Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Photo Journal Four - Robb Kendrick, Tintype of a Man with a Tattoo
Robb Kendrick’s work complicates my life.
You cannot look at this work as a man or as a woman and be an artist of any kind of value. You have to look at the body of the man and see his sexuality or his beauty as richly as you might see it in a woman and, if you want your work to matter, you cannot afford to look away. You have to own your gut.
Kendrick’s work, this piece in particular, has a rawness to it that sits in its construction. It is the novelty of tintypes that draws me. It is the artifact-ness of them. It is the idea that if you held it in your hand you would be holding the only one in existence, ever. There is one Mona Lisa. There is Night Café. Art should be like that. There is one moment, one vision, one heart.
It is certainly flawed, as the tintype process is so fast, you have to own the image even if the emulsion got laid down uneven or developed crooked. This type of process says the world is messy. It invites you to lay down in the unmade bed. It seems stained or soiled or unclean.
It’s imperfection is intoxicating but it is the rawness of the man in the picture that keeps me looking. He is unfinished. His tattoos are just black lines. He is bare chested. He is leaning out of the frame. His mouth, just opened and his eyes squint, seems to say he is unsure what Kendrick wants from him.
There is a subtle erotic nature to this picture like a black and white photo booth strip of two sailors arm in arm, in their sailor suits, grinning at each other. You might want to imagine them somewhere, unaware of their bodies, as they swim later that day on some foreign beach. You might imagine anything. I imagine this man as the Misfit, his eyes “red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking[1]”.
Maybe he’s just the Sal Mineo type, pressed forward, white knuckling the bed post for Jimmy Stark. It’s that kind a story that sits open ended waiting for the right person to sidle up to it and listen. I reckon it goes both ways. You have to be open to make it but you got be just as open to see what the artist has done or doesn’t even know he has done.
It seems to me that if you owned this tintype, you might put it some place special. Not like wall or a shelf but a drawer, someplace you kept those things too private for any guest, in your house, to see.
Good art is like that. It lays somewhere between the glory of God and the stickiest sins of the flesh, proof that in the heart's country we need have no boundries so that there could be no explaining why we tucked it away only the glorious blush of the unexpected.
[1] O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find.
You cannot look at this work as a man or as a woman and be an artist of any kind of value. You have to look at the body of the man and see his sexuality or his beauty as richly as you might see it in a woman and, if you want your work to matter, you cannot afford to look away. You have to own your gut.
Kendrick’s work, this piece in particular, has a rawness to it that sits in its construction. It is the novelty of tintypes that draws me. It is the artifact-ness of them. It is the idea that if you held it in your hand you would be holding the only one in existence, ever. There is one Mona Lisa. There is Night Café. Art should be like that. There is one moment, one vision, one heart.
It is certainly flawed, as the tintype process is so fast, you have to own the image even if the emulsion got laid down uneven or developed crooked. This type of process says the world is messy. It invites you to lay down in the unmade bed. It seems stained or soiled or unclean.
It’s imperfection is intoxicating but it is the rawness of the man in the picture that keeps me looking. He is unfinished. His tattoos are just black lines. He is bare chested. He is leaning out of the frame. His mouth, just opened and his eyes squint, seems to say he is unsure what Kendrick wants from him.
There is a subtle erotic nature to this picture like a black and white photo booth strip of two sailors arm in arm, in their sailor suits, grinning at each other. You might want to imagine them somewhere, unaware of their bodies, as they swim later that day on some foreign beach. You might imagine anything. I imagine this man as the Misfit, his eyes “red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking[1]”.
Maybe he’s just the Sal Mineo type, pressed forward, white knuckling the bed post for Jimmy Stark. It’s that kind a story that sits open ended waiting for the right person to sidle up to it and listen. I reckon it goes both ways. You have to be open to make it but you got be just as open to see what the artist has done or doesn’t even know he has done.
It seems to me that if you owned this tintype, you might put it some place special. Not like wall or a shelf but a drawer, someplace you kept those things too private for any guest, in your house, to see.
Good art is like that. It lays somewhere between the glory of God and the stickiest sins of the flesh, proof that in the heart's country we need have no boundries so that there could be no explaining why we tucked it away only the glorious blush of the unexpected.
[1] O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find.
# posted by Mike : 10:30 AM
