MAY/JUNE 2007
Metamorphosis
Rosamond Purcell's natural history
John Crowley
Fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened,
swollen, dried, scrawny, collapsed, shredded, peeling, torn, warped,
weathered, faded, bristling, moldy, clenched, tangled, punctured,
battered, bashed-in, scooped-out, withered, engorged, trampled,
toppled, crushed, bald, listing, leaning, twisting, hanging, buried,
wedged, impaled, straggling, stretched, disjointed, disembowelled,
skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.
—Rosamond Purcell, Owls
Head
8 A
difficulty with writing about the photographs of Rosamond Purcell
is that she is such an exact and vivid writer about them herself.
It sometimes seems that all a critic would need to do to sufficiently
examine her work is to quote her own account of it. Here is her
description of the subject of one of her images, an open, termite-chewed
book:
The pages looked like a stack of thin sandwiches after children had dug into the soft parts—eaten the butter, the meat and most of the bread—but left untouched, as despised, the delicate crusts. Printed in French in eighteenth-century type, the lumps of uneaten matter stood high like islands on a relief map. Piles of sandy-orange termite leavings were packed into the crevices throughout.
The word for written descriptions,
in prose or verse, of works of art is ekphrasis (the
poet John Hollander has written an entire volume on the possibilities
it presents to writer and reader). Purcell’s description
is of a subject before it becomes a work of art; and yet it is
also a description of the work that results—she describes
the objects and things that she has chosen to photograph in light,
as it were, of the photograph that she will make, or has made.
It wouldn’t do simply to string together a selection of
these ekphrases of hers, though the temptation is strong:
I have gathered up books in all phases of decay . . . I find a poetry book unfurled to the rain. It has a clotted look, like wet wool, as words, letters and syllables swell. Some words are now elongated, some lines swung round ninety degrees. Verses slide away under the rain dragged by the weight of paper into gullies and pulp dikes. The book slumps to the touch, malleable as clay, its lines broken in half into crooked Js and Ls, mushed Ms, Ts, and independent commas. Liberated letters gather like the limbs of insects at the base of the churned-up embankments, and as the book dries, real insects—silverfish, sow bugs, and very tiny ants—will join them. The poems metamorphose into concrete poems, the original strophes transformed into the cryptic warp and drift of paper and ink.
But in the end, no matter how vivid and circumstantial and charged with perceptive metaphor her descriptions are, the works that result—particularly seen in the flesh, full-sized and first-generation—are always a surprise.
Susan Sontag, in her 1977 essay
“On Photography,” insisted that “what a photograph
is of is always of primary importance. . . . We don’t
know how to react to a photograph . . . until we know what
piece of the world it is.” This frank avowal was challenging
to the photographers of that time, who were often troubled by
photography’s ambiguous status as art. They were alert to
modes of working that could move the first question out of the
what realm and into the realm of what Henry James called
“free selection,” the realm of art and the artist’s
choice. Henry Holmes Smith, with whom I studied photography in
the 1960s, chose to work entirely in abstraction, making negatives
without a camera, pouring various substances (Karo syrup was one)
over glass plates and enlarging them.
Smith once gave his class two questions
to answer: “What does a photograph look like?” and
“What should a photograph look like?” These aren’t
the first questions that would be asked today, but they encapsulate
the anxiety that photographers (and critics) then were feeling.
I recently rediscovered my own long-ago answers, which Smith published
in a journal of the period called Memo. “A photograph,”
I wrote, “should look like a tension between a reality and
the fact of the recording of that reality.” I didn’t
examine what might be meant by “reality,” but I claimed
that while several painters set before the same subject produce
different paintings—in fact, different objects—several
photographers set before the same subject produce different photographs—but
not different objects. “Minor White [an important name in
the photography of that time] wonders to what extent he owns the
images he makes,” I wrote. “He doesn’t own them
at all. What he owns is the tension between his claim on them
and their inviolable otherness.”
