The Brooklyn Rail

When visible certainties lose their conviction, many artists have turned to the blurred, the transitory, the disorderly, and the incomplete. Out of focus, on view at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, takes as its subject blurriness and the imprecise image, where boundaries are elusive, identities are unstable and often unidentifiable, and where history and memory are urgent but unreliable. Imaginatively conceived and curated by Claire Bernardi and Emilia Philippot, the exhibition feels particularly timely. It speaks to a world where uncertainty, instability, indeterminacy, loss of clarity, and an appreciation of perception’s inherent ambiguities increasingly present themselves as conditions of modern life and thought.

These trends have become especially evident from 1945 to the present and form the core of this exhibition, but the evocatively indistinct image has deep roots. Optical science as well as a downbeat, romantically-infused Symbolism play important roles in both the early and more contemporary works on view. Blurriness—a property of flawed vision, extremes of scale, or of mechanical reproduction—can often speak of the misunderstood, the unnatural, or the unskilled, especially in the realm of socially redolent amateur photography (of which this exhibition has telling examples).

Nineteenth-century x-ray images of hands and feet by Albert Londe and the early astronomical photographs by les frères Henry open the exhibition, which also features paintings and drawings by J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, and a hazy Georges Seurat conte crayon drawing of a veiled woman. A hallucinatory watercolor by Edvard Munch, The Artist’s Diseased Eye. Kneeling Nude with an Eagle (1930) is noteworthy, part of an ongoing project that attempted to record what the artist’s unhealthy eyes caused him to see. In Auguste Rodin’s sculpture Last Vision, Star of the Morning or Before the Shipwreck(1902), an indistinct figure partially emerges from the marble, while in Edward Steichen’s early Pictorialist photograph Balzac, The Silhouette—4 A.M. (1908), we see a dark and moody rendering of Rodin’s sculpture of the writer, commissioned by the artist himself. An attenuated figure by Alberto Giacometti is augmented later in the exhibition by a shadowed and mysterious Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph from 2016 of a similar Giacometti sculpture, L’homme qui marche II.

In the postwar art section, a Mark Rothko painting from 1948—the period right before his typically simplified formats—is as hazily edged as his later work, but the multiple shapes are disordered and almost formless. A transitional painting, it sits uncertainly in his oeuvre. There is also an untitled 2016 painting by Albert Oehlen that looks uncannily like the Rothko. The scientific weighs in with astronomical and microscopic observations blown up, altered, and made elusive. Sigmar Polke’s painting Pasadena (1968) transforms a newspaper image of the lunar surface taken during the first Surveyor mission in the mid-sixties. The low-resolution source photograph is enlarged until it becomes a collection of black dots that refuse to coalesce into a recognizable image. Paradoxically, the painted caption underneath it precisely describes, to the millimeter, what the blurring does not allow us to see. Elsewhere, Gerhard Richter takes a printed reproduction of atoms, whose contours are necessarily blurred by the visualization process, and further obscures them by layering a smear of black and gray paint over the printed image. In the politically-edged painting, Schwarze Sonne (1962–63) by Otto Piene, a pulsating circular form made by setting a painted circle of solvent on fire commands the center of the canvas. Piene, one of the founders of the Zero Group, created this black sun as the world was coming to grips with the uncertainty of the nuclear age, with its ever-present possibility of mass destruction.

The political makes its presence felt in many works in the show. The horrors of war and their attendant undermining of belief in rational behavior have yielded images that seem to tremble and vibrate, moving in and out of focus and consciousness. Krzysztof Pruszkowski’s fifteen superimposed but misaligned 1992 black-and-white images of a watchtower at the Majdanek extermination camp combine the opposing urges to both remember and forget. Thomas Ruff’s shaky, pixilated, photographic print of the burning World Trade Center, jpeg ny01 (2004) reverberates with Richter’s painting of the same subject, which takes an image of the first airliner hitting the north tower and renders it almost illegible by obscuring the surface with scrapes of paint, simultaneously drawing our eye to the familiar image, while also locking us out.

In Six Seconds (2001), a work of particular beauty and poignancy, Alfredo Jaar speaks to the difficulty of processing the horrors of war, in this case the Rwandan genocide. Six Seconds is a large photograph of a woman in a brilliant blue dress, set against a yellow and green ground. Jaar has said:

It is the image of a young girl seen from behind. This young girl had witnessed her father and mother being killed with machetes. I had arranged to meet her so she could tell me her story. But when she arrived, she changed her mind…As she turned around and walked out, I grabbed my camera and took a photo without really focusing, hence the blur. This blurred image represents my inability to recount this woman’s experience or the experience of Rwanda—the impossibility.

Jaar’s work connects in an oblique way with a 2021 work by Mame-Diarra Niang, an indistinct photo that may be a dark brown head merging somehow into the top of a torso. But the fleeting figure wears a brilliantly colored fuchsia shirt, infusing it with a vivid presence. Made during the COVID lockdown, the artist conceives of this image, Morphologie du rêve #6, as part of a group of works that explore the identity of Black bodies, rejecting Western representation of those bodies, and in the process, creating what she calls forms of non-portraiture. It is interesting to compare this work with Nan Goldin’s blurred vase of what looks like a bouquet of cherry blossoms set in front of a window, 1st Days in Quarantine, Brooklyn, NY (2020), whose elegiac indeterminacy evokes the anxieties and dislocation of those early pandemic times.

Art, no matter what form it takes or whatever its purpose, is inevitably both a record of and a guide to seeing. By blocking or pausing immediate apprehension and naming, the act of blurring addresses the act of seeing. Frustrating the desire for clarity, coherence, and immediacy, this most cogent form of visual ambiguity forces us to look harder and to integrate imprecision into our understanding. Out of Focus is an ambitious and far-reaching presentation of this important yet often overlooked facet of artmaking.