| The format of
Joseph Bartscherer's Obituary appropriately resembles that
of a cemetery. Copies of The New York Times are laid out in
orderly ranks, like headstones, and each of the front pages carries
the death notice of some notable person. The viewer is thus transformed
into a visitor, who peruses the obituaries with the kind of interest
with which we read the epitaphs in a graveyard. In addition to biographical
information, identifying the deceased sufficiently to explain why
their deaths were front page news, there is in nearly every case a
photograph of what they looked like in life. These images-selected
from the newspaper's not inappropriately named morgue-tell us, through
their size and position on the page, a great deal about the significance
of their subjects' lives, and in consequence something of the magnitude
of their loss to society at large. All lives are not equal, and neither
are all deaths. |
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| Installation
view of the exhibition Obituary. |
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| The knowledge
of who these persons were often forms part of the common consciousness
of our culture. Ava Gardner, whose death at 67 was announced on January
26, 1990, remains a living presence through the virtual immortality
of late night reruns. Most of the names, however famous or important
their bearers, merely ring a bell, as the expression goes. But the
fact that it is printed on the front page of the Times means
more often than not that something about our world is explained through
what they did. Who knew much or anything about Robert N. Noyce, the
inventor of the Microchip, dead at 62 on June 4, 1990? Who knew that
his invention was gnawing like a worm at the very institution of the
front page, which through the solemnity of its graphic design communicated
the certitude of its preeminence as the vehicle of the day's major
news? What could threaten its authority in 1990? By May 16, 1998,
when Frank Sinatra-one of Ava Gardner's husbands-died, more and more
of us were picking up the headlines moment by moment on Yahoo or Alta
Vista. So Obituary itself is a kind of pre-emptive obituary
of the front-page obituary itself. It is preemptive because the front
page is still a living part of visual culture. But thanks in part
to Robert N. Noyce, its days as society's main news-bearer are numbered.
Already this morning's paper feels out of date-we read it all on the
Web before we went to bed. |
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| Front-page
obituary of Ava Gardner (1/26/90). From the exhibition Obituary. |
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| One of the main
ways in which art is being addressed today is through what is called
Cultural Studies. And one tendency within Cultural Studies has been
to subsume the visual arts into what I have casually referred to with
the term visual culture. In a way, this is a late intellectual version
of the effort to overcome the distinction between fine art and vernacular
imagery, which began early in the twentieth century, but climaxed
with Pop art in the 1960s, that decade of conceptual revolutions.
Artists sought to appropriate some of the energy and immediacy of
imagery which had proven its power by its popularity. The familiar
Coca-Cola logo induces virtual thirst, the face of Mickey Mouse is
an inscription of fun for people who can't read one another's language.
The newspaper headline belonged to a culture so much more popular
than that of the cubist collages into which Picasso pasted it, that
one sometimes wonders if he did not count on its commonplaceness in
daily life as a way of gaining acceptance for his art. Picasso loved
the comic strip before "Pop Master" Roy Lichtenstein, as the Times
called him in its obituary of August 30, 1997, was born. Andy Warhol
appropriated the front pages of tabloids, with their photographs of
suicides and plane crashes, as the visual language of sensation and
sudden death. It says something about the graphic tone of the Times
that, for all its familiarity, it was somehow too dignified to quite
enter the lexicon of Pop. |
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| Front-page
obituary of Frederico Fellini (11/1/93). From the exhibition
Obituary. |
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| But that does
not prevent the Times from becoming subject to analysis under
the discipline of cultural studies, which helps us understand not
only how its design gives graphic embodiment to the way that newspaper
shapes news into history, but how it presents this as authoritative.
The ornamental lettering of the New York Times logo, for example,
gives the front page the feeling of an official document, like a marriage
license or a diploma. It is testimony to the insights of Pop art that
the newspaper itself has taken its logo over as the identifying emblem
for its home page on the Internet, where the visual difference between
broadsheet and tabloid otherwise disappears. On the newsstand, the
tabloid graphically screams for attention with its single image, its
bold headlines, and its vivid language. The Times presents
itself as the bearer of uninflected truth. Tremendous thought goes
into selecting what is to be noticed on the front page, and where
on the page it is to be noticed-above or below the fold, in which
corner of the page, given how many columns with headlines in which
of several fonts-and whether there is to be an illustration and how
large the picture should be. The Times thus pre-shapes
the news for tomorrow's historians, but at the same time it shapes
the minds of its readers, or at least those who have entered into
a tacit contract with the newspaper to allow it this authority. How
much of this will carry over in the transfer from print to computer
screen is difficult to say. The ranking of stories from top to bottom
on the Web page, for example, already sacrifices a degree of subtlety
and nuance that goes with the rich semiotics of the large newspaper
page. |
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| Front-page
obituary of Roy Lichtenstein (9/30/97). From the exhibition
Obituary. |
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| The
newspaper no longer monopolizes the dissemination of news. More significant,
perhaps, it is losing the authority to shape the news-to tell its
subscribers how important a life was by the way in which it shows
on its front pages how important a death is. If one searches on the
Web under obituary, dozens of different sites appear. One is invited,
for example, to Design an Online Obituary Today!-where the exclamation
point is a warning not to dally since Tomorrow may be too late. The
sites tell us a great deal about how memorialization is observed in
our society-one can even order obituary T-shirts at T-Shirt King.
