The Artist As a Lonely Hunter
By Andrea DenHoed
Photograph by Fumi Ishino / Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery
In the poem “Lonely Hunter,” by Fiona MacLeod (the pen name of the Scottish writer William Sharp), the speaker asks, “Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring? / What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?” Despite the speaker’s disavowal of singing, a reader can see that the poem itself is a song—that absence has given rise to substance. The poem’s refrain later became the title of Carson McCullers’s strange and haunting 1940 novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” which similarly deals with isolation, but also with the energy derived from private longing, as when Mick, a young girl who loves music but has little access to it, hears Beethoven for the first time:
How did it come? For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or a march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. The music was her—the real plain her.
If the photography exhibit “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” currently on view at Fraenkel Gallery, in San Francisco, is about loneliness, it is about loneliness as an innate human condition—one that gives us both the room and the reason to create. Some of the pieces in the exhibit seem to speak to solitude as we might normally think of it: a photo by Matthew Connors shows an old man in a white T-shirt and khaki shorts—it could be somebody’s grandpa—looking tiny and starkly alone as he stands on an empty sidewalk, accompanied only by the shadow of someone standing outside the frame. In other pictures, loneliness looks more like idiosyncrasy: a voluptuously curved gourd on a floral tablecloth, photographed by Heather Rasmussen, could be an expression of the individual mind’s unpredictable sallies against the world’s neatly printed expectations. In a photo by David Alekhuogie, the bright-yellow cover of the Roy Ayers album “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” glows in the midst of the cold steel of a science lab, like a private but persistent preoccupation.
The exhibition’s curator, the photographer Katy Grannan, is known for her own stark and sometimes disconcerting portraits. She said that she hoped, through this show, to explore the itchy and obsessive side of the artistic process. “Making art is born of necessity and it’s an ongoing process—responding to the world and continuously moving forward, occasionally hitting on something then plodding ahead,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Each artist has a very particular way of seeing and responding to the world, and that was the thing that interested me most—the pathos, the discomfort, the circling around and around again.”