Since then, that anxiety in photography
(or in photographers) has slackened or evaporated, along with
a lot of other earnest questions about intention and attention
in art. In Cindy Sherman’s photographs there is no ambiguity
between recorded object and recording, though the ambiguity of
the artist’s project remains. In my student essay I claimed
that retouched studio portraits are what photographs should not
look like, because in them all harmonic tension between the thing
recorded and the fact of recording had dissolved. Yet the recent
hearts-and-flowers studio portraits of Pierre et Gilles, of glossy
pink-faced sailors in phony settings and valentine framing, record
nothing, and assert blandly that recording is not the point. Rosamond
Purcell’s photographs—all still lifes—are of
things, and they are usually things we recognize, whether we have
encountered them before or not; but our recognition is undermined
because we don’t know how they got that way. We are asked
to examine her recording with the same wonder, salted with revulsion,
that she has brought to her examination of the object. The tension
in them, sometimes strong enough to cause a palpable sensation
on the viewer’s skin, results from a transcendence intimately
and inseparably bound up in thingness.
Rosamond Purcell has collected
her photographic work in a number of volumes in which the impulse
for or context of the pictures is given generous space. For a
book with the magician and sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay (Dice:
Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck) she made an astonishing
suite of photographs of celluloid dice; celluloid is a notoriously
unstable substance, unlike the plastics that it foreshadowed and
resembles, and it corrodes, foams, and suppurates wonderfully.
Rotten luck indeed.
With Stephen Jay Gould she has
turned to the old natural-history museums and collections, where
the skins, bones, carapaces, shells, and preserved bodies remain,
the corpus of the taxonomical and classificatory project of the
last 300 years (Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors).
These bottled, boxed, and labeled items retain their places in
an order, of course, but as photographed by Purcell they also
divorce themselves from their classifications and look outward
(those that have eyes, and those that seem to possess them), demanding
to be seen as singular, irreducible and unique. Thus the stated
topics of her collaborations always seem to be about
to evanesce or lose their grip over the contents, at
least the pictorial contents. I think this is quite conscious
if not quite deliberate.
Bookworm, a new volume
of Purcell’s work that has appeared from the Quantuck Lane
Press, collects pictures made over a period of years in some of
the modes that Purcell favors. In this book, though, she is her
own collaborator, and the context is her reflections on her career
and ambitions. I recently studied and read it in conjunction with
her narrative Owls Head (2003), in which the pictures
are mostly footnotes in humble black-and-white. Some of these
appear large and in color in Bookworm—many, but
not all, are of ruined books; the title is a complex of referents.
The two books are companion pieces, the later sometimes quoting
from the earlier.
Those who have long known Purcell’s studies of natural-history museums and other highly organized realms of preservation can now follow, in these volumes, her more recent search for photographic subjects in a fabulous kingdom of semi-organized dissolution: an eleven-acre junkyard in Owls Head, Maine. Her book of that name recounts her coming to discover it, her explorations of it, her conversations or attempts at same with the owner, William Buckminster, and the reflections he and his world have engendered. This description suggests a chatty memoir or travelog or Most Remarkable Person anecdotal tale, but if it is any of those things it is so by a kind of intense indirection. Far more of it is about the things she finds, her longing to have them, her delicate negotiations with Buckminster (who seems reluctant to part with them, and to suspect Purcell’s motives in acquiring them, as possibly tending to his or his establishment’s dishonor) and her obsessive building of a “collection” in which every item is unique.
Buckminster seen through the prism of his stuff evolves into a rich and almost novelistic figure. For all his random piles of this and that, he seems weirdly precise and exacting, cutting his cord of wood before breakfast and beveling each log to fit in the pile: “They point in one direction like dozens of the same breed of dog facing the wind.” He is conscious of his long lineage in this part of the world; he mourns his dead wife, with whom he was close—his reclusion seems to have intensified with her death. But he is also a tournament pool player well known throughout that part of the world. Purcell’s cautious affection for him is displayed in the strange day they spend going to see a show of her work, and to her studio to see what she’s done with her purchases. He is amazed, in fact—according to Purcell—but what he says first is, “The garden club ought to see this”: his longtime nemesis, always after him to clean up his eyesore in Owls Head.
