The Recording Machine by Joshua Shannon

Author:Joshua Shannon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 96. Robert Bechtle, Roses, 1973. Oil on canvas, 60 × 84 in. (152.4 × 213.4 cm). Neumann Family Collection, New York.

Figs. 97 and 98. Bechtle, Roses (details).

It is the glances that make the painting. As usual, we hardly see the eyes (fig. 97). The women do not make eye contact: two of them gaze in the direction of the flowers, seeming to look not so much at as vaguely past them, while Nancy Bechtle looks out at her husband, the photographer. There is the suggestion perhaps of some small psychological gaps, of the work involved in maintaining the social links of family. Note the slight physical separation of the sister-in-law, together with the mild bashfulness of her stance, or the mismatch between Nancy’s neo-hippie casualness and the post-mod dresses of the other two. In some sense the image is driven by the look that Nancy casts out at us (fig. 98). Her smile is clouded—as the artist’s own expression was in ’61 Pontiac—by a division of psychic labor: she lightly humors her mother-in-law, while, at the same time, blankly accepting her husband’s photophilia.

My point is not that this painting amounts to an essay on misery. On the contrary, Roses is about its own withholding, about what it does not, or cannot, show. This particular composition of poses and glances—arrived at with the help of a shutter—refuses to mount any account of the true character of the women, or of their relationships. More specifically, this is a painting of appearances. (In a statement made the year he painted Roses, Bechtle wrote, “I have always been interested in how things looked . . . something of substance is to be found in the details of appearance.” In an interview five years later, he echoed this idea, remarking that, while traveling in Europe, “I had a sense of becoming more aware of the appearance of California.”75) While remaining with the appearance of things, however, Roses neither contends that appearances are false nor seems quite to believe that they are all there is. Rather, the painting restricts itself to the visible, to the surfaces that can be recorded, even while teetering on the edge of wondering whether we might have means for discovering some reality beneath.

Compare, then, Nancy Bechtle’s indefinite expression before the camera to the more familiar antihumanist hollowness we often see in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. The Screen Tests, those fantastically relentless short-movie portraits shot silently on sixteen-millimeter film, have no single philosophy of subjectivity—that is their brilliance—but in general, Warhol’s laboratory conditions ended up showing his sitters’ identities as desperately performed or simply annihilated.76 The sheer emptiness of Screen Test: Richard Rheem, for example, is chilling (fig. 99). Bechtle, although his art also turns people into surfaces, shows identity instead as a continually deferred promise of depth, as something we hope to find but which even our best means of representation cannot deliver.

Bechtle’s 1970s photorealism was an effort to represent and deal with an abidingly deep human subject at a

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