O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Meatyard’s Enigmatic, Dark World

A small male Earthling hovers in a shadowy field of mushrooms. His blurry fingers graze the edge of a floating metal dome incised with thin grooves.

Is this a mystical revelation? An otherworldly sighting from the cover of the Weekly World News? A still from a surreal film? Actually it’s a boy with a hubcap, photographed by Ralph Eugene Meatyard in the late ‘50s.

Meatyard, at his best, had the knack of transforming aspects of ordinary life into darkly enigmatic events. The photographer--who died of cancer in 1972, just shy of his 47th birthday--is the subject of a retrospective circulated by the Akron Art Museum in Ohio and on view through Feb. 14 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

A optician and family man from Normal, Ill., who settled in Kentucky and confined his photographic work to evenings and weekends, Meatyard was both in and out of the artistic loop of his time.

Although he lived far from the New York art scene and traveled infrequently, he read widely and struck up friendships with people from literary and artistic spheres (including poets Thomas Merton and Denise Levertov, and experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage).

He was well versed (through reading and workshops with such leading photographers as Minor White and Aaron Siskind) in the history and contemporary practice of his art. Even his local Lexington Camera Club attracted photographers with an experimental bent.

Interested in fashioning his own version of the world, rather than pursuing a documentary vision, Meatyard eventually devised a highly personal approach to black-and-white photography. His figurative images--all of family and friends--were carefully posed and frequently included incongruous props, notably a set of cheap Halloween fright masks.

When it suited him, he deliberately moved the camera to blur the imagery or made multiple exposures. Contrary to technical wisdom of the day, he preferred to print inky blacks that obliterated detail. But he was firmly opposed to cropping, “dodging,” “burning in” or using other tricks of the trade.

During the 15 years he was active as a photographer, Meatyard was not only prolific--his annual output ran to 600 or 700 prints--but he also worked simultaneously with vastly different types of subjects. Yet no matter whether he was shooting a surreal scene of masked children, a landscape view or an abstract pattern of light reflections on a pond or river, his work was influenced by a consistent world view.

As Meatyard once wrote, “an educated background in Zen influenced all my photographs.” The Asian philosophy seems to have given him an enhanced ability to focus on details within the flux of life--from the shape of a twig to a joke shared between two young girls--as well as a fascination with process and flux for their own sake.

A letter Meatyard wrote in the early ‘60s reflects his notion that “the Zen awareness can produce a photograph of simplicity, power, interest and the intuitive realization on the part of the seer or viewer that he is seeing more than he realizes.”

In some of his “Light on Water” prints from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Meatyard produced eerie, flame-like images in which the fine white wisps of light look almost like etchings.

The intensely mystic quality of these photographs--recalling the rhythmic gestural qualities of certain Chinese brush paintings as well as calligraphic paintings by Northwest artist Mark Tobey--distinguishes them from previous work that might look superficially similar, including the stylized light abstractions of French modernist Francis Bruguiere and the water studies of Harry Callahan.

Zen meditation also seems to have inspired his “No Focus” photographs, images of unidentifiable soft-edged black or white forms or pin-headed anonymous figures. These deliberately unfocused prints--which Meatyard printed several months after shooting, to ensure that he no longer could identify the subjects--have a hallucinatory quality, as if taken with a special camera able to capture a dreamy, slow-motion world undetectable to normal human sight.

The most obviously “Zen” of Meatyard’s photographs are the images of twigs, in which a few wiry black lines jump out from a softer-focused background of branches. But these images seem too politely contained within the manicured tradition of 20th-Century formalist photography to lift the viewer to an otherworldly plane.

The real contribution Meatyard makes to American photography is his melding of Zen thought with a Southern Gothic streak and a darkly sympathetic view of childhood stress. In many of Meatyard’s most memorable prints, everyday scenes are transformed into mysterious events shadowed by an awareness of human mortality.

On the one hand there are such dreamlike-but-sunny childhood photos as “Untitled (Child as a Bird),” in which a boy--moving his arms so fast they register only as blurs--is seen against a wall in which the torn plaster resembles bird wings.

But there other, darker views. The little girl in “Untitled (Girl Lying Under Tree)” lies on her back in the grass with arms crossed and legs spread so that she fits neatly within the long shadow cast by a tree. The image mingles the Victorian sensibility of the child’s prayer, “If I die before I wake . . .” with a deadpan humor that is purely 20th-Century.

“To--El Mochuelo (Boys With Noose)” is a particularly bizarre and unsettling image. In the blurry darkness at the rear of what appears to be a barn or garage, an open-mouthed small child lies across the leg of an older boy whose head is caught in a noose. In the foreground, a rectangular patch of light glows with unearthly brilliance. In Meatyard’s universe, the grotesque is on the same continuum as the divine.

