No Label

text by Robert Goethals, photography by Arthur Tress

Shadow, Arthur Tress, 1975

Labels lend gallery-goers a soothing sense of the fixed yet rising value of an artist, at least, in the predatory wilderness of your self-deception.

When Robert Mapplethorpe began photographing male nudes, forever identifying the artist with homoeroticism, his images suddenly assumed a commercial bang-for-the-buck ratio. Brooklyn-born photographer, Arthur Tress, celebrated the bodies of men, too, but steered clear of the mental constructs of private-school Culture Hosts hotlinking prices, cliques, styles, theories, and mediums on their BlackBerrys.

Black Prisoner, Arthur Tress, 1976, JGS

Forget the shit you hear about photographys legitimacy as an art form, Tress knows, photographys still the miraculous Caribbean babe you met at the Learning Center wholl find a cheerful, positive side to the sneery leers of the Culturati. Remember, art history nerds, when Ben Shahn
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casually suggested hanging photographs alongside his paintings at his first retrospective at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art. Connoisseur, collector, aristo, curator, and troglodyte, James Thrall Soby, freaked. Soby allocated Shahns photographs to the far end of the show to avoid cootie contamination. Never mind the 1933 photograph that later inspired Handball kicks the temperas ass.

Untitled, (East Houston Street, New York City), Ben Shahn, 193235, Fogg Art Museum

Tress got how painting and photography was no meridian of sea and sky but two distinct and hostile spheres of price and value. Gerhard Richter paints in a hundred different styles, he said, and he is much admired. But in photography, that kind of variety makes people nervous. Most people say you need to have a consistent portfolio. Quite often, when photographers go off towards a new style, they get slapped down. Their work wont sell in the galleries as well as their earlier work.

Boy in TV Set, Arthur Tress, Boston, MA.

Concepts of cultural superiority werent so rigidly or mindlessly cast among the company Arthur Tress rolled with during the 60s. Bard College, hanging at Cinmatque in Paris, documenting the rituals and ceremonies of folk cultures in Stockholm at the Ethnographic Museum. Dude considered the world in horizontal continuums. Growing up poor or outside the U.S. didnt make you some sort of worthless slob. The experience may well have been ennobling, allowing you to possess a detached and valued advantage. When Tress returned to the United States, he gigged for V.I.S.T.A., burning film on urban poverty. He shot the deprivation, slums, and bad schools, the smoky twilights of Newark, Detroit, and Los Angeles lit up during the riots.
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Boy in Burnt-out Furniture Store, Arthur Tress, Newark, NJ

Ben Shahn documented poverty, too, in rural, small-town places, with photographers like Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, and Walker Evans. President Franklin Roosevelts New Deal government employed artists to raise public awareness of the nations poor, pulling strength from their hopes, as they stumbled headfirst towards the green light of the numinous future. Photography powerfully dramatized the difference between living, breathing life and stale forms of political consciousness. Perhaps a little too powerful for Ben Shahn since the artist later depoliticized and abstracted his images for fear of being branded a parochial Jew or some kind of card-carrying Commie. (Parochial like Trotsky in hot pursuit of all those lovely White Russians booking to Vladivostok in their armored gold trains, not parochial like All-American Golden Boy, Lloyd Blankfein, at Goldman Sachs.)

Girl with Dunce Cap, New York, Arthur Tress, 1972

Youd think the Fat Reputations auctioned off at Sothebys, New York, London, Angel City, their prices soaring up, up, up, would reflect some sort of social value, but price and value have little in common with the grim realities most of us scurvied rabble know. Arts like iconography. Fetishism. Who the eff are you, Meyer Shapiro? homegirl goes. Im saying most art you see in these extra-atmospheric digs is so exclusive and private it runs away from life, and when you duck the heartbreak concerns of all the luckless and lonely just hanging on by a sea grape of faith, our chic, cozy Planet Art becomes a ruthless, vaguely perverse sort of place. For brain power, moral rectitude, and depth of feeling, Ill take Meyer Shapiro any effing day over uber collector and F.B.I. person6

of-interest, Steven Cohen, Treasure Island Casino genius, Steve Wynn, or connoisseur of unattainably hot women, Leslie Wexner. Not much social reality in these blue-chip collections. When you navigate their dreamy warrens, pack your Financial Services Industry Dictionary of Cultural Discrimination and Discretion.

Mother and Son, Arthur Tress, Princeton 1967

Like Ben Shahn, Arthur Tress stylized and abstracted his images, but never felt painting was more desirable or highfalutin. The self-effacing artist wasnt hung up on the difference between making and taking a picture. Tress believes arts more closely aligned with the nature of perception than technique or medium. In an early series, Shadow: A
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Novel in Photographs, the vibes Edgar Allen Poe. Tress protagonist is this shadow darting around a treacherous, uncertain world while waging psychic battle with madness, innocence, or guilt. If the work strikes you as tortured, perhaps thats the toll of scaling the cold, isolating summits of Planet Art, where cryptic interactions of color, line, and mass remain so precious, real life is just too much for Ballers and Benefactors to even contemplate. Some route may sweep you unexpectedly away for months or years at a time, Tress once lamented, only to suddenly evaporate in a dry stream bed of an artistic and financial desert, asking which way is out.

Charlotte Olds & Rooster, Albany, NY 1975

~ Robert Goethals, March 2011

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