[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: October 13, 2008]
I had thought this Rudy Burckhardt show, which runs through January 4, might offer a more extensive overview of his New York work. The 2005 book, New York Moments, shows Burckhardt photographing and filming the city over an extended period. Still, this is a timely and unexpectedly moving exhibit, and worth your attention.
Almost concealed in a small, second floor side gallery I don't recall ever visiting before, this show has a single and simple focus: it is no more than the unbound pages of a charmingly scrappy little album of photos and verse/commentary put together by Burckhardt and his partner, the dance critic and secret poet Edwin Denby. I know Rudy's the visual artist, but strictly speaking the title of this exhibition should give them equal billing.
Denby is an intriguing character - almost an unknown member of the New York school of poets. Trained in modern dance, his public persona was as a critic and a writer of ballets and opera libretti. Some poems made it into print, but the products of his poetic activity seem to have been shared mainly among his friends - a less prolific Konstantin Kavafy. In any case, his first book publication by a mainstream publisher was, unconventionally, his collected poems.
A Complete Poems was issued by Random House in 1986; the cover features Burckhardt's iconic portrait of Denby sitting casually close to the edge of a roof-top high above a New York street. If you've only seen one of Burckhardt's photos, it's probably this one, and it hangs fittingly in the entrance to the show.
The home-made scrapbook, picked apart and displayed here, was called New York, N. Why? - a title which sets the mood for Denby's generally light-hearted squibs and Burckhardt's fascination with urban detail. He certainly enjoyed repeating images: there are sequences of fire hydrants, the shoes of city walkers, the rock candy swirls of barber poles, and menus - in the 1940s, you could lunch on fried scallops and pie à la mode for forty cents. The details evoke a world: the world of 1940s New York
But I was stopped in my tracks by the photographs which pore over the surfaces of corner stones - the great, weighty corner stones of Wall Street office buildings - and brass plaques of company names. Built for posterity. But Denby writes:
"...get the building faced,
Carry it on the books and when the firm's failed
Pedestrians still go by the slabs as placed."
Permanence and transience; the dialectic of the monumental city, and a dialectic we are living with particular intensity in the fall of 2008.
"Believe it or not, this city is common
To people who are historically unsuccessful..."
Buildings rise and are torn down, companies reign for a century then fail. It is curing to be reminded that the city, the tread of the pedestrians, the round of sandwiches and haircuts, somehow endures.
"Pride shifts from this accomplishment to that,
Leaves old killings and half a city built,
The noise that smoothed it like a swimmer's fat
Disintegrates into Sunday bits of dirt.
Measurements however in straight angles to
The pavement and a standpipe do not so move,
As if the mind shifts slower than people do
And keeps widening the space between love and no love.
This widening like a history mystery
Is what Rudy's camera takes in the city."
Burckhardt and Denby were together almost fifty years. There is nothing about this show which will make you feel worse about New York, 2008, and much that might make you feel better.