Gregory Crewdson:
Photographic Close Encounters of the Cinematic Kind
By Antonio López
If you are passing through Lee, Connecticut, and happen to stumble upon a
tangle of power lines, movie lights, and a large crew with gaffer tape hanging
off their belts, you will be forgiven if you mistake the scene for a film-in-progress.
What you are encountering is actually Gregory Crewdson and gang setting up
an elaborately staged scene that will result in a single photo.
The images that result from this painstaking process have an even stranger
sense of dissonance. Often the subject appears almost self-possessed, on the
verge of busting out of the zombified mythical American suburban landscape
to a land of wonder and enchantment, as if about to tumble down Alice's rabbit
hole. If the Richard Dreyfuss character in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters
of the Third Kind comes to mind, you're not far off.
Still, even though cultural icons like crop circles, lights in the sky, and
mutilated cows are intimated in Crewdson's Twilight series
(1998-2000), one of the two series now on display at SITE Santa Fe, you would
be mistaken to think of UFOs. These images do not evoke the Twilight Zone
so much as echoes of the unknown, drifting fragments of conversations half-heard
from behind a wall. Trouble is, that wall is your skull, and those words might
be coming from that trippy place we call the unconscious.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Crewdson used to spend hours with his ear planted
to the floor of his family's brownstone, eavesdropping on the sessions between
his father, a psychoanalyst, and patients in the basement office. Not surprisingly,
Crewdson's work has a deeply psychological aspect, often depicting a fractured
psychic space where anxiety, fear, and desire collide. Many of the photos
in the Twilight series portray a maniacal obsession that is suggestive
of the artistic process itself.
Looking at these images, you can quickly jump from Spielberg's Close Encounters
to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, or David Cronenberg. But they
are also evocative of the isolation and loneliness portrayed by American realist
painter Edward Hopper. And from another perspective you can almost sense Norman
Rockwell storyboarding an X Files episode. Crewdson's in good company.
These strange psychological spaces skulking like cockroaches out of the pop-culture
drain are distinctly American, no mistaking it.
The Twilight series is an externalized staged diorama that evolved
from another series, Natural Wonder (1992-97). For this earlier series,
Crewdson built intricate tableaus, some of which took up to a month to construct.
These are surreal landscapes from a natural-history museum of the mind. Miniature
houses and elaborate backgrounds built in perspective create the illusion
of a "perfect world," yet there is always some kind of dynamic tension that
causes a double take. An otherworldly insect colony with newfound intelligence
and other strange juxtapositions of animals and the environment inhabit these
uneasy tableaus of taxidermy dreams.
While Crewdson's stuffed birds in the Natural Wonder series hinted
at a first-person narrative, in the Hover series (1996-97), Crewdson
became a bird himself, moving out of the studio to shoot from the air, creating
an enigmatic third-person narrative. Photographed from the perspective of
a cherry-picker crane, the Hover series, also on display at SITE Santa
Fe, was inspired by "flying" dreams. The pictures are in black and white,
representing a departure from Crewdson's
earlier work. Also shot in Lee, they depict the moment after the "event"
has taken place, and there's lots of head scratching by the people standing
around in the images. These are relatively calm yet disquieting disruptions
of domestic ritual: an eerie light emanates from a sewer while emergency personnel
stand around a car's burning engine; an obsessed man lays sod across the street
to connect his lawn with the neighbor's; a lone man mows concentric circles
in field.
Crewdson is fond of relating an event that took place during the shooting
of the Hover series. He left a note on someone's door asking for permission
to create sod circles in their backyard for a photograph. The owner of the
house replied with a message on Crewdson's voicemail: "Do what you have to
do." He got his shot but never met the lady of the house. As time passes and
each photo shoot becomes more complex and technically sophisticated, Crewdson
carries within this little message from the phone line, from a disembodied
voice of a person he never met but collaborated with anyway: "Do what
you have to do." It's the credo of the obsessed visionary artist, a mantra
rippling through the imaginary narratives of Crewdson's fantastical world.
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