—

Ron Falcioni
ART REVIEW

Robert Frank and the Everyday at
Presentation House Gallery until
October 10. Seen in conjunction
with the exhibit’s film program as
screened at Pacific Cinemathe-
que, September 17 and 18.

O SOME of us, certain
artists are emblematic
of an entire era.

In the “hot’ Jazz Age of Duke
Ellington and George Gershwin.
which followed hard on the heels
of the First World War, Hem-
ingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
epitomized, both in their lives and
in their literature, what Gertrude
Stein was cryptically to label the.
Lost Generation.

But it was in fact no more
“lost’’ than the Beat Generation
of Allen Ginsberg and Jack |
Kerouac who were frantically try-
ing to find themselves in the post-
bebop “‘cool’’ jazz Age of Dizzy
Gillespie — another era which
emerged disillusioned out of the
ashes of a major cataclysm.

Similarly, some iconographic
images best conjure up the
zeitgeist of a specific milieu in
ways that other images of the
period cannot. A particular in-
stance of this phenomenon can be
witnessed (unti] Oct. 10) in the
current exhibit of Robert Frank's
work at Presentation House
Gallery.

The multiple focus of Robert
Frank and the Everyday reflects the
multi-dimensional talents of this
Swiss-born Jewish expatriate
whose achievements in America
expanded the syntax of
photography and film-making. On
the one hand, it posits the possible
influence of vernacular
photography on Frank’s idiosyn-
cratic output.

On the other, it explores Frank’s
life-long celebration of the
minutiae of everyday life as a
reflection of what he and Kerouac
— in the 1959 film, Pull My Daisy
-—— would define as the holiness of
the mundane. The esthetic of ver-
nacular photography is explored in
the generous display of anony-
mous photographs by non-profes-
sionals whose objective in tripping
a shutter was seldom anything
more ambitious than the desire to
preserve an everyday event in the

form of a simple snapshot.

This component of the exhibit,
though apt as an illustration of
principles at work in Frank's
photographic output, ultimately
leaves something to be desired not
only because it proves nothing
about Frank's intentions but also
because these hyper-enlarged
snapshots, unpretentiously
beautiful as they are, deserve a
more generous treatment than
they receive here.

Mounted like an obtuse footnote
in a disorienting jumble on a single
wall of the galley’s west wing, their
“installation” does little service
to the integrity of the photos
themselves and seems curiously at

pty spa

THE AMERICANS: Trofley - New Orleans, 1955-56. Swiss-born photegrapher Robert Frank travelled throughout the United States in

the mid-fifties to compile his strikingly original portfolio of images.

odds with the disposition of the
rest of the show.

Generated in the wake of the
new documentary photography of
Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson and
Bill Brant, Frank's major contribu-
tion to the history of photography
consists primarily of The Ameri-
cans, his brutally honest and visu-
ally innovative portrayal of mid-
die-class America in the ‘50s. Two
factors contribute to make his
perspective unique.

The first is his capacity to see
America as an outsider intent on
capturing, without precept or
compromise, the true underbelly
of common everyday life in the
U.S. The second is the very casual
and spontaneous utilization of his
small hand-held Leica, an ap-
proach that, in duplicating the
idiosyncrasies of the untrained
photographer, produced seem-
ingly naive and haphazard resu!ts
whose immediacy and inner logic
constitute a new esthetic sensibili-
ty.
The realities revealed in these
photos came as something of a
revelation. In City Fathers,
Hoboken New jersey (1955) poli-
ticians in top hat and tails are

* This Mi
sf

ueued up as if waiting to kiss
their quota of babies for the Red,
White and Blue.

In Beaufort Cafe, S.C. (1955) a
black infant plays at the foot of an
elegant jukebox in an otherwise
spare and impoverished room. In
Memphis (1956), a black menial in
a white smock gives a shoe shine
to a bored white businessman
amidst banks of polished urinals.
This was clearly an America not
seen in Life magazine.

Having explored photography to
his satisfaction, in 1958 Frank Jaid
aside his camera in favor of film-
making, a pursuit which brought
Jess acclaim but allowed him to
expand his quirky vision in more
original, if less popular, ways.

This component of the Robert
Frank exhibit, screened in con-
junction with Pac.fic Cinemathe-
que, brought together a repre-
sentative cross-section of films,
many of which like the historic
Pull My Daisy have since become

‘classic documents of the Beat

Movement.

Drawing on the cinematic ad-
vances of the Italian neorealists
and the French New Wave, Pull
My Daisy was a unique blend of
fictionalized reminiscence and im-
provisational documentary.

Based loosely on a scené from
Kerouac’s unproduced play, The
Beat Generation, it featured beat-
nik poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter
Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and
painter Larry Rivers in an absurd
comedy of errors that postulates,
through an unlikely tete-a-tete
with a bishop, that everyday ex-
istence is a kind of divine poetry in
itself. Filmed in silent 35mm black
and white and dubbed over with a
spiky scherzophrenic music track
and dialogues improvised ex-
clusively by Kerouac himself, the
film pretty much summed up the
objectives of the newly formed in-
dependent film movement in New
York,

Also included were the eccentric
documentary spoof on underdog
“scientist Lightning Bob, Energy
and How To Get It (1981), featur-

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Wa

ing Dr. John and William Bur-
roughs, and Me and My Brother
(1968), Frank’s erratic feature-
length excursion into the life and
times of poet Peter Orlovsky's
schizophrenic brother Julius.
Curiously, what emerges from all

‘of this is an interesting portrait of a

milieu that might very well have
been “‘lost’’ in a non-figurative
sense if it were not for the unique
contribution of Frank. :

For, among other things, this
worthy exhibit pays fond tribute
both to the Beat Movement of the
‘50s and to the intellectual out-
sider who was largely instrumental
in defining and documenting it.

PROSIT
OCTOBERFEST
Is Back!

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weekend of Gemutlichkeit!

Join us in a celebration of everything
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fun all happens October 9-11, 1993.
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THE

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whistler

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