Robert Flick’s career is exciting. Born in Holland in 1939, the artist emigrated to North America by the 1960s and had work featured in publications as early as 1966. He has been exhibiting since the 1960s, and his work is featured in many institutions; yet, he is not easily placed in any respective movement, although his work could be considered conceptual. Several early series also feel prototypical of the New Topographics movement, with series such as Midwest Diary and Arena making considerations into subject matter and uniformity of aesthetics that would later qualify the New Topographics output. With this in mind, it is fair to suggest that the work, although in line with those tendencies, had its orbit and is unique. That Flick is not better-known is surprising.
When I first came across Flick’s work, it was in his retrospective book Trajectories, published by Steidl in 2005. The book was something of a conundrum for me when I purchased a copy in the mid-2010s, as I sensed a sense of Americana in the work. Still, it also had a feeling of dispassionate post-war European minimalism that bridged these two worlds. I was reminded of Henry Wessel in places as well as Chargesheimer. I could sense a hint of Ruscha and Baltz, but I didn’t feel that the Bechers were far behind. What stood out to me the most was how to place the work in the context of Flick’s large sequencing swathes; the epic composites made a direct bridge toward cinema. I could sense Richter in the job, as well as synaesthesically hear orchestral patterns that swept the images up in great, heaving waves, crescendoing back into quiet lulls that were like movements in classical music. I have been drawn to photography and audio before, and in Flick’s work, the movement elicited this feeling in me, as well as another key factor: cinematic gesture.
With the use of such large sweeps of sequences, Flick’s work is hard to disentangle from the notion of filmmaking. One sees the composites, and at first, they appear like mosaics until one reads them in stanzas. This moment-to-moment alliteration asks less about the single image than it does about the flow of imagery to create a cohesive flex between the still and moving image, if not words. Sometimes feeling like a panorama, or a visual form of prose writing, these clusters, or cosmologies of images, stand as attempts to relate time to the viewer, if also to place. The effort seems to simultaneously acknowledge photography’s medium-specificity and its pursuit of single images, while also criticizing its efforts, or at the very least, linking it to other forms, such as cinema. This would not be out of place during the 60s and 70s when cinema’s hold, both arthouse and popular, captured the world’s attention.
In LA Diary, published by eminent Nazraeli Press in 2016, this attraction to the multiplicity of images is instead less about a sequential run of images next to one another than it is about the idea of cinematic exchange through the effect of montage. Running the film through the camera twice, or experimenting with multiple exposures, creates a less specific outcome and relinquishes control over the frame to serendipity, thereby breaking any notion of the singular moment or its relationship to indexicality. Instead, we are given several images stacked on top of one another to sift through, creating formalist compositions and hallucinogenic filters to adjust for. The haze of these images creates a type of slippage in our understanding. They seem to move and oscillate the longer one looks at them, and the montage effect is reminiscent of early silent film montages from Sergei Eisenstein to Orson Welles. This is where LA Diary as an object takes form. It is a vast world of images slipcased in a large volume of Flick’s works, scaled and printed to a nearly monumental book size that allows the viewer to get lost in the morass of these Frankensteinian creations.
“I was also quite poor and had a limited amount of film. I kept some several dozen self-rolled films in a shoebox; whenever I went out I would reach in for four or five of them, and return them back into the box when exposed, leaving a snippet of leader so the film could be reused. I would have absolutely no idea what was on which film I put in my camera.
At the time I would think of film as an endless continuum, and there was a wish to acknowledge that aspect visually … the idea of multiple exposures was linked to ideas about simultaneity, the use of the “I Ching” and “there is no such thing as accident”. I photographed in this manner for a period of three years.”-Robert Flick
What appeals to me about the Flick quote is the honesty in his use of class position as a catalyst to explore his creativity. Being poor is sometimes the mother of invention, no matter the suffering involved. That he reused rolls of film to create palimpsests per celluloid frame is not a first, but in the case of considering economic displacement as a lever for making these images, it certainly adds to their charm and mystique. It is also a grave reflection of the times, from what I can understand. The 1960s and 1970s, or how I am told America functioned during that time, were politically and socially chaotic, with unrest stemming from America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, fostering a sense of listlessness, much like how we understand the forever wars my generation has suffered through. A desire for change against the established order was a sentiment shared by many, with alternative utopianist movements championed by hippies, who promoted slogans of free love and anti-war.
These movements were pitted against several political assassinations and social unrest, with civil rights progressivism and feminist movements guiding the conversation. It was a time of strife, but also a queer optimism that the American Dream, bought and sold could be reclaimed from the arms syndicates, the bigots, and the tyrants. In retrospect, this generation and time were profoundly impactful for what it desired, but did not achieve. The youth of the ’60s and ’70s eventually led the way to neoliberalism and corporate boomer culture, which seems the antithesis of that golden moment. This is not to slight those whose motivations were pure, but rather to comment on where it all ended. You can feel this tension in Flick’s images, where he dissects and runs themes of death and disorder in with the flower children of the time, while using L.A., its freeway arteries, and its cityscape against skulls, Victorian homes straight out of Hitchcock’s Psycho, all of which promote a sense of disillusioning grandeur.
LA Diary is an immersive and engaging way to delve into the history of the American 1960s and 1970s without having to bear the weight of its written history. It comes across more as a feeling than an outright diatribe. Nazraeli has done an excellent job using the American Standard reference to Warhol on the cover, the petrol nation, and its holy grail of symbols. The size of the book allows one to dwell within the images, each blown up to roughly 24 x 30 inches when opened, with images filling the entire double spread. I feel lost looking through each montage, and it is overpowering, which is the intended effect. Superbly handled and well worth picking up! 350 copies, get one!