Some Thoughts on Elinor Milchan’s Pictures
By Frederic Tuten
I’m leaving aside for the moment he site-specific references, for the moment, the tragic history, and the implied narrative of disaster. Leaving it aside just as I would had I come upon Guernica for the first time, not knowing the work’s title and the horrific event attached to it and was left to respond to the picture itself, and what it elicited in me disrobed of its historical context. It is the child’s screams in Picasso’s jagged painting that I hear and not the bombs—which inspired his monumental work—dropping on Guernica. I’m leaving all that aside because when I first chanced upon Elinor Milchan’s pictures, I did not know the artist or the titles of her work. I walked into the Spike Gallery one afternoon for reasons wholly other than those paintings—for that is what I first thought them—burning on the walls and was taken by a wonderful surprise. I was struck by the punch of waving and flaming light brighter than the room which was itself swept in bright midday light and was now suddenly bathed in saturated color. The triptychs seemed great color-drenched curtains and translucent banners opening to a make-believe sky or to the idea of the indefinite. Of course, one’s feelings are formed before knowing or trying to know the reasons for them. And at that moment I felt I was seeing a powerful, lyrical vision removed from galleries, shows, art strategies and aesthetic exercises, a vision owing itself only to the artist. That feeling persisted, even after realizing that the paintings were, in fact, photographs. But there was an added mystery of wondering by what photographic craft the artist created the impression of the immediacy and the intensity of her flowing explosions. Beware, I was once told, of love at first sight, in life and in art. Often the work you are most immediately attracted to is not always the work that stays with you. Or that you stay with. But over time and the longer I looked, the more I experienced her pictures as tableaus of an inextinguishable emotional fire, the kind of vision that Francis Bacon or Van Gogh would have recognized. Not that I can define that vision, The beauty of terror I thought, after seeing images of faces and limbs nested among the rhapsodic waves of color. A Dantesque vision of inferno, maybe. But that idea seems too literary and illustrational for a work so obdurate to literalism. The title WTC Series helps to explain the work’s impetus, but there are some deeper reaches into the human condition being made here, some glimpse into the dialectical nature of beauty and its pivot into darkness. In the tradition of Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s Disasters of War series Milchan’s pictures both commemorate and transcend the occasion of their origin.
Robert A. Sobieszek Curator of Photography Los Angeles County Museum of Art Picturing
Picturing emotions, feelings, and sensations is not something easily done. Yet, depicting ineffable states, especially in complex combinations, has been long a mainstay of modern art from 19th-century Symbolism to 21st-century Immersive Technologies. Provoking the viewer to share in internalized sensations – no matter how synthetic – is a real challenge. Elinor Milchan’s photographic abstractions fix a rich complexity of sensory fusions – colors feel, forms morph and elide, shapes project tonalities, backgrounds merge with foregrounds. Her visual language is mute, but only to have the sensate and subjectivity transcend logic and objectivity. Messages from the objective world are conjoined and conflated – as in synaesthesia – and mirror a total experience, her visual analog to the immersion that’s called life. Elinor Milchan’s aesthetic reminds us that pathos is always essential to the beautiful, just as horror eternally informs the sublime. And this has always been critical to all memorable photographs.