An-My Lê's Dedication to the Sublime
A Review of Dark Star/Grey Wolf at Marian Goodman Gallery
Every artist has their pigeonhole—the story most often told about them—the expectations against which any future work is judged. For An-My Lê, it is that she is a photographer of war. As a young child, she was forced to flee Vietnam. She came of age as a refugee hopping between Southeast Asia, Europe, and America. She studied biology at Stanford (a fact that will come in handy for understanding the show at the center of this review) and later got an MFA in photography at Yale. She finally returned to Vietnam after 20 years away to photograph what initially led to her departure—villages and families torn apart by conflict. Afterwards, she went on long (sometimes many-years-long) journeys with US military personnel to photograph their lives, among other related projects.
Perhaps due to a special insight gained through her own personal history, she has a gift for clearly seeing the human side of events that usually blind us with their violent spectacles: war, displacement, political strife. She has photographed children playing in ruins, soldiers washing the walls of a ship, the stillness of the jungle before an attack. They pose a striking contrast between intimacy and the sublime—the everydayness of being a soldier or a civilian foregrounded against the might of military force.
In Dark Star/Grey Wolf at Marian Goodman Gallery (her first solo show since her stunning retrospective at MoMA two years ago), Lê has taken on a decisively new focus. This body of work shows (as if we needed proof) that her photographic and pictorial intuitions transcend her choice of subject. She continues to capture an arresting juxtaposition between the puny scale of human existence and a much greater power—in this case, outer space.
I must admit that I’m usually disappointed by photographs of space. It is difficult for any reproduction to fully live up to the majesty of the universe. But Lê gets pretty damn close. These photographs are almost magical objects. Each star seems to shine through the paper on which the image is printed, as if they were holes in the sheet illuminated from behind. Some of the dots are yellow, some are white, some are blue—some are a combination of all three. They come together to form an irreducible optical illusion, somewhere between the balancing act of Seurat’s pointillism and the overwhelming scale of sculpture by Richard Serra. They feel more like tapestries than photographs. This is, in part, a result of Lê’s obsessive, almost painterly approach to printing photos. She once told The New York Times Style Magazine, “I spend an enormous amount of time working on editing and color correcting my inkjet prints. I agonize over contrast, the saturation of greens in grass and plants, color casts in the skies and the density of someone’s skin.”
She manages to convey the infinite depth between every star speckled across the sky with a surprising tactility, as if you could read the galaxy in braille. It reminds me of the feeling I get walking along a highway, staring at billboards and signs that are meant to be seen at 60 miles-an-hour. Looking at them by foot, advertisements and printed words feel like towering, mighty giants. If highway signs are meant to be seen by car, maybe stars are meant to be seen by God. But Lê shows us what it’s like to look at them as humans. She makes our humble vantage point clear with foregrounded tufts of grass and distant auras of light pollution from nearby towns (though most of the pictures are set in the middle of the desert, many miles away from any human civilization). The grey-lit ground and ghostly trees make the Earth feel like a side character next everything else beyond our stratosphere.
There are two rooms in the exhibition, each shrouded in black walls with careful spotlights illuminating the starscapes that comprise Dark Sky. The other series on display, Grey Wolf, hangs within a bespoke rotunda illuminated with bright light from above. These are day-time photos of nuclear missile silos in Montana surrounded by fields—crisp blue skies framed against dying grass patrolled by clouds, whose ominous shadows crawl across the land. The pictures might as well be abstract paintings with their vast swaths of green and brown that, for any fans of pure color, are simply delicious. As with Lê’s delicate depiction of depth in the nocturnal sky, these landscapes run away and disappear into the horizon, affording viewers a visual understanding of scale that is almost impossible to appreciate with the naked eye.
Philosophers have long idolized the unique rational faculties of human beings, as if we should be proud to rise above the restrictions usually imposed on animals by the laws of nature. Lê celebrates the opposite perspective—humility before the sublime, basking in awe of the universe without feeling the need to conquer it.