Americans
didn’t invent the concept of freedom, although they are particularly
fond of it. Freedom, the boiled-down, disyllabic version of France’s
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, serves, in the
absence of other foundational myths as a kind of national legend, a
point of departure, even a nemesis against which progress and reality
are weighed.
It’s
also a defining trope in American art. The CIA supported Abstract
Expressionism because it was the unbridled style that “proved” America,
unlike fascist Europe or communist Russia, supported the free
expression of the individual. Freedom is also a recurring motif in
American photography. The 19th and early 20th century landscapes of the
American West served as emblems of free movement (as well as
expansionism) and iconic war images like Joe Rosenthal’s photo of
soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima served to document the
“preservation” of freedom. The unflinching eye of straight photography
underscored the way in which artists functioned as free agents,
documenting the social landscape as well as the quirks and debaucheries
of its freedom-drunk population.
American
art and freedom have been most characteristically combined in one
concept: the road trip. The classic example, of course, is Jack
Kerouac’s bohemian Beat odyssey, On the Road (1957). But the road trip
has become a rite of passage for photographers too. Robert Frank’s The
Americans was even anointed by a Kerouac introduction: “that crazy
feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music
comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert
Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on
the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car.” **
In
his new series of photographs, Ryan McGinley combines all of these
things: bohemia, America, the road trip, the search for some kind of
freedom. For the last two summers he’s taken vanloads of friends who
double as subjects on road trips across the United States and
photographed them in motels and houses, campsites and landscapes
ranging from forests to deserts.
The
subjects are young, kind of beautiful, and romantically reckless. They
carry names—Jake or Lily or Tim—but we don’t know anything about them.
They exist in a halo-world of light and beauty, like models in an
editorial or ad spread. Only, they get to do what those models only
hint at doing. They get fucked up and have sex and fight and lie out on
the desert sand, naked. They bungee jump and skinny dip in rivers and
streams. Nothing comes between them and the great American outdoors.
In
many ways, the figures in McGinley’s photographs are recreating the
age-old art pastoral: Titian’s bacchanals; Manet’s Le dejeuner sur
l’herbe; everyone’s bathers (from Boucher to Cezanne to Picasso).
Getting out of the city, as McGinley has commented, brings out “a
freedom and energy. People really let down their guard.” That
persistent idea of freedom …
There
is, naturally, in all Western art pastorals, the nagging sense of a
journey that can never be completed: the return to Eden. However, where
much of the pastoral genre swings around this idea of nostalgia and
melancholy, McGinley’s subjects are stripped of this. Often, they are
smiling. Guilt and shame are erased. This seems the biggest break from
the photographs of the past. For where Larry Clark’s subjects in Tulsa
had sex and did plenty of drugs, there was embedded in the photos the
dark moral tale: the drug addict whose infant dies; the gun that leads
to trouble; the heartland of a country gone rotten.
In
McGinley’s works, sex is playful, joyful. This isn’t the fumbling,
desperate back-seat sex of Teenage Lust—which serves as an analogue for
a whole other level of existential frustration. It’s something
different. Groups of nudes splash in the water or lodge themselves in a
pine tree. The figure merges with the landscape—often literally. The
sun washes out bodies in the desert; a torso slips into water. And
bodies merge together.
McGinley
is characteristically candid about his inspiration for this series.
It’s not the photography one would find in galleries or museums—the
fuzzy pictorialism of Steichen or the roaming road-trip camera of
Friedlander. Rather, he’s turned to the vernacular: that great sea of
photographs created by amateurs, “lay” photographers who like to
document their friends and themselves at leisure in the buff, riding
motorcycles, boating, camping, scuba diving, consuming nature.
McGinley
collects photos in the same way Jim Shaw collects thrift store
paintings or Richard Prince re-photographs images of topless biker
chicks. But where irony rules among Prince and Shaw’s generation—a
complicated stance that positions the artist “above” his
subjects—McGinley is markedly different. He embraces these found
photos, makes booklets of them, copies their subject and tone and, more
importantly, identifies with the sense of freedom one gets when looking
at these images, a feeling that being nude in nature and documenting it
is every photographer—no, every American’s—inalienable right.
With
their precedent in the “high art” road trip and their embrace of
vernacular culture, McGinley’s photos achieve something beyond the
anthropological barometer reading of a moment in history. He’s moved
beyond the charged status of the photographed nude, rejecting the
“serious” approach to art-nudity and adopting the easy, comfortable
relationship between the body and nature—and, more importantly, the
photographer and his subject—that already exists in so-called amateur
photography.
This,
then, might be a new definition of freedom: the road trip, not as
escape or odyssey into self-discovery, but a journey into an accessible
Eden, one already found and enjoyed and documented by thousands
(perhaps millions) of clothing-optional Americans. The photographic
nude, rather than being conscious of her nudity—her exposure—revels in
it. She becomes the everywoman cavorting in the great American
outdoors, an emblem of freedom shaken, for a brief moment, from all the
complicated associations that word brings forth.
by
Martha Schwendener
**
Frank, Robert. The Americans. Introduction by Jack Kerouac.
Scalo, 1998.
