Among the 41 works in this exhibition were examples of most of the varieties of photographic work for which Duane Michals is known. The roster was a diverse one: celebrity portraits (Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Downey) and portraits of friends and others; three photographic sequences, including one nine-part work, I Remember Pittsburgh, 1982, with marginal commentary written in Michals’ familiar spindly scrawl; multiple-exposure images—here frequently portraits in which each side of the frame is used as the horizon for each of four different exposures of the sitter; a dozen black and white photographs on which Michals has painted small objects in oil; and more. But despite this impressive quantity of new work from one of the more consistently exploratory of photographers working today, a becalmed air, a sense of safeness, hung over the show.
Michals’ work has always been marked by a certain naiveté, both of emotion and of craft. This disarming innocence has made each of his stylistic leaps convincing, and a little thrilling—especially in a photographic scene where conformity has at times approached a dogma and where internecine struggles over the true definition of photography abound. But with the work here, in which old ideas are in many cases simply restated in slightly different forms, Michals’ invigorating innocence seems a little frayed around the edges.
Over the past fifteen years the protean diversity suggested by the above list has become one of the hallmarks of Michals’ work. Any one of the many photographic tactics he has pursued could, in the hands of another artist, provide the basis for a long and fruitful career. This exhibition demonstrated that Michals has avoided the danger of succumbing to a too-facile flitting among processes. But by the same token the show failed to reveal a corresponding deepening of the emotional resonance of the work. Instead, a consistent tone—somewhat cutesy and somewhat depressed—ran throughout. Much of the work is introspective and even autobiographical; I Remember Pittsburgh, in which the artist offers memories of his family and his childhood, is the most obvious example. In another series, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1982, Michals himself plays one of the two characters—the father to whom the prodigal returns.
In addition to such specifically personal references, a feeling of domesticity can be found in many of the painted-on photographs—for example, Cheating at Solitaire or Look Someone Took a Bite Out of My Cookie, both 1982—suggesting parlor games played on a rainy afternoon. In these works Michals typically juxtaposes various small objects (most painted, some in the underlying photograph) on a table top, with a partially seen figure also in the frame. A man in the foreground of Who Cut My Hat with a Razor?, 1982, holds his cheek and looks at a toothbrush, comb, cigarettes, and hat with a razor blade stuck in its crown; in The Letter, 1982, a hand holds a match in front of a table littered with fruit, a postage stamp, and an envelope. Michals may intend these congeries to suggest René Magritte–like absurdist collages, or compendia of personally meaningful objects. But the crude rendering of the various knickknacks—the painted ones never cohere with the photographic space, and instead sit like decals on the surfaces of the prints—suggests instead the depictions of everyday objects that neophyte drawing students relish. There’s a mixture of yearning and coyness in these images, a quality also found in a series of black and white multiple exposures of seemingly allegorical tableaux of male and female nudes. The obvious references in these works to the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge are outweighed by their echoes of the grandiose estheticism of Puvis de Chavannes.
The dominant impression here was of that sort of false sincerity in which emotions are displayed in a seemingly open manner, but with no real attempt made to understand or transcend them. Instead, they are simply indulged; the result is a kind of solipsism, especially unfortunate from a photographer whose past achievements have led many to hope for much more.
—Charles Hagen
