Rudy Burckhardt:
Poet of the Visual Arts
February is Rudy Burckhardt Month in New York City. The legions of adoring friends and the uninitiated public will have the opportunity to see the art works of this witty, intelligent and worldly, grand non-specialist Renaissance man in several settings. Photos and paintings will be on exhibit at two downtown and one uptown gallery, MOMA is screening 62 of his films spanning 50 years, and a book of his photos along with transcribed conversations will arrive.For those unfamiliar with his work, Rudy is the master celebrator of the ordinary. He transforms the common moment into a heightened cadenza of breathless attention. His source is the richness of daily life: a country fair, pedestrian activity, enacted dream script or pond at sunset all get montaged in his films. Or particular details zeroed in on in his photos, or skillfully embellished in his heavy impastoed forestscapes or lightly brushed city slivers. For Rudy Burckhardt is the poet of visual arts.
For more than 50 years Rudy has been making personal films, photos and paintings that blend mortal dailiness with fractured myths. A quiet, understated power gently persuades. No other artist is so perfectly in tempo with the rhythms of the ordinary day. He knows the city, he knows the woods around his summer home and he's preserved for us the tropical innocence and back-alleyed street dance of his extensive traveling and Times Square musings. He filters the cacophony of charged city streets down to the clear jazz of Gabriel's trumpet. He lovingly attends the beauty there in overlooked crannies and the more obvious though thrilling sights passed by on strolls around. Permeating it all is a slapstick spirit of spontaneous invention practically dormant since silent comedy era wackiness. Motifs reappear in his other media. Sometimes fruit stars. Not to mention his hilarious, frenzied stand-up performances at past St. Mark's Poetry Project New Year's Benefits and in his other films.
The secret of his excellence is in his incredibly disciplined and formal eye that enables him to instantly edit every time he's behind the camera. He knows what to focus on: a foot stepping off a curb, i.e. he knows how to gently grab an image so that it still suggests its natural context. He undercuts any pretense with a self-deprecating humor and a playful, urbane quirkiness. He never inflates a situation or shies away from his honest obsession, like naked women.
Rudy's mediums — lyrically montaged films, snapped b/w good neighbor views, and canvas fantasies of fractured classics — open and reflect the world the way a poem does: editing out mere reportage and using only the heightened impressions, the affects of a dream time. He consistently gets to the essential fragments of an experience or a view.
His perspective is that of a loving pedestrian god of the sidewalks and breeze blown dandelion, a celebrator of details we might have missed. His art is about desire, bewitched noticing and, most of all, love.
Studio Visit
Visiting at his loft the other day, I entered as Rudy was trying to dissuade a young man from making an hour long documentary about him for Swiss TV. Rudy was just interested in having his films shown and this guy was adamant about the package deal, proposals and contexts. Rudy offered tea.
"Call it a portrait, not a documentary. When you make a documentary you show things the way they are, you don't fix it up. That's the way I make films. I don't use a script. Why should I conform to what they want...The color of tv I think is terrible. Film has color. Videotape you can change the color by turning the knobs — some people want it bright, some just brown. But it's convenient, cheap. In order to make a video, it's so much cheaper. A film print is $300. Once you have a master, a video is $20. But tv is in slots. You have to put something in for 10 minutes or half an hour. With films, they can be whatever length they want to be..." So the Swiss guy leaves finally, disheartened that his project is stalled.
"...I've only been able to talk in public the last few years. In my old age, I've gotten more devil may care. And even able to make people laugh. If you have an audience of 15 or 20 that are really with you, it's more gratifying than a big audience of 500 with a lot of dead weight...
"I never knew many photographers. I find painters brighter than most photographers. There's always exceptions. Most good photographers have painted also, like Cartier-Bresson made drawings. With still photography you have to get inflated with yourself—you snap a few pictures here or there in a frenzy and the rest of the time you have nothing to do. The best thing you can do with a photo is make a joke — some sort of visual joke. I don't think I ever said that before. The reason I like painting is it's occupying, it takes time . . . Vuillard had a dreary life. He lived with his mother in a house filled with junk. Sounds like it was a boring life but when you look at his paintings, you can see he was happy when he painted. If he'd have been a photographer, he couldn't do that. Film-making is something else again. Truffaut said shooting film is a fever. But that's shooting feature films. For a few weeks everyone has to get into that fever. It's a little like that with the films I make. It takes time. It becomes more like a poem or piece of music . . .
