August 12–19, 1999

art

Private Rooms

Photographer Tina Barney’s anthropology of the privileged.

by Robin Rice

Photographic Tableaux: Tina Barney’s Family Album

Allentown Art Museum, Fifth and Court Sts., Allentown, PA, through Sept. 19, 610-432-4333

The Entrance Hall, as depicted in Tina Barney’s sumptuous chromogenic print, is a lovely Tiepolo turquoise decorated with gilt and crystal. It’s impressive. So is the white-coifed woman planted in the middle of the picture and dressed for an evening out. Her dress and matching jacket are both patterned with oversize white roses. The jacket is additionally overlaid with gold lace and edged with gold braid. She wears several items of "important" jewelry, including a large rock on one manicured, age-speckled hand. Her makeup can’t hide the slight droop of one eyelid and red, red lipstick emphasizes the provisional nature of her smile. We are neither friends nor family; she is civilized.

Tina Barney has made a career of photographing the people she knows best in the tradition-bound settings of the American elite. The handsome families inhabiting her oversize Tableaux at the Allentown Art Museum are comfortably surrounded by colonial fabrics and Chinese Chippendale, with its encrypted representation of European conquest. They are aloof from the wave of flashy new wealth, which threatens to inundate the intricate patterning of Laura Ashley-esque nests with its pushy posh cosmopolitanism. New money ignorantly synthesizes tradition through eclectic borrowings from Asia, Africa or the American Southwest.

Barney’s documentation of the rich has been appropriately compared to Dorothea Lange’s images of victims of the Great Depression. Lange interviewed her subjects and sometimes posed them. Barney’s use of a view camera with a tripod and, often, lights, eliminates the element of surprise, but her familiarity with her subjects and decades-long status as an observer encourage candid behavior.

Where every element in Lange’s photographs points to POVERTY, everything in Barney’s points to WEALTH, though both suggest a similar ambiguous relationship to beauty. In addition, Barney’s initiation into the culture she represents allows greater intimacy, as well as a subtle skewing toward tropes she relishes: multiple patternings of upholstery, wallpaper and draperies and kitsch Tiffany clutter. Barney’s men and boys often wear shades of blue. Women and girls wear pink and white.

At best, Barney’s photographs suggest the intricacy of Tolstoy’s examination of aristocratic families: the quirks of familial interaction, arcane hierarchies of authority and powerful social rituals. Barney has recorded a generation of poignant human gestures from childhood to adolescence to adulthood — a dance in which parents advance from confident, blooming fecundity to proud but blighted age.

	At best, Barney’s photographs suggest the intricacy of Tolstoy’s examination of aristocratic families… Still, I find myself impatient with their complacent insularity.

Two significant shortcomings mark Barney as a less ambitious chronicler than Tolstoy. First, she manifests scant interest in the larger sociopolitical context. True, there is the occasional maid, like the woman in the pink apron in The Portrait (1984). She looks round from her task of tidying a bedroom to the pair of women playing with a blond-ringleted young girl. We can’t see the baby’s face, but she resembles the child in a sentimental portrait above an Adam mantelpiece grotesquely overcrowded with knickknacks. Typical of Barney’s early works, the room itself almost dissolves in the overwhelming repetition of a blue-on-white export-based pattern featuring a medallion depicting a Chinese laborer. It covers walls, bedclothes, curtains and even a chest of drawers.

Many works, like The Son, are filled with layered movement. In The Conversation (1987), the negative demeanor of a man seated on a step between rooms — his eyes squeezed shut as if searching for words to convey his disapproval — is reinforced by the palms-out "No!" gesture of the pink-and-white-clad woman behind him. One assumes they are parents responding to the supplicant posture of the pink-and-white-clad teenage girl in the foreground. This family encounter would be fine fodder for Tolstoy.

Beyond slighting the social implications of her subjects’ way of life, Barney is artistically indifferent to larger political events. A family reads the Sunday New York Times, but we have no idea what is contained therein. This is not necessarily a fault; some of our most beloved art is so, simply because it transcends the temporal. Still, though these are beautiful, well-made and interesting pictures, I find myself impatient with their complacent privilege and insularity.

Barney eschews confrontation with the temporal, in a second divergence from Tolstoy. She records family — even herself — through decades of time, but she’s organized the exhibition to avoid narrative juxtapositions. For example, there are three pictures featuring Peter, who is apparently the father of Marina. In the earliest, Marina’s Room (1987), a canopied bed with pink flower appliqué quilt is central to the scene. Dewy, dark-haired Marina (aged maybe 7 or 8) is swathed in a white ruffled party dress. She tentatively caresses a pink beribboned hat inside a box. Peter, reclining across the corner of the bed, idly toys with another ribbon, as the two lock eyes in father-daughter sympathy. It’s a sentimental moment.

By 1990, Barney is moving into her later phase, which emphasizes the faces of participants, but Marina’s bedroom is again the setting of an ambiguous portrait, Peter and Marina. Peter, wearing a blue shirt as he does in all the pictures with Marina, looks at Marina inquiringly. She again wears white — this time, a lacy blouse with a bow that is pulled askew. Marina’s slightly parted lips and sidelong glance at Peter suggest ambivalence. Though she literally seems to be pulling away from her father, she is also still very much in his orbit.

In Marina and Peter of 1997 (the order of the names, incorrectly listed in the brochure photo, suggests a power shift, though it simply reflects the position of the figures), Marina’s bedroom has been redecorated, again in pink and white. Marina and Peter’s frontal side-by-side pose is typical of Barney’s recent work. As they face the camera across Marina’s bed, Marina self-protectively turns away from Peter, as she holds a cigarette with self-conscious sophistication. His face is grim, beleaguered. Fatigue infuses his forward slump as he leans on the bed. Marina again wears white, but this skimpy top parts from her jeans to reveal a few stray womanly hairs on her abdomen. Her stare has a covert air of smug conquest. Poor Peter.

In a similar vein, we can follow Moya and Phil from childhood to adulthood. We see the aging of Barney herself to the lean, leathery look of women who sail and play compulsive tennis. In a 1993 photograph, Jill and I (from contextual clues, I deduce that Jill is her daughter), both women confront the camera with wide-eyed Bergmanesque aplomb. They are handsome, blue-eyed, fine-boned, blondish: arrogant. Their demeanor is as closed as the boxlike rooms Barney recorded earlier. This is not a world we are meant to enter, but Barney has given us a peek through her eyes.