Marsha Burns/Michael Burns Jundt Art
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October 26 - December 14, 2003 Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington
Ma sha Burns at the Jundt "Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup. " -Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness The above quote will help us apprehend Marsha Burns's most recent work, but first we will look at her earlier work. Events, place, and time influence an artist's work. Moving into a loft studio in Seattle's historic Pioneer Square may have triggered Marsha Burns's remarkable and original photographs of the latter 1970s, which were done in the new studio. The studio was new working space for Marsha and her husband, Michael, reclaimed and made livable with their own hard work in the unused upper floor of an old brick building that, without its historical value, would have been demolished before they found it. light from the west-facing windows filled one end of the big empty space. The light, the shadows, and the angles were irresistible. Marsha and her husband began to photograph the empty space, as if warming up to what each of them might eventually put there in front of their cameras. Marsha inserted the figure, in costume and out. Carefully composing the scene, she directed each figure's attitude, how one stood, or sat or leaned, or looked. She photographed these different figures, male and female, as elements in the formerly empty space, not as individuals with character or beauty or personality to reveal, as in portraits. She was the director, but the human elements weren't actors. light and shadow played on the figure as on any prop (a large white box to lean against, for example). Ever the skilled director, she instructed a left foot to move forward three inches, a right hand to rest on the box, a head to lower a little and turn slightly right. Marsha imagined the SUbstanceof these photographs in, as the Seattle artist Francis Celantano wrote in his Photography Northwest article, "the conceptual delirium" of her "inner vision" before she began a session. But always she knew that in execution, the dynamic of the moment brings discovery and change. Looking at these photographs, one's eye is drawn, of course, to inspect the figure, and then, with luck, on to the other elements in the picture. These are photographs of existential moments, sometimes erotic, always mysterious. During this period, Marsha worked outside the studio, too, on location on a larger stage where she revealed her big imagination and her big talent as a director. Perhaps her best-known work from this time-still in the 1970s-is her Snow Goose series. These photographs of nude women in and out of a swimming pool are seen in a sequence, a cinematic, surreal narrative in which the figures may be preoccupied with pool paraphernalia such as loops of long white tubing and goggles. This series, and others from this period, are wonderfully rich to look at, even for one who may not have a glimmer of the symbolic or allegoric clues Marsha intended. Her exquisite handling of the medium, the strangeness of content, are enough. Following this work, Marsha traveled a good deal in the eighties and nineties, in this country and in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In the American West, she made rather classical portraits of American rodeo riders, unknown men whose cowboy gear announces a personal identity and possibly local status. These are formal view camera portraits made with only modest direction of the subject's stance and gesture. Except for her subjects' more expressive, self-possessed poses, their less flummoxed look, the portraits echo and bring up-to-date those of frontier photographers. With the same view camera and skill, and during the same general period, Marsha produced a remarkable series of formal portraits of young people who live, or appear to live, outside convention. Without their style, their dress, their decorations, they would go unnoticed on any city street. They are their message; they are different. It's not always clear just what it all means, except, perhaps, that they are not like the suits with whom they share the sidewalk. Marsha found these young on Seattle and New York streets and in her foreign travels and for that they are lucky. These International Tribal Youth, as she calls this series, are quite naturally pleased with the concrete evidence Marsha gives them that they have been noticed by an intelligent, articulate, and beautiful woman who clearly understands and is sympathetic to their place in the world, and
Cover: Marsha Burns (American, b. 1945). Rome,1997.
Chromogenic print, 16 3/4" x 19".
