The
Tiny Photographs of Judy Fiskin
In
the Ant's house, the dew is a flood.
A well-known
children's story tells of a miniature family that lives
in a regular-sized house, unbeknown
to its regular-sized
occupants. The diminutive parents and their wee offspring
survive by "borrowing" – a
button to use as a platter for a pilfered morsel of
food, a thimble
for
a barrel in
which to haul things around, a matchbox for a little
girl's tiny surrogate bed.
Mary Norton's The
Borrowers is not exactly
hard-hitting – everybody is basically happy, the manufactured
crisis is resolved
by the closing pages and we all learn a valuable lesson.
But it is also powerfully vertiginous, the text wildly
and repeatedly distorting any sense of scale. Positioned
as viewers of a deviant reality, we identify alternately
with the tiny family, who perceive the world as monstrously
huge and fraught with danger, and with the oblivious,
"real"-world
hosts, who fail to perceive the "borrowers" as
anything but faint flecks on their already oversaturated
visual fields.
Judy Fiskin makes tiny photographs,
no more than a few inches square, which play with and
against habitual
modes
of identification and perception. Fiskin's images do
so – like Mary Norton's story – by directly engaging
the body. To enter
the miniscule worlds the photographs offer – postage-stamp-sized
houses, chairs, floral arrangements and craft-show
tableaux, each stationed at the center of a field of
white – we must
shrink into miniature phantasms of our normal selves
(little people who fit into little chairs and live
in little houses),
or imaginatively expand those things so that they match
up with our less fantastic corporeal forms. It sounds
like high adventure, but there's nothing Swiftian or
Rabelaisian
about it. This is neither Gulliver among the Lilliputians,
nor Gargantua bestriding the world. If anything, Fiskin's
images are Nortonian – powerfully domestic, enjoying
intimate status with their subjects, tangled up with
the telling
detail.
There is something profoundly Los
Angeles about Fiskin's photographs, even when they document
a trip to
New
York or Victorian houses spread out along the Jersey
shore.
She captures L.A.'s benighted landscape to ironic
perfection in the 1982 series, Dingbat,
which records subtle variations
among legions of box-like apartment buildings.
The Dingbats
(all at least slightly off-kilter) fall into such Fiskin-designed
categories of "Japanese
Roofs," "Side Stairways" and "Geometric
Facades." The deadpan array neatly suggests the
vanity of attempting to conceal no-design
design with
weirdly non-indigenous adornments. But this is not
what makes these images
intensely
familiar; it is rather the sense of longing built into
Fiskin's work as a whole – a longing
so strong that it drowns out the irony.
Fiskin conjures
the yearning for permanence when we're otherwise used
to seeing the world through the window of a speeding
car,
in a blur, a haze, each form a momentary blip on a
fast-changing screen. Fiskin describes her images as
stand-ins for possessions.
But they are less about possession than a particular
vision endemic to Los Angeles car culture – fragmented,
careless
and quick. Eminently legible and neatly framed with
the black edges of the negatives from which they were
printed,
the photographs represent the desire to reverse that
vision, to slow the world down and render it comprehensible,
to
see it from a pedestrian's eye-view at an unhurried
pace.
Fiskin has been working in series
since 1974, selecting
a subject – Dingbat, Stucco, San
Bernardino, Long
Beach,
Furniture –
and ostensibly assembling, classifying and cataloguing
specimens. But her scientificity – like that
of a generation
of conceptual chroniclers which includes Ed "Every
Building on the Sunset Strip" Ruscha and Douglas "Photographing
Everyone Alive" Huebler – is a ruse, a formal
strategy designed to reveal the randomness, rather
than the
order, behind every self-proclaimed system. Fiskin's
choices are
not uniform, but as uniformly idiosyncratic as the
white apartment house with the Chinese lattice-work
screen projecting
from its side, or the Victorian chaise uncovered in
a corner of a dusty European museum.
