a
homespun american proust
by Douglas Messerli
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant
Familes (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1941)
William Christenberry, Foreword by Elizabeth Broun, with Essays by Walter
Hopps, Andy Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox (New York:
Aperture/with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006)
Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry, Smithsonian American Art Museum, July 4, 2006-July 4, 2007
William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2007, Aperture Gallery, July 6-August 17, 2006
Howard N. Fox, lecture at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, July 22, 2006
Richard B. Woodward, “Country
Roads,” New York Times Book Review, September
3, 2006
William Christenberry,
lecture, UCLA Hammer Museum, November 30, 2006
On July 22, 2006—during a trip to
Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 90th birthday of his father—my
companion Howard lectured on the occasion of “Passing Time: The Art of William
Christenberry” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Howard had also
contributed an essay to the recent Aperture publication, William Christenberry. Although we intended to arrive early to meet
the Christenberrys for a tour beforehand, D.C. traffic prevented him from
joining them—he had to preview the sound and projection systems before his
lecture—and I toured the show with Bill and Sandy without him.
We had known Bill and Sandy for some
years going back to our life in that city. Howard reminds me that our first
dinner of spaghetti alla carbonara was shared with them at Pettitos on
Connecticut Avenue. I also recall an afternoon in their home and a visit to his
studio with Howard, which I will discuss later in this brief essay.
The tour of his new show was fascinating
to me not only because I enjoy Christenberry’s art, of which this show
presented a good selection, but also because of the artist’s own observations
about his art. I recognize that most critics detest just such heavily “guided”
viewings; but I love them, if only because it is at these times when one can
truly get to know the artist—or at least get to know what the artist feels is
most important about his art. Bill is a laconic southerner, and I don’t believe
that he offered much information about his work that hasn’t previously been
published, but the tone of his
comments and the focus of his
observations were significant, if only in his reiteration of his major
concerns. What a pleasant afternoon: a guided tour by the artist followed by my
friend’s lecture
It may appear, accordingly, that I might
have little to observe other than sharing these pleasant memories. Given that
one of Christenberry’s major concerns is the role of memory, that may not be a
bad way to approach the assemblage of paintings, photographs, sculptures and
mixed-media works collected in “Passing Time.” What do we remember, and why?
The numerous old houses, sheds, barns, roads, churches, road signs, graves and
grave-markers, and other representations of his native Hale County, Alabama—a
region also explored in the photographs of Walker Evans and writings of James
Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—seem
to call up Christenberry’s youth or a time before his youth, when these same
buildings and objects, many now in decay, actively housed the activities of
living beings. And in that sense, there is a bit of nostalgia in the beautiful
world he presents, a beauty that, perhaps, illuminates the lives once involved
with these places and things. As Walter Hopps writes in his short essay to the
Aperture book: “Without its ever being maudlin or sentimental, there is a
belief in human goodness and redemption—in virtue and hard work and effort,
however tattered.”
Howard Fox reiterates these concerns in
his essay, “An Elegiac Vision”:
He characteristically depicts in
all of his art—photographs,
paintings, sculptures, drawings—the most
intimate aspects
of people’s daily human existence: the doorways through
which they enter and leave in the course of their workaday
routines; the windows through which they gaze out or peer
in; their
front and back yards; the sheds where they store
their tools, their forgotten
belongings, and maybe their
secret things; the calendars and
diaries wherein they mark
the passage of time; even the humble objects
used to mark
their graves.
Christenberry’s depiction of this everyday
Alabama world, however, often appears to be one of complete objectivity. As Fox
points out, these places and objects, particularly in the mature work, are
nearly all bereft of people. It is as if they are sensed only “by their absence.”
The riotous force of nature, indeed, has taken over, and, in that sense—and
despite the “goodness and redemption” that once existed in these places and was
represented by the objects—there is a sense of total objectivity in his work.
As Richard B. Woodward observed in his New
York Times Book Review essay on the book, William Christenberry:
The kudzu devouring a vacant cabin
in a 2004 photograph
is a science fiction monster that can turn
anything into a
Chia Pet. Neither good nor evil, the vine is simply a
nuisance of life in this part of the country. Christenberry’s
focus on the
habitats and hangouts of the poor, blacks
and whites, is similarly
nonjudgmental. These places weren’t
constructed to last for the ages and aren’t
likely to be missed,
except by those who filled them for a few years or
decades.
Still, he treats them with respect, charting their
alterations
and passings. Paying careful attentions to surroundings that
would
otherwise be forgotten or unremarked upon can be its
own political
statement.
Accordingly, it appears, it is
the attention to these places and things, the importance the artist himself has
put upon them and the memories through which he has viewed them that awards any
value to his subjects.
