The Brooklyn Rail

Primarily known as a painter, Jay DeFeo was part of a generation of American artists who trained in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. She gained a national following in the early 1960s through profiles in Art in America and Look and her inclusion in Dorothy Miller’s 16 Americans exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. However, except in her native San Francisco, DeFeo faded from artworld conversations by mid-decade. She relocated to rural Larkspur, California, in 1966 under the duress of eviction and a failing marriage, where she struggled for several years before assembling a living through teaching work and grant funds.

But it was also during this time that DeFeo experimented intensely with photography, collage, and related practices. As Corey Keller explains in her contribution to the lush new monograph Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work, photography helped reenergize the artist during this difficult period. (Its role in her larger body of work has become more and more apparent since a 2013 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.) Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work joins several other recent exhibitions and publications in continuing these explorations as the first to focus solely on the artist’s photography. Bound in matte black cloth and printed at a large trim size, the book showcases more than one hundred and fifty prints, collages, photograms (created by placing objects on photographic paper in full light), and chemigrams (created by applying developing fluid directly to photographic paper) portraying a range of subjects: plants and leaves, scavenged objects, fragments of abandoned paintings and works-in-progress, and studies of photographic equipment and materials. With a few exceptions, as Leah Levy explains in her introduction, the works are printed at actual size. Apart from several reproduced from museum collections, most of the images derive from a large, rarely shown archive at The Jay DeFeo Foundation (of which Levy is the director). Among the most striking are a series of photo- and chemigrams produced on May 11, 1973, subtitled “Salvador Dali’s Birthday Party”; a foldout of five photographs of a homemade cast used to treat DeFeo’s dog’s broken leg; and several staged portraits of a photographer’s tripod draped with paper and tape.

Essays by critics, art historians, and fellow artists are distributed throughout the book. The arrangement makes for a conversational reading experience, as if overhearing a group of friends gathered to reflect on the artist’s work. For example, Catherine Wagner’s playful stories about the camaraderie she and DeFeo shared as colleagues at the Mills College Art Department amplify the spirit of curiosity evident in her collages. Similarly, Justine Kurland’s bold meditation on DeFeo’s use of her body as an artistic tool and subject suggests that her many photographs of tangled seaweed, torn leaves, and broken glassware are just as much poignant explorations of embodied vulnerability as they are studies of texture and light.

Readers more interested in photographs than words will find pages of surprising work to consider. The untitled still life from 1973, for example, features a faceted disco ball, pelts of fur, DeFeo’s camera, the bust of a female mannequin, and other objects arrayed on a table partially covered in black Mylar. A large chunk from the abandoned work Estocada hangs at the right, mounted on a board that leans against the table and wall. Appearing separately in other photographs throughout the book, each element suggests a distinct visual itinerary curious readers might follow.

In an earlier photo in the book, from 1972, daylight glints off a thrift shop window display. Translucent reflections from across the street layer over the primary image, heavier in its top half. A price tag is visible at the right edge, dangling from a piece of cloth, perhaps a doll, and a bright white bentwood side table (which recurs in a later collage) fills the image’s left side. A double-handled glass bottle rests on the table’s surface. Obscured by the street’s reflection, the bottle is decorated with a spiral. DeFeo’s eyes and the bridge of her nose are just visible between its handle and body. She is inside and outside the window at once, emerging within and detached from the scene.

In his contribution to Photographic Work, Hilton Als insists that the seemingly infinite textures of DeFeo’s photographs invite viewers to keep “looking and looking.” Writing to a group of his students, Als proposes “looking” as a complement to theoretically minded interpretation. The glimpse we catch of DeFeo in the thrift shop window shows what can be gained from this approach. Indeed, wherever we turn in Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work, we will find the artist just over our shoulder, or perhaps smack in the middle of an image, ardently looking back.