DIANE ARBUS: THE CALCULATED PARABLE
“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough. ”
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was... ”
“the parable is calculated… ”
Diane Arbus was a photographer, who died by suicide in 1971, aged 48. Much ink has been spilt on Arbus, from serial monographs to biography. Several books have been penned and manufactured by her surviving daughter, Doon (aged 78 in 2023). The primary source for this post-mortem literature has been her mother’s letters over her mother’s photographs.
I use the word “manufactured” as a provocation. Biography, and its more reputable sister, autobiography, is always an invention. Through the various machinery of the reproducible self and speculative other, biography—not to mention post-mortem biography—becomes a formal process of sanctification. “Knowing yourself is not going to teach you anything... It’ll leave you with a kind of blank.” (Diane Arbus)
Diane Arbus, Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C. 1965.
Susan Sontag was one such post-mortem ‘biographer’, but of a different kind and context. Especially in her unwillingness to sanctify Arbus, dead or alive, saint or sinner.
Sontag never pulled punches when it came to her criticism, which, she admitted herself, came from a position of “dissenting opinion”. In her 1974 article ‘Freak Show’ for the London Review of Books, Sontag criticises Arbus—three years after her suicide—for what she provocatively stated was the photographer’s exploitation of the “freaks” she seeked out and photographed.
Sontag opines that Arbus’ freaks were not in a position of power or self-awareness to “give” their image, as Arbus put it, rather than “take” their image as Sontag put it. Sontag’s criticism is biblical in both its self-righteousness and moralising tone. To her mind, Arbus’ freaks know not what they do, or whom they are…
“Thus, what is finally most troubling in Arbus’ photographs is not their subject at all but the cumulative impression of the photographer’s consciousness: the sense that what is presented is precisely a private vision, something voluntary. ”
Sontag’s use of the word “voluntary” hits home here. She continues: “The camera has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look abnormal. The photographer chooses oddity, chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it.”
Here Sontag is portraying the artist as an agent of the perverted gaze, a claim that is often repeated elsewhere in psychoanalytic literature. The psychoanalyst focuses on a perversion that somehow unlocks the psychology and thus the pathology of the artist. Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel goes as far as to suggest that “perverts [artists] tend toward aestheticism”.
Yet the power and imperfect perversion of Arbus’ photography is not bound in the oppressor (photographer) and oppressed (“freaks” whom Arbus “collected”) relationship. It is unwound in the artist’s cold neutrality behind the camera, not between the lens and her subject. Except for one documented photograph, wherein Arbus inadvertently caught her reflection in a double exposure with images of Times Square in 1956 (below).
“Like Brassaï, Arbus wanted her subjects to be as fully conscious as possible, aware of the act in which they were participating. Instead of trying to coax her subjects into a natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward—that is, to pose. (Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew.) Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves. ”
Even though Sontag is one of the reasons I became a cultural critic, I feel she misses the point of Arbus’ work, and for that matter, the artist’s objective to make visible (without spectacle or moralising) what most of us will only notice in its most extreme manifestations. Art is not activism, or a democracy. It’s radicality is to present the world without taking sides. Here you are; what do you think?
Agreed, there is definitely something artificial or posed about Arbus’ freaks, who don’t measure up to the freakishness portrayed in what could be described as her fantasy fiction. That said, Sontag is a moralist in her critique of Arbus. She sees oppressors and oppressed everywhere: “And there was always daily life, with its endless supply of oddities—if one has the eye to see them.” (My italics)
Strange thing is, we all see them. We don’t need a singular “eye” to see them. Sontag, in a manner of speaking, is seeking out the aberrant in Arbus, the same way Arbus is seeking out the aberrant in society. What is the difference here between Sontag’s seeking eye and Arbus’s seeking eye: to seek or destroy?
See, and by extension see(k), is when the artist reaches beyond the preserve of the self into a territory that is not their own. The current Israel-Hamas and by extension Palestine conflict, and the colonisation of the latter by the former comes to mind, especially Frantz Fanon’s words: “colonisation is a thinking entity.”
Arbus is a thinker, not a feeler. But is she a colonist? Her motives are not so explicit in her cloud-bound words or visceral images. Adam Phillips, whom we will get to later, picks up on this tendency in his line: “...the explicit is always misleading”.
