ I believe it. There is nothing the least bit natural about these pictures. And yet the children are near enough to natural, close enough to real, to excite the most confusing feelings. They are certainly beautiful.

I didn’t want to read anything before I wrote this, but I remember reading a piece by Francine Prose on Lux in the New Yorker a long time ago. Prose kept talking about child porn, as I recall. Looking at the pictures I couldn’t feel any of that. The skin of these children is perfectly rendered ; their eyes are as clear as the sky. But I think they must be cold to the touch.

It’s the expressions in the faces that in the end frighten me. Ironically, these expressions may be the most real, the most photographic elements of the pictures. The children look weary; they seem deeply guarded; they’re cynical far beyond their years; they’re suffering . Or am I projecting this onto them? It’s as though the children are looking at me across an unbridgeable chasm. My parents could remember horse-drawn wagons; my generation, the parent generation now, has made the transition to a new digital post-modernist world. But I for one _- & I’ll bet not untypically – am clumsy, nostalgic, neither fish nor fowl. And these kids? These are the ones who learned to express their natures through computers the way I learned to run & swim. No wonder their heads are so large! It’s not that they can’t get to me & they’re bereft. It’s that I can’t get to them (& I sense that in some ultimate perversion I’m dependent on them for survival).

Or maybe none of this is true. Still, I really don’t have any choice but to end this with some lines of Yeats’s “Stolen Child” that just floated into my head.

“Come away o human child
to the waters & the wild
with a faerie hand in hand
for the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand.”

Your turn…
Posted at 9:27PM, 24 May 2006 PST ( permalink )