Art
Points of View
Sixty-six artists, 243 photos, and the innumerable stories suggested by the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Seeing Now: Photography Since 1960
Tina Barney. “The Reception.” 1985. The Baltimore Museum of Art: National Endowment for the Arts, and matching funds from E. Stuart Quarngesser, BMA 1991.26. ©Tina Barney
Published: April 6, 2011
Seeing Now: Photography Since 1960
Baltimore Museum of Art through May 19
Visit artbma.org for more details
Tina Barney’s 1985 photograph “The Reception” hits you like a wall-mounted middle finger the first time you pass through the Baltimore Museum of Art’s current mammoth photography retrospective. First, there’s its location: on one of the first walls you pass after Seeing Now’s initial eye-calibrating gallery introductory space. This second gallery is devoted to the “Seeing People” section of the exhibition, and its positioning feels a bit like a curatorial affront. It’s sandwiched between two typically blunt black-and-white Diane Arbus photographs and Liu Zheng’s “Two Miners, Datong. Shanxi Province.” Both Arbus prints—“A Family on the Lawn One Sunday in Westchester (Suburban), N.Y.” and “Woman with a Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C.”—and the Zheng offer candid, probing peeks into people’s lives in austerely composed contemplative black and white. Barney’s print is this oversized, garishly colored photo of three rich people in what might as well be a boring snapshot. It’s trite. It’s annoyingly calling attention to itself. It’s almost vulgar. It’s, it’s, it’s—
It’s also oddly magnetic the second and third times you visit the show. You start to notice how some of the elements that initially annoyed have softened into the curious. Yes, it helps to recall that Barney spent the 1980s photographing the affluent lives of her Rhode Island family and friends, which somewhat explains the photo’s candid, ordinary mien. The exhibition’s wall text informs you that the woman on the left is Barney’s sister; the image itself comes from an actual wedding reception, meaning there are people who really and truly do this on purpose: the gold dress, the ridiculous hat, the actual Pablo fucking Picasso painting hanging on the wall. Who the hell lives like this?
By the fourth and fifth visits to the show, this tempestuous curiosity has sharpened into something like full-blown rage: Why am I even supposed to care about who these rich shits are? “The Reception” isn’t even all that technically interesting. The left-hand side of the frame is kinda in shadow and not crisp at all, as if another person wearing some kind of ostentatious headgear was standing near the photographer and obscuring part of the flash. But whatever it was didn’t prevent light from hitting the highly polished dark-wood paneling in the background and making it shine like a cheerleader’s glistening forehead after a particularly rousing bit of sis boom bah. The seated, pretty man in the dark suit has his right hand raised to just under his mouth, as if he’s about to cover it after witnessing some unfortunate display of unbecoming behavior. (In the 1980s movie adaptation of this photo, he’s played by Rob Lowe.) The woman in the chandelier-like gold dress is seated in such a way that her head bisects a flower arrangement on the table behind her, making her already obnoxious hat look like some architectural monstrosity George Lucas saddled Natalie Portman with in The Phantom Menace. And if you look real close you’ll notice just to the right of this woman, also on the table behind her, is some kind of figurine in a clear protective box—wearing something similarly shiny and gold and assuming a very similar pose to the photographer’s sister.
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