Painted Photo Backdrops and Colonial Culture
When I saw The Last Supper in person for the first time I was shocked to discover that it was essentially not there. The banquet scene is so much a given in our memory that one superimposes what the fresco might originally have looked like onto the faded shadows occupying the wall today. Without such psychological preparation, however, I suspect that the wall would appear empty. These precious smudges are wonderful, but so is the willingness of our kind to stare at them and claim to see the face of Jesus. The Berticevich Collection is also made up of adumbrations—shadowy outlined sketches that obscure as much as they reveal.
George C. Berticevich travels the world in search of the fading, wrecked leavings of an Edwardian colonial commercial practice. The painted backdrop—inspired by theatrical sets—was invented to solve the problem created by being photographed standing awkwardly in an empty room. It also created an opportunity to add subjective context within the otherwise objective document of the photograph. The popularity and transportability of the camera spread this practice throughout the world, and it's no surprise that Berticevich has found his backdrops in India, China, Burma, Malaysia, Bali, Java, Mexico and the Bay Area. The bulk of the work in this exhibition dates from the 1920s through to the 1980s.
The backdrops in this exhibition are mostly tempera on cotton, about four yards wide and three yards or more high. The images generally depict what Europeans one hundred years ago thought of as an idealized locale: formal gardens, gothic mansions, dreamy landscapes, opulent homes. Overlaid with such themes is the Western idea of the exotic: many backdrops portray once-famous sites in Asia, or hackneyed notions of ravenous tigers and moonlit temples. Colonial culture never could replace indigenous civilization. The colonized peoples protected their own culture and allowed the erection of a hybrid world into which elements of both the colonial and the indigenous were insinuated. George C. Berticivech's collection epitomizes this complex melding of two societies alongside an interest common to most cultures—the world of appearances.
A poignant aspect of these works is their sense of incompleteness. Landscape painting seems to argue that nature is complete and indifferent to human presence. The absence of human subjects is palpable in these backdrops. But to our great satisfaction, the collection and the exhibition are augmented by vintage photographs taken in front of these very canvases, or by ones much like them. Hence, we are able to study the carriage, the costumes, objects held by these people that complete the aesthetic circle in a highly moving way. As the first generation able to see what the world actually looked like a hundred years before us, we simultaneously know that these figures are also receding from us. As the eye travels from empty backdrop to inhabited photograph to the contemporary absence of these subjects, a kind of psychological and visual time travel occurs. Everywhere the eye stops, the covert text of this work speaks about human vanity in the light of the human tragedy that time imposes.
These objects are beautiful but not in any traditional sense. Sometimes they are like folk art—untrained but highly effective. Sometimes they are like kitsch—mass-produced imagery that can become charming over time. Almost always these images are portals that allow us to step back into the taste and values of the era of their making. In their unrepaired states, many of these backdrops have a certain fog-bound, hand-from-the-grave allure in their decaying surfaces. These are vernacular art objects, the high-toned cousins of carnival signs and tattoo flash.
A second meaning of "adumbration" is an intimation of the future that arrives offering an obscure glimpse of what is to come. These photo backdrops and accompanying photographs play backwards and forwards with that sense of the word. Berticevich's collection offers us veiled hints at what is in store for us by having to confront fading images of our collective grandparents.