Though they have a shared origin on the same long-lost cave wall,
pictures and words have always had a combative
relationship. For
the most part when you combine them, you’ve created something tawdry
and disposable, like a children’s entertainment (something to grow out
of) or an advertisement. Comics are a collaboration between the two,
but even then the words have to be safely tucked away from the
illustrations in a bubble of rounded lines; the delineation between the
two is clear and inviolable. In a museum, words are servile, trapped on
tiny, high-quality index cards and usually displayed just below and to
the right of the image like a loyal dog; people stare at the painting
or photograph and then glance down at the words to gain a little
context. And, obviously, there’s a tension—the basic frustration
that comes with any translation—to all visual-arts criticism.
Looking Together, a new book from the Frye Art Museum, plays
with that essential conflict in interesting ways. In 2005, the Frye
decided to unleash the museum’s founding collection and allow it to
collude and commingle with new artists’ works.
The most visible product of that decision was the 2007 exhibition in
which Victoria Haven created an altar for Franz von Stuck’s 1908
painting Sin. The giant golden construction is gaudy and
marvelous, at once canonizing the art and humbling it from its
Wagnerian scope. But less obviously, for the last three years, Rebecca
Brown has been curating a reading series of pieces that respond to art
that belongs to or has visited the Frye. Collected together in
Looking, the book becomes something similar to Haven’s altar:
It’s a true collaboration between writer and artist.
You’d also be hard-pressed to find a better survey of the array of
literary talent available in Seattle, and for the most part the writers
are up to the task. Like Haven’s altar, Frances McCue deepens Von
Stuck’s Sin with a five-part poem that could have been written
in the same nauseous-green color as the painting itself: “Sin, we
learned from M_____/congeals in craft and ornament:/lamp shades of
human skin, pricked/with lanyard strings along the seams; or/sketches
of those girls, lippy/in the killer’s journal. Residue.” It’s an altar
unto itself, glimmering around the work, simultaneously poking at it
and petting it.
A few of the text pieces are superfluous. Lesley Hazleton’s story
from the point of view of the crucified woman in Gabriel von Max’s 1867
painting The Christian Martyr thuds along like a bad museum
brochure that lamely tries to make the facts entertaining (“But then I
was no lady. Just a mere slave girl from Carthage, on the northern tip
of Africa…”). And Adrianne Harun’s “The Darger Episodes,” a
collection of short bursts of action inspired by Henry Darger’s murals,
don’t add anything to the art that Darger didn’t already write
himself.
The book begins and ends with its best pieces from its best-known
contributors. Jonathan Raban opens with a treatise from the point of
view of Albert Bierstadt (giddily, it begins, “Critics? Don’t talk to
me of critics!”). Titled “Mr. Bierstadt Speaks His Mind,” it’s a sly
and sarcastic work that deconstructs Bierstadt’s tacky landscape. Of
the rainbow that sits, brain-dead and drooling for attention, in the
center of the painting, Raban/Bierstadt writes: “That was the finishing
touch, done in a few seconds in the studio, and it makes the
picture—God smiles on California!”
And Ryan Boudinot closes the book with a short story inspired by Tim
Eitel’s 2004 painting Leerer Raum (Empty Room), a dispassionate
look at a young couple with a stroller standing in a room with nothing
on its walls. The story offers no additional commentary on the
painting, choosing instead to work with Eitel, to accentuate his point.
Stacey Levine’s story “The Cats” bears a similar relationship to
Patricia Piccinini’s 2005 sculpture The Embrace, in which a
hairless alien creature attacks a woman’s face. “The Cats” is about a
woman who loves her cat and fears the possibility of its death so much
that she wants a clone of it immediately. Of course things go very
wrong. Levine and Piccinini are coy about genre—the story and the
sculpture are science fiction—but they both know how to toy with
our well-worn expectations, which have been prescribed by surface-level
examinations of their works. It’s hard to imagine a more profitable
truce between words and pictures. 