Duane Michals: The Time-Keeper
An 89-year-old artist, expert in a form of freeze-frame, delves into his archives to find material for fresh works, the better to endure the suspended time of “coviddepression”. Robert Storr paid him a visit for an instant anti-gloominess fix, which he very kindly agreed to share with us...
The pandemic has undoubtedly had its impact on art these past couple of years. How could it not have? Unlike the HIV/AIDS crisis, however, COVID has thus far spawned little work about the virus itself, other than the digital genre consisting for the most part of short documentaries or narratives focused on how people made the most of their confinement, that I think of as covideo Art. One might suppose that younger talents with limber sensibilities would, in particular, be inspired to play fast and loose with this mass medical and social disruption, though from what I have heard many have been profoundly shaken by it, even to the point of paralysis.
Among elders of the New York art world, though, one in particular has seized on the plague and its constraints as the prompt for a whole new body of work amounting to thematic slideshows: the 89-year-old photographer, graphic designer, prankster and poet, Duane Michals. A working class-mate, rough contemporary and almost neighbor of Andy Warhol—the Pop star was born into an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1928, Michals was born into a very similar milieu in nearby, still more industrial McKeesport, PA, in 1932. In due course Michals flirted with straight forward street photography while in Russia in the late 1950s but by the 1960s he had become a latter day Surrealist staging fantastic scenarios with spectral special effects as well as subtly estranged deadpan portraits of the likes of René Magritte.
ABSURD PRESENT
The long ignored ’radical’ elements of his uniquely stylish and consistently well-made work were its introduction of narrative—in violation of all formalist taboos of the postwar era—along with his unshy way with overtly homosexual imagery at a time when most gay artists, Warhol being the other notable exception, were at best half way out of the closet.
I mention some of these details because they inform the sequential words and pictures pieces I am concerned with here, several of the are poignantly retrospective, even elegiac. Of these images is an homage to Danny Entin, a friend who got Michals started on his career by loaning him a studio. Another references his life partner Fred, who Michals patiently and lovingly cared for as he slowly succumbed to Alzheimer immediately prior to the pandemic. Furthermore, many of his still photographic cycles imagine his own death, usually with a comic twist—humor has long been a salient trait and saving grace of Michals’ otherwise frequently Romantic set pieces, demonstrating that if he harkens back to the aesthetics of the past he never forgets how stuck we are in the unforgivingly absurd present.
And then, some of these slideshows overtly evoke the silent slapstick comedies of cinema’s origins, complete with intertitles and trick photography, and later on cameo appearances by stars from his other projects, featured in sequences not specifically keyed to the silent era, notably the veteran vaudevillian Bert Lahr (who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz) who mugs for a mirror in one picture, while Joel Grey (the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret) turns up as a character in a frame-by-frame minidrama, and ballet divo Benjamin Millepied impersonates Jean-Paul Belmondo in a tongue-in-cheek homage to the late vedette of Godard’s Breathless. Having shot for fashion magazines on commission for decades, Michals has unique advantages when it comes to casting his current work, and with a studio full of old negatives and prints he can, at will, enlist the services of generations of ’beautiful people’ in their prime. Tilda Swinton and Richard Gere, for example, though there are numerous exceedingly attractive ’girls’ and ’boys’ who show up in various roles and remain tantalizingly anonymous, Tadzios and Tadzias, that are temptation incarnate.
In short, slide shows are the reveries of an old man wistfully looking back while playfully looking forward at the same time. Indeed, among the best of these COVID confections is one called The Somnambulist, in which, above a suite of photos of Gere overpainted with an oil likeness of Michals slumbering youthful muse appear these words written in a decoratively awkward cursive scrawl:
Dreams are the midnight movies of the mind Where the Sphinx recites his riddles to the blind and as our daydreams sleep.
Our nightdreams come awake Phantom visions float. as we in reverie recline
[...]
As I write I now know too that the universe is a great dream room imagined by our senses in the womb
It is our enigmatic fate that we must dream in time
And Wait.
Robert Storr is an art critic, author of numerous catalogues, dean of the Yale University School of Art since 2006. Among others he was curator at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA (New York) from 1990 to 2002. He directed the 52nd Venice Biennale. He lives in New York.
Duane Michals Né en born in 1932 à in McKeesport (États-Unis) Vit et travaille à lives and works in New York Expositions récentes (sélection)
Recent shows (selection): 2022 The Portraitist, Hasselblad Center, Gothenberg
(Suède) ; Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, Barbican Centre, Londres, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, fondation LUMA, Arles, et FOMU,
Anvers 2021 The Portraitist, Lowe Art Museum, Miami 2019-20 Art After Stonewall: 1969-1989, Patricia and Philippe Frost Art Museum, Miami ; The Illusions of the Photographer, The Morgan Library and Museum,
New York 2018-19 Scripted Reality: The Life and Art of Television,
Museo Jumex, Mexico 2017 Retrospective, Fondation Mapfre, Barcelone 2014-15 Collector et Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh et Peabody Essex Museum, Salem
Page de gauche left page: Tell Me Such a Story. 2021. (© Duane Michals)