New York State of Mind
Every summer there is an
afternoon when the wind has scrubbed the sky over Manhattan to a blue
translucency, and the whole city looks as though it has just finished an
extremely satisfying game of tennis (winning 7-5 in the third), taken a long
shower, and is now sitting on a shady porch with a tall glass of mint iced tea
in its hand and absolutely nothing on its mind. This summer, that afternoon
turned up last weekend. It was not an afternoon you wanted to spend in a
museum. But having lived for 22 years in the city, with little prospect of
escape, I decided, on a perfect day for bananafish, to go up to the Whitney
Museum of American Art, on Madison Avenue, to visit a show called NYNY: City
of Ambition and find out what this place is all about.
Tall
buildings, is the answer. Also: dead gangsters and ladies' hats. The show,
which is curated by Elisabeth Sussman, has on display paintings and architects'
models and comic strips and film clips and photographs and a few items of
women's clothing, all made by artists and designers in and of New York between
1900 and 1960. There are photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand and
Alvin Langdon Coburn and Margaret Bourke-White, paintings by Edward Hopper and
Stuart Davis and Andy Warhol, scale models of Rockefeller Center (which Lewis
Mumford originally hated) and the Seagram Building (which everybody originally
hated), drawings by Reginald Marsh, comic strips by Will Eisner, and a bolero
jacket by Charles James. If you like New York and have lived here long enough,
you'll have seen most of this stuff already, but you'll like this show anyway.
I liked the show anyway.
The photographs steal it. A lot of the power of the
paintings to compel astonishment or pathos has leaked away: Max Weber's fantasy
painting of a New York department store (1915), once an icon of modernity, now
seems quaint. New York no longer exactly leads the world in big department
stores; big department stores are the sort of thing you go to New Jersey for.
But the photographs, especially the photographs of buildings--Coburn's
Flat-Iron Building, Stieglitz's Singer Building, Bourke-White's Chrysler
Building--are as grand as ever. Those early photographers must not have
believed their luck at finding hundreds of brick and steel towers jammed
together for them on a little island, with new ones blasting up out of the
ground like constructivist flowers every day. The compositional possibilities
must have seemed endless, every change in the light disclosing a fresh set of
visual effects waiting to be captured. It was better than a haystack. They knew
what they had, and they took advantage of it.
The dead
gangsters are a more specialized taste. The Whitney has plunged rather deeply
into the oeuvre of Arthur Fellig (Weegee) for this show. He's
represented not just by his homicide victims and his famous shot of The
Critic (two grande dames in evening dress stepping out from their limo as a
bag lady appraises their fashion sense), but by a 20-minute film, called
Weegee's New York (1953), as well. The film--a long series of crotch
shots on Coney Island, followed by a long segment of drunks at a cocktail
party--gives the game away a little. Weegee didn't seek out the underside; the
underside was all he saw. He is one of the great chroniclers of midcentury
luridness, but his photographs of men grinning at a dead body on the sidewalk
are like those photographs of Southerners milling around after a lynching: They
are undeniably riveting, but you don't really want to stop to think about what
the photographer was doing there in the first place.
The greatest photographer of New York street
life, I think, is probably William Klein, whose collection titled Life Is
Good & Good for You in New York , first published in Paris in 1956 and
long out of print, has just been reissued by Dewi Lewis Publishers under the
title New York 1954-55 . I have never seen the original edition; the new
one is said to have been completely redesigned and to include many more
photographs. Several are in the Whitney show.
The
formal trick in Klein's pictures is the multiplication of focal points. There
is almost never a single subject in the frame, and as soon as the eye picks out
a face or an object as the thematic center of the composition, another face, or
another object, suddenly displaces it, and the center moves off someplace else.
The key to the effect is that the various "centers" are nearly always
incongruous. The boy with the pompadour staring with a smile of lighthearted
menace straight at the camera is in a different visual world from the lady in
the demurely checked kerchief with her eyes somewhere else and her mind on
lunch.
Most of us look at a midtown sidewalk and see a crowd. For
Klein, there is no such thing as a crowd. There are only a lot of faces, all
inscrutable, but differently inscrutable. His pictures are advent calendars on
which none of the doors will open. It's the kind of instant de-homogenizing
sensation you sometimes get in the subway, when you suddenly awaken to the fact
that the dozen faces you've been staring vacantly at across the aisle from you
belong to a dozen different moral universes--not just in the trivial sense that
we all see the world differently, but in the distinctly nontrivial sense that
people sitting right next to each other really can have nothing in common--and
that you'll never know a single one. Sometimes this sensation is moving, and
sometimes it's just creepy. But it's a New York sensation.
When you find yourself
reflecting on the phenomenology of the subway, you have had enough art for the
day. Outside, the city had all gone home, but there was still a summer sky, and
an empty iced-tea glass was sitting on the porch. New York seemed like the
least ambitious town in the world.