So instead of being explicit, Arbus utilises the parable, a backhanded way of smoothing over the cracks of this or that way of behaving morally or ethically with metaphor. Meaning, there is no moral compass to her penned letters and notation and especially photography. There is just an impasse. One that propagandises acceptance over moral judgement or confoundment.
“...One summer I worked a lot in Washington Square Park... The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. And there were young hippie junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really tough amazingly hardcore lesbians. And in the middle were winos. They were like the first echelon and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies... I got to know a few of them. I hung around a lot. They were a lot like sculptures in a funny way. I was very keen to get close to them, so I had to ask to photograph them. You can’t get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.”
Arbus’ photographs of the transient twisted—“winos”, “hardcore lesbians”, “hippy junkies”—are portrayals of people with no idea of what personal space is, or this is how Arbus posed and photographed them. Up close and personal, these strange actors are caught agape in the murky middle of their own subjectivity. A subjectivity unavailable to them in the opinion of Sontag. They barter for sex, drugs and power in a wilderness seen but not sought out by the distracted mainstream masses, who hurtle past to their place of work and institutional servitude. The same way Irish artist Alan Butler appropriated the computer-generated degenerates that form the wandering-maul backdrop to the game Grand Theft Auto, Arbus too flips the switch on vision and the visible, what Jacques Rancière calls “the sensible”, by looking behind the billboards to find a sentient presence entirely substantial. Arbus is a panopticon unto herself.
“People are strange
When you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you’re alone”
“...it is reassuring to be reminded not only that we are not all freaks, but also that we know a freak when we see one…”
An author who brings us closer to Arbus, albeit a thwarted one, is Adam Phillips, whose article ‘Thwarted Closeness’ (2006), also for the London Review of Books, and named Arbus’ Freaks in a later essay collection, is the primary source and inspiration for this text.
Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and brilliant essayist. He is less explicit in his critical technique than Susan Sontag, who seems to enjoy defining culture against the grain. While Sontag was demonised for her criticism of the sanctified Arbus, Phillips is difficult to critique, due in part to his seductive writing style. The epigraph for Phillips’ essay on Arbus is a line from The Invisible Dragon by the late Dave Hickey that ironically describes the seduction inherent in his writing: “…but we have the right to be seduced”.
On contemporary art you will find Phillips’ words spread thinly in artist monographs, most memorably in relation to the work of American artist Matthew Barney in essay and interview form. His words even made an appearance in our Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin in 2011 for an Alice Neel catalogue.
Over the years I have found myself scavenging for texts that locate Phillips’ prose within an art context, for the simple reason that it is difficult to find good psychoanalytical writing on art. When the prose and insights are good, something mutually sympathetic occurs between art and psychoanalysis that reveals both their parasitic natures.
Generally speaking there’s too much investment on the part of the psychoanalytic writer to seek internal pathology over the external factors of capitalist desire and social trauma in the formation of the artist in culture. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are good on the latter in their Anti-Oedipus posturing, locating desire not just in the groin, but within the flows of capitalism.
After years of reading and thinking about Phillips’ writing, the word calculated came to mind when re-reading Arbus’ Freaks. Phillips hones in on what Arbus became infamous for: the making visible of people who are more visible than most, but whom we make invisible in our anti-social interactions with them and non-acknowledgement.
“It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats. ”
Washington Square Park New York was the billboard behind which Arbus found a cast of characters, who, on the surface, seem down and out and ugly by nature or neglect. They are “aristocrats” according to Arbus. It is the adoption of this peculiar language-game—“aristocrats”—against her adoption of this peculiar community of freaks, that Phillips critically targets in what is, on the surface, a seemingly uncritical take on the photographer.
Yet in Phillips’ overuse of the qualifier “too”—before “famous”, “elegant” and “ eloquent”—in respect to Arbus’ use of words to describe the philosophy behind her subject, that his criticism latently seeps in. Jean Baudrillard did the same thing to Michel Foucault in his essay ‘Forget Foucault’, wherein he described the latter’s philosophical project as “too perfect”.
