Though he died on November 17, 2012, at the age of 86, the presence of Canadian artist Arnaud Maggs is being keenly felt in Toronto this week. Tonight sees the world premiere of Spring & Arnaud—a new documentary about him and his wife, artist Spring Hurlbut—at Hot Docs. And on Wednesday, the Ryerson Image Centre opens a solo exhibition for Contact that includes works curated by the artist in his final months. (Soon, Steidl will also release a book related to his work.) In this essay, Arnaud’s friend David Dorenbaum—a psychoanalyst in private practice and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto—peels back some of the layers of his oeuvre.
The death of Arnaud Maggs in November brought to an end the inquisitive mind of an artist whose trajectory is almost impossible to characterize. Graphic designer, fashion photographer, portrait photographer—these were only a few of the many hats that Arnaud wore over the span of his 86 years.
As often is the case with such protean spirits, he was also an avid collector, acquiring and archiving objects that ranged from antique envelopes to stained notebooks. His death has been, one might say, his way of ending the collection.
What did it mean for Arnaud to collect? I believe that it was a private matter, and at the same time I believe that it was an intricate component in his manner of creating publicly displayed works. Looking back at his collection, it is very difficult to get a sense of unity among the objects included. Yet many of these found objects also became harmoniously coherent in his body of work.
Take, for example, Manomètre (2011), which consists of a photograph of the cover of a Dadaist review from 1924 that Arnaud found in a second-hand bookstore in Paris. He once told me that the moment he saw that cover, he felt as if he had been the one who designed it. The power of the instant identification he had with the object made it irresistible. He had to have it because he could have been the one who created it!
Some time later, as Arnaud photographed the cover of Manomètre in the studio and produced his own work from it, he retroactively became its creator. This is the kind of situation that one reads about in the fantastical stories of Jorge Luis Borges—but it was all real life for Arnaud.
In the face of their disparity, the objects in Arnaud’s collection seem, to me, to have been held together by a form of tension. I am referring here to an irresistible force that led him first to acquire them, and later on to turn them into the subject of his own artistic investigations. Arnaud had the capacity to look at these objects and photograph them without dissolving their mystery. This was his way of doing justice to the objects he photographed.
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The same could be said about the vast series of portraits he produced, like André Kertész: 144 Views (1980). In capturing what was offered to his gaze, Arnaud was able to apprehend the multiplicity of images contained in each person. He was also able to evoke the estrangement that a hundred images of the same person can generate. To paraphrase French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, a game of repetition is at issue here, a system that operates from one present to another present. Through this provocative device, Arnaud’s work invites us to apprehend the unity of the object from outside of itself.
In his final show at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto—“After Nadar”—which was followed by the last major exhibition of his lifetime at the National Gallery in Ottawa, Arnaud presented a collection of photographs that he produced of himself as the French mime Pierrot. The poses and compositions of the photographs were borrowed from Nadar’s 1854 series of photographs of this performer.
Arnaud very much admired the quality of Nadar’s work. He once told me he was fascinated that in Nadar’s portraits, the subjects appear incredibly alive. In his After Nadar photographs—some of which will be on display in the upcoming Ryerson Image Centre show—Arnaud repeated Nadar’s work. Through the wonder of a repetition that is capable of crystallizing difference, Arnaud managed, in his own way, to capture that same aliveness.
In Arnaud’s self-portraits, I see his masterful manner of working, his incredible capacity for self-transformation. I can see the way in which he plays and displays himself as he explains to us what he is doing. Arnaud: the photographer of gestures. Arnaud: traversing the limit from one side to the other. This manner of working is unmistakably his: It invites a good laugh. Everything is extreme in his resolution as an artist. He makes no concessions.
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Over the years, Arnaud and I cultivated a kinship of minds. His analytic interest in details and his insistence on the enlargement of fragments became points of intersection between our respective fields of photography and psychoanalysis.
In one of the last conversations we had prior to the decline of his health, Arnaud caught me by surprise. He swiftly got his camera out from his knapsack and requested to photograph one of my ears. He told me that this was a project he had been working on for some time. The experience was daunting.
Since Arnaud preferred plain light, he insisted that we go outside. Standing at the edge of Spadina Circle, I found myself being photographed sideways by Arnaud.
Arnaud took his time. People kept passing by. They must have wondered, Why is one person trying to introduce the lens of a camera into the ear of another? The lens kept getting closer and closer to my ear to the point that I could hear the innermost sounds of the camera’s mechanism.
Camera aside, I could almost hear the sound of Arnaud’s pupil adjusting in his eye while he was focusing, regulating the amount of light, the time of exposure, and his proximity to the subject. This is when the surprise took place: Time stopped, and for an infinite instant the eye of the photographer and the ear of the psychoanalyst were connected by a click. Voila!
The magic of that day is long gone—but the man who created it remains deeply missed.
