By contrast, Judy Natal's Neon Boneyard: Las Vegas A-Z does a familiar two-step titled "The Boneyard Romp." Loose a photographer in the Neon Museum's fabled scrap heap of salvaged casino signs and let the platitudes roll. Nothing lasts in this town. Today the jackpot, tomorrow jack-squat. All our yesterdays, lighted fools, yada yada, dusty death.
Taken together, the two shows do more than tempt reflection on "things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete." They demonstrate how the camera and the photographic process tease that notion. Nothing is as evanescent as reality in the subjective lens.
It is useful to imagine each photographer operating in the other's setting. Had Natal made a large, rectangular landscape in saturated colors, comprising fields, a foreground scarecrow and a middle-distance steeple, it might have struck a mildly poignant note in an otherwise frank melody about season and tradition. But Fournet's pinhole-effect and tight focus, particularly in "Potok, Slovakia, 2005," suggests a color-blind eye succumbing to macular degeneration, effortfully scrutinizing a wind-ravaged avatar of the past. Fournet might well have found a similar conceit in, say, Mr. O'Lucky. The symbol of Fitzgerald's—plump, green-suited and bespectacled—lies on his side, broken arm still clutching the bowler with which he once saluted suckers. But Natal's deceptively blunt, richly toned print trains a clear, uncomplicated eye on the open coffin of a favorite uncle you'd just seen, about a mile away, full of vigor.
This is an absurd proposal, of course; each photographer, tasked with the other's project, might have settled on her strategy. But strategy is the point.
Fournet, who earned her MFA at Memphis State University, lives in New Orleans, but she directs an academic exchange program in Prague. She started photographing scarecrows in the Czech Republic in 1993, eventually moving into more rural areas of Slovakia and Poland. In addition to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, she associated her project with the hard-to-translate Czech word litost. On a website about Sticks, Stones & Bones (http://www.photomediacenter.org/Fournet/Fournethome.html), Fournet quotes Milan Kundera on the word: "... a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse and an indefinable longing."
From this tangle of elegant emotions Fournet weaves a visual style that begs for the adjective "haunting." If her scarecrows fail to frighten their avian targets, they might at least torture them with exquisite regret. As she explains on the website, the grandmotherly craft of scarecrow-making has faded in modernity's post-Soviet advance, leaving behind crossed sticks that slowly shed tattered sweaters. The church in "Potok, Slovakia, 2005" helps evoke yet another element in the emotional mix. As the scarecrows in prints such as "Dukla Pass, Slovakia, 2005" and "Liptovsky, Mikulas, Slovakia, 2004" lose their garments, they reveal a cross.
Strangely, though, the pictures without scarecrows resonate more. "Praha, Czech Republic, 2004" presents a wall of worn plaster with a wooden door. For reasons that can only be guessed, a tree hard by the wall has bent left toward the door, then straightened. The image is both stark and tender; you want to pretend the tree was lonely. In "Kuks, Czech Republic, 2003," a dog in the middle distance regards a heap in the foreground, which resolves into a wrapped figure whose hand grasps the wall below—but whether the figure is human or sculpted (and to what end?) is unclear.
These are more about life's mystery than its transience. But the latter theme is never far from these prints. A medallion of compressed skulls and bones in "Melnik, Czech Republic, 1999" could be evidence of genocide or a memento mori—in "Sedlec, Czech Republic, 2005" ribbons of skulls and bones festoon the ceiling vaults of a church, with a statue of Baby Jesus presiding. That this grisly folkway might lapse, too, only heightens the disturbing nature of the image.
Natal's large color prints are weighted and hung by paperclips, a matter-of-fact presentation that underlines the utter absence of mystery or mysticism. Instead, she has taken the prosaic approach of locating the alphabet in the boneyard's flamboyant leavings. Given that these are, after all, signs, this need not be a challenge, but Natal neatly avoids the obvious. In some cases, a letter from another sign accents the subject—"A," for instance, appears to the right rear of the recumbent Fitzgerald's totem. Seemingly by way of closing a circle, the title letter of "Z" is from an old El Cortez sign, which appears by the fugitive hand of the Fitzgerald's figure.
Mostly Natal composes her images from a flat, straightforward manner, but occasionally she imposes a vertiginous angle. The "K" of the word "luck" appears to be falling off an arched armature, as if it were "running out" in the turn of fortune's wheel. "H" pulls its subject from a lightbulb-dotted pattern that has no lettering—without the purpose of verbal signification, it serves only as backdrop to a propped-up oval sign with the smiling Colonel Sanders, of KFC fame.
Natal, a professor of photography at Chicago's Columbia College, certainly is not the first person to pick up on the notion that the naming of things amounts to claiming them. In this case, the alphabet seems to reassert itself in ways not intended by those who originally displayed the signs—perhaps this invalidates their claims. And as the desert reasserts itself amid the debris, it seems to confirm transience at work. "E" is for "entropy."
But "E" in this setting is the last letter of "Horseshoe," whose remnants turn up in several of Natal's prints. That name-turned-brand offers instruction. Dissociated by legal nicety from its literal landmark (the casino is now just Binion's), it no longer names a place but rather an idea: Poker, Benny-style. You can view this two ways. One, the Horseshoe is no more, and its broken sign typifies the accelerated pace of transience in this town. Two, all of this jetsam testifies to the permanence of Las Vegas as idea, as brand. The signs change, but the subject remains the same: $.
Herein lies the essential difference between transience in Eastern Europe and vicissitude à la Vegas. The mystical folkways of lands kept artificially backward by repressive ideology are starting to follow a natural path of collapse. Blame this on globalism or capitalism if you want, but it happens. In Las Vegas, however, nothing really changes. That we save discarded casino signs implies a desire for self-certifying history, for permanence of a sort. It also suggests that the essentials remain the same.