who has a serious camera. Accustomed to staring at television monitors, these cowboys and "tribal youth" know how to look into a lens. The Polaroid Company invited Marsha to use its newly developed 20"x 24" Polaroid camera in a New York studio, which is where Marsha made some of these "tribal" portraits. We've gone into some detail about Marsha's earlier work to better demonstrate the changes in her current photographic work. While traveling to cities in Asia and Europe, Marsha found new images, new ideas, everywhere, and she began working more in color. ("Black and white doesn't see atmosphere," Marsha says, "as much as color does. You can almost smell in color.") Handle the camera the way she does (skip the monuments), and you'll have something you've never seen before, or imagined. In london, an ordinary incident clarified her shift to this drastically different way of photographing. Now, thanks to this accident, she found clues to where she was going. It was in an altogether new direction, as far from her early studio work, her directed, more conceived work, as she could get. She loosened her control and let chance in. Unlike American museums, london's Tate Gallery permits photography. In london, in 1996, using a friend's miniature video camera, Marsha Burns shot footage in the Tate. As she was leaving, the floor caught her eye and she began taping its patterns. Outside, getting into a taxi to return to her hotel, she neglected to turn off the camera and left it resting in her lap. While in the taxi, getting out at the hotel, going up to her room, alert as always to the unexpected, open to chance, she would be looking, scanning, sweeping the passing scene with her vital, ardent eyes. looking for what? For the unlikely, for what speaks. Sorting out the ordinary, the expected, the repeated; there is much to discard. During the ride, distracting her eye from its everpresent need to see, her heart, of course, would be charmed by humans in the street, the humans lost in the delirium of their daily follies. later, in her room, when Marsha connected the camera to the television monitor, she discovered that the camera was still on, and, apparently, still busily filming without her direction. It was enough to knock her pulse up a bit. What had the camera seen that she hadn't seen? There on the monitor, as expected, were the paintings, the sculpture that had interested her, and the Tate floor. Fast-forward. Stop! And there was the most gorgeous shot she's ever seen of a london taxi's door handle. During the ride she hadn't noticed the handle, wouldn't have thought of photographing it, and now, thanks to the unattended video camera, it was made into a thing of beauty. Forward, again. Her own feet leaving the taxi; curbside grime; then the curb. legs in uniform-the doorman. People's legs; feet, women's shoes, the door's frame at the entrance, a slice of a planter and a plant, and the floor and a rug. The elevator, feet, legs-strangely framed. That hallway. Thus the beginning, tentative yet bouyant, of Marsha's new work: photographing the unnoticed in a way that speaks to us, and, in Marsha's words, offers "a new experience of the world." Typically, a photograph focuses on a thing or place that then becomes the identifiable object, the point of interest, for the viewer, and that stops the eye from looking further, looking for more. Marsha's new work is "less about objects than the experience" of seeing or looking. For example, when she makes a photograph, she may focus her lens on an object or space beyond what would normally be the "object of interest." This switch of focus leads or draws the eye away from the usual punctum, the element in the picture that pulls the eye, to an experience of seeing differently; it draws the eye away from the muteness of the expected, the repeated, and toward the noise of chance. James Burns Writer and founding editor of Photography Northwest James Burns is not related to Marsha Burns.
Publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign 2002-2003. ŠJundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99258-0001
lch el Bur /Mar Jundt Art Museum
October 26 - December 14, 2003 Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington
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Michael Burns at the Jundt In summer 1991, driving north on 1-5 toward his residency at the Pilchuck Glass Center near Stanwood, Washington, Michael Burns wondered what he could do to interest Pilchuck students. They were there to become glass artists; he worked with camera and film. He knew that glass was a remarkable material made from sand, that it broke easily, that it was transparent, and that, exposed to intense heat, it became a liquid. And that he was looking at 1-5 through glass. That was about it; hardly enough for him to talk about, or understand the language of glass that surely would soon wash over him. He would happily talk photographs, if anyone were interested. Soon, he turned off the freeway onto the rural highway and saw the Pilchuck sign and climbed up to the campus and, yes, as usual on his excursions, he was ready to learn something of value. He'd brought books to read whenever glass students didn't seek him out. He looked forward to settlinq in the comfortable quarters, the quiet, the fresh mountain air, the clear rural light flooding the pages of his books. And, oh, yes, the big dining room, the food. And the new people. He didn't know that reading Man Ray's biography would drop a spark into the tinder of his mind, fan the flames of some new idea, a plan, a project. Even of another way to photograph. He didn't know that when he returned to his Seattle studio he would begin his greatest-yet adventure with a camera. He didn't know how big a project it would be, that it would go on and on and produce so many negatives that, even with his great ability to organize, he risked a bad case of eye strain, maybe vertigo, or a whiff of confusion, or a state of not knowing. In his time, the American Dadaist/Surrealist Man Ray was known, as he is known even now many years after his death at 86 in 1976, for his studio photographs, his experimental manipulation of the medium, and especially his portraits of Kiki and Juliet, among others. In Paris, Ray photographed to support his painting. (Michael Burns, once a painter who taught painting, gave up painting for photography.) In his Pilchuck cabin, Michael read Man Ray's autobiography and biography and learned that Ray regarded his models as being a continuing part of his studio equipment, as, for example, Edward Weston had his favorite seashell, a nautilus, which he kept on a shelf and took down and photographed whenever. His head full of Man Ray, Michael walked in the foothills on old logging roads, his mind simmering with new ideas, dreaming as artists must, given time and removal from routine. Underfoot, Douglas Fir seeds waited for rain; in Michael's mind, Man Ray's ideas sprouted images of action in his Seattle studio. He would add a woman to his studio equipment. There would be his three Leicas, light from the big west-facing windows, the white walls, the rough, dark floor, noise from the city street. He had no pictures in mind yet; they would come from the woman, from her imagination, from her costumes to be created out of boxes of clothing yet to be given by others, from gesture in changing light, from the moments he chose to release the camera's shutter. He didn't quite know how it would work. Would he leave what happened in the session entirely to chance? He would not direct, except in the slightest way, as he might see some li11leneed. The woman-he didn't know who yetwould be an element in the space. Or would it be a stage? According to the day and season, light and shadow would play on walls and floors and on her. Chance and accident would be present. As schedules permitted, he would photograph the woman's presence in the studio for as long as there was something for him to see and for as many weeks as he, or the woman, could manage. It turned out to be forty sessions over four years that Michael and the woman, Alanna Rosebrook, worked in that loft above First Avenue, Alanna offering personae, Michael looking with the permission implicit in studio work. At first, finding a way to work, the "how" of the process, the relationship seemed "weird." There were tentative moments, questions, and in the beginning, the awkwardness of the inevitable intimacy. With fertile imagination and occasional suggestions from Michael, Alanna pulled garments from boxes of cast-off clothing, dressed and undressed, fit herself into the space and light; she found positions, gestures, roles. Michael looked and the shutter clicked; Alanna moved. The film moved forward 23,000 times. At the end of each session, Michael went down the hall to his solitary work in the darkroom and Alanna went off to her world. Michael is master of his medium. No longer do the technical aspects of photography interfere with seeing. But before we can
Cover: Michael Burns (American, b. 1942). Alanna Rosebrook, 1993. Gelatin silver print, 11"x 14".
