Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle

Now I know what Walter Benjamin meant by aura. Sometimes an image will seem to have a soul, so powerfully affective is its halo-like quality, its uniqueness, its presence, its authenticity and unabashed display of beauty. Such was an image I viewed last Tuesday at Windows: A Retrospective of Philip H. Red Eagle at the Leonor R. Fuller Gallery near Olympia, Washington. The image was titled Foggy Sunset and is a photograph. Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction eroded an artwork’s aura by its one-step removal from the immediacy and inimitable singularity of its moment in space and time. Reproduction is, by default, a degradation. To listen to a CD or streaming service of Miles Davis’s “So What” isn’t the same as hearing Davis perform live at the Village Vanguard. You’d have to be a bit old to make that claim, but so what? The point is a lesson in discernment. Nothing beats immediacy, the qualia of a particular moment. We live in a universe of improvisation. Spinning yo-yos and spilled sugar. Orb webs beaded with dew. These things are true. But isn’t it possible, as with this particular photograph, that the aura has in no way been harmed by a perceived detachment from its original setting, but generates, out of its own uniqueness, its language of light and shadow, its liminal and irreproducible position at the threshold of the divine, an aura redolent of an individual’s diffusion into that beauty, and its uncanny stillness?  The act of creation has its own immediacy. The camera registers the visible in a simple click of the shutter, but it’s the dilation of an enchanted mind that carries its visions and apparitions into the light. “To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy,” declared Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

The mood is serene, crepuscular. A bright sun crosses a narrow wooden bridge traversing a small narrow pedestrian bridge with two towering evergreens to the far left, a cluster of shrubs, dark and well-defined in the immediate foreground, a tree in the center receding, phantom-like, into the mist and off to the far right – muted as a parenthetical remark - the limbs of a tree just barely visible, so veined and delicate they could be the nervous system of a very pale ghost. Also faintly bordering on invisibility is a streetlamp and a street sign. Most of the scene is void, nothingness and mist. The world appears softened, hypnotized into an exquisitely serene Elysium so pure in its twilight vision the ugliest despair couldn’t crawl its way in, or eat a hole in the glamour. And there goes the sun, rolling homeward to night, and dawn in another part of the world.

The entire scene would repose in a serene uniformity of mist were it not for several more contrasting details that excite a deeper reading: in the far upper left is a sharp, steel-like, triangular section of what I’m guessing is the overhang of a roof. It’s aggressive, a Darth Vader-like thrust from the industrial world of commerce and finance into this nirvana of fog and ease of letting go. The triangular section – shaped somewhat like an arrowhead - is matched by a smaller version lower down. Together, they seem more like clumsy intrusions, awkward displacements, than a deliberate attack, or an aggressive, colonizing force. They’re just there. Twin architectural forms remindful of what everybody loves calling the real world (overcrowded freeways, healthcare snafus, broken pipes, hysterical outbursts, greasy combs, existential dilemmas, supervillain tech giants, drug gangs, military strikes, drones, arcades, helicopters, etc.), caught in a moment of harmless tranquility like two corporate moguls peeking into the ultramundane.

I became engrossed in a number of photographs – a very up close and personal view of a clematis in one photograph, and a rose in another, both highly sensual, intensely actual and detailed – and a large, open view of two American battleships off the coast of Vietnam, circa the late 60s or early 70s, in other words the Vietnam War, with a Vietnamese fisherwoman in the foreground wearing a broad-brimmed nón lá, or “leaf hat,” maneuvering a small boat with a long bamboo pole, poised with seeming unconcern. Her face is shadowed by the broad brim of her hat and completely hidden, so we do not know what she might be thinking, or if there were visible on her face any expression revealing her mood, or disposition. This makes the photograph a hallmark of wartime ambiguity. There are no explosions, nothing ripping the air apart with death and shrapnel. It’s simply a moment of calm in a universe of spectacular volatility.

In the middle of the gallery was a dugout canoe crafted by hand and using an array of tools such as an adz for rough shaping, chisels and gouges for fine details. The canoe is named Flicker, and was the first dugout canoe Red Eagle worked on, setting up shop in 2005 in the Tacoma Art Museum parking lot. Work was finished in the summer of 2008. Flicker was put in the water and paddled up to Cowitchen up on Vancouver Island. “Merrie was skippering,” Red Eagle relates, “and was not happy about taking so much water while traveling thru the San Juans, so we added the cover on the stern. We also thinned out the hull and used her on the journey to Suquamish where we gifted it to our lead carver, David Wilson (Lummi).  He used her on several journeys.  Recently, Flicker (Dave renamed her ‘The Gift’) had been sitting a lot at his house. When we asked to use her for the exhibit, he noted that he was getting ready to refurbish her and start using her to do some traditional style fishing.”