To the things Purcell has rescued, or at any rate taken, from Buckminster’s literally bottomless store (the bottom layers are retreating into the earth on which they lie) are added things that her friends bring her, things that they guess will be what she wants: “rocks, roots, ashes from volcanic eruptions, small skeletons of rodents, mammals, birds and fish, prehistoric axes from Australia, a carved goat skull from East Timor, a hunk of bread from a World War One prison in France.”
Purcell’s ways of making sense—and eventually pictures—of her collections vary almost as much as the things themselves, systems of classification resembling those in Borges’s imagined Chinese encyclopedia. Some of her items take on meaning by juxtaposition. A mummified cat and a pitted one of concrete go together with pitted volcanic stones, because such stones falling from the sky were once called “lynx stones,” and their sulfuric odor was like cat piss. Or do the stones and the concrete cat go together with the piece of wormholed bread from France as “Things that have holes”?
An overarching category (if Purcell’s
extreme nominalism can permit such a thing) is the category of
the sublimely diminished, things that, as she says, are
bereft of their original potential yet still familiar. “I
have chipped these things from the matrix of the almighty thingness
of our all-American world, and, as I did not stop to mourn their
demise, why not revel now in their inevitable disintegration?”
Disintegration might be said to
be Purcell’s persistent concern, if the word is understood
in its full sense: not only rotting, rusting, corrupted, turning-to-dirt,
fading, losing qualities, but the loss of that integrated meaning
that a thing or things once had—use, for instance, or function;
place in a hierarchy, name, meaning, logos. She likes
things that are tagged and numbered, but only, it seems, if the
tag or number has so lost its defining or delimiting power that
it actually emphasizes the subject’s loss of place in a
sequence or list, its devolution to uniqueness. Stephen Jay Gould
was a lover of oddities and the apparently inconsequential and
unrelated, because sufficient wit and thought and imagination
could track the hints that they were not unrelated but in fact
linked in a dense net of relation. In Finders, Keepers
he relates the scientific odyssey of Eugen Dubois, discoverer
of Homo erectus (1892), collector of primate and other
brain casts, to show that what Dubois was passionately wrong about
holds a general truth about the multifarious world. Purcell is
as intrigued by the fact that Dubois kept his brain casts—small
suggestive white shapes—in cigar boxes. When photographed
open, the bright chromo of the Victorian cigar-box label comments,
or doesn’t, or might, on the strange shapes within, like
petrified puffs.
Purcell has constructed what she
calls “insect boxes” in imitation of the scientific
collectors’ boxes she has photographed. She considers the
contents to be like rebuses; they reflect as though in a dream
her long and intense engagement with the “finical”
classification systems practiced in museums. To me they resemble
the neatly numbered and over-explicit Audubon-like animal paintings
of Walton Ford, in which exactness masks and at the same time
intensifies an underlying chaos and even horror. Purcell once
was refused by a curator when she wanted to photograph one of
his many splendid toads preserved in jars. “Not my Booby!”
he cried—because the one she’d chosen was his type
specimen, the original specimen that defines a distinct biological
species. What if the photography process somehow harmed it, blanched
its pigmentations? The idea of photographing something that was
only important as bearing the defining characteristics of a type
for its own sake was to him meaningless and even alarming.
On the other hand, Michael Sappol, commenting in his book Dream
Anatomy on Purcell’s photographs of anatomical specimens,
notes that such specimens were “originally designed to exemplify
the particulars of human anatomy and pathology, and also to amaze.”
In Purcell’s photographs of preserved babies in fluid, eyes
closed as in sleep or serenely open, the exemplification is gone,
and amazement—even a kind of sacred awe—is what remains.
I call Purcell a nominalist in
the philosophical sense, or even the scholastic sense. Medieval
nominalists were opposed to realists, who thought that organizing
categories, types, concepts, had a real, not merely a notional,
existence; the treeness that all trees share was as real a thing
as any individual tree. The nominalists said that such categories
were mere names, not realities, a human mental construct, a handy
tool; every existent thing was unique in itself, and not just
an emanation of some overarching logos.
