88: "Generative Dynamics" by Janina Ciezadlo (Thursday, October 1)
Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision at the Chicago Cultural Center
Then/Now: The Eternal Thread of the ID Aesthetic at Illinois Institute of Technology
Most people use the word “design” in reference to organizing visual information, the built environment and objects for function, impact and communication. The word “design” in Chicago tends to mean design as practiced by the Institute of Design and other institutions within the sphere of influence the original Walter Gropius and Moholy-Nagy Bauhaus curriculums brought here from Germany in 1937. Everything else is just layout or building. Visitors to who go to The Illinois Institute of Technology to see Barbara Crane “Then/Now: The Eternal Thread of the ID Aesthetic” will catch a glimpse of this utopian vision in the perfect harmony between Crane’s two-dimensional photographic visions of the human body and the spare but lyrical room designed (as are several buildings including the Library) by Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe where the exhibit hangs.
“Barabra Crane: Challenging Vision” an expansive and inspiring retrospective running concurrently at the Chicago Cultural Center exhibits Crane’s protean productivity. Each set of photos in the exhibit has an essential set of dynamic problems that echo and overlap but don’t repeat. The north end of the exhibit hall in “Challenging Vision” is dedicated to nature. Here Crane’s approach is Aristotelian, her careful cataloging of natural forms rests on rigorous observation. The largest images —Crane varies her image format and print size according to her subjects—are four paper wasp’s nests at least three times life size (each 36x60, “Coloma to Covert-Nests” 1995) in black and white, and the smallest are a suite of slightly anthropomorphic fungi (possible life-sized, from “Portfolios of Nature” 1988-2007) made through a Polaroid transfer process. There are images of maple leaves in series (“Coloma to Covert” Inkjet 2007), several photographs of dead rats, fires, smoke, objects trouvés and large narrow prints of sticks revealing, like the wasp’s nests, complex textures created through natural processes. As one looks at the work an underlying interest in motion unites examples from different series; many subjects are in multiples or displayed in grids. The grids often move into abstraction, such as a series of Polaroids, (“The Red and the Black” 1984) which are non-objective variations of color latent in the photo-chemical materials. Prints of Crane’s work were also exhibited at the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago from October 16 to December 12.
Abstraction, enjoying renewed interest these days, is intrinsic to Crane’s Institute of Design training; abstract experimentation exists in a clear and crucial tension with figuration throughout her career all the way back to work on display at the IIT exhibit which appeared in her thesis show. Possibly because the size (over three hundred photographs) and sixty-year scope of the Cultural Center exhibit is overwhelming, one feels most vividly the essence of the generative dynamic between abstraction and figuration and a profound dedication to form in the restrained fluid glass and steel space designed by Mies. Photography and buildings may be still, but Crane’s eye and oeuvre are never static. She keeps realigning the balance among sensuality, individuality and formal structures through compositions that demarcate the temporary spaces in which her subjects—the human body, nature, cities¬— rest.
The camera is the industrial object which will usher in and mediate post modernity through its own transformation and frame a contemporary world which seems to be made of images rather than things. When Crane graduated from IIT in the 60s during the waning moments of modernism, the camera—she uses all kinds of cameras, from box cameras to Polaroids to digital— was still mechanical. One gets the sense that when she frames her subjects she is completely aware that she is subjecting them to industrial space, to rectalinearity and to an industrial process of representation. This lucidity is the “Eternal Thread of the ID Aesthetic.” Composition is key because the relationships within the frame must be in dialogue with the shape and edges to find perfect dynamic harmony among the elements at play. Intimate nudes revealing only curves and crevices, images of people in doorways (“People of the North Portal” 1970-71) overlapping multiple exposures of the human figure with light coming alternatively from behind which silhouettes and abstracts the limbs or from the front (“Multiple Human Forms”: she did many variations of this series in the 60s) and revealing their specificity exemplify this reflexive balance between humanism and formalism. While modernism has been widely derided for its rigid and mechanistic utopianism, Chicagoans are well-acquainted with this missing humanistic piece of high Bauhaus modernism through the photographic traditions of the School of Design including Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind (who signed Crane’s MS in Photography) Kenneth Josephson and Ray Metzker among others. Crane was one of the only women from this masculine cadre to become well-known.
Crane often truncates her human subjects almost crushing them in the frame, or man-made spaces like doorways (“People of the North Portal” 1970) or crowds. The tight focus produces poignant intimate compositions. In many of the early series like “Chicago Beaches and Parks” (1972-78 Gelatin Silver Prints) her camera seeks out private moments of human contact (“Private Views 1980-84) in public places that are revealing and restorative rather than voyeuristic. A series of double exposures of street portraits caught in letters from neon signs (“Neon” 1969) are among the few sets of images where there is a sense of struggle and the kind of cultural sadness one associates with Robert Frank. In my favorite series, the intimate but anonymous and recent figure studies she calls “Pedway Notations” (2009 Archival Pigment Prints), the angular and usually diagonal shape of images placed in strips on a white ground capture people’s feet and legs in motion while the details in the brilliant light produce graphic shadows: the shape of a knee, the arch of a foot or the achingly unique angle of a heel in stride reaffirm human grace against the abstract constraints of negative space.