Phillips repeats the words of American poet John Ashbery, who said: “The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about”. This is a strange line for Phillips to use to make a point about Arbus’ gift of words. Is he criticising Arbus’ photography, which he avoids discussing, or celebrating her words? I am of two minds: Arbus’ words are either a struggle to decode, or a brilliant evasion that supplements not subjugates her photographs’ power. To see(k) but not destroy, as Sontag would have it.
Phillips says in his introduction to the translation of Freud’s writings that psychoanalysis redescribes “the way we treat each other with words”. This is a very lucid observation by Phillips, one I have to bring up in respect to Phillips’ own treatment of Arbus’ words, which have a high degree of self-reflexivity and fantasy. In one sense (or two sentences) we fall between Freud and Jacques Lacan if we think of each respective psychoanalyst as an inverse of the other. Freud is engaged in a deep-dive into the ever-elusive libidinal drives of the forbidding forbidden id.; whereas Lacan’s forever linguistic chain is where the unconscious is found structured like a language.
However, Freud, especially in his essay ‘The Uncanny’, starts with language in a long and laborious definition of das unheimlich (the uncanny…) before taking the fork in the road less travelled. Psychoanalysis tout court is indebted to language, and the games it plays, unconsciously or not. So it is unsurprising that Phillips uses Arbus’ words, not her images—purviews are always biased towards needs—to get closer to her as an artist and a person. And Arbus is good with words, even though she overreaches with them into fantasy, leaving the real—if that is what Arbus’ freaks represent—to vanish back behind the billboard.
In this sense Arbus and Phillips are two of a kind. They give and take in one fell swoop. Arbus presents an image of the world that we invariably disavow—the homeless, the weird, the mentally ill or handicapped—all the while disavowing in her words the facility and capacity of the photographic image to capture that world, referring to her photographic project as a secret about a secret. Phillips, who proffers words that burn after reading, is sympathetic to Arbus’ articulations, transposing the unconscious onto Arbus’ secret about a secret: “is there a better definition of the unconscious?”
Bottom line, Arbus and Phillips are neutrals. They both land on the territory of epoché — the suspension of belief, or withholding of assent. Their work is neither political nor partisan. They don’t take sides. For Phillips, although privately political, psychoanalysis has no place in politics. For Arbus, who both adores and abhors her subjects, writes in her diary that she could never be like them. Yet there is something parabolic, hence moralistic, about both their world views; how people treat each other up close and at a distance with a bartering system of communication, of words, tit for tat.
But in Phillips’ words, which always have a slight of hand in their delivery, the same way Arbus’ images of freaks are more than their freakishness can give away, “the parable is calculated”. This is my biggest take away from reading Phillips and Arbus against the backdrop of the latter’s photography. Especially if we swap “parable” for “unconscious” in Phillips’ line “the parable is calculated”.
The unconscious takes many forms in psychoanalysis. In his predilection for doubling, Freud called the unconscious a “double inscription”. Sometimes the unconscious is conflated with the subterranean subconscious, forming an architectonic hierarchy of sub, un and consciousness proper, like the basement id, ground-floor ego and penthouse super-ego, the convenient building blocks of our greater metaphysical selves. In the 1960s the French psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire, an acolyte of Lacan, proffered the analogy of a radio tuned into two stations to describe the unconscious. I personally like the image of the transceiver, a device that can both transmit and receive communications.
The unconscious breathes in and out to permeate inside and outside, to project and introject. It's not imprisoned, escaping into the light of day in Freudian slips of the tongue and other bodily and verbal gestures, taking us for a joyride now and then when our guard is down. No, it is always there. It is a calculated entity. Borne upon our desires to give and take with pleasure and unpleasure towards a ground of neutrality, without which we would fall into a delirium of anti- and asymmetrical resistance, whether political, sexual or social.
Which leaves me with the apprehension that the unconscious is calculated in its agency over us rather than our perceived part-censorship over it. That, like Adam Phillips’ and Diane Arbus’ words and images, it teases us into thinking that we are masters over its secrets, secrets that are ours and not ours. That behind consciousness, or the symptoms of our behaviours, there resides not the truth, but a split-off entity, whose design is better off left secret. For we may not like what we find in its telling. So let’s keep it so. Secret.—James Merrigan
*Thank you to Lorraine and Althea, who gifted me a beautiful Diane Arbus monograph, a pleasurable and valuable resource for my ongoing reflections on the artist.
