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True Madness
John Haberin New York City
Ulrike Ottinger, Vivian Maier, and Ray K. Metzger
You may associate photography with the unvarnished truth. Photojournalists have—to share its pain or to thrust it in one's face. Then again, you may associate it with strangeness or even madness. Altered photos and photograms often insist on it, to the point of abstraction.
Then, too, you may be more than happy with both. Early photography brought out both responses, with its silvery light, from silver compounds themselves, and its promise of a direct impression of nature. It made people a step away from life, and it made them real. Starting in the 1960s, photographers went for both as well, because nothing could be stranger than the street or the truth. At the same time, writers were deconstructing opposites like these, with honest but odd results. Art, they pointed out, has long had much the same twin myths as well. 
Ulrike Ottinger finds madness all around her, even if she has to make it up. She has traveled widely, for her work in a crazier medium still, film, and her film stills show it. Vivian Maier may seem to treat the city as a freak show, too, but is she? When she finds a real eye-opener, she is opening photography to color and demanding sympathy for what she sees. Ray K. Metzger may come as a relief, with not a freak in sight, but he makes the medium as strange as it gets, in black and white. What you cannot so much as recognize, he suggests, may be the truth.
Freak city
Welcome to Freak City. No, not just the Bowery, where the bums and the rockers have departed, and even Chinatown's sprawl and the restaurant supply stores must vie with the galleries and all that they usher in. It is the frantic imagination of Ulrike Ottinger just upstairs, in which practically everyone and everything is a freak. That includes monuments to civilization past and present—the ones you remember and the ones you cannot. It includes Ottinger's global wanderings, on antique maps and as a filmmaker. You can always pretend that it does not include you.
Her photographs line the walls, in unnerving focus and with an equally unnerving cast. Who are they, and whatever are they doing? Who is the woman in makeup so cakey that her red coat and lipstick might better suit a circus act? Who are the young women on a balcony, waving to someone or anyone other than you? Who are the young men, naked from the waste up, in a landscape reduced to low hills of soot or coal? Who left the sickly cattle, and who is saluting—and saluting whom?
They can only be stills from her movies, from the late 1970s into the early 1980s, but not as tributes to the greatness of film's past. They have about as much to do with Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills as Downton Abbey has to do with New York's downtown. Nor do they have much to do with home-grown freak shows from Garry Winogrand or Diane Arbus. They display little in the way of either vulnerability or self-assertion—and little touch with the streets. If, like me, you do not recognize even their titles, the artist, born in 1942, has not exhibited here in twenty years. I can only take on credit that she has an underground rep and has shared actors with Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Germany.
They have all sorts of evocative, provocative, and half-familiar references, from popular culture to early Soviet photocollage and from brothels to bodybuilding. An unaging Dorian Gray, trapped between death and dying, collapses at the news in a headline that he is already dead. Freak City turns out to be Ottinger's Freak Orlando, a decent enough choice. The photographs might stir interest in her films, although sitting through one might be more unsettling still. I was already wondering if I could return to planet earth. I have been to Orlando, I wanted to say, and it was not so bad—or maybe it was.
The photos, like actual celluloid clips from Jonas Mekas, may well gain from their release from the movies and into an installation. Four large maps hang at its center, one of a polar sea and another of the even more chilling former Soviet Union. One has postcards affixed to the front with yarn, while the others have slits that open onto postcards, like a cabinet of wonders. They are keyed to sites on the map, but no less exotic for that. Ottinger found and hoarded some of them, while others found her. You can read their text if not their senders on the back.
Now they have found you, more or less, should you be willing to play along. As for "Freak City," the words appear on a homemade sign in one photo's middle distance, like a for-sale sign—the kind for property you had better avoid. A pilgrim in the foreground, in medieval dress, turns his back on a naked woman sinking into a huge pile of green goo. He could stand for piety or death. You might look for hope in an actual distant city, for all I know Orlando, but I would not count on it. It can only have freaks, too.
And red all over
"Here's a Real Eye Opener." Vivian Maier captures those words in a photograph, as well she should, for they apply to everything she touches. Who else would have spotted that small note in an urban landscape—and obliged you to read it without explaining what it was and where it appeared? Who would have seen someone's shadow cast on green plants and scattered over with yellow flowers, as if interred beneath them all? And Maier does love signs and shadows, like the silhouette on a poster for Heaven Can Wait, framing and darkening an angel. Yet she opened photography's eye most of all to color, starting in the late 1950s.
The show quotes Joel Meyerowitz to introduce her work and its importance, and he should know. He was a pioneer in color, too, like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, and they, too, have used titles to root a photograph in a place and a date. Yet Maier used color not to document the city like Meyerowitz, to capture its anonymity like Anthony Hernandez, to saturate a print to the point of madness like Eggleston, or to limit photography like Shore to the accidental and the everyday. She uses it to construct an entire photo around a detail—and then to draw one's eye from photo to photo as an evolving body of work. Her bright reds include a dress, a heavy coat, the leather seats in a car, a newspaper box on a Chicago sidewalk, and a single shoe looking ever so incongruous next to the white cast on a woman's left leg. The lavender hat on a woman's head looks not just intense but just plain awful, and Maier knows it.
Most of her subjects look rather awful, whether squinting or surly, but she is not out for a freak show, no more than Alec Soth. She was not Diane Arbus before her time. Rather, she is situating the visible, color included, in a context of humanity, rushing about or hoping to regain a measure of pride. She often frames people closely, except when they do the job of framing themselves—in a passageway, a kiosk, a train car, or a shop window, like Maier herself in a self-portrait or two. Color interrupts a streetscape, awkwardly and abruptly, because so do people. It makes her "a humanist disguised (for many at least) as a formalist."
Actually Keith F. Davis, a senior curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, applied those words to Ray K. Metzger—who has a much larger selection at the same gallery, to boast of its now representing Metzger's estate. They seem that much more implausible applied to him. The show begins with a cryptic black box on a white sheet, from 1967, somehow combining a street sign and a portion of a building. And then comes its exact reverse, in white on black, followed by a still greater approach to abstraction in splashes or zigzags of light and shadow. Series titles speak of Pictus Interruptus and City Whispers, because pictures keep interrupting themselves and cities can only whisper of their presence. By 1974 he is printing his strange patterns on tiling, as Whimsy.
Metzger celebrates and decimates black and white, just as Maier does with color—and he insisted on its continued relevance until his death in 2014, at age eighty-three. Like her, too, he treats light as an enigma, daring one to guess how he pulls it off. What has he double-exposed or burned again in the darkroom, and what has he shot or developed through torn paper? Are his soft spheres Christmas decorations, light bulbs, or onions, as the sole hint of a stem seems to admit? How has a chain-link fence become not so regular white hexagons on deep black? A paradoxical depth of field can blur his subjects while sharpening their surroundings.
Humanity does turn up about halfway through, in whispers of Chicago and Philadelphia from the 1950s. The photographer found his vocabulary, it turns out, in the language of the streets. Not that a commitment to reality stopped him from punning at the expense of human beings, as with a weary army recruiter backed by cardboard cutouts. A woman's skirt billows outward in black, pressing up against scaffolding or other pedestrians. Metzger's closest identification with his subject comes in a contact sheet, with just two heads at opposing corners—both, of course, only partial and both completely black. Where Richard Avedon used dark strips at the edge of a print to identify his medium with a portrait's glamour, Metzger used them to deny that anything is clear-cut in art or life, not even in black and white.
Ulrike Ottinger ran at Bridget Donahue through March 3, 2019, Vivian Maier and Ray K. Metzger at Howard Greenberg through March 2.