Heaven on Earth: Sally Gall’s New Photographs
Sally Gall, Turbulence, 2015
Though my meditation on Sally Gall’s new body of photography, which involves kites and clotheslines, is not about painting, nonetheless I must start there. I’m starting at that moment in art-historical time when photography usurped painting’s authority as arbiter of direct and verifiable observation.
To some painters, this moment of usurpation meant liberation, freeing the hand and the eye to look elsewhere for truth. To others, it was condemnation and relegation to a diminished status – a life of effort they no longer needed to exert.
Ironically, the liberation of painting from the constraints of “objective” reality, which allowed it to move away from the surface of things and into a deeper and more abstracted “feeling” realm brought painting literally back to the surface. Painting became first and foremost about paint.
Several years ago I visited Monet’s home in Giverny, France, the site of so many of his greatest contributions to the history of art. This is the place where he finally got rid of the horizon line and let the water lilies scatter across the surface of the painting to become compositional and tonal markers on an inflected surface of paint. This is where Monet almost gave up trying to capture detail.
His estate has tried diligently to recreate his famous garden so that when walking through it you can crop your sightlines in ways that give you the impression that you are witness to his moment of inspiration. I stood before his iconic pond, full of its blossoming water lilies, anchored at one end with his oft-painted Japanese footbridge. I stared. I squinted. I cupped my hands beside my eyes to block out peripheral distractions. I could see what was there. I could see what he chose to paint. What I could not see was what he saw.
If you are too tethered to the practical eye, the familiarity of objects stand no chance of becoming inspired, animated, fantastic and strange; no chance for transformation.
A principle difference between painting and photography, when artists reach to capture the essential shapes and colors that will push their perception towards abstraction, is that painting breaks free while photography always includes the origins of its source.
One could argue, rightfully, that the transformative experience in art is more difficult to achieve through photography because it is always moored to its own banality.
So when a photographer is able to achieve an ecstatic and animated transformation from what, until that photograph was made, had passed as unremarkable, you have to acknowledge that that photographer is not just skilled but truly gifted.
Sally Gall has always been interested in waves and caves, caverns and curls, folds and furls. In her most recent work, she continues to express her delight and pleasure in the sensuality of form, specifically the flickering of things in the breeze.
This book, Heavenly Creatures, weaves together two stories, both having to do with wind, air, and colorful shapes, but to this she brings a new perspective: these stories can only be seen from below.
Kites on strings and clothes on clotheslines appear as abstract shapes set against a ground of blue, luminous yet flat. Sally has done for laundry and kites what Karl Blossfeld did for plants: transcend their natures while absolutely adhering to them.
Let me change the subject. (As I said, this is a meditation so I allow it go where it pleases.)
There are two kinds of art making, paradoxical in their oppositions but contained within the creative mind. An artist is generally predisposed to one or the other. On the one hand, you have art seeking to resolve pain, torment, injustice, emptiness, and conflict through truth-telling. On the other, you have art that blatantly disregards that suffering.
During WWll, while Matisse painted the sensuous glow of the Mediterranean sea and sky, the color saturated folds and patterns of an odalisque’s garment, and the curves of her glowing skin, his wife and daughter were picked up by the Gestapo for questioning. I put it to you to tell me which painting he was working on at that time of this grave interruption.
Clearly, either Matisse did not feel that stress and worry or the darker emotions were not the best fuel for his inspired practice. He had his eyes set on the distant horizon: the site of ultimate conflict-resolution. Through the lightness of his touch, the light of his color, the eroticism of his fluid lines, he delivered to us a near-heavenly pleasure that carried us out of the temporal, out of our suffering, out of ourselves.
Sadly, I am not that kind of artist, but Sally Gall is. In these dark days of American existential conflict and crisis, where anger and fear are running fast and burrowing deep, it has to be seen as an act of bravery to turn one’s attention away from the flame and focus their net on capturing the elusive distractions of fleeting beauty.
From Zbigniew Herbert’s poem, Ornament Makers, I take these few lines because it is in these lines that the significance of Sally Gall’s art is most eloquently expressed.
Praised be the ornament makers
the masons and the decorators
the creators of flitting angels…
the poets it goes without saying
the defenders of children playing
giving voice to smiles hands and eyes
they’re right it is not art’s business
to seek the truth is for science
masons guard the heart’s warmth
Eric Fischl
Sag Harbor, NY.