see what he has seen, or what he wants us to see, he must edit the contact sheets. He must study each frame and blend-the way he once blended paints for a certain color, or the notes on his electric guitar-knowledge, training, intuition, history, memory, and feeling to find the images he will print. A heroic effort: 23,000 frames. Will he finally be tempted to flip a coin? Heads, yes to this frame, tails, yes to that one, as John Cage once selected the notes of a composition. No. I see Michael bent over, his eye to the loupe, editing contact sheets and I think of Wright Morris's father's chicken venture, the father bent over in the darkened shed, candling his crop, one egg at a time. Now Michael, perhaps more open than ever to the element of chance, can see what the camera saw, for it takes in more than his eye does. What does he look for? Does he know? Yes. But there is surprise, delight, deep satisfaction and disappointment; like bad eggs, frames are canceled. Will one editing of a proof sheet be enough? Maybe. Finally, a print of what Michael saw (in the final editing) arrives on the gallery wall for us to see. The photograph demands more from us than a casual glance. We must stop for as long as it takes to engage the mind and the imagination; we must note the intelligence of these photographs, the accident of our being there to see them, the accident of what they, and who we, are. We must focus our feelings and intelligence, our literary and visual history, and resonate to the bell Michael sets ringing in us so that we can discover what we might not have known existed, and then, with luck, decipher, at least partly, his mystery, and our own. Michael regards this series of studio work as his homage to the many influences on his art. He calls them "referents," some sixty or so artists and writers: a syllabus, really, for a liberal arts education. Michael Burns, traveling in' 1981 to 1984, in the Great Basin of the western states, photographed his great Landscape Architecture series. This is a significant example of classic 8 x 10 view-camera work done with a modern intellect and eye. The series, a small sample of which is in the Jundt exhibit, deserves a separate essay. In 1984, (Orwell's famous year), long before the intense studio work with Alanna Rosebrook, Michael hauled his bulky 8 x 10 view camera in a cumbersome wood box from Seattle to West Berlin to photograph the Berlin Wall. Surrounded by The Wall in West Berlin, Michael went each day from the hub to the wheel's perimeter, as along a wheel's spoke, and set up his camera to photograph a different Wall segment. Calling on the skills honed in his earlier work photographing Seattle's architectural landscape, and in the tradition of view-camera work, he thoughtfully composed his photograph on the camera's ground glass. In this series, The Wall rarely confronts the viewer; rather, it is often revealed subtly, not always noticed at first. As if frightened away by The Wall, the human figure is absent from the landscape. Asked about this, Michael replies: "One waits." Yes, one waits and waits. But on the streets of Seattle, or New York, or Rome, where, as he puts it, he walks "harvesting images," Michael doesn't wait. With a Leica at his side and lashed to his wrist, he finds women; women who, through the fashion of their day, announce their presence, their existence in a crowded world. He often photographs without lifting the camera to his eye. Like Alanna, each woman is in her costume of the moment, but unlike Alanna, she is unaware of Michael's choice. In a moment of her splendor and human mystery, Michael snaps her from the crowd and onto film. Her plan, her desire to be separate from the ordinary, is fulfilled. She doesn't know it, but now we do. In some photographs, the figures near or around the woman become objects of greater interest. In distant cities, Michael Burns's great eye and skill gather images for us to see. This Jundt Art Museum exhibition is but a small sample of Michael Burns's great body of work. We are fortunate to have these splendid photographs firmly fixed on the wall-still, not quick-cut in a fraction of a second. Here we can take all the time we want to see all there is to see. Michael Burns says that the purpose of art is "to delight and interest." That, his photographs do for us. James Burns Writer and founding editor of Photography Northwest James Burns is not related to Michael Burns.