Vidor, Texas: 'Rough Beauty'?

Continuing what will surely be a rich tradition on this blog of commenting on articles in the day's New York Times, I stumbled upon a piece [$; will be available free this weekend] on the controversy surrounding a book of photographs about the people of Vidor, Texas, called Rough Beauty.

Vidor, Texas has been in the news recently. A CNN special on race in December featured the town, which is in close proximity to Jasper, Texas, where a black man was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck not too many years ago. One of Vidor's finest, a fat white woman who apparently spends much of her time in a diner, said this: "I don't mind being friends with them, talking and stuff like that, but as far as mingling and eating with them, all that kind of stuff, that's where I draw the line." (What's next? Letting them into our neighborhoods? Our bedrooms??)

What's interesting about Rough Beauty, however, is that it is a book of artistic photographs that seeks beauty in the mundane, and the visual poetry that reveals itself in the squalor of rural poverty. This is controversial because there is an unstated belief by like-minded people that beauty cannot coexist with horror. I am happy to report that this is an aesthetic debate that has consumed much of art theory in the 20th century.

The critic Walter Benjamin made a useful distinction between "aestheticizing the political" and "politicizing the aesthetic." The former paradigm fits most closely with fascist regimes, while the latter will be familiar to those who have seen Soviet propaganda (or An Inconvenient Truth). For example: Shorn from its context, is not the image of a bomb dropped on a Spanish village during the civil war -- from the point of view of the airplane -- beautiful, the orange flames slowly pulsating outwards in a ring of fire? By removing this horrible image from the political context, can't we aestheticize it and view it as art? To take a more mainstream example, isn't Triumph of the Will rightly considered one of the greatest documentary films ever made?

On the flip side, Soviet propagandists created an entirely new aesthetic, injecting art, literature and film with their own political ideology. In film, this resulted in the dialectical montage made famous by Eisenstein. In a communist state, it was deemed necessary to define reality in the terms dictated by the Party so that the people would buy into that reality. The only way to do this was to use the very aesthetic means with which artists have spoken to the masses throughout history. For fascist regimes, it was necessary to mask the horrors of totalitarianism by aesthetic means. So, from the leaders' point of view, one method revealed truth while the other concealed it.

My point is, both methods showed that it is quite possible to combine beauty and ugliness, art and evil. Are the people of Vidor, Texas horrible/racist? I don't know, but I do know that they are probably, in large part, not very well-educated. That, besides utter stupidity, is the only way to explain why someone would display open racism to a television reporter. And it explains a curious aspect of the controversy, which is that apparently, many of the protesters are in fact from Vidor. Clearly, they haven't actually read the book themselves, and have assumed that it is another indictment of their ... way of life.

And what of this way of life? It's funny that I caught this article as I was reading the first chapter of a groundbreaking book called Sundown Towns, which basically asserts that the majority of incorporated towns in America, from about 1890-1968, were whites-only, either by law or through more indirect and unstated means. Interestingly, the vast majority of these were not in the South. The author, sociologist Jim Loewen, suggested that Vidor "takes the heat" for these other towns that most people don't know about or wish not to admit exist. It also helps that Vidor is in Texas and not, say, California or Illinois (and that it wasn't built by the FDR administration ... yikes!).

The Times article had this graf about the reaction to the public opening of the book's photographs:

Reactions to the show were mixed. Photography enthusiasts unfamiliar with Vidor praised Mr. Anderson for the formal composition of his pictures, while those familiar with the town tended to focus on the location. "They're nice," said Jonathan Meadows, 26, a painter who grew up in nearby Fredericksburg, when initially asked what he thought. When told that the photographs had been taken in Vidor, Mr. Meadows laughed and clarified his reaction. "A few are beautiful," he said. "But they're not beautiful in the true sense of the word."

This is a perfect example of the ambivalence and hesitation caused by the unholy mixture of aesthetics and ugliness. It reminds me of a very similar reaction at an AFI Silverdocs screening of the documentary The Bridge, which was about people who threw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide. What's so stunning about the film is the pure beauty of many of the images. Weirdly, though, the director completely denied this in the Q&A afterwards. I concluded, basically, that he actually had an agenda (to build a decidedly ugly barrier that would prevent people from killing themselves at that particular bridge, which would surely drive them to do so in less-patrolled places instead) and misunderstood his own creation. He couldn't accept that the horror of suicide could coexist with the grandeur of great architecture. But there it was.

This controversy also hits close to home. For my senior thesis, I made a documentary about some of the same thorny issues that were the subject of Rough Beauty. Like Dave Anderson, the photographer, I didn't come out with the conclusions I was supposed to. My shots weren't art, necessarily, but I did aestheticize the subjects of my movie (especially at the end, which took on a surreal quality because I didn't use audio). In other words, I didn't demonize them outright -- I merely asked questions. Partially for this reason, I believe, my classmates and instructor were at times fairly hostile to my work. Here's Anderson:

Mr. Anderson said he was surprised by the storm his project started. His curiosity, and his willingness to represent Vidor in a new light, have not been rewarded, he concluded.

"I think artistically it's problematic," he said. "There have been so many strong reactions that I don't want to overcompensate on future projects."

And that's too bad. My project, too, was very problematic -- but I acknowledged this from the get-go. Anderson, too, has tried to embrace a difficult and problematic subject and come out scarred as a result.

It's worth asking what happens when you do come back with the conclusions you're supposed to. The article mentions work by photographers such as Walker Evans, who traveled South with James Agee for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (which I kind of despise). The book concealed their obviously Marxist (and condescending) sympathies with various rhetorical flourishes. It's since been recognized as a classic. And what do you know? The gorgeous photographs within politicize the aesthetic.