god’s spy
John
Maloof and Charles Siskel (directors) Finding
Vivian Maier / 2013
by Douglas Messerli
Come, let’s away to prison;
We two alone
will sing like bird I’ the cage:
When thou dost
ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee
forgiveness: and we’ll live,
And pray, and
sing, and tell old tales and laugh
At gilded
butterflies, andn hear poor rogues
Talk of court
nes; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses, and
who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
An take upon’s
the mystery of things,
As if we were
God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d
prison, packs and sets of great ones
That ebb and
flow by the moon.
King Lear, ACT V, Sc. 2
John
Maloof’s and Charles Siskel’s 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier begins with several of the interviewees—former
employers of Maier’s, children for whom she served as nanny, and art
critics—seemingly being momentarily speechless, apparently since they have just
been asked to describe their central emotion regarding the figure at the center
of this film.
What gradually becomes apparent through the
nearly hour and a half that follows is that Maier was a brilliant outsider-like
artist working within numerous traditions of street photography that might be
compared with artists from Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and Gordon
Parks to Cartier-Bresson and numerous other older U.S. and international
photographers, while still remaining absolutely original.
Maier was a true talent, who evidently (so
we eventually discover) perceived photography as her major endeavor, yet never
printed or apparently even saw most of the images she shot. The art
establishment, accordingly, has had a difficult time in characterizing and
evaluating her work: an outsider artist is one thing, but an outsider who never
even attempted to reveal most of her artifacts and, literally, hid them away,
is quite another. Who was this woman, who worked throughout most of her life as
a nanny, and yet appeared to many of her families as aloof and apart, a figure,
much like the stereotype of an artist, who often treated their own children
with a certain, objective, aloofness and even disdain that might even have put
them in harm’s way.
While some of those interviewed attest to
her love and her children and their love of her, others—including a couple of
those children grown up—admit to a darker side of Maier’s personality that when
revealed puts them at the center of mild child abuse, force-feeding, slaps,
and even
somewhat compulsive behavior (as when one young girl’s purchase of trinkets is
hosed down in a highly ammoniac concentration of water). Films Maier left
behind show her sometimes gently questioning and frolicking with her young
charges, while at other times she appears to be following in the tracks of a
famous murder victim as described in the daily headlines.
Maier, it appears, was also a kind of
pack-rat, saving an enormously large collection of newspapers whose lurid
headlines shouted out murders and other lurid deeds with which she as morbidly
fascinated. One senses a desire, when she combines this with her photography,
to play, at least temporarily, the role of journalist. I, too, occasionally
save newspaper articles which may later find their way into my annual writings;
but I clip out particular pieces and rarely save them after I’ve put them to
use or realized that these possibly interesting subjects nonetheless remain
separate from my specific concerns. Maier saved them all in total, almost as a
librarian might, hinting she saw them not only as sources for her art but as a
kind of record of or testament about the cruelty she found in the world.
What becomes an open question of this
lucid and yet sometimes obscurantist film is what happened to Vivian Maier as a
young girl that led her to compulsively explore the dark side of human
behavior. It is apparent that some sort of abuse she had experienced or
observed drove her art. At times she appeared to be interested merely in people
going about their everyday business, working people smiling, simply enjoying
themselves; but far more often her figures, human and animal, appear to have
been abandoned by the society around them, abused, punished, even tortured.
Like the German artist, Hans Bellmer, she appears to be utterly fascinated by
the naked manikins in store windows, lying about without heads, arms, and legs.
At one point a child with whom she associated, hit by a car, is objectified by
her camera as a victim. And many of her street encounters concern figures
clearly victimized by the society around them, representing children in tears,
a small Black boy shining the shoes of another white boy of the same age, the
poor forced into manual labor in order to survive.
In some respects, her choice of occupation
makes perfect sense: her job as children’s caretaker allowed her complete entry
into wealthy homes, food, housing, at least a regular, if small, salary, and an
opportunity to move out into the community with her charges in tow. An office
job, clearly, would never have allowed her to carry her camera daily around her
neck as she was allowed by her rather open-minded parents, or the possibility
of movement throughout the city—although there is some evidence that she was
chastised for taking the children into disreputable neighborhoods.
It was almost as if, in practicing her
art—an art that seemed to be concerned with a documentation of her world and a
testifying to the evils in it—she felt the need to be incognito, to be a secret
agent, or a kind “God’s spy” determined to reveal the details of the evil she
had discovered in mankind’s heart, while she operated, meanwhile, in a kind of
protected cocoon of innocence—surely also a sort of prison—in which the
children around her existed. While Maier—who was very much, it appears, in
touch with the world around her and aware of cultural precedents—cannot
precisely be described as an outsider artist, she shares some kinship, it
appears, with Henry Darger, who felt compelled to tell, in painting, collages,
and writing, of the terrible adventures of the innocent yet sometimes brutal
young girls—oddly enough, named the Vivian girls—who lived in a world that
threatened them with murder and mayhem.
____
*Although
Maier was born in the US, her mother was apparently from Alsace, and Maier
herself traveled there at least twice for period of time.
Los Angeles,
January 25, 2015