Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  There were regional variants and hybrids of these approaches. A particularly influential one in Toronto during the 1970s emanated from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Headed by the photographer Nathan Lyons, it used the tools and materials of the Leica people but spiced them up with largely urban-based formal games, the occasional use of colour and heavy doses of irony.

  An ambitious fine art photographer of Doug Clark’s generation had to absorb and pick through these modes and influences and find something for himself in them. During the late 1970s Clark did some of the obligatory black-and-white “street” photography, using hand-held 35mm cameras, but soon moved on to a more individual use of the medium. Doug’s was an extremely oral personality. He spent a lot of time stuffing things in his mouth — fast food, donuts, cigarettes and endless cups of coffee. And lots came out. All those stimulants made him run fast and chatter. He was always bouncing off the walls, talking, joking, enthusing, exclaiming. He photographed the same way, cranking huge quantities of film through his Leicas and Nikons.

  This personality soon attracted him to working in colour. It was sensual and delicious, and the world was full of weird mysterious tableaux. Its store windows, urban signage and the strange nooks and corners of people’s homes and workspaces were best recorded in its full range of hues and chromas — not in the more abstract black and white. With the aid of the new fast colour negative films, a wide-angle lens and on-camera flash, these odd little corners of the world could be lifted out of the ordinary and made strange — and beautiful. During the early and mid-1980s, Clark made thousands of photographs this way, many crazy, sensual and inventive. It was exciting.

  By the late ’80s these visual acrobatics had begun to wear thin for Clark. He wanted more control over what the world threw at him. Instead of just documenting the odd little corners of evidence that he found out in the world, he began to construct his own.

  The strange juxtapositions that he occasionally found out there in the world could be built by cutting up individual negatives, joining them together and masking them around the edges so that they became the towers and totemic stand-ins for the human body that make up his Articles of Faith. To make the component negatives he ransacked his own overstuffed studio and those of others to find “hot” objects to arrange and light under a copy stand.

  The techniques and materials employed to make these assemblages were Clark’s caveman version of high tech. Many people were beginning to use computers for this work. Clark used razor blades, yards of Scotch tape and kitchen aluminum foil. His results were just as good or better. He took delight in the polished beauty that could emerge from kindergarten technique. Its manual primitiveness suited an oral personality. Doug had always loved things. Now he was trying to understand why and what meaning these objects had for him. He was trying to increase their power by rubbing them up against each other. He was also beginning to think about leaving evidence that he had existed. He used the nearly adult-sized photographs of Articles of Faith to ask basic questions:

  “How do you remember?”

  “Does time change the picture?”

  “Do you enjoy being watched or watching?”

  “Do you believe in what you see?”

  “What kind of objects do you collect?”

  “Do you have dreams that you hide?”

  “Do you kill time?”

  Articles of Faith was a popular show, touring Canada and making its way out into the world. Clark was no longer just a taker of photographs, he was now also a maker. He had never really been a true documentarian.

  He wasn’t above a little diddling, a little adjusting of reality as he found it in order to make the picture more successful. In 1983, when he found a spherical glass vase of lilies next to a desk lamp in a Venice, California, living room, he tried making the photograph several times — with the lamp on and with it off. The change had a significant impact on the depth and focus of the photograph. He was rehearsing for Articles of Faith and beyond.

  Clark, however, didn’t totally abandon his documentary impulse. During his many travels in Europe and Asia at the end of the 1980s, he encountered things so foreign and beautiful that he simply recorded them, using a panorama format of his own construction that mimicked the experience of scanning the visual field of the world. These are among his most beautiful pictures. He loved being alone in an exotic place, drinking in all that new strangeness and the evidence of other ways of being.

  By the early 1990s Clark had begun working on a kind of sequel to Articles of Faith. He returned to his low-tech cut and paste. These new pieces were simpler, more graphic and less exuberant. While a few of them retained the vertical format of the Articles, many ranged off horizontally or at angles. Several of them seemed to take on the shape of letters in a primitive alphabet. He arranged three of these in a sequence to come up with the name of the series: Gio.

  Gio was less obviously figurative than Articles of Faith. In some of the pieces we’re not really sure what we are seeing, whether looking at the components or the whole. Gio is more like a private alphabet. We recognize that we are seeing runes, but we don’t know what they represent. Doug has left us with only a partial explanation for just one of them:

  Madonna is based on the 1450s Stefan Lochner painting Die Mutter Gottes in der Rosenlaube (The Madonna in the Rose Garden). This votive painting of the humility type originated in Sienese art and relates to a myriad of spiritual symbols. Here the “Queen of Heaven” wears the crown and the blue robe of paradise. The roses in the image are meant to represent pain; purity and chastity are represented by the lilies; modesty and humility by violets; strawberry leaves represent the trinity of the divine.