The on-line obituary is itself a cultural artifact. An essay in the
Antioch Review described some the features of cybergrief in
connection with the death of Gianni Versace. It is already clear that
the number and variety of obituarial sites is probably a better index
to the shape of contemporary mourning than the placement of an obituary
notice on any front page. The language with which grief is keyed in
opens a window into the hearts of the population far more eloquently
than that with which the writer of obituaries attempts to anticipate
the judgment of history. |
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| Front-page
obituary of Gianni Versace (7/16/97). From the exhibition Obituary. |
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| The
newspaper is almost a metaphor of ephemerality. Once read, it is discarded,
or put to secondary uses-to light fires, or wrap china, or fill cracks,
or line the puppy pen or-today-to get recycled as egg cartons or paper
towels. Even the libraries no longer keep bound volumes of old newspapers,
and have been freeing up space by destroying the ones they had been
storing on shelves. Where, outside this remarkable work, would one
see 300 integral copies of The New York Times, covering more
than a decade of noteworthy demises? Try buying a copy of the Sunday
Times from 1991! |
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| Row of front-page
obituaries featuring Joseph Papp, Fred MacMurray, Yves Montand,
Sonny Werblin, Kim Bergalis, and Berenice Abbott. From the exhibition
Obituary. |
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But Obituary reminds
us that even great institutions have their ephemerality. The newspaper,
in one form or another, is not likely to disappear at all soon.
But as the matrix through which history is given shape, we can speak
of it, as Hegel spoke of the end of art, as a Vergangenes-as
something that already belongs to the past. The mere fact that it
is addressed as a subject of Cultural Studies is a concession that,
to enter Hegel's mood, "in its highest vocation" it has become part
of history.
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| Obituary
itself belongs to Cultural Studies in a sense, not because it is part
of visual culture, being a work of visual art, but because a field
of visual culture is its subject. Its task is philosophical, bringing
a form of life to consciousness, and contributing to our own self-consciousness
as well, since that form of life is one we ourselves in part have
lived. Part of what it brings to our awareness is aesthetic-the beauty
of the front page of The New York Times and in particular the
beauty of the photographs selected to memorialize the life and person
of the deceased. Bartscherer began to think about the front page in
these terms when the Times was delivered to him some years
ago, when, as a displaced New Yorker, he was living at a distance
from the city. Each day he would open it and see, spread before him,
the array of events reported and tacitly commented upon by the page's
design. In particular he was struck by the obituarial photograph,
and what was said by means of it, about what the life to which it
belonged meant. He himself is a photographer, with a special sensibility
that infuses his work and the way he thinks about the photographs
of others. He began to preserve these newspapers. In fact he froze
them, to insure their freshness. Paper has its own life and its own
way of aging and of dying. Even to exhibit these pages, as he does
in the present work, exposes them to the irresistibilities of time
and physical change. Paper dies at a different rate than the information
inscribed on it, but, as we have seen, not even information is indifferent
to how it is inscribed. If Cultural Studies tells us anything, it
tells us that. |
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| Front-page
obituary of Martha Graham (4/2/91). From the exhibition Obituary. |
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| The
primary unit of Bartscherer's art is what I will call the aspectival
still. It is a photograph that shows what we know is an aspect of
his motif because he usually presents it with other stills showing
different aspects of that same motif. A natural mode of presentation
for him is a grid of photographs-Obituary is a grid of newspaper
pages, each a kind of still taken from the flow of time. Time is shown
moving through a regular staccato of front pages, each, as it were,
opening an aspect onto history. It is, as aspect, taken from the perspective
of The New York Times, but it means to be objective. The front
page means to be the visual truth of its historical moment. A farm,
to use one of Bartscherer's earlier subjects, is really too much to
be taken in at all at once. Better to take it in a shot at a time,
and then assemble the shots which collectively present the farm as
a reality. In a way, Robert Frank's The Americans is a body
of aspectival documents of an unfurling social reality, brought together
in a book. Alfred Stieglitz's 300 photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe
collectively disclose a single woman, herself too complex a being
to be revealed within a single image. |
|
| Installation
view of the exhibition Obituary. |
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| In
the section of his Critique of Pure Reason titled "Analogies
of Experience," Immanuel Kant discusses the way we build up our knowledge
of wholes too large to be taken in at a single glance. In the great
Second Analogy, he argues that the knowledge that two appearances
belong to the same thing is not given in either of the appearances,
but belongs to what he terms "the synthetic faculty of imagination."
Appearances, he writes, are "always successive." But the structure
of the mind synthesizes them in such a way as to represent an objective
whole. Bartscherer presents the viewer with a grid of aspects. He
does so because he has an implicit philosophy of the inexhaustibility
of the real. But the viewer has a lot of work to do to bring them
into a representation of a single object. |
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| The
eye is part of the mind. Bartscherer counts precisely on the synthesizing
mechanisms of the visual process to bring to consciousness the reality
he wants us to know. There are overlaps from image to image-a piece
of farm equipment, water flowing through an irrigation ditch, a stand
of trees seen now from this angle, now from that, now at a distance,
now close up. Noticing these links, the whole begins to take form
in consciousness. The images all link up, and by the time we have
integrated them we know the reality they collectively document. But
we have also learned something about how we put perceptions together.
In this way Bartscherer's work belongs to philosophy rather than Cultural
Studies. |
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| Front-page
obituary of Gene Kelly (2/3/96). From the exhibition Obituary. |
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| Given
his methodology as an artist, Bartscherer began to notice overlaps
between the obituarial photographs and the other photographs on the
front page, as if the choice and placement of these images was done
by an artist very much like himself. If it were done by design, it
could be seen perhaps as the living paying tribute to the dead by
miming their gestures. If the photographs of the dead are themselves
aspectival stills, there is a question of what whole they reveal.
Perhaps they reveal, taken in the aggregate, the way we think of death.
If that should be true, we will lose a mirror of our inner life when
the newspaper gives way to another form of memorialization. |
|
| Installation
view of the exhibition Obituary. |
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