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NEW YORK, 23 August 2004—It was time—the election was stolen,
robbed by middlemen on top. Folks who thought the past was the future because
they owned the present. Entitlement didn’t come from being lazy; it came
from cunning, aggrandizing connivance. The leader was a twice entitled frat
boy, a thick-headed intellectual goon, with charisma informed by homily and
stubborn gotcha comfort.
It was simple! I was shooting fashion, perhaps
a compromise for me, but a trivial, jovial, stylish, learning theater. Why not
use its public accessibility for subversion, satire, association, and
education?
An idea! One of my favorite periods in twentieth-century art
was Weimar Germany, with Beckmann, Dix, and Grosz all melting down convention
in an impassioned visionary way. Grosz was especially political, but all of the
were hyper-aware of the decadence, the despair, the hysteria, and the lies. I
suggested to The New York Times Magazine (whose rear end is sometimes
gifted with fashion spreads) an idea to replicate the period but loosen it,
update it, and tell it anew. There were fashion equivalents and certainly moral
and historical ones.
Larry Fink: Homage to George Grosz
Photo courtesy of The
powerHouse Gallery
Oh the glee! They said yes. I suggested
that rather than the corpulent Weimar German types, why not use our current
fraudulent leaders, George W. and his cabinet. Oh the glee! They said yes.
Political satire and critical acuity are something rarely if ever done in
fashion. Yet another coup.
Larry Fink: Homage to George Grosz
Photo courtesy of The
powerHouse Gallery
We searched for the cast of dancers, whores,
merrymakers, and priests. We searched for the look-alikes of our own Mr. G. W.
and his consortium. We found it all and went to work. Five paintings chosen
from the period and three days shooting them, interpreting them, and creating
aesthetic clarity and political bedlam.
The pictures were shot on
7/19/01 and were hypothetically scheduled to run in The Times in the
fall. 9/11 gave birth to doom. The tragic inevitable moment, the rupture of
providence, the rape of the external soul of America. And its aftermath.
Larry Fink: Homage to Max Beckmann
Photo courtesy of The
powerHouse Gallery
Critical images of the president and his men
would not be published. In fact, all critical thought was temporarily suspended
and the fundamentalist Islamic conspiracy bore the turf for the fundamentalist
neoconservative conspiracy that was already in wait for the history that would
give it license and muscle. Its muscle is still prominent and will be for some
time.
Larry Fink: Government on Crutches
Photo courtesy of The
powerHouse Gallery
As it became apparent that the presidential
team was acting beyond the righteous knee jerk of antiterrorism, when the
public critical spirit was on the rise, I offered the pictures again to The
Times. No! The New Yorker. No! Harper’s Magazine. No!
The European market I felt sure would publish them. But no. Like their
influences, the images were banned, not by decree, but through a suppression
enabled by tragedy and coincidence.
Larry Fink: Praise the Lord
Photo
courtesy of The powerHouse Gallery
Here in the halls of political science of Lehigh
University, they speak their eye and tongue. They are free. But the
ever-evolving question is, are we?
—Larry Fink
12/4/03
Artist statement from the Lehigh University exhibition of The
Forbidden Pictures
Photojournalist Larry
Fink began his career with a documentary on beatniks in the late 1950s. He was
born in Brooklyn in 1941 and studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch and
Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Currently
a professor at Bard College, he has taught photography at Yale University,
Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, New School of Social Research, and New
York University. He is represented by Bill Charles Inc. Fink has had solo
exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art,
both in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Art, as well as in major
retrospectives at Les Rencontres de Photographie, Arles, France; Musee de
L’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland; and Musee de la Photographie, Charleroi,
Belgium. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Art in America,
Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time-Life Books, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice. The
author of Boxing, Runway, and Social Graces (powerHouse Books, 1997, 2000, and
2001, respectively), Fink lives on a farm in Martin’s Creek,
Pennsylvania.
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Art and Archaeology Exhibitions