"One thing I never could do if I tried was glamour photography. I once tried to do fashion photographs. De Kooning and I both tried at the same time. Elaine [de Kooning] was the model. She was incredibly beautiful. She went to Klein's and got some fancy ballroom dresses and I took photos and de Kooning made some drawings. The next day she brought them back. You had to make sure you didn't take the tags off. De Kooning and I both went to Harper's Bazaar and showed them to Alexei Brodovitch [art director] and he took one look at my photos and looked down his nose. He liked de Kooning's drawings, though. De Kooning got the job and he did some drawings of hair-dos, little girls heads with different hair-dos. It took him two weeks to make them and then he'd get paid $100 or something so he decided it wasn't worth it...
"I had started taking photos of paintings in galleries after the war. My Swiss money was gone and I got some veteran's benefits. I was Leo Castelli's photographer for galleries and museums. I was Leo Castelli's photographer for 15 years. By the time Castelli opened his gallery [1958], I'd been shooting for around ten years and had a reputation. ARTnews had this series, "So and so paints a picture" and it ran every month for awhile and I took a lot of photos for that. Tom Hess [editor] made the magazine lively. He and Elaine de Kooning were a great team. Tom was in total admiration of Bill de Kooning. That was nice to see. And he stayed that way. He was steady. He knew what he liked. For those articles, I was with a writer and I did the photos. People like Jackson Pollack, Hans Hofmann, Larry Rivers, De Kooning, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz. They paid $75 for the photos. Writers got the same. It was much more work for the writers . . . I painted a little in Switzerland. One was a balcony, an ornate balcony. I think it was my best painting. I have no idea where that painting is."
When asked what his intentions are in making art, he answered quickly, "To keep busy. I didn't have a job. Instinctively, I always like to make pictures of things. Since I couldn't draw well I used a camera because (a) you want to remember things and (b) you wanted to show them to other people. If you saw something gorgeous or funny you could show it to other people. That's communication.
"I was very innocent for a long time about career. I never thought about it. I lived on money inherited from my father. When the war came around, I never thought I'd get drafted. My money was running out. I thought: what should I do? Become a camera salesman in a store? I had no thoughts of selling photos. I vaguely thought of working for Life but I never expected to get there. If you were a Life photographer you were on top. The magazine was really big. Imagine people having the nerve to call something Life or Time. Just a bunch of pictures. But when something violent happens, you have to be there. When there was an accident, I always looked the other way. My photos were always everyday happenings. I never had women crying or a sick baby, much less a crime or accident. It's about ordinary stuff.
"The army took care of me for three years. After the war, I didn't have any money left. I didn't have any de Koonings to sell. Edwin [Denby: poet, dance critic and lifelong friend] and I were acquiring them but we had no intention or thoughts of selling them. American paintings weren't worth anything then anyway. Veteran benefits were very generous. You got readjustment allowances. Every month you'd show them your book, and they'd give you the difference between what you made and $100, so you could live on that. Rent was $25 a month for a studio. Then you got the GI Bill and I used that for studying painting for three years. They also gave living allowances. I went with Edith, my first wife, and Jacob, still a little baby, to Italy to study painting. Things were so cheap there. You could rent a house for $15 a month. I was never really broke. I hated the army. It was frightening when I got drafted but I would never have met those people leading a sheltered life."
Rudy brings me to the back of the loft and starts bringing out paintings and placing them against the walls. "It's such a mess here, I only find things I'm not looking for." Suddenly one corner of the room immerses us in the dark overgrowth of a forest floor and it's clear to see the hours of joyous activity spent in making these paintings. Who makes paintings like these? No one!
Photos of Rudy Burckhardt by Barry Kornbluh