  Imposed on the surface I have recorded a Hopi winged-man and plastic leaves. The metal devil figure is wonderfully technological and the plastic leaves further extend a comment on this irony of paradise. Paradise came to mean the most perfect, the most secure part of a garden — here a garden of plastic leaves, a garden of reproductions. At the top and bottom of the frame, the negative has been cut and flipped. This is another direct intrusion of myself into both the factual and symbolic memory of the photographic process.

  Here, an already heavily freighted image, Lochner’s Madonna, is further loaded up with iconography from another culture (Hopi) and then skewed by a material analysis (a tinned steel devil and plastic leaves) into an ironical commentary on paradise and photography. It’s easy to get lost attempting to understand what Clark was trying to do here. He seems to be questioning the veracity of the photograph and its ability to carry meaning beyond those meanings assigned by, for instance, Christian convention to depictions of the rose or lily. If we do not have established manmade meanings assigned to images, then what do they mean? Is there meaning without the impositions of cultural convention?

  Looking at the other pieces that make up Gio, it seems difficult to believe that they were all meant to carry forward a dialogue about meaning, but it may be the case. The message seems so hermetic that most viewers will be tempted to simply enjoy the forms, textures, colours and moods that they encourage rather than struggling with speculative interpretations.

  Clark’s life was soon to change radically. In 1992 he was awarded a residency in the Canada Council’s studio in Paris. Exploring the city’s contemporary galleries, he began to encounter artmaking practices that were more based in ideas than on raw perception, sensation and the affection for the curious that had previously informed his work. Other artists like fellow Canadian Robin Collyer, also visiting Cité des Arts at the time, encouraged this shift in Clark’s thinking. A blossoming romance with the Hamburg-based artist Martina Oehmsen led to collaborative work on a three-dimensional project. When he went to Germany he discovered that conceptual work was everywhere.

  Clark had always enjoyed punning titles with double meanings. He titled his 1984 show in an Edmonton elevator cab Upward Mobility. The Articles
of Faith were both objects and clauses or stipulations as in a written document. In 1994 he produced Stock Market and Counter Fit. Both played on double meanings — Stock Market inserted a cowboy into the NYSE newspaper listings and Counter Fit carefully collaged (fit) faces lifted from various international paper currencies. The following year while living in Germany, he produced Shelf Life, a piece in which expropriated images of hands from outdated magazines were converted to photographic reproductions and wrapped around 120 large cans arranged on a dozen shelves, like groceries that presumably had expiry dates. Puns on puns on puns: it was classic Doug playfulness.

  Shelf Life became an important component of Clark’s last major public exhibition. North of America was installed at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton during the fall of 1997. Although his journey was soon to be over, this show clearly demonstrated how far he had travelled in a quarter of a century of active practice. Sombre, formal and monochromatic, North of America was an exhibition in which things disappeared into the walls and technology was used to ask more questions. The numerous clocks in the exhibition struggled to tell the truth about time. It was as much a show for the ear as for the eye. While new original work in photography now took a backseat, colour was right off the bus. Clark was getting ready for new travels.

  Our rational minds pooh-pooh foreshadowings, but in Clark’s case they were totally rational. His father had died of a heart attack in his 40s as had his grandfather. Doug’s solution was to live and work fast. He packed a lot in — not just artmaking but also travelling around much of the world as well as lots of passing on what he had learned to his many students during the last few years of his life. And then it came to the foretold midnight ending in a Muskoka cabin while holidaying with his wife and son. Like his father and father’s father he had his fatal heart attack at 47.

  One of the qualities that made Doug special was his generosity to others. Not financially, for years he seldom had enough to feed himself regularly and well, let alone to give, but he gave of his time and his energy. He always praised and promoted the work of his peers when he thought they’d done well. Peripatetic and gregarious, Doug knew many people in many places. He always made sure the ones who could profit by each other’s company eventually met, and he initiated many collaborations.

  From his career beginnings as a 25-year-old curator of photography at the Edmonton Art Gallery, Clark worked enthusiastically to showcase the photographic work of others, often in quite imaginative ways. His 1981 publication, Keepsake, combined public submissions of amateur photography with documentation of selected communities by commissioned camera-artists to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the province of Alberta. In 1983–84 he filled buses in Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vancouver with fine art photography. Gallery-in-Transit stripped buses of all the hectoring and intrusive advertising and filled the card slots over passengers’ heads with images that gave rather than took. He organized other projects. People loved all of them.