Indeed, Christenberry further extends these
issues of memory with his own reconstructions of various places and objects,
most notably the 1974-75 sculpture of Sprott Church (surrounded on its pedestal
by “real” Alabama clay)—a “reconstruction” of the 1971 photograph, an image
presented again in photographs of 1981 and 1990 (the last of which reveals the
removal of the church’s two steeples) and the 2005 “memory” reconstruction
(titled “Sprott Church [Memory]”) that in its ghostlike white wax-covered
rendition appears like something out of a dream. Similarly, the “Green
Warehouse,” photographed 18 times over a period from 1973-2004, is remembered
in his 1978-79 sculptural reconstruction of the 1998 painting “Green
Warehouse.” Combined with his several “Southern Monuments,” which read almost
like surrealistic dreamscapes, his patchwork house, and various “dream
buildings,” these works call up issues surrounding memory and the dreams
memories invoke. His “Alabama Box” contains works by the artist depicting his
native landscape as well as objects and even soil from that state, a work which
may remind one—in the art historical context—of the dream boxes of Joseph
Cornell, while recalling—from a more populist perspective—Jem Finch’s treasure
box (in To Kill a Mockingbird by
fellow Alabamian Harper Lee) filled with hand-carved objects found in the knot
of a tree. Christenberry’s art carries with it, accordingly, a sense of totemism,
an almost mystical kinship with the group of southern individuals whose
structures and objects these works of art symbolize.
What has generally been described as the
“dark side” or the “underbelly” of this world is Christenberry’s obsession with
The Klan. Some photographs call up Christenberry’s personal encounters with the
Klan. “The Klub” for example is a photograph of a small bar in Uniontown where,
so Bill described the incident to me, he had stopped for a drink. But upon
entering the building he’d gotten a strange feeling about its inhabitants, and
he quickly turned to leave, observing several individuals gathering near the
doorway. “It dawned on me, suddenly, the existence of the K in the word Klub.
It’s a good thing I left as quickly as I’d entered the place, and my car was
tagged with Tennessee license plates.” Fox relates Cristenberry’s first
engagement with the Klan in 1960, when he attended, “out of curiosity,” a Klan
meeting in the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse. “Or at least he planned to:
ascending the stairs, Christenberry was stopped dead in his tracks by the
presence of a Klansman in full regalia, whose menacing eyes glaring through the
slits frightened him off in a rush down the stairs.”
Howard also recounts his first viewing of
the mysterious “Klan Room” in Christenberry’s studio, a room separated from the
rest of his studio that looked like a padlocked storage area, a room revealed
to very few individuals. I was with Howard on that day in 1979:
For the few to whom Christenberry
did reveal this secret
place, the experience was eerie,
disturbing, and spellbinding.
It was pure theater. The door opened into a
claustrophobic
space flooded with blood-red light and as crowded as
an
Egyptian tomb, stacked floor-to-ceiling with hundreds of
Klan-robed dolls and effigies of all the Klan represented:
torchlight
parades, strange rituals, lynchings. A neon
cross high up on the wall
presided impassively over the
silent mayhem of the room.
I recall he also had a photograph
taken of a Klan march in Washington, D.C. in 1928.
As Andy Grundberg reminds us in his essay
in the William Christenberry volume
the contents of this Klan Room were stolen, under mysterious circumstances,
soon after we had seen it. I recall Bill telling Howard and me about the
robbery, and him describing his distress in now having to suspect everyone to
whom he’d shown it, a chosen few friends.
At a recent lecture in Los Angeles Bill revealed that during the robbery
the doors to the storeroom had evidently been taken off their hinges and then
replaced before the thief’s or thieves’ escape, which suggests a highly focused
robbery by a very professional group or individual. It is no wonder that among
the suspects were pro- or anti-Klan sympathizers.
For Christenberry this more frightening side of Alabama life is
presented as another aspect of his memory, dark and horrifying memories as they
are. And, although no works from the Klan Room appear in the Smithsonian
American Museum Show, one eerily recognizes the same terrifying images in the
reverse V-shaped images of the “Dream Building Ensemble,” a suite of eleven
sculptural forms that may appear first as images similar to the Washington
Monument in D.C., but quickly transform themselves before one’s eyes into terrifying
all-white emblems of futurist-like cities akin to those of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or even of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Christenberry’s drawing
“Study for a Dream Building,” his variously colored sculptures “Variations on a
Theme, Eight Dream Buildings,” and his 2000 “Dream Building (Blue)” all
reiterate the same images, thus incorporating the Klan figures into his
totemistic memory as well.
A few years ago, I would have stopped this
essay here, agreeing with all of the observations—observations which include
comments by the artist himself—I’ve reiterated above. But this time, as I
observed the various photographs, paintings, sculptures and combines while
discussing with the artist and his wife the writings of James Agee and Eudora Welty
(the latter with whom Bill had a long conversation in her Jackson, Mississippi
house), I suddenly was struck by the fact that despite the great beauty and
longing of this work, it is not representative of what one might describe as a
confirmation of life. Indeed, except for a couple of early works (“Fruitstand,
Sidewalk, Memphis, Tennessee” of 1966 and the beautifully formally-constructed
[by accident Christenberry told me] photograph “Horses and Black Buildings,
Newbern, Alabama,”), Christenberry’s art was not only “bereft of human beings”
but conveys little sign of the lives connected
with his subjects. Change, yes change is expressed everywhere: in image after
image one witnesses the transformation of buildings through time. But in most
cases, these buildings had already lost their original purposes and were left
in a state of decay or, as with the iconic Sprott Church, were transformed
beyond recognition before being caught in the shutter of Christenberry’s
camera.
