It was the last night of the year, and we were visiting the belly of the whale: old shimmering Menäting, the Island Place. We sought the center of a culture of collective insight, a distillation of plunder and purchase, lend and lease, ache and expansion. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: temporary exhibit: Richard Avedon, Portraits (in black and white): floating above Fifth Avenue: visions out of time: an artful pillage of posture and concealment. It was a display of selfhood in multiple manifestation... an array of recorded vessels of suffering, suffrage, denial, awareness, harbors for history.

We saw Oppenheimer's stilted surprise, maybe nuanced by a gesture of feigned regret, maybe sincere, seeing the brilliance of terror, a halo of mortification over the head of the pilot who delivered O's devastation to Hiroshima. In the pilot's eyes we saw the unbearable draw of hundreds of thousands dead at the flip of a switch, the knowledge of an incomparable crime which no one had the courage to stop. We saw the utter failure of all human systems outside the basest urge to annihilate... the moral fabric of history's long anguished striving torn on two sides and splitting... then three sides, then four... we saw the glistening of a tear that said six million, one million more, then twelve, then thirty!

We saw the face of a man born into slavery and the grave and ravenous turmoil within him even eighty years hence, how he spoke with eyes of lucid interrogation about the worst weaknesses that posed as strength in our perverse history... an antecedent realm of madness, mayhem and moral vacuity, where devils were honored, revered and given sway, and angels were trodden underfoot, cooked and devoured, to feed an addiction.

We saw two walls of defiance, two covens of law-breakers, face to face in a struggle to define democracy, define humanity, write the epilogue to a culture's sense of the Good... on the north wall the silk-dressed, close-cropped, wrinkled sodden directors of a war; opposite, looking into them from the southern wall of the gallery, seven conscientious objectors, eyes filled with hope, disappointment, vision, bodies poised for civil disobedience, faces overburdened with natural growth, not with a napalm-consciousness... the Directors use the law to violate its own principles of the sanctity of individual liberty and of life itself; the Objectors use individual liberty, and their lives' sacred sprawl, to violate civic regulations and to speak for peace, to speak for the voiceless, to remake the discourse in a broader mold.

Avedon's work itself seems to be structured around a fundamental 'island place' of individual being. The subject is starkly portrayed, in silence and asymmetry, against the abstraction of a white background. The whole of an individual's life experience seems visible through the features into which he or she has developed by way of that experience. Eyes, flesh, posture, each speak of the impression of the living world into life itself, and of the reverse. Each image seems to speak of a convergence of forces and futilities in the conscious life of the individual self. It is this act that makes Avedon's work miraculous, and allows for a sweeping commentary on the human condition to emerge from each of his portraits, from each face looking out from the walls in this room, on the last day of the calendar year, in the belly of the whale.

© 2003 Joseph Robertson