Went to the Diane Arbus show at the Met. As the web and the blogosphere mentions it’s particularly remarkable for the way it integrates her diaries into the photos. Her writing is so poetic and amazing that some of the time the photos become background — illustrations of the diary texts. One dark room has been built as a kind of secluded installation dedicated to her life — and it takes the form of her darkroom and various other elements from her house. Her enlarger and test prints are in one area and along the ceiling are her collection of books, mostly books by other photographers.
In a way parts of this show verge on the tacky dioramas similar the ones in the Mormon museum recreating the boyhood home of Joseph Smith or the one we saw in Auckland recreating the Antarctic base complete with piped-in wind and voice excerpts. This approaches the same fakey re-creation, but stops short of complete realism — Arbus’ books are not on real book shelves and they’re displayed partially spread out, not side by side, and the “darkroom” lacks lots of pipes, chemicals, red lights, etc… it’s meant to evoke, not recreate.
Anyway, her diaries, postcards to friends, letters and scribbles are incredible and it was smart of someone to make them such a special part of the show — normally a museum show like this might show just the work, chronologically, neatly mounted and framed on off-white walls, with a few diary excerpts quoted on wall texts at various intervals, and this show has some of those familiar display elements intact. But by launching into the realm of her inner thoughts it makes the show less about the work and more about her. Luckily she holds up to scrutiny, otherwise it could turn into a cult of the personality type show.
I remembered when I first encountered her photos — I might have been in my early 20s entering art school — and to me at that time they were shocking. Not so much the photography, but the people, the subjects. To invite us to stare at midgets, naked transvestites, nudists, retarded kids and other freaks and fringe elements of society was irresistible. These were the people our parents (some of them) told us NOT to stare at — “it’s impolite” — and with Arbus’ somewhat classical formal approach to photographing them we were being invited to do the forbidden — to ogle and stare as long and as hard as we liked — to pore over and scrutinize these parts of humanity that had been excluded, edited out of polite conversation. These were the people we didn’t see on television, or even in the movies very much. Look how wide-ranging and extreme humanity can be! By photographing them at their homes she made them seem even stranger — because seeing them at home forced us to imagine what their daily lives might be like — that they even had daily lives — rather than seeing them simply as freaks on display.
Caught a showcase gig by Nouvelle Vague, a French combo whose record is just out on Luaka Bop in North America. The record is vaguely lounge bossa nova type interpretations of post-punk songs — a Clash song, PIL song, Joy Division, etc. It shouldn’t work, it should be a one-joke gimmick, but it does work — it’s a moving and marvelous record. Some of the songs sound fully equal to the originals.
On center stage are two young women bookended by two more or less bald neatly dressed young men on keyboard, laptop and acoustic guitar. This setup makes it seem like the whole thing might have happened spontaneously — perhaps one late night in someone's apartment the guitarist began strumming old songs he knew and the girls in the room — it was late and everyone had had some drinks — began to casually sing along and dance with wine glasses in their hands. Then maybe they all realized it would be so easy to do it again in the daylight and make a little record. And maybe that casual, loose, approach, a way of making something with no ambition or audience in mind, was what made it succeed.
