Bechtle on Memory
by Jake Erlewine
How can artists visualize memory? The struggle to depict that which was once perceived visually but is now unable to be physically perceived is a problem of representation that has confounded artists since time immemorial. While, as Linda Nochlin states, “the act of perception is… conditioned… by time, place, and concrete situation, ” memory serves as a modality through which to view life through the conditions of a different time. The acknowledgment of the inability to completely divest art of its ties to place, time, and culture is what separates the work of Robert Bechtle (and that of the broader 1960s New Realist movement generally) from the work of previous Realists. This was accomplished primarily through the alchemical transformation of memory from film to paint, using medium to reflect the process of remembrance by combining the objective and subjective. While for many Photorealists, this transformation mirrors the broader mechanisms at play within the contemporary reception of photography, Bechtle uses this to create self-conscious works of painting that are aware of their distance from the photographic medium.
Bechtle, an artist born and taught in the San Francisco Bay Area, is most famous for his paintings of the suburban environment in which he lived, emphasizing the presence of the automobile. His 1974 painting Alameda Gran Torino (fig. 1) embodies the tense and exacting realism that he practiced. Objects such as cars take up monumental positions within a larger suburban canvas but are never lent any monumentality – these are things that are always seen, but rarely noticed. Within this specific painting, viewers are presented with a rearward shot of a Gran Torino station wagon parked in the driveway of a single-family home. Light plays a paramount role in driving the tension of the composition – the ethereal reflection of the California sun off the hood stands in stark contrast to the jarring shadow of the car on the driveway’s concrete. Apart from this first impression, Bechtle’s work requires the kind of absorptive ‘close looking’ championed by art historians such as Michael Fried, as the car itself is rendered in painstaking detail; one can even locate the exact dealership where it was purchased on the license plate. While recessionals (formed by the wagon’s wood paneling as well as the mortar on the driveway) do project inward to the center-left of the canvas, suggesting movement, the most apparent quality of the scene is that of stillness. This can be interpreted as a sign of the temporality of memory – although the car which Bechtle saw can move, this representation of a car is a phenomenon in and of itself, tied to a time, a place, and a concrete situation. For this artist, it is the 1960s suburban Bay Area that he called home. Bechtle uses this Husserlian bracketing of the Gran Torino to ask timeless questions about living in such a world based on his own experiences – in his own words, the car “is dumb [as a subject], but it’s very American”.
Robert Bechtle, Alameda Gran Torino, 1974. Oil on canvas. 122 x175 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
To fully understand how Bechtle displays memory self-consciously, it is important to discuss his method of production. Like many of his Photorealist colleagues, he projected a film slide onto a canvas, which served as a diagram for an underpainting that he usually completed in umber. This is worth noting for several reasons, chief among them being that Bechtle’s creative process uses looking at art as a linchpin for creation. The artist is forced to both physically and mentally reckon with an artwork to create an (arguably) totally separate work. In this sense, Bechtle betrays his spectators by concealing the fact that he, at a different stage in the artistic process, was a spectator himself. This theme of forcing the subjective upon the objective continued in his colouring technique. To this point, Bechtle remarked that “It’s paradoxical. You’re wanting to get away from a photographic look… even though that’s not possible, totally”. Instead of simply selecting and transcribing color in service of achieving verisimilitude, Bechtle would complete the colouring of the scene, and then spend a period adding arbitrary marks before adding finishing details to make the painting “more layered, not quite as tightly finished, and more interesting to do”. At this stage, it is clear that Bechtle is self-conscious about his works’ status as ‘meta-pictures,’ or as WJT Mitchell puts it, pictures that offer “a second-order discourse that tells us… something about pictures.” The artist quite literally layers levels of obfuscation and subjection upon an objective base, nesting orders of representation on top of one another to make a larger self-reference to the picture’s transformation from film to paint. This is not unlike the process through which memory changes over time. Beginning with the witnessing of a physical event, a memory can influenced over time by subsequent memories and experiences, to the point that the content of the memory itself can be altered. The memory does not become completely false, but a distortion of the truth has taken place. Bechtle’s willful distortion of the photographic form – and his concealment of this distortion from the viewer within the gallery – pushes his work into a unique liminal space between the didacticism of photography and the subjectiveness of high oil painting. This is a place where realism is assured, yet nonexistent.
Robert Bechtle, Portrero Hill, 1996. Oil on canvas. 91 x 168 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
We can go further. If Bechtle’s work consists of meta-pictures, then those who look at his work become meta-viewers. If paintings like Alameda Gran Torino truly reflect the artist’s experience of a phenomenon, then we become a second-order party to that phenomenon, and its objectivity becomes ever more distorted. To see Bechtle’s work to a Northern Californian, or even as an American more broadly, is an exercise in celebrating one’s own memories of the banal, of the days in Suburbia where nothing happens and life unfolds under the scorching California sun and impressing these upon Bechtle’s canvases. This artist meditates upon the shared experience of growing up in this environment, yet forces us as spectators to reconcile with the fact that these memories are only as objective as the beholder thinks they are.
Bibliography:
Fried, Michael. “The Primacy of Absorption” in Absorption and Theatricality, 1980.
“Interview with Robert Bechtle.” 2012. Walkerart.org. 2012. https://walkerart.org/magazine/interview-with-robert-bechtle.
Loftus, Elizabeth F. “Leading questions and the eyewitness report”, Cognitive Psychology, Volume 7, Issue 4.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press.
Nochlin, Linda. "Realism Now," in Realism Now catalogue (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College Art Gallery, 1968), reprinted in Battcock, Super Realism.