Gary Schneider, “Vegetable”, 1993

#somereallygoodones, #garyschneider, #lowhangingfruit

A dark, almost impenetrable print of the Gary Schneider’s “Vegetable’, 1993 hung just outside the door to his darkroom downtown near Coopers Square. It has probably followed him to Bellport, Long Island where he is now based. I was always delighted to visit because of the promise of seeing this compelling work. I am and was captivated by it: stunned, baffled, curious, and exhilarated.

It may have been that I saw a more personal variant of the image, but “Vegetable” is from the artist’s “Botanicals, 1989-1996” portfolio. This is the sneakiest one, the killer.

The print is moody and a bit unreadable. The shapes are enigmatic and amorphous, vaguely phallic, a cave of uvulae. The blacks go from softly highlighted dark gray to unknowably deep.

What caught me first was the intimacy of the photograph. I remarked to the artist that it struck me as a picture about fist fucking, of the transgressive and impossible penetration of a man’s anus. This image is a sort of gay S & M “Fantastic Voyage”.*1

Schneider’s response was bemused silence.

The image is incredibly suggestive because so much visual information seems to have been withheld. It is hard enough to decipher what the organic forms are in the first place’ they all seem positioned in an organic black hole, a wonderland that Alice might have fled.

It is secretive, and it suggests, which is what great photographs do — they withhold. Schneider is such a dazzling technician as a printer that he brings all kinds of unknowables into the mix: a range of negatives possibly, revealing and toning them; parts even look solarized. Is the whole square a construct? How many negatives has he used to devise this? What is the source material, e.g., what has actually been photographed here? Questions.

For me this is a journey of transcendence, a search through low hanging fruit for some truth. It’s that good.

Maybe I see penises everywhere?

*1 A 1966 sci-fi movie in which Raquel Welch and submarine crew get miniaturized and attempt brain surgery.

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