As an instinctive nominalist, Purcell
not only recognizes but delights in the transformation of the
standard, or the example, into the unique instance, especially
when a thing that was actually manufactured as one of a kind
in the mass-production sense passes through stages of resemblance
to other things, even as its own thingness evaporates. From Owls
Head:
Each machine-made thing starts
out as a replica of its own kind. As self-similar objects disintegrate,
clones turn into fraternal twins, into kinships, into singular
incarnations. The process of disintegration that reduces complex
machinery to its fundamental crumbs is the inverse of the process
of embryological development—from a gleaming brand-name
toaster, say, to its wire skeleton to shadows of rust.
Or the celluloid dice—“warped,
crumbling, and sometimes smelly”—where chemical decomposition
delightfully altered products that were supposed to be entirely
standardized and fungible into something uselessly particular.
Or the ruined and barely recognizable typewriter she names Underwoodensis
corrupta, “a close invertebrate cousin to an echinoid . . .
It . . . comes from the place where metaphors
are made.”
Purcell’s nominalism draws
her to metaphors, even to whimsical equivalences. “If the
eye orbit of a fossil horse looks like a volcanic depression,
doesn’t this mean appearance has delivered two realities
for the price of one?” Metaphor is a long-standing strategy
of photographers facing the Sontag insistence that what a photograph
is of is the first question. Edward Weston’s pepper resembling
a nude body (or nude body resembling a pepper), his cabbage leaf
that might be Marie Antoinette’s train, shift our attention
away from the thing the photograph is of to what it might be of.
Photographers use isolation, removal of scale, telephoto effects,
to disorient us, so that we can’t tell whether what we look
at is big (volcanic depression) or small (fossil bone). Nor are
all such affecting resemblances the choice of the photographer:
“When I train the camera on a stone, the bark of a tree,
a roll of burned tinfoil,” Purcell says, “I think
I know what will appear on film but sometimes shapes emerge I
had not anticipated.” Minor White called these metaphoric
interpenetrations, arising from the matrix of the seen world,
“gifts of the camera”; he would not value similar
metaphors constructed by arrangement or deliberation. Those nudes,
common in the Photography Annuals of my youth, that amalgamated
female torsos and sand dunes or waterfalls to make statements
about the eternal feminine, show that photo metaphors can be as
cheesy as those in any bad poem, unredeemed by the facticity of
the stuff that was photographed to make them.
Rosamond Purcell in her most constructed
works (several of them are shown in Bookworm) employs bits of
this and that as a collagist does, to create scenes and topoi
that didn’t exist before, thereby setting up a tension in
the work that could be called metaphoric. This is of course a
longstanding art procedure. Baroque artists liked to take multicolored
shells or thin sheets of alabaster and with paint or other means
enhance the cloudscapes or faces or whatever that they saw in
the natural swirls and irregularities. Her procedure of placing
certain ambiguous objects in relation to each other to suggest
some third thing resembles Leonardo’s advice to painters
to find faces in old stone walls or landscapes in a rumpled cloth
left out in the weather to stain. The photographer Vik Muniz,
in a stratagem that might at first seem to resemble Purcell’s,
photographs a huge space that is filled with industrial junk,
the junk arranged in such a way that, shot from high above, it
creates the lights and shadows of Goya’s Saturn Devouring
One of His Children.
But it seems to me that the whole
conception of metaphor in photography, whether created, discovered,
worked up, accidental-on-purpose, or truly a gift of the camera,
is something of a misdirection. It’s an attempt to restore
to the thing the photograph is of the abstracted quality
that a subject in a painting has. Purcell more exactly identifies
the power and appeal of her core work, even as she places it the
realm of metaphor. She writes in Owls Head that her appeal
to metaphor was rarely effective in getting the curators of natural
history museums to let her combine unlike things in pictures—a
shocking solecism to a classifier—but she herself knew that
“because many things look like other things, the archive
from a single museum, even the contents of a single drawer, may
expand when photographed to reveal an infinite number of things.”