My father was a designer, so I grew up with an appreciation for good design, and a particular fascination with the fusion of functionality and beauty. On display above Flicker was an array of paddles, and above them – hanging like scrolls – were drawings of the paddles, very precisely drawn, with numbered sections for aid in the carving process. Red Eagle picked one up and handed it to me: I was struck immediately by its sensuous shape and texture. It was wonderfully smooth and the curves were a pleasure to run my fingers over and around and under and across. I can only imagine the added pleasure of moving one of these paddles in the water and watching the swirls pass by in a sunlit glitter. “For the paddle blanks I used a grid form to make it easier to cut away the wood to make the paddle,” Red Eagle relates. “I started when I had heard about the Chief Leschi paddle that was at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. I knew the director from Udub and she agreed to show me and further allowed me to make a drawing and thus come up with the Grid Layout of the paddles. I have made several designs using this method. I used this methodology to teach the Udub students for carving their paddles.”

Red Eagle relates that he began his work in photography in the summer of 1976, when he was living in Sitka, Alaska. He used a Canon F-1 35mm camera loaded with Kodak Kodachrome ASA 25 film. One photograph in particular – a panoramic view of an intensely bright sun blazing through a thin, diaphanous mist over a range of mountains. The sun is moving over a range of mountains and shooting a streak of phenomenally bright light across the water; a few dark rocks accentuate the celestial power of the light, creating a dramatic contrast between the romantic splendor of the atmosphere and the silent dignity of earthbound objects. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson legendarily put high value on what he termed the “decisive moment,” a perfect, fleeting moment that reveal a deeper truth about life. I see that same principle here. Red Eagle’s photographs are éclats of sudden recognition, epiphanies of light that evoke occasions of sublimity and deep spiritual connection with forces external and supernal.

Other photographs, taken, I assume, at a much later date, are more human oriented, focused especially on the female form. One in particular perplexed me a little, it seemed so at odds with the serene intimacies of the other photographs. A beautiful woman with long black hair sits next to a tall accent table supporting a large Oriental vase with a bright white chrysanthemum in it. The woman appears to be in a state of crushing despair. Her head is bowed, and supported by her right hand, which is clutching her hair, and her pale left arm extends down, bends at the elbow as her forearm rests on the arm of her chair. Her upper torso is bare and a breast is partially revealed under her arm. The woman’s form is so gracefully curvaceous it feels like music, soft, sorrowful, and fascinating, a kind of stillness in movement. My wife and I both agreed that there was something Pre-Raphaelite about it; it evinced the kind of Gothic, aestheticized realism of the Pre-Raphaelites, artists like Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and John Everett Millais. I was surprised to discover the photograph was part of a project Red Eagle was working on in 1988 called American Kimono. Kimono, in Japanese, means something to wear, and there was something incontrovertibly bare and unadorned about this woman, not just physically, but emotionally. This was a woman open to view under a sheet of glass in a deeply private moment, an individual experiencing a level of emotional distress familiar to everyone, but doing so with a posture and gracefulness so remarkable it felt rude to look, and even more rude to walk away.

Another nude featured a young woman sitting in a lotus position on smooth floor, her arm reaching behind as she leans back in voluptuous ease, breasts exposed, a Japanese fan splayed by her side. She is wearing a shirt or robe, unbuttoned and loose as an afterthought.

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart,” remarked Henri Cartier Bresson. I can think of no simpler way to describe my immersion in Red Eagle’s photographs. They tend to coax one into a fuller state of being with their seductive intensity, their depth of caring about a world whose beauty is generously offered daily to anyone disposed to enter into that proposal. I’m glad we made the drive down to Olympia, and were treated to iced tea and the best cheesecake I’ve ever had at the Cascadia Grill on 4^th Avenue West, surrounded by hundreds of photographs, people, mostly, who’d come from Olympia: Dave Grohl, Judy Collins, Matt Groening, and many other less familiar faces. Time felt open and broad and generous, like a canoe on the Salish Sea.