Magic America: William Eggleston at C/O Berlin
Some weeks ago at a good-not-great Italian restaurant just off Rosenthaler Platz, a friend of mine made an offhand comment about her inability to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth on its own terms. As a professional opera singer who has dedicated her life to the study (and singing) of the Western musical canon, her emotional experience of the symphony is now inseparable from and maybe even encumbered by the mountains of intellectual and theoretical context she has gleaned from years of serious musical study. Turns out you can only have one or the other.
I thought then, as I do now, that this phenomenon is one of those half-cruel, half-comic ironies of studying the arts. Many of us study art because we a) hate money, and b) once experienced an artwork that stirred such a singular, uninhibited, and profound emotional response within ourselves that we longed to be drawn deeper into its world. But give it enough time, enough slide shows, enough memorization tests — title, artist name, year, country, medium, period, one point each — and you end up deadening the nerve endings that crackled strongly enough to redirect you to this path in the first place. And art school or no art school, the Western canon has an exposure therapy problem. Live long enough and you never see the Mona Lisa the same way again.
Skipping up the steps of the photography exhibition space C/O Berlin, I couldn’t help but wonder if Eggleston was my Beethoven. He was always there. He was on every syllabus, waiting patiently in line behind the high-minded tonal perfectionism of Ansel Adams and the high-minded social critique of Robert Frank. Later on, he floated over every crit so long as there was a guy with a Leica and a Carhartt beanie in attendance. Can I ever see that red ceiling the way I once did? Can any of us?
And so we arrive at Mystery of the Ordinary, C/O Berlin’s Eggleston retrsopective, with Ye Olde Contemporary Curatorial Conundrum: how to present a fresh perspective on The Great Master Everyone Knows that neither ignores the best-known works nor descends into misguided deep-cut snobbery. Eggleston is a particularly difficult subject in this sense, as his monumental stature and influence has never ceased reverberating through art photography or American image-making. Every photographer who has taken to the interstate in search of something or other to photograph that will say something or other about America, myself very much included, owes him a debt.
As the name implies, Mystery of the Ordinary presents Eggleston as master photographer of the banal. The opening wall text — situated between an image of a glistening glass of Coca-Cola on a diner table and a shadowy sunset scene of a parked purple Cadillac — describes the exhibition as both a monograph and a retrospective. Eggleston’s chief artistic concerns, it declares, are “the ongoing question of the everyday” and the manipulation of color toward its own conceptual and aesthetic ends rather than as a vision-replicating tool. The show is successful on both counts, opening with a room full of black and white images shot mostly from car windows between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, each one grainier and more underwhelming than the last. His heart isn’t quite in it, and his eye isn’t either. The haphazard compositions lack the discipline and distinct formalism of his color work, which he’d already begun by this time.
It’s a clever set-up. Opening with the now-iconic freezer, the subsequent room explodes with color and familiar faces: the woman in the blue dress with the pile of papers on her lap, an affluent white man — Eggleston’s uncle — and his Black driver standing near a pond, the captivating red-haired girl at the Biloxi snack bar counter, and the windblown boy in the red sweater. Just adjacent to the boy in the red sweater hangs the troubling nude portrait of T.C. Boring, a Memphis dentist, drug dealer, and bona fide eccentric. Stood between his bed and a dresser, Boring is steeped in the sinister red he’d used to paint his walls and ceiling — a ceiling that would shortly thereafter become, insofar as the rest of the world was concerned, Eggleston’s red ceiling.
Mystery of the Ordinary fixates on decay, presenting the Southern U.S. as a dreamland in tatters made of wind-bent awnings, litter-strewn gutters, peeling paint, and oil-stained asphalt. Rust is a near-constant motif. For all the exaggerated brilliance of his colors, Eggleston can be a chillingly cool observer, shooting the marquee of a porn theater in the harshest possible midday sunlight. Eggleston’s photographs crystallize a protracted present, largely unconcerned with past or future. In other words, the rust is as important as what is rusting, if not more. His photographs are only ever vaguely racialized, no small feat in the American South, and strikingly amoral. The curation revels in the artist’s shrugging aloofness and doubles down on the image of him as a preservationist without pretense or overt political leanings. Ankle-height quotes of Eggleston being Eggleston help: “Photography just gets us out of the house.”
