continued Mobile Homes: The Art of Rudy Burckhardt
by Vincent Katz

Gary Winogrand, who was born in New York in 1928, studied with Alexey Brodovitch and went on to photograph for Harper’s Bazaar.  His early 1960s street photography, while taking in a bigger view through the use of a wide-angle lens, has some of Burckhardt’s sensation of being there at the right time.  It is a rare Winogrand image, however, (one example might be one photograph from 1965 of a blond woman crossing the picture frame, stepping below its bottom border, in front of two out-of-focus men) that attains the formal development Burckhardt regularly achieves.  More often, Winogrand frames his women in traditional -- or conspicuously untraditional -- manners.
            The wide-angle prevents Winogrand’s pictures from true empathy with their subjects.  Ultimately, in his photographs and in the mental space they project, he is a distant observer, and one gets the feeling there is a judgement taking place.  A sense of irony or slight superiority toward the people he is photographing pervades Winogrand’s pictures, even though physically he may have been as close to his subjects as Burckhardt was to his.  It is partially a formal fear as well -- the need to include the whole subject, rather than a fragment of it -- that limits Winogrand’s pictures, making them at once more easily graspable and less profound.
            Why do Winogrand’s people -- and those of other street photographers, such as Levitt or William Klein -- look dated, whereas Burckhardt’s people from the same years look natural, casually disposed?  It is because Burckhardt is seeing individuals rather than at their cultural trappings.  A similar discrepancy can be observed when comparing Burckhardt’s portraits of artists to those of other photographers.  Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of Ezra Pound, for example, is a sensational shot with a manipulated personality.  Instead of being a poet, Pound becomes a type -- the epic sufferer of popular myth.  Even a highly dramatic image, like Burckhardt’s Jack Tworkov II (New York, 1951) -- the figure lit by skylight while the studio around remains immersed in shadows -- gains its power from the look of concentration on the painter’s face and the tools of trade in his hands.  This is a portrait of a man engaged in his work, not a commercialized fantasy of artistic inspiration.  Burckhardt’s photographs of artists always connect on this level, first because he knows that art-making is a way of life, a craft, and second, because his subjects, even if they struck a pose while taking a momentary break from working, were confident that Burckhardt would portray them as they looked, without pretension.
            Burckhardt’s position as an artist-photographer affects formal aspects of his photographs, as well as his relation to his subject matter.  His compositions come from a richer background than those of many American photographers.  Instead of relying on journalistic graphic impact, Burckhardt’s thought comes from the tradition of European painting.  Patterns and rhythms of figure groups come to Burckhardt through a long lineage he absorbed from an early age.  In particular, we should look to quatro cento  painters to find similar relationships.  Massacio’s fresco  The Tribute Money (c. 1427) in Florence is an example of the kind of group portrait that would have affected Burckhardt’s vision.  Another is Perugino’s Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to St. Peter , a fresco from 1481-83 in the Sistine Chapel.  In the latter, the foreground group combines a variety of gestures, while in the middle ground figures disport themselves on a vast piazza, and further back architectural monuments are visible.  This is not to say that Burckhardt would model photographs on specific paintings.  Rather, he had internalized their vision of harmony between figures and their environment, as well as the classical mechanics of relating figures to one another, so that when he went out to photograph, he had this store of aesthetics and philosophy to draw on.
            When he shifts from artificial, urban, environments, to uninterrupted rural settings, Burckhardt brings along his accustomed savoir-faire and alarmingly dedicated observance of the everyday world.  Burckhardt takes what passes for mundane and shows it to be anything but that.  In Glitter (Searsmont, 1994), he proves his eye remains fresh and even surpasses previous seeing in precision and glamor.  Again, his work is not Romantic.  It is too involved in the moment; hence, its subliminal resonance with the Beat poetry movement.  It threatens the idea of an avant-garde, because it is meaningless -- insignificant -- yet it is palpably possessed of great artistry. 
            In that, it shares something with Paul Taylor’s choreographies, which are able to reference previous artists without being arch or ironic.  In 1961, for example, Taylor, who had danced with Martha Graham and was known for minimalist choreographies, decided to use a score by J.S. Bach for a new piece, called Junction.  As Alex Katz, who designed the set and costumes for the dance, recalls, Taylor used the music unexpectedly, not illustrating it but rather paralleling its ceaseless energy: “He [Taylor] was moving, the energy was exploding, and the dance had a great line.  I also wanted a line that exploded in energy.  I put bright colors on the leotards, so when the dancers spun, the colors rotated and energy would come off the bodies.” Burckhardt, who was an admirer of Taylor and made a film of the piece Junction, often makes similarly shocking combinations of music and imagery in his films, for example in Mobile Homes, when he combines a soundtrack of Percy Sledge singing “When A Man Loves A Woman” with footage of poet Harris Schiff doing a reading.
