Gus Blaisdell Collected

Thirteen Ways of NOT Looking at a Gossage Photograph

∙ 92 ∙ thirteen Ways of not looking at a Gossage Photograph In Memory of Arnold Gassan ■ To use a horse to show that a horse is not a horse is not as good as using a non-horse to show that a horse is not a horse. —chuang tzu John Gossage has asked me to write a few words about what his photographs are not. I have been in love with the negative since childhood . But what a photograph is not? Not identical with its subject; not a likeness of its subject; not a representation but a projection, because the original, as Cavell says, is as present as it ever was. In a photograph we see what is not present, the subject transformed in the medium of visible absence. I particularly love negation used to isolate what a thing is, like the theologians ’ via negativa. Attributes are taken away till the thing sought stands naked before you. Slightly obscene this long undressing of concepts and objects, it is like clearing out a bunch of weeds to get to a bare place. Gossage is seldom about clearing out. His photographs are often about a weedy and wasted jouissance. Whenever I look at a Gossage photograph one stanza from Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” comes to mind, the seventh: O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? John Gossage, Plate 57, from The Romance Industry: Venezia/Marghera, 1998, Nazareli Press, Tucson, 2002. 94 ∙ on photographs Gossage is always about the luxuriance of what goes unnoticed, what goes unseen until his pictures call your attention to it. Stevens’ men of Haddam have grown thin imagining golden birds when at the feet of the women all around them they do not see either the blackbird walking or the women. An exercise in subtraction. I will form pseudo-propositions with parentheses , negate them, and at the end, after the parens are closed, I attach the name of a major predecessor or contemporary of Gossage’s, artists with whom he shares a similarity but an even deeper difference. NOT (atmospheric erosion like lichen clocks the head of Pan at Versailles; autumn leaves fallen on steps that descend semi-circularly to a circular landing and then continue their descent; the archaeology of streets and buildings presented after a terminal moraine has melted): Eugene Atget. NOT (the American commonplace so quietly essential as to seem beyond the ability of photography or any other medium to capture, within the reach of nothing but admiration): Walker Evans. NOT (the drama of the hard travellin’ road after Whitman and Kerouac, in outsider eyes where the lights are always going down, leaving only the ghostlighted stage of the photograph): Robert Frank. NOT (still going on down, even Beat-ing it on down to its basic Beat-ness, the discovery of structure where mirrors crack the picture planes into what can be seen front and back and behind and beside, or a vegetal equivalent of an abstract-expressionist scrawl that blocks the picture surface—a genre of delirious possibility, but still anchored in the often rigid permanence of what looks like asides and throwaways): Lee Friedlander. NOT (a gaze as steady as Buster Keaton’s wonders whether the industrial parks depicted manufacture pantyhose or megadeath; hip beyond irony or cool, where what passes for the so-called art world bleeds and leaks itself seamlessly into the so-called real world): Lewis Baltz. NOT (a metropolis constructed by people for their discomfort, and which in turn refuses to reflect them in its curtain walls; eyes more alienated thirteen ways of not looking at a gossage photograph ∙ 95 than Antonioni’s—eyes of an American veteran who returned with Vietnam locked in behind eyes that for years photographed without film or camera—eyes that stare at the traces of homelessness and the violence of wasted shooting sites where dolls’ heads hang for targets. Whether we edify or degrade we first create ruins, like Olympic sites once the games are gone and the local economy begins an unending hemorrhage): Anthony Hernandez. NOT (the outrage rightly registered at the sight of a few trees that survive on the freeways of Los Angeles, or the stupefied faces of people on intimate terms with the thermonuclear unconscious of Colorado’s Rocky Flats): Robert Adams. And...