Overstuffed and
gilt-edged,
that chaise joins several heavily carved Neo-Baroque
chests and lavish Rococo cabinets to compose the 1988
Portraits
of Furniture. Photographed in museum period rooms and
display aisles, the series gently interrogates the
aesthetics of presentation. While Louise Lawler similarly
photographs works of art in their natural settings (corporate
lobbies, collectors living
rooms, museums), Fiskin is more interested in aesthetics than politics, less
attentive to the ways the work of art validates a socio-economic class than
in how it pictures that class to and for itself. For Fiskin, it's a matter
of taste.
Is this too gaudy? Is that elegant enough? Is this awkward? Is that just
right? What, in sum, is the "correct" taste, and whom do we allow
to define it for us?
Portraits
of Furniture demonstrates
that what has been consecrated
by the institutional apparatus as "high" art plays equally well
as low comedy. One photograph depicts a modest two-drawer wooden chest
with curved
legs alongside a towering double chest topped by an elaborate pedestal
and perched upon delicate ball-and-claw feet. Together, they read as the
Mutt
and Jeff of
Sotheby Parke Bernet, a poignant but conspicuously mismatched duo.
Fiskin
is attracted to aesthetic "mistakes," to the ways in which
cultivation and discernment unwittingly sabotage themselves. Such mistakes
occur in
the realm of high art as well as in the less vaunted realm of the popular.
In
1984, Fiskin
hit the flower show circuit
and documented floral arrangements – Oriental-style with single
meandering stalks, sparse bunches of posies trapped in wrought-iron
birdcages and clusters of tables, each proudly boasting its own potted
cactus. One of the more telling images depicts several tubular blossoms
arranged
in a tall ceramic pot embellished with a madly grimacing face. Displayed
against
a
carpeted stretch of wall, the whole – intended to exude refinement, delicacy
and grace – resembles nothing so much as an anthropomorphized vacuum
cleaner complete
with cord and attachments.
Fiskin's little pictures are funny,
but they aren't about humor. Nor are they elitist, although
at times they may
appear condescending.
They discombobulate the viewer, shaking up the confidently haphazard
way we read images, especially art images. Fiskin began her career
as an art historian, spending countless hours in darkened
rooms poring over thousands of tiny slides which
necessarily distort
the works they depict. Slides pretend to simulate the work of art;
in fact, they numb you to
it. Slides
are the Great Equalizer, (mis)representing massive frescoes, illuminated
manuscripts, monumental architecture and precious
mosaics in the
same small, square format. They deceive regarding scale, while they
falsify color and suppress detail. Fiskin plays out this triple distortion,
erasing
all intermediate
hues so that her images read as pure white against deep black. They
are recast not as slices of reality (the documentary photographer's
traditional
pretense),
but as mnemonic triggers: a dark curve here, a sharp line there-and
they near-magically solicit recollection.
I look at one of Fiskin's
latest
photographs, from the
series Some
Art, and I'm back in the N.Y.U. basement, memorizing
slides for an ancient art exam. The image is particularly
powerful – a detail
from a Roman
sarcophagus?
a Greek frieze? I can't quite remember. The scene depicts a seated
man – young, strong, distanced – with an older, bearded supplicant
kneeling at his feet.
At the edge of the frame stand three proud horses, waiting as if
for some epochal
decision. The carving is exquisite – the musculature, the expressions,
the way the men's knees just barely touch, as if appeasement is imminent.
And
then it
comes to me: it is the scene from the Iliad in which Priam kisses
the hand of Achilles, begging him to return Hector's body.
This is the
moment when
Achilles
finally finds his humanity. But the image isn't taken from a Roman
sarcophagus or from a Greek frieze. Judy Fiskin's photograph is a
close-up view of
a Wedgewood platter.
The knowledge is amusing, embarrassing
and confusing. What we accept
as a natural hierarchy – classical sculpture ranks higher than
Sunday paintings, etched glass lamps, embroidered doilies,
metal animal
reliefs and Wedgewood
platters, the subjects of her most recent series – is suddenly
and irrevocably thrown into
question. How can something merit serious attention if you can
pick it up
at a department store? How can it not merit serious attention if
it is owned by
a museum? Fiskin's quietly disquieting work does not deny our ability
to make distinctions between Wedgewood and Phidias, The Borrowers
and Gulliver'
s Travels,
but playfully embraces all of these and more in her tight focus.
– Susan Kandel |