In this sense, the persona looms. Eggleston famously abhors the photojournalistic impulse, interviews, and critics. (In fact, during the interview segment of the 26-minute video playing in an attached screening room, he glibly mentions that most of the critics who panned his 1976 MoMA show have since apologized.) He doesn’t title anything. He never lets a traditionalist yearning slip. Nowhere does one detect some embedded complaint that we used to be a proper country. Magazines and monographs neatly arranged on tables underscore decades of institutional recognition and the scope of his work and influence. The video reminds us that the individuals in his photos are there not as social commentary but only to serve the higher callings of color and form.
But we knew all that already. What we didn’t know — or rather, what we haven’t seen — is excellently deployed in a section titled “The Outlands,” curated by his sons and culled from images that John Szarkowski, the former head of MoMA’s photography department, passed over when organizing the aforementioned 1976 solo show. Immaculately printed and generously sized, the new edit reveals a certain experimental streak, or at least a series of noticeable breaks from his M.O. He shoots crooked and from above, lets the sky take up two-thirds of the image, even breaks out the flash. A photograph of a backyard swimming pool looks very nearly staged. Although he’s known to shunt figures to the side and chop-crop them in half, here his fellow Southerners appear fully intact in the center of his frames. There’s a warmth here, or at least a loosening. He seems given over, however briefly, to the beauty of a dusky sky and the sun glinting off the plate glass windows of the Sacket To Me Grocery.
And then he arrives in Berlin.
First, an important caveat. No other country on Earth could have produced William Eggleston. He is an American invention with an American sensibility roaming the vast American landscape as is his American birthright. Eggleston is decrepit drive-ins, Coca-Cola, and Maytag. He is red (vivid and violent) and white (always blinding, sometimes fluorescent) and blue (every shade of sky, plus pool water). Only one country possessed the hyper-specific alchemy of previously unimaginable postwar prosperity and protracted rural decline, in which teenage girls floated up to the snack bar counter without touching the ground and grandmothers scowled from underneath immovable bouffants. Eggleston didn’t invent his palette. He plucked it from the lurid tones of midcentury American advertising. Like it or not, he’s one of us.
It doesn’t translate. The final room of Mystery of the Ordinary compiles a small number of photographs taken in the center of divided Berlin between 1981 and 1988, including two of the Wall. The Wall, even when cast in his trademark sunset gold, rebuffs him. His amorality bounces off its monolithic concrete barbarism. The layers of graffiti he captures are more interesting on their own linguistic and historical merits than as working pictorial elements. Eggleston demands space and air and sky — every shot of an empty gas station or abandoned drive-in attests to this — and the Wall’s frighteningly literal stranglehold hems him in from all sides.
It makes the Berlin section among the best in the show. It’s revealing in a way that only the failures (or at least shortcomings) of the masters can be. It demystifies the Egglestonian eye, if you will, by demonstrating its boundaries or, better yet, its misapplication. Mystery of the Ordinary is expectedly reverential but not completely in thrall to its subject. Curatorially, it presents Szarkowski’s rejects and the Berlin odds and ends on their own terms, actively complimenting the built-in context of your average audience member without confirming or aggressively challenging it.
And, most importantly, it never gets in Eggleston’s way. His colors stun. His compositions beckon. His atmospheres invite even as they beguile. Eggleston can be abrasive and confrontational and blunt, and Mystery of the Ordinary lets him. It also lets us revel in some of his most gorgeous and intriguing imagery. Let the master work, as they say.
Later on, I post a couple of my favorite images from the show on my Instagram story. A friend from art school (and talented photographer in his own right) responds to one, and I try the Beethoven’s Fifth analogy out on him. “Yeah,” he replies. “But have you heard the 5th live?”
The man, the myth, the legend. William Eggleston: Mystery of the Ordinary runs through May 4, 2023 at C/O Berlin. Want more overwrought art writing? Find my review of the Louisiana Museum’s enormous Weimar Germany exhibition here.