Working in this vein, Meatyard stumbles only when he works too hard at making a timelessly emblematic portrait: The pickax masquerading as a scythe hanging above the head of the cherub-mouthed boy in “Untitled (Boy With Pickax Buried in Wall)” is dramatic, but it offers only a pat contrast between impending death and innocent youth.

Ambiguity and paradox, key aspects of Zen teaching, also are key aspects of Meatyard’s best work. Most mysterious of all are the photographs of masked people, which culminated with his final series, “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.”

The catalogue essays make much of the idea that masks represent the different faces we show to the world. But they also remove key elements of everyday reality from Meatyard’s scenes. The old-face or fright-face masks create significant disjunctions between heads and bodies, between heads and suburban landscapes, and between people’s appearances and their actions.

By altering viewers’ expectations of an otherwise believable scene, the masks open up new, deliberately illogical possibilities. As Meatyard noted in the margin of one of his books about Zen, “pictures of people (with) masks or as actors are examples of me playing God!! “

In “Romance (N.) From Ambrose Bierce No. 3”--the reference to the turn-of-the-century American writer is not clarified in the catalogue--four masked children in play clothes perch restlessly on numbered bleacher steps. The kids’ sprawling postures are difficult to reconcile with their lot as pint-sized grotesqueries, equipped with lopsided, wild-eyed faces. At the same time, the numbers suggest an inexorable progression of fate, perhaps a countdown to Armageddon.

Despite all apparent signs to the contrary, Meatyard was a fairly traditional-minded fellow; certainly he was no friend of ‘60s counterculture. According to the catalogue essays, he was distressed when friends opposed the Vietnam War, had no interest in drugs and put his foot down when his son grew his hair long.

Although outwardly he may have seemed conservative and self-contained, Meatyard seems to have had a much less constrained inner life, parts of which he allowed to seep into his photographs. An unfettered--sometimes bizarrely dark, sometimes boldly embracing--view of human sexuality informs quite a few of his images.

In “Untitled (Children With Dolls and Masks),” a group of children--some wearing masks--sit and talk in a suburban back yard, paying no attention to a bunch of undressed, partially dismembered dolls flung on the lawn in front of them.

The “Lucybelle Crater” series--the title was inspired by the name shared by an old woman and her mentally ill daughter in a Flannery O’Connor short story--features Meatyard’s masked wife, Madelyn, posed with masked friends and family members in perfectly banal outdoor suburban settings. By identifying every person pictured as Lucybelle Crater (in handwritten notes below the photographs), Meatyard further attempts to wipe out individual identity and sexual difference.

Posing with her 15-year-old son, “Lucybelle Crater,” Madelyn assumes a “manly,” legs-apart, hands-in-pockets stance while the son faces the camera at a droopy angle. In the final photograph in the series--taken shortly before he died--Madelyn and Ralph pose in a grape arbor wearing each other’s clothing.

The photographer, in a skirt and blouse and a woman’s mask--used this time to heighten the illusion--presses his arm against his wife’s body, as if to impart a message. Large and passive-looking, in a lifelike older-man mask, Madelyn leans against a wooden stake and looks out resignedly at the viewer. In fact, both of these people are Ralph Meatyard, Artist Nearing Death.

Of the photographs in the exhibit, perhaps the boldest is the vaguely hermaphroditic “Untitled (Male Nude in Bathroom)” from about 1970, in which a long-haired, plump nude man in a mask stands alongside a toilet. One of his hairless legs seem to be dematerializing in a ray of sunlight.

This figure seems to be an ideal melding of opposites, a creature combining male and female attributes in order to become a spiritual force that has transcended constraints of the flesh--so frankly alluded to by the toilet.

No doubt aware of Edward Weston’s famous photograph memorializing the graceful lines of a toilet bowl, Meatyard reclaimed the humble bathroom fixture for a picture of spiritual transformation.

Exhibit catalogue essayist Barbara Tannenbaum writes that the reason for looking anew at Meatyard’s work right now lies in the interest in “enigmatic, unresolvable images” and “sense of pessimism or distress” that he shares (albeit for significantly different reasons) with postmodern artists including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince.

Others have drawn parallels between Meatyard’s vision and Diane Arbus’ celebrated photographs from the ‘60s of freakish-looking “ordinary” people as well as deformed and mentally ill subjects.

The important thing is that, far from being tied to its own era, Meatyard’s remarkable body of work is still coming into its own. It possibly never had so much relevance as it does today, in this era of shifting notions of gender and personal identity.

“Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary” remains through Feb. 14 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. $4, general; $2, students and senior citizens; free for members and children under 12. Tuesdays are free. (714) 759-1122.