This is not metaphor but metonymy, which is, I think, more exactly what we mean when we experience the suggestive power of certain photographs, or of things photographed in certain ways. Metonymy can be defined as the use of a word that signifies a whole, or a quality of a whole, to represent a part or a transient state of something. When we say “Iraq resisted American invasion” we understand “Iraq” to mean the armed forces of Iraq, the soldiers, the officers, the people, or certain people, none of them singularly or even in combination amounting to “Iraq”; it’s more than a shorthand and less than a symbol. But metonymy can also mean the use of the name of a part of something to suggest the whole of it (in this sense also called “synecdoche”). We say “the stage” to mean the whole realm of actors, producers, theaters, plays, performances, audiences, and all else in that realm of life.
The difference, in relation to
pictorial work, is that metaphor employs the pictured thing solely
as a vehicle for meaning; in metonymy it is present as itself,
only pointing us toward what it also stands for. To say “my
love is like a red, red rose” gives us no rose, only my
love; but to say “I’ll be with you in apple-blossom
time” gives us apple blossoms, from which we derive the
spring. Purcell’s pictures are of things undeniably;
those things point to wholes or to categories that are beyond
themselves, or to which they might belong: “Things that
have holes” or “Things that look like letters but
are not letters” (insect legs scattered over a corrupted
text or musical score) or “Intimations that all is vanity”
or “Subtrahends of forgotten systems” or all of those.
We cannot determine fully what the indicated categories might
be, but their existence, and the infinite number of unique things
they might contain, inform our gazing at the irreducible quiddity
of the few or single things she has shown.
So there is a tension arising in
Purcell’s metonymies, resulting from her sturdy nominalism:
she will not let these burned, wormholed, damp-ruined books, these
moldered feathers and seed-pods, foxes’ skins, locks rusted
to inscrutability, simply stand for in the sense of “substitute
for,” or “be put to the use of indicating.”
They are too singular; in fact their singularity and resistance
to use, even by us as viewers, is exactly their draw and their
appeal, to her and to us: they proffer possibilities of meaning
without definition or circumscription. In this they are like those
things in dreams that we shy from or are drawn to and when we
wake can’t understand why (and aren’t many of them
ruined or corrupted or seething with creepy life or out of place
or in process from state to state?). The wise intensity of her
gaze on these things that she has first discovered, then gathered,
then posed, and her skill in transmitting that gaze through the
medium of photography is in a way the shaman’s skill of
investing power in a shell, a tooth, a bone mallet, and a drumhead
of skin, at the same time as he draws his power from it.
I recently re-saw (why is there
no visual equivalent of the word “reread”?) the 1988
film Alice, by Jan Svankmajer, the great Czech stop-motion
animator. His version of Alice in Wonderland is so full
of connections to the work and spirit of Purcell as to seem nearly
a collaboration. Svankmajer’s Alice, a dark fearless girl,
becomes a chipped antique doll when she drinks the inky potion
that makes her small; the White Rabbit is a decaying stuffed specimen
who tears himself from the box he is kept in, pulling out the
nail that pins his foot, and thereafter leaks stuffing loathsomely.
Alice falls through a world of things bottled in dark fluid that
may be animal parts but also include buttons, keys, and other
things; she makes her way through piles of soiled junk, drinks
from stained, cracked porcelain. Things transmute, as she observes
or takes hold of them, from animate to inanimate and back (a scene
of ancient socks that become wriggly snakes or caterpillars who
bore sawdusty holes in a wooden floor, then crawl in and out of
them). In all of this Alice is unafraid; more, she is curious
(“curiouser and curiouser”) and attracted to the things
offered, even the bugs that pour from opened cans and the rotted
fabrics and papers—avid for strangeness, selective and judgmental,
but willing, always, to go farther. Rosamond Purcell is an Alice
in a wonderland she has herself sought out.” <
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