Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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Sally Mann: What Remains, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington
"What Remains" is a striking, spiritual suite of photographs of mortal decay. Working with the antique technology of glass plate negatives and wet collodion, Sally Mann meets the crumbling that is death in a direct encounter. The first gallery presents ambrotypes (negatives mounted on ruby glass) of the remains of Eva, a favored pet greyhound. It's a precious reliquary of bones and skin. Moving into the next room, we find images that Mann made in cooperation with the University of Tennessee Department of Forensic Anthropology. She visited the grounds where corpses were allowed to decompose under scientific scrutiny, and it's not surprising that this section yields images with the power to shock. The photographer is open to all the happenstance imperfections of her photographic tools—she prints images where the negative has been torn; vignetting is common. Many of the pictures here are washed with a cloudiness that one might read as the soul's putative 21 grams leaving the body. It is clear that these bodies are indeed merely remains; they signify that life's suffering is something these people have left behind. A brief section documents an escaped convict's suicide on Mann's property, and is followed by landscapes made at Antietam National Battlefield, the place where 23,000 combatants died in a single day in 1862. The 19th-century collodion process is a natural fit with the subject matter, at least on historical grounds. Mann reveals very little detail in these large (3' by 4') photographs: we might make out a grove of trees. Many of the blemishes on her negatives read as star tracks. Like late-career paintings of Mark Rothko, the work is a black foreground, a deep gray sky, the two separated by a chilly slice of dawn at the horizon. There is no glory on this battleground, only a sort of peacefulness. As a sort of coda, the exhibit closes with images of Mann's three children, again as 6" x 9" ambrotypes and as enlargements. In most of the pictures, the eyes are closed. The shots are very tight closeups, so the negatives are almost life-sized, hence the effect is not unlike a death mask. But the enlargements offer a more hopeful message. The largest, of one of the girls, is Chuck Close-sized (4' x 6'). The bridge of her nose is overexposed and is washed out, and her eyes aren't completely in focus. But she holds a look of assurance and faith. Mann quotes Ezra Pound's Canto LXXXI in this gallery:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee posted: 8:39:52 PM |
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Ben Yagoda on "style" vs. "clarity" as objectives of prose composition (a/k/a "romanticism" vs. "classicism"):
Of course, anyone who's ever been hired to turn a couple of dozen
undergraduates into competent writers will discern at least two problems
with the notion of putting individual style on the syllabus. To put it
bluntly, not just students but a vast number of our citizens are poor
writers. A sort of triage is clearly called for: Sloppiness, mistakes,
clichés, jargon, and obfuscations need to be addressed before one moves on
to finer points of style and voice. The second problem might be called
"proprietary." We all would grant that the singularity of Charles Dickens's
or Dave Barry's prose is a good thing. But would it be wise -- or sane -- to
suggest such singularity as a goal for the average English-composition
student? We are not all destined to be Hemingways, nor would most of us want
to be.
The piece helps me understand why I am drawn to both poles of the opposition: to both Proust and Orwell, Joyce and The Economist. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.) posted: 9:48:03 AM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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