  For nearly two decades Doug Clark was a prime animator of Canadian fine art photography. He thought that the invention of photography in the first half of the 19th century was a seminal event in human history. No other visual medium was capable of recognizing the phenomenal strangeness and beauty of the world with such fidelity. Photography changed how we saw and how we communicated. It introduced us to places, people and events we would never encounter first hand. It was amazing! Through exhibitions, teaching and his personal photography, he communicated this wonder to others. His excitement was a great gift. Doug often joked that he was going to trade in his personality for a new one. Photographers from one coast to the other are glad he couldn’t.

  Toward the end of his life Doug decided to take himself more seriously. He began to dress in charcoal and black. His clothes were even ironed. Early in this final phase he yelled at me one day, “Don’t call me Dougie.” He was turning into Douglas. And he was now Mr. or Professor Clark, not Clarkie as many knew him in western Canada. Before I had time to adjust to this change he was gone. Miss you, Dougie. I miss Clarkie too.

  I want Dougie back. I want EL too and Mary and David and Volker, Jeremy, Patricia and both Johns, Bill and Charlie and Arnaud — I want them all back.

  It’s been an unsettling day in the cabin. Each time I look up from my laptop a strange shadow flickers in my peripheral vision. When I turn my head to catch it — the shadow’s always gone. When it returns there are movements on the margins. I hear steps and feel ghosts flutter.

  Sixteen

  A Slender Summa

  “Stare, it is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

  Walker Evans

  Early photographers worked at the forefront of the information age. In a sense, their medium continued and expanded the information dissemination and storage revolution begun by the printed book. A large glass plate or a strip of film is a massive storage medium, so massive that it is frequently difficult to manage the message.

  We have always modelled our world and the universe in order to understand it, manipulate it and control it. The handprint on a cave wall is a simple I am and was here. The cave image of a prey animal is more complex — this is what I hunt, how I do it and how I survive. A Gothic altarpiece is a statement of how I believe the universe works and what I hope will happen after death. A Dutch portrait painting of the 17th century models an individual’s place in a social order, their values and their economic achievement. It records what people of that time and place thought was important. Everything else was ignored and omitted. It was invisible.

  Photography took modelling to a whole new level because it took in everything, not just the immediate subject and one’s responses and associations with it. It also took in an enormous quantity of ancillary and adjacent information that, while perhaps not of interest or concern at the time the exposure was made, may speak volumes to future concerns. Those things were not mediated by the artist’s consciousness, they simply got recorded as part of photography’s omnivorous gaze.

  Photographers must accept this complexity and mystery and the currently unrecognized, in a way that no other visual medium demands. This extra evidence can be mined for many different interests and intents. It is open-ended data collecting that serves not just the present but can also serve the future in unanticipated ways. This is why the meaning of individual photographs can change through time.

  Most users of cameras try to control the extreme data hunger of the camera by putting the subject squarely in the centre of the frame as an indicator of what’s important. When doing portraits the American photographer Richard Avedon set his subjects on white seamless backdrops, even when outside, so as to control the distracting, indiscriminate and unruly data recording inherent in photography. But even with that radical act of environmental elimination he still recorded much that a traditional painter would have customarily ignored or not seen. Avedon still had to live with signs of wear on clothes, its wrinkles, blemishes and postural flaws and so on. There’s plenty of extra information in his portraits.

  Really, truly seeing a photograph can be quite taxing. When teaching I have locked students for hours in a classroom with a single photograph projected on a screen and asked them to make observations. A half-day later they were still finding new things in the image. Sometimes we’d be at it all night. Photographs can be very rich.

  Friends who still teach tell me that many current students of photography are more interested in manipulating found and borrowed photographs than in taking their own. It’s as if they believe there are already enough pictures and all the best photographs have already been taken — there’s nothing left. Whereas the wonderful thing about being a photographer is that it gives you a license to be curious, to be, as Les Murray once said, “interested in only everything.”

  So what does a life as a photographer add up to? What has it meant?

  We went everywher
e, did everything and were fortunate enough to have a purpose. That purpose forced us out of ourselves and attached us to the world. And it allowed us privileged access to many otherwise closeted and closed worlds. We were allowed to enter those worlds because we made a practice of staying awake, of being alert and caring about people and the whole huge, messy business of being alive. And each of us leaves behind a paper trail of photographs, our individual footsteps through our tiny gift of time.

  And ever since digital technology released us blinking into the light from the darkrooms of the world we have ridden the crest of an image wave that swells by an estimated three billion new pictures each day. It constitutes a vast “language” that we all share. What began with a red ochre handprint on a cave wall is now the most exhaustive and definitive statement of I am, I saw, I was. Nothing is now forgotten.

  Seventeen

  The Waiting Room

  “We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.”

  “Terror seeks out the odd, the sick and the lost.”

  J.A. Baker

  “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

  Bob Dylan

  Getting old was something that happened to other people. It wasn’t going to happen to us, we had an infinity of time ahead of us; besides, we were busy idling in an eternal present.