ART REVIEW : ARBUS: PICTURES AT AN ODD-DUCK EXHIBITION

If Bob Dylan was the ‘60s prototypal rock star and the Kennedys were that decade’s archetypal politicians, then Diane Arbus was certainly the era’s essential photographer.

Her strange pictures of human deviants, both normal and odd, were like illustrations for Dante’s Inferno updated through Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” They were icons, like the essays of Susan Sontag or Tom Wolfe, inextricably wedded to the times.

We admired Arbus’ imagery even as it shocked us. She was as sensitive as a J. D. Salinger character, as tough as a Hell’s Angel and, not just incidentally, a woman who became something of a feminist hero. She did not survive her own heyday, dying a suicide in 1971 at age 48. Her influence, however continues to this day among young photographers. The lurking question is whether her own artistic legacy is intact or, like much else from the decade, just a dated relic.

An opportunity to sort that all out is presented in the exhibition “Diane Arbus, Magazine Work.” It is on view to Feb. 24 and serves to launch the University Art Museum, a new art facility at Cal State Long Beach. More on that presently.

Arbus started life as Diane Nemerov, daughter of a family that owned a glossy and successful Fifth Avenue department store. She grew up in Manhattan’s milieu of cultivated chic, married and wound up as a successful fashion photographer. A couple of recent biographies reveal, however, that her life was far from being all beer and skittles. She was troubled, to put it mildly, and her interior turmoil progressively focused itself through the lens of her camera, searching out life’s quirky, freakish underbelly. The work in this exhibition was commissioned for publications like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, and is only slightly less stark that her best-known images.

Time has not been kind to Arbus’ sensibility. Pictures that once seemed bracingly daring now appear merely perverse and cruel, like misfired skits from “Saturday Night Live.” Her attraction to twisted, haunted human flotsam once seemed like ‘60s-liberal sympathy and celebration of anybody who was different and, in that way, original.

Today, most of her pictures look like the visual equivalent of that classic ‘60s conversational game, the put-down. The trademark Arbus photograph distances itself from the subject and shoots it pretty well centered. That is not how you make pictorial empathy; it is how you signal laconic distance and rob the image of any aesthetic resonance. I just click the shutter, mister; I don’t want to get involved.

Arbus used the same distancing device with almost everybody; a dwarf who did Maurice Chevalier impersonations, a crackpot accountant who liked to dress up as Uncle Sam, strippers, socialites, movie stars. It all seemed so hip then. Now it dawns on us that there is nothing easier than making people look like damn fools in photographs. If they are a little weird to begin with, they are sitting ducks, cheap shots, innocent victims.

The Arbus sensibility begins to come across as that of a declasse rich kid, hostile and sarcastic, spouting cliches about “those people” and “the System.” There is no question that this was a smart, sensitive and talented artist, but her vision was rigidified by terror-stricken neurosis. She was mesmerized by odd ducks because she saw herself in them, but she stepped back, repelled, making the pictures look brazenly voyeuristic. They have the same kind of sleazy sensationalism as the work of her predecessor, Weejee, but lack his energy and sense of sharing the same ground as the subjects. Arbus’ work never plunges into its world, so it looks snide and vaguely insincere, even though it wasn’t.

This psychological double bind makes the work cut like a double-edged razor. When it’s not downright nasty, its emotions get frozen in the air somewhere between the subject and the camera. There is tension without catharsis. Pictures of a poor black family may mean to be empathic, but they wind up in paralyzed fascination with squalor and chaos.

When Arbus took out after H. L. Hunt or Mrs. T. Charlton Henry, normal prejudice against the rich makes us join in her sneer-along, until kindness wonders why she is beating up on a couple of old folks. Pictures start to feel less like social commentary and more like blurted-out confessions about her fear of children, poverty, madness and old age.

The other side of the coin is that she was an absolute sucker for gorgeous men and artists. Oh, she’d eviscerate Norman Mailer for being a macho ass, but she got downright muzzy over Marcello Mastroianni, Rudolf Nureyev, Agnes Martin, Marcel Duchamp and Germaine Greer. No wonder the art crowd liked her. She flattered them and confirmed their prejudices, because she shared them.

Every once in a while she’d drop her caricaturist’s guard and get a shot with some real resonance. Her study of the aged debutante Brenda Frazier has a delicacy that rescues the subject from easy ridicule rather than plunging her in. The same goes for Arbus’ picture of a slightly puffy, thoroughly likable Jayne Mansfield, cuddling her daughter protectively and showing five layers of depth and humanity under her dumb-blond facade.

It’s a good, challenging exhibition to launch Cal State Long Beach’s new museum. Located on the fifth floor of the campus’ main library, the space is not a perfect solution but is a distinct improvement, solidly earned by gallery director Connie Glenn. For several years she has sparked a highly professional exhibition and educational program that has been the envy of her colleagues despite cramped quarters in the old art building.

Now she and the rest of the staff are tickled to have two commodious exhibition bays and offices in the library. At the moment it’s a trifle hard to find, the gallery spaces do not have the world’s tallest ceilings, they are architecturally ill-defined and have an entire window wall bouncing direct light into the space, creating reflections that make facing works under glass nearly impossible to view. Never mind. Nothing wrong here that can’t be fixed with a couple of signs, a bit of ingenuity and some plasterboard.