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Frozen Moments

Jane Hammond sounded more bemused or bewildered than upset. At her opening, she kept having to explain the obvious: she had doctored these images. She had not spent years searching magazine archives for such improbable conjunctions. She had not photographed them all herself.

How could anyone dedicated enough to seek out the artist get her so wrong? Black swans do not float through inner cities, as if a catastrophic flood had turned faceless apartment complexes into the canals of old Europe. Acrobats could not sustain their three-tiered pyramid through a life-drawing class. A bride and groom would not walk a narrow aisle between white-robed, decaying mummies. Besides, as a 2005 show of spiritualist fakery proved yet again at the Met, photographs do lie, and the photocollage predates even Analytic Cubism. Surely by now, after Photoshop and its abuses, just about everyone takes skepticism for granted. Jane Hammond’s Can You Draw This? (Galerie Lelong, 2008)

She deserves the compliment of belief all the same. Hammond titles the works “Photographs,” at Galerie Lelong through October 11, and it took time and patience to find their uncanny elements. Some of them recur in isolation, sharing a matte with snapshots of her own, many of herself. She looks out in varying degrees of art and artlessness—as a child, in perhaps the stylish 1960s with a camera, and older. A typical visitor lingers most over these two-dimensional photo albums. Could they reframe the entire show as autobiography?

Even with obvious cutting and pasting, the collages offer another recent history as well. Perhaps, as Sigmund Freud knew, the uncanny always looks familiar. However, Hammond captures a style, at the end of the Eisenhower era, when irony was about to erupt into a culture war. Gary Winogrand might have snapped that nude bather sharing the foot of a waterfall with an elephant. Diane Arbus might have photographed Zwei Frauen mit Streifen—a blond and brunette on the same striped bedspread in the same striped dresses, doppelgängers but hardly twins. Hollywood might have happily staged the dancers and accordionists descending a villa’s grand staircase.

Like the two women, the heritage of these works weaves between Europe and America. The statue of a Greek god reclines on a front porch, contemplating freshly fallen snow. A man in a goat’s head takes archery practice while tending a herd of sheep, like the missing link between the American west and tribal rituals. That heritage also includes Modernism. A black-and-white collage with sexual innuendo just has to recall Hans Bellmer and Surrealism. More recently in grisaille paint, Mark Tansey has punned on the frozen moment of life drawing with an atomic explosion.

Still, the temptation to seek out the artist makes some sense. A collage is somehow precarious, like photography’s traditional frozen moment. In one, a daredevil or failed climber hangs from a rock, itself balancing in space thanks to geologic processes. In the photo albums, the acrobatic pyramid recurs most often after Hammond herself. If one thinks that beauty depends on balance and harmony, that, too, will seem a little less certain and less realistic now. It will also help one understand a good liar.

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