Right of Assembly
Photograph by Arthur Siegel
Used by permission of EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY, New York
Siegel’s photograph “Right of Assembly” features prominently in HGO’s Chorus! The image shows throngs of automobile workers at a United Auto Workers (UAW) strike in 1939. The UAW was one of the first major labor unions to organize African-American workers, and during its peak represented workers from the aerospace, agricultural-implement and bicycle industries.


The Space Between the Dots

Arthur Siegel at Stephen Cohen Gallery
by Jan Tumlir

Many of these photographs at Stephen Cohen Gallery seem at once familiar. They are accomplished images, the kind that make their way into coffee-table collections because they exemplify a certain aesthetic position or attitude. Indeed, this modest survey of Arthur Siegel's work could serve as a general object lesson in photographic modernism. Every trope is in place: an insistence on a uniquely photographic point of view, a willfully hermetic process, a strict policy of reduction and containment, the elevation of form over substance, the exclusion of narrative, metaphor—all systems of reference exempting those turned inward, onto the medium itself, etc. For the most part, they are photographs about photography. Siegel's predilection for the dot—a motif that reappears throughout the exhibit, usually in large quantity and subject to an all-over deployment across the field of the image—can be attributed, on one hand, to its inherent insignificance, and on the other, to its condition as material analogy (to photographic grain).

Arthur Siegel, Lucidagram, 1969, platinum print, at Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles.
By hanging the famous Right of Assembly—an image from 1939 representing a large crowd of demonstrators viewed from above—alongside a model photogram from 1969, the sea of hats and heads which make up the first spills over and becomes a field of abstract dots in the second. From political icon to mute aesthetic symbol, the complex route of artistic inspiration is reduced to a two-step. Positioned between an early series of double exposures from the forties—wife Barbara filtered through an array of natural "screens"; water, a thicket of weeds, an expanse of dried-out land—and a couple of abstract compositions from the seventies which employ torn paper as a masking device to produce landscape-like results, these dot pictures emerge as the artist's foremost achievement. The early pictures are too derivative to merit a great deal of attention, and the late pictures just too empty, teetering dangerously on the brink of corporate kitsch. It is in these dotted fields that Siegel's habitual asceticism and formal restraint seems most purposeful, the rules functioning to free up, rather than inhibit, the game. Covering a narrow wall, a tight grid of identically sized and framed dot-pictures appears as both a single photographic detail, enormously enlarged. Within these narrow parameters—and also because of them—a surprising amount of stylistic variation is allowed to take place. The effect might be spectacular if it weren't at the same time so modest.

 If Siegel's contributions to the practice of photographic abstraction have been unfairly overlooked, it certainly is unfortunate, and yet understandable. Not only is the desire for recognition at odds with the elusive "attitude" of these pictures specifically, but also with some of the most salient features of the medium in general. Whatever we think of mechanization and its relation to the truth of photography—whether the suppression of the (artist's) hand necessarily entails the suppression of subjectivity, or merely the signs of an arbitrary difference—it remains that in no other art form are the author's claims to authority so tenuous. Unless it is forcefully trafficked with, the photograph will always tend towards anonymity. This is a problem of which Siegel was certainly aware, and which he took no steps to remedy. Even though most of these images are products of a markedly "hands-on" approach to the conventional darkroom procedures, Siegel's various manipulations—conditioned as they are by qualities inherent to the medium—always retain a basically mechanical character. In his selfless fascination with photography, it almost seems as if Siegel were perfectly content to disappear behind "the apparatus." These pictures have been purged religiously of self—the authorial voice is vigorously denied at every turn (a fact underscored by the ubiquity of untitled works), as is any trace of specific content. A generic photo-vision is substituted for the unique point of view.

The modernism that Siegel represents is quiet, almost monkish. These pictures certainly have nothing to do with the "loud" modernism of grand gesture, of myth-making or the cults of personality. I would prefer to think that he never participated in the self-important clamour of all those heroic authors. I would rather locate his desire on a different plane entirely, aside from talk in general and even the picture—and in that empty space between the grains. In place of expression, his pictures assert the beauty of pattern and complexity, of spaces systematically filled and emptied, the serene pleasures of meditative process, and above all else, the will to silence. If they get lost in the art-historical shuffle, it is perhaps to their credit.

Arthur Siegel closed in October at Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles.
Jan Tumlir is an artist and #### who lives in Los Angeles.
 

Arthur Siegel

Arthur Siegel was born in 1913 in Detroit. He studied at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, Detroit (BA, 1936), then taught photography at Wayne State. In 1937 he was awarded a scholarship at the New Bauhaus (later renamed the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology) to study photography with László Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes. Returning to Detroit in 1938, Siegel worked as a freelance photographer for such important publications as Life, Fortune, and Colliers, and also worked for the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and the US Army Air Corps. Through the Detroit Camera Club he met Harry Callahan. In 1945 Moholy-Nagy hired Siegel to head the newly formed photography department at the Institute of Design, and to develop the pioneering course “New Visions in Photography.” He served as head of the program from 1946 until his resignation in 1949. After nearly two decades pursuing commercial work, photojournalism, and color photography projects, he returned to the Institute of Design when Aaron Siskind rehired him in 1967. He became chair of the photography department in 1971 and continued to teach for the rest of his life. Siegel died in Chicago in 1978.
(Printed with permission of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, www.mocp.org)

For more information on the works of Arthur Siegel contact Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY  10151
212-750-7070
 www.houkgallery.com.