            Burckhardt is a bohemian, adhering to a time-honored laxity of personal and cultural behavior.  His nudes represent not only an essay into organic form but also an unashamedly tawdry look up-close at sex.   The women are never only abstract forms; their individual physicality is asserted, and, as with people on the street, is not judged, but rather praised, regardless of its relationship to ideal standards.  Robert Frank’s photographs, by contrast, for all their remarkable beauty, always have a social message -- the London bankers are bad, the poor Americans in busses are good.
            The artists Burckhardt depicts are bohemian as well, catching a breather or else engaged in the act of creation.  Bill and Elaine de Kooning (New York, 1950) is a study of their relationship.  In a session which, typically for Burckhardt, he exposed only a single roll of 12 shots, a vision of this famous couple emerges.  Elaine stares with daunting intensity at Bill, who muses introspectively, staring down at his hand on the table.  Edwin Denby on Twenty First Street (New York, 1937) is a classic portrait, orchestrated but not posed -- Denby slumping in de rigeur  decadence, while the bustle of urban life steams on behind him.  The organism of contemporary life makes our own despair seem pointless (“Tuesday, dying seems a fuss” as Denby writes in “The Climate”).

IV.  Painting
While Burckhardt’s early paintings are formal, they are not abstract; rather, they present reality as form.  This is somewhat surprising, given his early friendship with de Kooning, and that painter’s widespread charismatic influence.  The cityscapes are views, actual locations in various urban settings.  He equates New York, Florence, and Los Angeles (all cities with roofs), enamored of the great, haphazard, accumulation of rectangles, diagonals, volumes, and cones, always covered by dour grey sky.  Photographers like this sky best, as it minimizes contrast.  An overall haze unifies Chrysler Building (1947), and the V-shaped progression from top left to bottom center to top right creates a momentum countered by the distant and hazily-painted Chrysler Building.   Rhythmically and tonally, the subject strikes reverses to the current of the painting, arresting the eye, and perhaps bringing a smile to the lips. 
            Certain paintings allow insight into concerns in the photographs.  Parking Lot  (1970), Dusk (1971), and Wrapper (1964) all show similarities to photographs taken around the same time.  The photograph A View From Astoria, (New York, 1940) presents an odd, distant, view of Manhattan’s skyline, a vision taken up ten years later, at almost exactly the same spot, in the painting Manhattan Skyline from Queens (1950).  There is a series of photographs, taken over a number of years, of the “canyon” view of a city street or avenue, with a jagged section of sky forcing down to a point on the horizon (see Chelsea Evening I, NY, 1960).  These views automatically have built-in classical forms: the X structure of two complementary diagonals, crossing at a low point, a low-slung X.  They also carry the allure of dying city light, accentuated in the painting (Dusk [1971]) by the out-of-focus sequence of lights, which forms a syncopated rhythm across the bottom of the painting.  Wrapper , which was based, as are many of Burckhardt’s New York street paintings, on a Kodachrome, has the same formal interest in juxtaposing planes, with fragments of figures passing by, as in his Sidewalk series of photographs.
            Themes run through the paintings as they do through the photographs and films -- nudes, buildings, Maine forest, still lifes.  Burckhardt doesn’t question these genres; he finds individual ways to use them.  His painted nudes, as with his photographs, concentrate on the sitter’s personality, rather than any supposed purity of form.  Occasionally light hits a body in a singular way, but mainly our attention is taken by the characters, that is the faces, the positions, the body language.  We feel ourselves in the room with these women, and we delight in the sophisticated framework of a green couch.  Its familiarity reduces the tension of confrontation. 
            Occasionally, the acuteness of Burckhardt’s photographic vision makes itself felt in his paintings, as in My Roots (1972), where the exact formations of roots and bark are carefully noted.  More often, he goes for an overall effect, with an emphasis on the found formalities amidst the chaos of the Maine woods or a New York gutter.  Most striking are the paintings, like Fluorescents (1973), in which a distinct vision makes itself felt.  A specific fragment of a building facade with an air conditioner exposed and fluorescent lighting visible within combines gradations of linear motifs, slightly askew from the angles of the canvas, and leaves us marveling at the appositeness of the image.  It gives a real impression of looking up and noticing something.
