Gregory Crewdson
Alison Green
White Cube Mason's Yard London April 23 to May 24 2008
Gregory Crewdson is an artist at that point in his career when, from a critical point of view, all the ground has been covered. His work is linked to a major 'movement' in photography, so-called 'directorial style'; series by series, he has expanded and perfected both his craft and the ambition of his work; he has even got acolytes - a cluster of younger (women) photographers whom he taught at Yale, and whose work came to notice in the exhibition Crewdson organised in 1999, 'Another Girl, Another Planet'. It is all a bit of a dead end to discuss this, though. No doubt a thousand BA dissertations have been written on the subject already and, as one recent magazine article has reported, Crewdson's pictures are selling for 'six figures'.
So, in the face of this worldly process where an artist gets wrapped up in a ready-made package of journalistic consensus and commercial status, it is worth trying to find some critical purchase and accounting for what in his work is interesting, and how. I think it is interesting, but in certain specific ways. Contrary to general agreement, Crewdson did not invent the directorial style. The generation of artists directly previous to him did (Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Crewdson's teacher in college, Laurie Simmons). Using narrative and deliberate artifice, these artists made the break with both street photography and the conceptualist photodocument, exploring the way photographs can make fictions as convincing as real things. Over the course of his career, Crewdson has upped the ante significantly, though. The key aspect of his work in this regard is its scale. This is what registers the significance of what he has done (and what makes him 'of his generation', with ambitions the same size as Olafur Eliasson, Matthew Barney and Andreas Gursky). Crewdson's work is bigger than the traditional medium of photography. His method is from film production and, in his most recent series of photographs shown at White Cube entitled 'Beneath the Roses', his subject is a whole town.
There are, of course, key postmodernist tropes at play in his work: references to melodrama, the noir-ish scenes of suburban dystopia, and the sense of a story without any possible resolution. I would argue that Crewdson's work is significant because of its heightened visuality. These are not pictures that depend on specific texts or contexts. The point is the drama, not the story itself. This is what draws you to his pictures and has the potential to hold you, and once there you circulate without making any progress. There is some sense of discovery, some sense of what the next scene might be, but you are stuck in the moment of suspension he has chosen for you. Against some of the conceits of Postmodernism where pictures become texts that fall centripetally out into more texts, Crewdson's gambit is to trap you inside a web of visual thinking. Several critics have mentioned that Crewdson's work reflects the way the cinematic has structured our thoughts and ideas, even invaded our dreams. He deftly packs that into his pictures, but this also seems like a fairly obvious effect of using the production techniques of filmmaking (lighting, special effects, scenery). We might well ask which style of filmmaking he is adopting, rather than ogling at the production value. It is arch, indy-film stuff. I think of Ryan Murphy's 2006 film Running with Scissors, or Bob Balaban's 1990 movie Parents. But this line of thinking does not go anywhere towards explaining his work; it is only an association. Crewdson's work is about that kind of visual experience which resonates because of its familiar relation to everything else that is visual in the world. It is also best when it gets really weird.
With this series of work I felt, perhaps perversely, a desire to read them on a literal or political level. Crewdson's focus on the town of Lee, Massachusetts might be a means to draw attention to another side of American life. His photographs are replete with the vernacular of Lee's architecture, landscape, commercial apparatus, not to mention its eccentric car culture (all old bangers, not an SUV in sight). The story of downward mobility represented by this town, which so clearly did not benefit from the last decade's economic boom, is an important one. There is an anxiety in the US, even among the well-off, that destitution is always close at hand. On the other hand, there is something troubling about Crewdson's representation - his projection - of dystopia, or psychological trauma, on this working-class scenario. He loves this town, but it is also an exercise in nostalgia for him. Many photographers have developed an intimacy with a place, working in one locale over a lifetime. The question with this work, since it is so much about this town, is how well generosity and anxiety sit together there.
This review was originally published in May 2007 / No 317, p20-21.
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