[This is a post about arts, an artist who was maybe autistic, and presumptions about how artists are supposed to behave. If your reaction after reading is "tl;dr, just forget all this and focus on something else", or some variation on "arts are stupid anyway and I don't get them", that's not helpful, just don't hit reply.]
I saw John Maloof's Vivian Maier doc a few days ago, and it's been preying on my mind ever since, as has the existence of the scholarship fund that's been set up to handle the money that's been rolling in from the Vivian Maier industry.
Her photos, btw: http://www.vivianmaier.com
For those who don't know the story, the woman was a photographer, had no family, was secretive, worked as a nanny who was (in this telling) progressively crazier, died broke and alone. A cache of her negatives/photos/documents turned up at auction in Chicago, and a young historian working on a Chicago story bought them, not knowing what they were. Recognized he had a serious artist on his hands, also found she'd just died, but that there was no other info about her. In the way of self-confident young people, could not understand why anyone would do anything noteworthy without publicizing the living daylights out of it and making hay, and decided the Mystery of the Reclusive Artist was the story, so went researching away and made a movie. Also started printing and showing (and selling) her work.
I find her work to be better, often, than Diane Arbus's, but I have trouble looking at a lot of it at once for the same reason I don't like big helpings of Arbus: it's a view that finds reality in the grotesque, the dispossessed, the ignored. There's an abjectness, a gnarled and nightmarish quality, when you see a lot of it at once. Nothing in that world will ever get better. And she's located in that world: she isn't like some photographers of similar subjects who're documenting, but seem to stand clearly outside that world, in a safer world. (Though I don't know that Arbus was all that safe; she killed herself.)
She was well aware of the quality of her work and, despite the incredulity of the perfectly ordinary rich employers who were interviewed for the doc, it seems to me entirely reasonable that she worked as a nanny and hid what she was doing. Her employers wouldn't have understood at all. But someone else housed her; someone else fed her; for the price of having kids around, she was able to get out and do her work. Eventually the parents would rebel at having an autistic, touchy weirdo with a camera being odd with the kids and filling parts of the house with her stuff, and give her the boot, and she'd find another. Until, eventually, she didn't. I don't see how she'd have managed on her own as a photographer. Nor can I see that she'd have had any interest at all in the hideous s**tshow that is the art world.
Anyway. This Maloof fellow's turned her into quite the circus, and -- well, who knows what Maier would've thought of his heart-of-the-Chicago-art-establishment scholarships, but if someone found and made a mint off my work after I'd died, I'd be aghast to see the money go to MFA students. Or to have people digging the hell into my life, like I was the story. I've always silently applauded Stephen Joyce, who protected his grandfather's papers from all those scholar-vultures who insisted they had some god-given right to rifle them. You know, for all those monographs the public's dying to read. I keep wanting to write to Maloof, which is stupid, and...eh, he's just a horrible reminder of how things actually work. And I think about how she lived at the end, too. Apparently some of her old charges found her and paid for an apartment for her, but yeah, at the end she was garbage-picking, scolding people from a park bench, and very much alone. There just wasn't anyplace for her, and despite all the concerned-face her old employers gave the camera in their lovely homes, you know, they weren't going to help.
I'm not sorry I saw the movie. I almost am, though.
17 May 2014, 9:29 pm
