Positive Focus / Discuss

colorstalker    says:

Did you catch Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker (Nov 27, 2006) on photographer Jerry Shore? I like Gopnik. I even like how – after all that time he spent in Paris – he can’t resist spicing his prose with oracular pronouncements in the French manner (“Dignity opens the door to sadness.” “Desires are eternal, but their biddings are temporal”) OK, but mockery aside, his piece is reasonably sensitive. And certainly Shore’s work is well worth looking at. So why did the article leave me with a sinking feeling?

Here we have a prolific, successful writer – Gopnik’s prose practically bubbles with self confidence; I imagine him rubbing his hands together in glee after typing a fine phrase – taking on yet another doomed, isolated poet who died before his time. These resurrection jobs are getting to be a regular item. There’s nothing new about them of course (think Vincent Van Gogh; think Sylvia Plath). But I’m getting awfully sick and tired of sad stories about dead artists.

The story aspect is key, probably at least as important as the art. Gopnik calls Shore “…a kind of artist-martyr to the art of seeing…” He describes how he came to New York after art school “… intending to become a painter – he worshipped de Kooning and Hoffmann and Kline…” but instead ended up making “…thirty- and sixty-second spots for Pepsi, Revlon, Maybelline.” In those days making commercials was, says Gopnik, “…if not exactly a theatre of creativity, at least a medium of riches and excitement.” For Shore, the commercials led “…inevitably…” to Hollywood “…where he “…made a couple of small features,” then returned to New York only to discover that the advertising industry had moved on from the small-shop style he was accustomed to. Unable to find work, Gopnik tells us, Shore “…fell down a well of alcohol and isolation.”

Can you hear the music shifting to minor key? Unfortunately, this tragic-decline script is somewhat spoiled by the fact that in the remaining decade of his life (he died at 59) Shore shot & printed some 4,000 color pictures of a decidedly unglamorous New York City. And they are (based on the few I’ve seen) fine, unsentimental, brilliant -- the work of a visual intelligence at its peak & fully committed to creation. Gopnik’s meditations on Shore’s body of work constitute the bulk of the article, & I have no quarrel with them. But his dismay – he can’t seem to suppress it -- at the spectacle of a man of proven talent descending from recognition & good pay to uncompensated obscurity – to nobodyland – seems more about Gopnik's anxieties than Shore's reality.

I’m not suggesting that Shore losing his career & slipping into alcohol & depression was somehow liberating. Nah, you can have your Bukowski & all your adolescent fantasy movies about how the people in the asylum are wise old souls & the people outside are the crazy ones. Believe me when I tell you I have no romantic illusions about booze & drugs or mental illness. But it may be that standing on a street corner in perfect light in darkest Queens or later on, after a few drinks at home, that Shore felt -- at least temporarily -- that he’d made the right choices (somebody else could light the Breck girl). I would certainly never call Shore’s photographs “substitutes” for his film-making or anything else, as Gopnik does. I might instead guess they were his bulwarks against decline – the moments & hours of clarity & understanding & self-worth, perhaps the only ones, that rose above the growing murk & confusion of his life.

It’s a tragedy that a man of such talent & drive had to endure the horrors & go out unknown, believing himself a failure -- & that his work almost disappeared. But of course such things happen all the time. The morbid joke is that in the end the publicist, the curator and the collector are more important than the art. A guy like Shore has to die before he's eligible for suffering artist sainthood. After that the well-connected tastemakers can come in, roll back the stone & , if they're lucky, resurrect him. Without a collector/archivist like Daniel Wolf to buy up his prints after he died & a writer of Gopnik’s stature to analyze them in a major publication, we wouldn’t know anything at all – nada forever -- about Jerry Shore.
Originally posted at 10:19PM, 1 December 2006 PDT ( permalink )
colorstalker edited this topic 20 months ago.