            A signal breakthrough in Burckhardt’s painting occurred in the mid-nineties,  when he was in his early eighties.  He had often painted the woods, ferns, trees, bodies of water.  The close-ups he began painting in 1995, though, are entirely different.  They are often “full-bleed” details of trees with no other ground to help define them in space.  He developed the requisite technique for this new vision: soft handling of detailed information that can suddenly seem abstract.  Informed by years of looking closely in photograph and especially in film, Burckhardt seized a way to “photograph” a painting.  These works contribute to our century’s discourse on the influence of photography on painting.  They do so in an ineffable way, almost as an afterthought, based on an internalized, logical, system.

V.  Film
                                                                        “I still like stills” RB
Describing the use of music as structure in films, Burckhardt has written, “The best kind of structure for a non-dramatic film seems to me a musical one.  It can be any kind of music, from the steady forward movement of a keyboard fugue by Bach...to the sparse sounds and (to me) unpredictable intervals of Schoenberg or Messiaen.”    He agreed with Stan Brakhage that “a film should set up its own rhythm,” in other words be silent, “but I didn’t want to give up certain passages when image and music, though separate...most of the time, come together to carry you along for a blissful minute or so.  It mustn’t last long; returning to silence can be another event, more sober again, followed by maybe a poem or music again, as long is it stays a surprise.”
            His 101 films to date -- made from 1936 to 1997 -- range from childlike, tongue-in-cheek, comedies, to inside art documentaries, to distinct awareness of each fact of existence: flower, face, stomach, cloud.  Early on, he made films (Up and Down the Waterfront [1946], The Climate of New York [1948],Under the Brooklyn Bridge [1953]), which document specific visual worlds.  They are not, however, documentaries, as there is no omniscient point of view (most commonly implemented in standard documentaries by text, though it can be done non-verbally).  Burckhardt makes no comment on the workers he observes on Manhattan’s waterfront, the men drinking beer in bars or having lunch, pitching pennies during a break, the women walking home from work, or the children playing in the dirt.  All of this material could easily be maudlin, pulling on the heartstrings, but Burckhardt sets it up as part of a visual  experience. 
            He establishes the primacy of the visual through his stationary shots of buildings, then architectural details, then stationary shots through which people pass.  He forces the viewer to look seriously at a specific ornament as at a specific person.  His framing is always considered and strictly limited, even when it is a long shot.  His choices in editing impose a certain significance on each image, as well as creating a cumulative flow of visual information.  Burckhardt has said he prefers movies to still photography because in film he determines exactly how long the viewer will look at each image.
            He arranges his images in series, though he often plays with subverting these formal groupings.  In some films, such as The Climate of New York and Verona (1955), actual titles name the sections; normally, it is done without titles.  He applies this formal vision to all his films.  In Haiti (1938), for instance, he moves back and forth between shots of people walking in an open square; views of arcaded buildings; details of facades; medium shots of people walking at the port; progressive, uninterrupted, pans; details of exteriors of homes; and close-ups of people looking at the camera.  Within this seemingly desultory framework, Burckhardt inserts an autonomous scene: people dancing to a band at a bar, which he sets to an authentic soundtrack.  This is a structural procedure he often applies.  In Mobile Homes (1979), in the midst of an apparently disconnected flow of images and vignettes, he inserts a self-sufficient, fully staged and acted episode of Wonder Woman.  More subtle is the constant interweaving of motifs, imagery, and feelings.  He connects a vast array of pictures and sound, leaving one with a sense of beauty whose source one is hard-pressed to define.
            What is constant is the element of surprise Burckhardt mentions, and what is most often surprising is the way he allows us to see the commonplace, that which is disregarded or denigrated, as something worthy of attention, valid, capable of provoking strong emotion.  Often, this slighted thing is not society’s refuse -- though he has striking footage of garbage -- but things even less noticeable, like a normal-looking person walking down the street.  They are all captured in a light which does not even allow the refuge of nostalgia.  
              Burckhardt’s comedies often show life more or less as it was lived by the actors who play in them, with an optimism they may or may not have shared.  His first film, 145 W. 21 (1936), named after the address of the loft he shared with Denby, and shot there, tells a glib tale of a couple, played by Denby and Paula Miller, having their place painted.  The painters, one of whom is played by Aaron Copland, steal money from the apartment and go out on the town, eating and taking in a movie, where fellow moviegoers include Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson. 
