Mass MoCA, Petah Coyne, and the Allure of Photo-Grunge

MLC recently made a field trip to Mass MoCA to check out the Sol Lewitt retrospective arrayed on nearly an acre of specially built interior walls, covering three full floors of one of the old abandoned mill buildings that comprise this stunning museum. The Sol Lewitt paintings and wall-drawings were compelling, in their own way, and certainly it’s not for us to critique the recently deceased and accomplished artist, however, we found ourselves distracted (ambushed?), en-route, by the sculpture and (especially!) photography of Petah Coyne. There were several galleries devoted to her wax-and-bird installations which have garnered quite a bit of critical accolades and attention. Sebastian Snee in The Globe said: “I admired the fearlessness of her aesthetic, which is the absolute antithesis of minimalist cool” (full review). True enough, I guess. And the description on the gallery website continues: “Her sculptures convey an inherent tension between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction…” blah blah blah. Full disclosure, we were not entirely impressed. HOWEVER, upon venturing deeper into the cool dim labyrinthine gallery spaces, we found three rooms devoted to her large-scale, disturbing, haunting, beautiful photographs which indeed caught our attention. Apparently Ms. Coyne is not ‘known’ for her photographs, since the Mass MoCA exhibition guide only refers to them obliquely and without much enthusiasm.

Petah Coyne, Untitled 735, 1992. Photograph. Gift of Polly and Mark Addison. © The artist.

Art appreciation is a personal affair, of course, and viewing Coyne’s photos hit a sweet spot for this visitor. I’ve always been attracted to photographs that are murky, distressed, half deranged and difficult to decipher, never mind interpret. Probably my first favorite practitioner of this approach is William Klein with his scarred, blasted and blown-out prints of New York street scenes in the mid ‘50s that are a perfect complement to the gritty urban landscape that was his subject matter. Klein is contemporary to Robert Frank who shared the aesthetic. Bruce Davidson is also of the genre if a little more contemporary and, if I may, not quite as visceral as the others. Cool though they are, there’s something almost too perfectly encapsulated about his ‘circus in the rain’ and ‘sad clown’ compositions. It’s like, yeah, I get it. And once you get it, there’s not much reason to keep looking. Although his New York street glimpses are also gripping.

What makes a successful photograph? Like any art it’s an impossible question to answer. However, this viewer appreciates a synergy and a tension between surface and subject, so the photograph exists simultaneously as both a window and a canvas. It is this persistent schizophrenia of attention, the prolonged frisson, that keeps this viewer looking and re-looking, and then coming back to look some more.

Back to Blog List