ART REVIEW Degrees of artificiality
Larry Sultan: Photos gaze at staged sex and suburbia
She is a goddess, or at least a queen, and her mastiffs grovel in subjugation. Bouffant teased hair, kohled eyes, Greek nose. Jeweled fingers. Regal gait. She is seen in a terraced garden, a pool of gleaming turquoise at middle ground, cedars in the distance.
We are looking at a photograph, encountered midway through the exhibition “Larry Sultan: Here and Home,” opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, April 15, and running through July 23. Sultan made the picture in 1999. It is just one of many that demonstrate the acuity of his observational and descriptive powers. There are others that could serve equally well as fulcrum of the show’s argument that the artist, who died in 2009 at age 63, was “one of the most influential photographers of his generation.”
Despite the hints of epic narrative, the setting of the work, titled simply “Boxers, Mission Hills,” is neither romantic nor ancient. There are clues it is an artificial moment — tripods of some sort in the foreground and elsewhere, moving blankets stacked along a wall. The telltale pattern of a cheap stucco job on that wall, with seams barely disguised, has Suburban Somewhere written all over it. Indeed, it is from a series called “The Valley.”
The Valley — the San Fernando Valley — is where Sultan grew up, we learn from a wall label. But let’s rely on our eyes,
and not the text, for a while longer.
The series displayed here together, with its imagery of sliding glass doors, knotty pine kitchen cabinetry and subtropical landscaping, would feel familiar to anyone who knows Southern California. The bland point of view is more snapshot confidential than exotic.
Images of casual nudity, amped by glimpses of what looks like real sex, throw us off but also intrigue us. In a picture titled “Sharon Wild” (2001), a woman with the sensual features and makeup styling of Marlene Dietrich sits on the corner of a bed in her underwear. First, we survey her limbs, folded protectively. Then we spot those platform pumps so often meant to signal something kinky. Only gradually does the tattered and filthy condition of the mattress come to consciousness. This is, literally, a dirty picture.
“The Valley” series started with an assignment from the magazine Maxim to document the pornographic film industry centered in the Los Angeles suburb. At SFMOMA, it is exhibited in a room where it ends just a head turn away from Sultan’s series “Pictures From Home” (1983–92), his famous examination of American life based upon his own family and upbringing. These are the images that prompted his father to say, “You tell people that that’s not me sitting on the bed looking all dressed up and nowhere to go, depressed. That’s you sitting on the bed.”
The museum’s overlapping installation of the two series implies, astutely, that the artist’s work describes a continuum: from home life as defined by accrual of certain supposed hallmarks of success, to the hollow pleasures of simulated love.
Among the “Valley” pictures is one titled “Suburban Street in Studio” (2000). Much of it is a very convincing photograph of a row of houses at dusk, until the edges give it away as a backdrop, hung in what is likely someone’s basement. Just like the images of the faux queen and the actress/character Sharon Wild, it is a picture about the idea of picturing.
The exhibition — like all retrospectives, a stand-in for the artist’s career — is a house of mirrors. It has us turning here and there, jumping forward and falling back. That might sound dizzying but, in fact, the experience is more like the satisfaction of solving a complex puzzle.
The show opens with three collaborative projects Sultan shared with the artist Mike Mandel, whose own SFMOMA show will be unveiled next month. All three make use of found photographs in ways that may not seem as stunningly innovative today as they did four decades ago, simply because the way cleared by Mandel and Sultan been followed by so many others.
The most noted of these is “Evidence” (1975-77), which siphoned enigmatic images from official government and corporate photo archives and presented them, uncaptioned, in the artists’ own quirky and poetic new sequence. The malleability of photographic meaning, an obsession of crithas ics and theorists of the day, was never more entertainingly, more visually corroborated.
The last works in the SFMOMA show are from a series Sultan called “Homeland” (2006-09). For these photographs, Sultan hired day laborers as actors, asking them to play mundane and apparently aimless roles in settings on the edge of nature — beside a stream or crossing a field, perhaps, in places just beyond bordered backyards.
Lush in color and in landscape, the pictures at first seem very different from the black-and-white documents of “Evidence.” But the unsolved mysteries they describe bring us back to the artist’s first work, reinforcing an idea of a world where so much is visible but little is known.
Images of casual nudity, amped by glimpses of what looks like real sex, throw us off but also intrigue us.