When Christenberry personally describes
several of the images, he is delighted to share the stories involved with them,
revealing often anecdotal and emotionally moving incidents that relate to the
houses, barns, warehouses, and even signs which his art has embodied. We
discover, for example, that the seemingly impenetrable “Red Building in Forest”
was, in fact, originally a small, back country schoolhouse and, later, a
polling location for people living in this removed location.
But without the background information,
his images seem to have little to do with human use, and even the artist,
before his encounters with owners and neighbors, often pondered some of these buildings’
purposes. Even without the obvious
images of graves and the most recent crypt-like constructions of “Black Memory
Form” of 1998, “Memory Form with Coffin” of 2003, and “Memory For (Dark
Doorway)” of 2004, much of this art consists almost entirely of images of the
dead. Far from being objective, “nonjudgmental” presentations of nature, the
photographs of kudzu for example (such as “Kudzu Devouring Building, near Greensboro,
Alabama”) are quite emotionally-charged even in their titles. This world, the world
we cannot help but recognize as one with which the artist is nearly-obsessed,
is literally falling apart, being destroyed not only by nature but by the
forces—social and individual—that once controlled it. One need only compare the
various photo-graphs and reconstru-ctions of Sprott Church with Agee’s
description of an Alabama church to recognize that the vision with which Agee
imbues buildings and objects is not that of Christenberry’s:
It was a good enough church from
the moment the curve
opened and we saw it that I slowed a little and
we kept
our eyes on it. But as we came even with it the light
so held it
that it shocked us with its goodness straight
through the body, so that at the
same instant we said Jesus.
I put on
the brakes and backed the car slowly,
watching
the light on the building, until we were at the same
apex,
and we sat still for a couple of minutes at least
before getting out,
studying in arrest what had hit us so
hard as we slowed past its perpendicular.
(Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men).
If Agee’s church—not far away,
according to Christenberry, from Sprott Church—is all aglow with “goodness,” Christenberry’s
1981 photo is set against a dark stand of woods. No doubt, if Christenberry had
photographed only that image, it might also be said to represent “goodness
straight through the body”; but in the repeated images—whether reconstructed as
sculpture or revisited as in the truncated 1990 photograph—we ultimately see
this structure as a strangely lonely and isolated thing. In the 1974-75
sculpture, wherein the church is represented as being set up on blocks and the
stairway is presented without railings so that one might almost fear to
enter—particularly in its photographic reproduction in the book, but also in
its actual dramatically lit position of isolation in the show—Christenberry’s
memory church resembles less a site which might elicit a cry of “Jesus” than an
image out of a lonely Edward Hopper landscape. Whereas Agee’s church seems to
call up “God’s mask and wooden skull and home” standing “empty in the
meditation of the sun,” Christenberry’s “house of God” calls up something like
a burial tomb, topped with majesty of two Klan like reverse V-shaped figures.
The later truncated version looks more like the “Red Building in Forest” hut,
the latter with a door so uninviting to entry that it matches the bricklike
surface of the rest of the structure. It is no accident that the most recent
“Sprott Church” is covered, like Poe’s famed house, in wax.
Again and again, not only are
Christenberry’s structures devoured by kudzu but are destroyed by time and
nature (such as “Fallen House, near Marion, Alabama” or the “Remains of Boys’
Room, near Stewart, Alabama”). The transformation of “Wood’s Radio-TV Service”
to “The Bar-B-Q Inn” ends in the vacancy of Martin Luther King Road.
Christenberry’s Alabama represents not only a world out of the past, but a world
destroyed, dead, lost.
Within this context, The Klan Room and the
associated images of its undeniable evil do not appear to be so much in
opposition or even in juxtaposition to these other images, as they are at home
in it, perhaps even partially explaining why and how that Eden fell. Here, for
the first time in the artist’s oeuvre,
are human beings—and grandly dressed beings at that—but instead of bringing
life to this now empty world, they symbolize the brutal hate and death that
were at the heart of its destruction.
Christenberry’s is a world fallen, lost,
yes, but also a world once loved. And in that respect, we perceive in his
obsession with his Alabama childhood—depicted not only in his own works but in some
carved wooden tools from the museum’s vast folk-art collection, crafted by his
own father—a sort of homespun American Proust who is bent on not simply
representing his own Edenic past, but portraying a life now lost to all, an
Eden wherein man was Satan himself. Perhaps such a world was destined to be
destroyed and can only now be represented in the remnants that still exist or
might be imagined in monuments of one’s own making, the only possibility left
for redemption.
Los Angeles, September 4, 2006
December 1, 2006
Reprinted
from The Green Integer Review, No. 7
(January 2007).
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