The Brooklyn Rail

Before leaving a museum or gallery, I glance at the people around me, noticing the way they circle an object, or stand transfixed in front of an image, or lean towards each other to whisper their thoughts. I find it very moving to witness these vignettes, and it turns out, I am not alone. For her three-channel video installation Night Watching (2019), artist Rineke Dijkstra filmed fourteen cohorts of people after hours in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as they looked at Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642). Positioning her cameras head-on in front of her subjects, Dijkstra documented their collective and individual ways of engaging with the painting, capturing their conversational meanderings and private moments of wonder.

The video, originally commissioned by the Rijksmuseum, stands as the centerpiece of Rineke Dijkstra: Night Watching and Pictures from the Archive at Marian Goodman Gallery, where it plays alongside close to twenty photographic portraits pulled by Dijkstra during a two-year immersion into her archives. Dijkstra’s videomaking requires lighting set-ups and multiple cameras; her subjects know they are being filmed. Yet in sequence after sequence, self-consciousness falls away, supplanted by the simple act of looking at a very large, iconic painting. A cluster of Japanese businessmen evaluate the work’s benefits in selfies and on Instagram. A group of school girls discuss the romance of Rembrandt painting his wife into the picture during the year she died. A family matriarch, seated in a wheelchair, listens as her daughters recount previous viewings of the painting. Most captivating was a group of young women who sat on the floor with sketch pads, barely whispering to each other as they gazed at the Rembrandt while copying it. All along, Dijkstra’s filmic style is clean and controlled. Her cameras drift slowly in and out of thoughtful compositions and her editing picks out moments of intimacy or solitude as the assembled parties splinter through her video triptych. Throughout the work’s thirty-five minutes, viewers share the space of Dijkstra’s subjects, but the Rembrandt is kept off-camera; the viewer “sees” the painting instead on the faces of those who stand looking at it. Narrative clues of facial expressions, quips, comments, and stories recounted bring The Night Watch into being.

In her photographic practice, Dijkstra invites pairs of groups of children and teenagers to stand together for formal portraits in which they look directly into her lens, an approach that creates a tacit dialogue between artist and subject, subject and viewer. Here, nine large-format photographs reprinted from her “Beach Portraits” series of the early 1990s position subjects with their backs to the shoreline. Coney Island, N.Y., USA, June 26, 1993 (2023), shows an awkward grouping of four young people. On the right, a girl of about seven or eight smiles at the camera, her hand on the hip of her lime-green swimsuit. In the center, a boy of about six holds at an angle an arm bound in a cast covered with signatures. A second boy in a swimsuit and a young man in shorts and a button-down shirt awkwardly complete the grouping. Odessa, Ukraine, August 9, 1993 (2023) shows a teenage girl in a white bikini with a child I assume is her younger brother beside her. They stand barefoot in the sand, the waters of the Black Sea sparkling green and blue behind them. I calculate that the boy would now be in his forties, and wonder where he might be on this winter afternoon some thirty years later.

There can be a vulnerability in standing for such formal picture-taking, but the artist avoids the disquieting nuances that sometimes arise when artists like Diane Arbus or Sally Mann, for example, employ similar practices. Her technique also diverges from the on-the-fly style of documentary photographers such as Lisette Model; Dijkstra shoots with a tripod in a 4-by-5 format that requires her subjects to stand absolutely still during long exposures. Asking them to stare into the lens without eliciting smiles results in an uncanny directness, but there is also a degree of humor in the images that softens into an affection not unlike that of Alice Neel’s paintings of children. Brighton, UK, August 19, 1992 (2023) shows a little boy at a community swimming pool, both arms proprietarily wrapped around the waists of two teenage girls (his big sisters?) who tower above him. In Asylum Center Leiden, the Netherlands, March 9, 1994 (2023) two girls in skirts and patent-leather shoes stand with arms straight by their sides. The smaller one, who looks to be about five, wears a red “Mexico” T-shirt. Almost smiling, almost about to say something, her gaze meets mine as I take in the complexity of a situation the work’s title can only allude to, grappling with the intense honesty of a photograph that allows children to be seen for who and what they are—even if that includes adorable.