NELSON HANCOCK GALLERY

I’m still sifting through the materials I gathered recently at PhotoLucida in Portland, OR. The centerpiece of the event is an elaborately scheduled series of 20-minute meetings between reviewers (gallerists, editors, curators) and photographers. The upside of these events (Santa Fe Review is another, Houston FotoFest is the biggest) is that everyone gets to meet each other on a fairly level playing field. Minus the full-page ads and pr agents, people just put their work down on the table and we talk for 20 minutes. As networking events, they are hard to beat and when they’re run as well as PhotoLucida, they’re easy to navigate. Before I say anything more, I should say that I met a few great photographers there who I’ll probably be showing in the next year.

The downside? There’s something missing from these events, and it’s got to do with approaching the work as art. I know I know, (in fact, everyone knows now) that we live in a crass, commercialized society. However, it would seem that in an arena such as this, there could be a bit more attention paid to meaning instead of just marketability.

Also, I was struck by how difficult it was at times to respond the artists and their work. I later returned to the mother of all portfolio reviews, Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” and, reading it as a reviewer, was relieved by a few things. First, he initially disavowed any authority or special knowledge (I did this often). Then he points out the futility of hoping for a “review” to provide special insight (I often had trouble mustering the courage for this):

“In making contact with a work of art nothing serves so ill as words of criticism … Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe”

Having established that works of art aren’t so easily translated into words, and pointing out that they tend to “consummate themselves in a sphere where word has never trod,” he doesn’t hesitate to ask: … "May I just go on to tell you that your verses have no individual quality? … the poems are nothing in themselves, nothing independent, not even the last one…”

And what follows here is the sort of paragraph that makes you think that if Rilke were ever to show up at a contemporary art fair or portfolio review, he would probably faint:

“You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have previously asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems … I beg you to give all that up … Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write … confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you…”

ok, that’s about enough (you may be thinking). Fair enough. I just though it presented an interesting point of comparison.

posted by Nelson on May 3, 2007 12:48 PM