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Urban altars
Phil Bergerson’s American eye, plus ‘Multiple Delight,’ at Bernard Toale
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Phil Bergerson: New Works" and "Multiple Delight"
At the Bernard Toale Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, through December 24.


Photographer Phil Bergerson invites misreading the way martinis invite olives and bull’s-eyes invite arrows. I can think of at least a dozen ways off the top of my head in which Bergerson’s show at the Bernard Toale Gallery encourages quick understanding and fast responses that upon reflection turn inside out. His work is pretty (the C-prints are color-drenched), sentimental (he draws on familiar symbols and icons), simple (his technique is unembellished), and documentary (the scenes are photographed as he found them). It’s true that his "New Works" (taken from his Shards of America, which is handsomely published by Quantuck Lane Press) depict richly hued, culturally charged, straightforward and unretouched moments of the current American landscape. And those features provide the rhythm and rhyme of Bergerson’s visual poetry, but they do not explain the force of his lyric charge. In fact, they might even disguise it.

Shards of America could perhaps more tellingly have been called "American Altars" — Bergerson’s capturing of road signs and advertisements, graffiti and post–September 11 storefronts in Manhattan is about understanding and ultimately honoring the typically warped, often perverted and invariably heartfelt ways in which Americans put on public display their beliefs and terrors and wants and needs. Like the carefully laced shoes of the porn star who’s on his way to his niece’s bat mitzvah, it’s that most peculiar and riveting intersection where the outrageous and empty meets the nostalgic and fulfilling.

Consider the storefront window of New York, New York, October 2001. A New York Post front page showing a "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster with Osama bin Laden’s picture has been taped to the glass of a low-end furniture store. (Plastic-covered mattresses and a dinette-set chair crowd the area behind the glass.) It competes with five other images for the attention of passers-by: two American flags, a notary-public placard, a New York Post tossed on a crate whose headline reads "Terror Cells ‘Alive,’ " and, in the lower right corner, a large Christmas card showing the Holy Family, complete with wise men, shepherds, and angel levitating above a brightly lit manger.

At one level, the photograph is a study in raw bad taste: nothing is attractive or crafted or original. But at another level, the accumulation of detritus constitutes a most human, contradictory plea as love of country (the two flags), solid citizenship (the notary public who owns a small business), and piety (the mercilessly banal crèche) are channeled into fear and revenge (the tabloids and the bin Laden poster). If you’re still puzzling over George Bush’s re-election, it’s all there.

I am ordinarily offended by (or contemptuous of) art that deliberately straddles convictions, those cagey marketing types who create send-ups that also read as homages — Jeff Koons, Bruce Springsteen, John Ashbery. And I can imagine that same criticism being leveled at Phil Bergerson. After all, doesn’t his magazine-stand portrait New York (Greenwich Village), New York, July 2001, with its softcore porn decorating the shelves above the salacious headlines of the tabloids below like musclebound seraphim, do just that sort of duplicitous balancing? Isn’t the photo appealing simultaneously to bourgeois sexual renegades and to red America? Isn’t the chipped and fading outline of the Statue of Liberty on the dilapidated building front in Winona, Mississippi, 1998 a similarly astute way of appealing to all political persuasions?

In a word, no. The sharp ironies and pitched ambiguities of Bergerson’s photographs aren’t ambivalent or wishy-washy or compromised, they’re complex. There’s a strange and disturbing relationship between the steroidal narcissism of the gay-magazine covers and the tabloid headlines below, "Custody wars" and "War Chant." Bergerson is making a connection between the sexual display of the magazine covers and the aggression of the headlines, between the personal and the public, between frivolity and gravity. Aren’t the models’ bodies a kind of uniform? The appeal of Bergerson’s photo turns out to be neither conservative nor liberal, gay nor straight. If there’s an appeal to a foreknown constituency, then it is to those who are willing to make connections between what ought to be antithetical, pleasure and death, glamor and brutality.

The idea of altar — the sacrosanct, miniature stage where sacrifice meets worship, where mortality and eternity get resolved — describes not just the spirit of Bergerson’s photographs but also their architecture. Events take place on ornate, ritualistic ledges throughout this exhibit; altars abound — magazine stands, store windows, tabletops, bar counters. Planes meet at right angles, and on their flooring, miracles are intimated, transformations occur.

Another photograph that goes by the title New York, New York, October 2001 depicts a Marilyn Monroe doll standing on a red satin rise and wearing an American flag for a skirt and a Statue of Liberty crown. The doll is positioned against a backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, and her hands appear to be trying to hold her skirt down, an allusion to the famous Seven Year Itch publicity photo. In what’s a ’50s prototype of Janet Jackson’s bared breast, Monroe’s false modesty has been recast as an act of patriotism. Only in America. That is, only among the class-denying, the monarch-deprived, and the celebrity-starved could the grief following September 11 find expression in a starlet’s transparently phony embarrassment. Monroe the woman winked when her skirt flew up and made us all a part of her naughtiness; Monroe the doll keeps her skirt down to honor the fatherland. Our virginity was taken when the Twin Towers fell, and we want it back.

A generosity of spirit runs through Shards of America; for all the absurdity of the images — the blonde bombshell outlined in neon tubing on a Los Angeles billboard, the leafless tree whose 11 thin branches have been bracketed to a fence — there’s never ridicule. Instead, we get sympathy and an unflinching willingness to look at and dwell on our most public displays of grief and desire, our unmitigated vulnerability.

A DIFFERENT SPIRIT — sharp and playful but often less driven by conviction — marks the other exhibit at the Bernard Toale Gallery. "Multiple Delight" brings together the work of two dozen artists, international luminaries like Claes Oldenburg, Kiki Smith, and William Wegman, as well as lesser-known talents, whose imagery has in common repeated patterning. But wait, there’s more. Not only is there multiplicity in the forms of the artwork, there’s multiplicity in their production. Much of what’s in "Multiple Delight" issues from big, unsigned editions, editions so big the show can accommodate almost everybody’s holiday budget. You can pick up a Claes Oldenburg N.Y.C. Pretzel (cardboard, 7x7, unlimited edition) for $50 or a William Wegman scarf (guess what image it sports) for $250 (silk, 36x36, edition of 350). For those of you looking to stuff something down my stocking, so to speak, I’d be just as happy with one of Julia Featheringill’s flipbooks for $35 (inkjet- or offset-printed, unlimited editions). In one, toast pops up from a toaster; in another, laundry spins. Who could want more?


Issue Date: December 17 - 23, 2004
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