In Front of Diane Arbus’s Lens

“cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited” features 113 photographs, all in black and white. Looking at them is not a comfortable experience. You will see the strange and the painful, the desolate and the bizarre. Some of the faces will appear eager to make your acquaintance. Others will be indifferent. You will not know their names, but you will know more about being human. You will be on better terms with the weird. This show, at David Zwirner at Chelsea’s edge in collaboration with the Fraenkel Gallery, is an echo of one staged 50 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art. That exhibition broke attendance records and was a landmark in photography’s bid for art world prestige. Not everyone loved it. Susan Sontag devoted more than 5,000 words to the proposition that “anyone Arbus photographed was a freak.” She omitted that she had posed for Arbus’s camera. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl called Sontag’s demolition job, titled, “Freak Show,” an “exercise in aesthetic insensibility.” Another subject, the author Norman Mailer, spat out that “giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.” She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union. Her brother, Howard Nemerov, would become America’s poet laureate. Her nephew is a notable art historian.If Arbus belonged to American cultural royalty, her subjects were in large part the unwashed, not to mention unseen, masses. She removed her lens cap in the moments after the circus wrapped up. Hers is a photography of the periphery, what the poet William Blake called the “desolate market where none come to buy.” The show at Zwirner features only one celebrity: the newscaster Anderson Cooper, a Vanderbilt scion, incognito as an infant.Diane Arbus, ‘Tattooed man at a carnival, MD. 1970.’© The Estate of Diane ArbusEven if Arbus’s faces are unfamiliar, they quickly become unforgettable when captured by her gelatin silver prints. “Woman on a Park Bench on a Sunny Day” carries an easy intimacy that comes from sharing a bench with a friend; the woman has been waiting for your response since the photograph was snapped in 1969. “Teenager With a Baseball Bat” blurs the background and brightens the boy to suggest youth’s selective intensities. Compelling in its emptiness is “Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I.,” from 1963, where the tree in the corner lends a muted idiosyncrasy to a space that is otherwise a caricature of conformity. It is an eruption of the baroque and wintry into the prefabricated and respectably comfortable. A rather different sort of domesticity is nonjudgmentally offered in “Retired Man and His Wife at Home in a Nudist Camp One Morning, N.J. 1963.”Tender parody is on display in “The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens’ Dance, N.Y.C. 1970.” Attired in crown and scepter, its two subjects ape royalty while also indicating its dress-up pretensions. In a costume, anyone can be king and out of one, nobody deserves to rule. Arbus’s camera captures the earnestness of make believe, as in the poignant and puckish “Two Female Impersonators Backstage.”“Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J. 1963” captures the eeriness of natural replication. A different bed scene is “Girl in a Coat Lying On Her Bed, N.Y.C. 1968.” The girl is sprawled, her head is tilted, her jacket is on, and her eyes telegraph a challenge: “You have found me. Now what?” Of a similar insouciance is “Young Couple on a Bench in Washington Square Park 1965,” where an attractive pair eye the viewer as tension thrums between them. Arbus’s “Untitled” series are some of her most famous. They depict developmentally disabled individuals, largely against open fields and wide horizons. Their tone is difficult to parse, highlighting how the camera can be both caring and exploitative, sympathetic and prurient. “Untitled (15) 1970-71” depicts two women holding hands, exuding straightforward joy. “Untitled (7) 1970-71” is manic, a delirious and stumbling pageant.“The Human Pincushion, Louis Ciervo, in His Silk Shirt, Hagerstown Md. 1961” is an image of bizarre brutality, with Ciervo’s well-apportioned face laced with metal needles, for our horror and entertainment. His parents were aerialists in the circus, and Ciervo found his place in the troupe with a penchant for laceration. His visage is reminiscent of the Christian martyr St. Sebastian tortured by a barrage of arrows.Arbus took her own life in 1971. She was 48, and the MoMA retrospective that drew millions as it traveled around the world would come a year later. She wrote “Last Supper” in her diary the day she died, but “.cataclysm.” demonstrates that interest in Arbus is unrelenting. “A photograph,” she said, “is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

In Front of Diane Arbus’s Lens

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