Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
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over-exposed as well. Michael Hoppen is currently exhibiting a small selection of Tichýs at his London gallery. I asked him how many really good Tichý pictures there were in total. ‘In focus?’ he replied, as if that were a personal preference, and not a prerequisite for photographic adequacy. ‘Maybe two or three hundred.’ In some of these the ostensible subject is all but blanched out of existence by a blaze of intruding light.
We have concentrated, so far, on the most orthodox phase of Tichý’s working methods. Once developed and printed the pictures were subjected to a protracted form of editorial hazing: left out in the rain, used as beer mats or to prop up wobbly tables. Where the definition was not sharp enough Tichý would pencil around breasts or hips like an enthusiastic but unqualified cosmetic surgeon. Sometimes he’d frame the pictures with a specially chosen mount: a garbage sack, say, or a bit of squiggled-on card. One of the works at the Pompidou has been gnawed by the rats with whom the artist shares his home. It may be hard to resist the conclusion that Tichý is a few frames short of a roll – but he’s shrewd with it: ‘If you want to be famous,’ he has said, ‘you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world.’
And the eccentricities of Tichý’s habits should not blind us to the conventional aspects of his early formation. Enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1945, he eagerly embraced the liberationist promise of modernism. This promise was broken when the Communists came to power in 1948, dragging in their wake the social-realist imperatives of heroic representation of proletarian endeavour. After a brief period of military service Tichý responded by retreating to his home town of Kyjov. In 1957, during the cultural thaw ushered in by Stalin’s death, Tichý was slated to participate in a group exhibition from which he suddenly withdrew. Gripped by the delusion that his colleagues were part of a fascist conspiracy, he suffered a complete breakdown that led to his being committed to a psychiatric clinic for a year.
From that time on his life assumes the curious combination of neglect and compulsion that will eventually be transformed into the stuff of cultural legend (Nick Cave has written a song about him; Michael Nyman is contemplating an opera based on his life). He abandons everything else and, throughout the fluctuating political climate of the 1960s and ’70s – and despite repeated victimisation by the authorities and further incarceration in psychiatric hospitals – burrows away at his new existence as ‘a stone-age photographer’.
As often happens, the fairy-tale outcome of his story is largely down to the efforts of a confidant uniquely convinced of the worth of a man assumed to be an unstable outcast or renegade loser. (The film Round Midnight, based on the relationship between the alcoholic, tubercular and periodically mad pianist Bud Powell and Francis Paudras, the young Frenchman who saves him from ruin, is archetypal in this respect). In Tichý’s case it was the boy next door, Roman Buxbaum, who began collecting and conserving the work that Tichý treated with consummate disdain. (There is a wonderful sequence in Buxbaum’s documentary, Retired Tarzan, where Tichý flicks through samples of his work before tossing them onto the compost heap of the floor.) Buxbaum wrote the first article about Tichý, which led to a solo exhibition organised by curator Harald Szeemann in Seville in 2004, to the formation of the Tichý Ocean Foundation, and, now, to the Paris show.
It is in the nature of fairy tales of this sort that there is a potential for murkiness or unease. Here is a paranoid old man with a history of mental illness, unmarried, childless, so habituated to austerity that he has no need of money, whose work and legacy have been surrendered to those who find themselves in control of an extremely valuable body of work. The situation is inevitably complicated because the work has only assumed this visibility and value thanks to the efforts of the very custodians who lay themselves open to charges of exploitation and self-advancement. (Round Midnight immediately provoked critical blowback from people claiming that Paudras was not quite the selfless devotee portrayed in the film.) The bottom line, in this instance, is that without Buxbaum and the Tichý Ocean Foundation I would never have heard of Tichý and you would not be reading about him.
Tichý’s late rehabilitation may be the most extreme in the history of photography but it is not entirely unprecedented. In 2006 Hoppen cleverly paired Tichý and Jacques Henri Lartigue, whose work overlapped in several striking ways. Born into a life of privilege in 1894 Lartigue began photographing when he was a boy. Aged thirteen he suddenly got ‘a new idea: that I should go to the park and photograph those women who have the most eccentric or beautiful hats’. A year later he declared that ‘everything about [women] fascinates me – their dresses, their scent, the way they walk’. The results of these enthusiastic expeditions were pasted into homemade albums by the adolescent boy who went on to develop ambitions to be a painter. This desire was unfulfilled, but Lartigue continued to take photographs for his own delight and distraction. It is not until 1963, when he is almost seventy, that Lartigue finds himself exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and retrospectively installed as one of the founding fathers of modern photography.
Then there is E.J. Bellocq, whose photographs – some of them badly damaged – of prostitutes in New Orleans from the 1910s were eventually brought back from a long-forgotten death by Lee Friedlander (who also played a key part in the posthumous revival of William Gedney, another self-sufficient recluse). The difference between Bellocq and Tichý is that the former, evidently, was on close and friendly terms with the women he photographed. Even when Tichý’s wonky telephoto enables him to snuggle up deceptively close, his pictures gaze longingly on a world from which he is excluded. Whether the women look at him, berate him or remain oblivious to his approaches, they are absolutely beyond reach. This is formally enhanced by the fence that so often comes between the photographer and the women in the frame. It’s just the fence at the local pool but it imparts to the pictures the intensity of a prisoner’s peering through the bars of a cell.
Since the show is in Paris a personal anecdote about the city might be relevant at this point. In the summer of 1991 I went to live in Paris for a while. It was blazing hot, I knew almost no one and was in a torment of loneliness and sexual frustration. My apartment was a pit so I spent the afternoons in the park, looking, hoping, torn between the desire to talk to one of the many women sunbathing and terrified that to do so was a form of harassment. Meanwhile, other men were doing exactly what I wanted to do, sitting down, chatting to women – and not always getting told to shove off. I remember being crushed by the way the simple mathematics of desire refused to come out right: there were so many women in the world, how could it be so difficult to find one? The question contains its answer: it’s that tormenting and beckoning one, the chance in a million which non-mathematicians call love.
Tichý’s pictures are like photographs of that summer of longing extended over the course of a lifetime until it assumes a quality of stoic resignation or exile. Some are as erotically and romantically charged as any ever made. If anything that charge is felt even more strongly now, in the era of Internet porn, because, in spite of their abrupt cropping and haphazard framing, they contain the plausible context of desire and its frustrations and restraints of which the porno world is temptingly and deceptively devoid.
Not that all of Tichý’s pictures are of women. He sometimes photographed random objects, stuff he came across on a washing line, for instance. It just happens that the washing line is laden with bras hung out to dry. When Tichý was not on the prowl or lurking round the pool he would photograph women at home, screen-grabbing them from the telly. ‘People say I think too much about women,’ another artist once remarked. ‘Yet after all, what is there more important to think about?’ That was Rodin. At times, though, Tichý’s one-track mind suggests a kinship with figures lower down the cultural totem pole: Benny Hill, for example. When Tichý comes across a team of women stretching and exercising in a park the resulting image cackles with barely suppressed glee. But the distinction between high and low is not easy to sustain for there is, of course, a Benny Hillish quality about passages in the novels of Tichý’s celebrated fellow Czech – and near-contemporary – Milan Kundera. In both, the abundantly erotic – participatory in the novels, entirely voyeuristic in the photographs – is a tacit escape from the deadweight of historical materialism.
Different men tend to be attracted to different physical types of women: thin or voluptuous, blonde or brunette. For Tichý anything in a dress was