Thomas Struth
My favorite variant of the idea that the real world is a bleak, tedious place is the phrase “reality hit me,” implying as it does that reality is a violent, unforgiving entity that can’t be changed under any circumstances. Many photographs in the Thomas Struth retrospective–curated by Charles Wylie of the Dallas Museum of Art and now at the Museum of Contemporary Art–depict what appears to be a variation on this immutable real world. At the same time, their large formats and compositional integrity suggest an underlying optimism.
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Black-and-white photographs (from the 1970s through 1990) of mercilessly rectilinear housing projects in Germany and Chicago don’t so much record the buildings as confront us with them. Many are so imposing yet dreary that one can’t help wondering about the processes that produced them–the overly rational social visions that relied on concrete grids to discipline an unruly postwar world. Struth–who mentioned several times during the show’s opening lecture that he feels a sense of responsibility is crucial to art–suggests an implicit violence in their starkness through the use of a static, scrupulously centered camera and unmanipulated prints. Such photographs as South Lake Street Apartments, Chicago (1990) silently but resolutely ask what errors and miscalculations–or machinations of power–brought these buildings into being. The East German housing complexes are similar to what we used to call the “human filing cabinets” of the Richard J. Daley era.
The huge museum photographs that the MCA is using to promote the exhibit are complex and beautiful, recalling Renaissance paintings. Viewers–some blurred, especially in dark interiors where the shutter speed is slow–dressed in primary colors that mirror their Renaissance ancestors move through the foreground while sensuous paintings tower over them. In one photograph a crush of faces and shoulders beneath a window is juxtaposed with calm tableaux of biblical scenes. The great frescoes and paintings dwarfing viewers in Galleria dell’Accademia 1, Venice (1992), Stanze di Raffaello 2, Rome (1990), and San Zaccaria, Venice (1995) remind us that it was the great project of the Renaissance to create spaces in proportion to the human form. Previous cultures–the Romans, for instance–used the constructed environment to impress their subjects with the power of the state. Struth captures this dynamic of scale in Pantheon, Rome (1990), which shows a cluster of tiny humans under the structure’s blind “windows.” The tourists in Struth’s huge photos wander through vast spaces, their fluid, ephemeral patterns in complete contrast to the determinacy and regularity of the architecture. Masterpieces like Gericault’s melodramatic The Raft of the Medusa, itself a monumental 16 by 23 feet, seem all the more contrived in comparison with Struth’s random gaggles of mismatched late-20th-century admirers in Louvre IV, Paris (1989).
Yolanda Andrade’s simple but striking Las alas de deseo catches a man leaning on a lamppost, naked except for handmade wings, a butterfly over his genitals, and white socks and running shoes. Squinting in the direction of the street, he looks like a circus performer waiting for the bus. Of course the circus or carnival has always been a place where the rules of society are inverted, but this shot documents that everyday people also challenge gender roles.
