[Continued]
Watten: "Adams was an
ideal photographer to represent the university's view of itself. As a
world-renowned Modernist . . . he brought together in his work modern
technology and sublime grandeur . . . . As anchor of this sublimity, the
Campanile takes a prominent place in his iconography. The symbolic order it
represents is distributed everywhere in Adams's system of representation; the
archive reveals his repeated efforts to foreground and frame it as a
controlling icon. This . . . in turn, offers a paradigm for Adams's construction
of relations of equivalence between the elements of the discourse of the
university, beginning with the literal construction of the campus . . . ."
In the first place, Adams
could not by any stretch of logic be described as a "Modernist." His
work began in the tradition of, and continued to embody, throughout his career,
the pictorial landscape values of the 19th Century. He never questioned the
analytical or aesthetic implications of that program. Indeed, his first
portfolio--Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras--includes so-called
"soft focus" images which had been popular at the
turn of the century. In his eyes, natural wonders--symbolic
signposts of a secular pantheistic tapestry, designating parks as jewels in
the crown--became the means to project the preservationist's agenda into
the popular realm. Adams never questioned the basic claim of photography as the
means of the presentation of actual reality. He rejected any manipulation or
alteration of the image which did not enhance the original conception as seen
with the naked eye. Adams is wholly pre-Modernist in his sensibility and in his work.
Secondly, Sather Tower
(aka: the Campanile), which was constructed in 1914, as a part of campus architect
John Galen Howard's Beaux Arts Master Plan, was specifically and
deliberately designed to occupy the central visual key to the university,
visible from everywhere. Based on European models--the Venice tower comes
immediately to mind--it stands as a monument to the aesthetic mode of the time
of its conception, and as an image of the optimism and progressive spirit of
American liberal education. To suggest that Adams sought--either consciously,
or unconsciously--to emphasize it as an over-mastering iconic symbol of
repression and a decadent corruption of the administration, is sheer nonsense. What
fool would think that deliberately excluding images of the tower would somehow
have been a more politically correct choice? And for that matter, the tower's
original purpose wasn't as an icon of power. Anyone choosing to view it that
way, particularly in hindsight, is engaging in an egregiously cheap form of
gratuitous bias.
But why not?
Turning his attention to
the faculty portraits--"in each of these rigid and codified poses, the
inventor himself (always male) is an empty, nearly anonymous cipher, while the
given invention . . . offers a promise of fulfillment. . . . The transformative
potential of the most sublime orders known to man is disclosed--as with the
Berkeley research that participated in the development of nuclear weapons at
the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory . . . as seen in Adams' images of the first
diminutive cyclotron . . . This sublime potential . . . a threat of total
annihilation in the name of science and rationality . . . by means of logics of
equivalence . . . throughout the system."
All this analytical
presumption seems beside the point. In choosing to include the university's
scientific facilities as a pertinent sphere of its research mission, Adams was
certainly not attempting to portray the administration's underlying power
structure, as Watten states. It would be just as false for Adams to have
pretended that scientific research wasn't important, by not portraying it at
all, as it would have been to show a photo, for instance, of an atomic
detonation. Documentary photography can swing both ways, depending upon your
point of view. In any case, it wasn't Adams' mission to present a philosophical
criticism of the university on its centennial, as Watten seems to demand.
Watten goes on to include
the usual suspects--" . . . not only is gender rigidly ordered . . . Other
outsides of the system include minorities, as scarce as quark particles in the
cloud chamber of Adams' oeuvre . . . Asian Americans . . African Americans . .
. and Hispanics . . . [and] Native American[s] . . . ." Again, given the
context of the historical moment, it's hard to imagine what Adams ought to
have done, in retrospect, given the obvious mandate of his commission. If,
for instance, he had been queued to the motions of "diversity" so
prevalent in our own time, he might, instead of taking a photograph of
Department of English Chairman James Hart, have chosen to photograph Josephine Miles,
another professor in the same department, whose wheelchair condition could,
signally killing two birds with one stone, have qualified for both gender and
disability as the politically correct "coded" references of which
Watten could, fifty years later, approve. But then, Adams wasn't a photographer
in the mold of W. Eugene Smith (Minamata) or Paul Strand or Dorothea Lange; he
wasn't hired to portray the university in a critical light, a fact which Watten
seems unable to grasp.
"As a visual
endorsement of Enlightenment rationality, it is doubly remarkable that this
document was created, after the Free Speech Movement . . . Adams is hard
pressed to account for the historical moment . . . It occurred during the 1966
Charter Day ceremony . . . [in which] a well-organized student group provided the
students with picket signs [against the war in Vietnam] . . . " which are
clearly evident in Adams' photos of the crowd. Ironically, Watten sees
hypocrisy in the photo, which Adams included, as if the decision to
include it, involved a compromised failure, and was evidence of the ambiguity of
the project. But if Adams had chosen not to include it, then we would
not even have had it to consider in the first place. Indeed, if Adams had chosen to exclude it, might that not have been evidence of the very corruption Watten insists the photo signifies in the first place? Finally, though the
archive itself is exhaustive, no attempt is made in Watten's criticism to
distinguish between the vast archive file, and the images that were actually
published in the book.
Watten's attempt to
associate his undergraduate self--and later his associates in the Language
School activities in subsequent decades--with the era of student dissent at
Berkeley in the 1960's--is an amusing maneuver. Watten himself was never an active protestor, and in fact was a science major during that period. In a discussion
we had during the 1970's, he was adamant in insisting that participation in
political demonstrations and activities was a futile and pointless choice.
During the 1960's, I had had friends in the student radical movement. When I
went to work for the U.S. Government, I discovered that the FBI had developed a
fat file on my movements and activities during the 1960's. When I reported this
to Watten, he was angered and frightened, worried that his association with me
might have compromised his own non-participatory, officially a-political
stance. His first concern was for his own reputation, and his image. "You keep my name out of that shit!"
There is nothing in the
writing of the Language School participants to suggest that its
"poetics" should be seen as a politically correct program. From
Watten's point of view, it makes sense for him to regard himself, in
retrospect, as an early messenger of Left political points of view. It's a way
of polishing his legacy reputation, and that of his associates, to accord with
current politically correct attitudes. Their poems are
relatively free of political referents, primarily because they eschew the kind
of timely dialectics which require clear stands, that fade and date with
time--names and places and events that determine real outcomes.
Watten can put down Ansel
Adams--that's just shooting fish in a barrel--because it provides an
historically convenient symbolic document for his argument. Indeed, I myself
have put Adams down for aesthetic reasons, which have little or anything to do
with his politics, which Watten deliberately ignores in favor of easy,
and clearly unjustified character assassination. Fiat Lux is, on the whole, a
quotidian archive almost completely denatured of political content, primarily
because Adams himself wasn't a critic of the university, but it's also worth
pointing out the context of the commission itself, which had nothing whatever
to do with the student protest movement, or with Watten's preferred point of
view, fifty years later.
If Watten's goal is to privilege "transparent rationality" in institutions of higher
learning, he might begin by engaging with current politically correct
activities and attitudes on present-day American campuses, where freedom of
thought and expression seem as much in jeopardy today, as at any time in the last
century. In the 1930's, "fellow traveler" was a derogatory term used
to criticize those who shared political beliefs with identified radicals.
Today, there's a whole generation of American academics--of whom Watten is
one--who flirt with socialism (in its various guises) but who never risk
anything that might jeopardize their tenures and pensions. It's a kind of
dishonesty that sees harmless (fake) association as a convenient cheap badge of
honor. It's just chicken-shit behavior.
But why not?
No comments:
Post a Comment