            In 1950, having come into contact with a younger generation of poets and painters, Burckhardt made Mounting Tension, with John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, and Larry Rivers, all in their mid-twenties.  Burckhardt often celebrated new friendships with a collaboration in film.  A little later, Burckhardt met Red and Mimi Grooms, embarking on another collaborative friendship.  Their first joint effort was Shoot The Moon (1962), a take-off on Georges Méliès’ Voyage `a La Lune.  A more cohesive effort was Lurk (1964), which at 36 minutes is “feature-length” for Burckhardt.  The text by Denby was meant to evoke Mary Shelley’s original novel, not parody the Hollywood film: “Serene in the purity of science, in the purity of my lovely daughter’s undivided love, I watched hope ripening to the brink of success.  Not my hope.  I am an old man with no emotion -- it was your hope, it was mankind’s.”    With music selected by Frank O’Hara, the film alternates between the black humor of Dr. Borealis (played by Denby) throwing his victim’s brain into the garbage, then fishing it out and eating it, to the pathos of the monster roaming through Maine’s wilderness, to true terror.  All these moods are enhanced by the distancing and heightening effect of the black and white textures.
            Other “features” include Money (1968), with a text by Joe Brainard, and Tarzam (1969), starring Taylor Mead as a naive artist, with a text by him as well.  Money, like Lurk, has a sizeable cast, including Ashbery, Denby, Katz, and John Bernard Myers.  Denby plays the delightfully devious Hemlock Stinge, richest man in the world.  Burckhardt, in a cameo role, explains the ways of the world to his son Jacob in Brainard’s words: “Son, let me tell you about money... Money is what you buy things with.  It means many different things to many different people...”
            These films were leading up to a masterpiece in the comedy genre, 1971’s Inside Dope.  A mock-documentary on the gamut of psycho-tropic, mood-altering, substances, the film maintains a positive view of humanity that is profound.  This time the text is by Burckhardt himself, and he proves himself the equal of Brainard and Denby.  Inside Dope is on the opposite end of the spectrum from social commentary.  It does not skirt the issue of drug-taking, with episodes on heroin, LSD, and every other drug one can name.  Rather, it becomes part of Burckhardt’s lifelong essay on the human comedy, his most Fellini-esque effort in that sense.  Apart from poverty and war, there is little we moan about that cannot be laughed at, if examined in the light of centuries’ experience.  This is his classical wit again, his Mozartian wink and escape from pretense.  This sophistication is also present in the writings of William Burroughs and Jim Carroll.  In Burckhardt’s case, it derives not from first-hand experience of drugs but from long experience of the world.
            In a scene featuring Peter Schjeldahl, which starts with him devouring two large candies laced with LSD, a voice-over based on a text by Timothy Leary informs us:

“This man is going on a trip.  His ticket is our new technology which provides him with chemical synthetics of those ancient and venerable concoctions such as the Peyote Cactus, the divine mushroom of Mexico, and the Soma of ancient Vedic, pre-Hindu, philosophers, mind-opening substances called Psychedelics that have been shrouded in misunderstanding and controversy because they produce that most sought-after and yet most dread experience, ecstasy, and reveal the existence of undreamed phenomenological galaxies within.”

In the end, all is resolved, as the film changes from black-and-white to color, the barbituate-taker is reconciled with his speedfreak girlfriend, and the sinister, white-haired, pusher (played, of course, by Denby, with perfect scowl) joins the hippies in a free-form love-in. 
            The colors in Burckhardt’s films are stunning -- interestingly, since he has rarely made color photographs.  His early travel films established Burckhardt’s gift for patient looking and seeing.  By keeping his camera still, he allows the viewer to witness the movement of ordinary life.  Utilizing classic techniques like slow and fast motion, reverse motion, animation, and time lapse -- learned from such masters as Dziga Vertov and René Clair -- steadied by hand-held stills, Burckhardt molds odd paeans to invention.  An example is to be found in this passage from my log of Burckhardt’s Ostensibly (1989): “(Music lower, Kia Heath reads John Ashbery’s poem ‘Ostensibly’ as voice-over); fast-motion trees/clouds; Maine Blueberry Queen; shadows on tree trunk; tomatoes; animated pine cones, apples/nudes; fast-motion path to pond; quick shots of spruce, maple, pine; zoom out from pines; time-lapse pond; shirtless man running country road; traffic divider at Flatiron Building, wet pavement, car lights; man running toward camera edited so as to be successively further away; water skier; logs in flame; building edge with clouds moving right to left.”

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