The Kinetic Imagination of Gary Hallman

By Robert Silberman, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Art
University of Minnesota

When Gary Hallman was five years old, his father took him to a bluff overlooking downtown St. Paul. There, he opened up the back of the family camera and inserted a piece of wax paper. On it appeared an image of the city, inverted: magic. This experience led the young tyro to become hooked on photography and eventually to an outstanding career as an artist and a teacher.

Hallman may have been serious about photography from an early age, but his career path had its twists and turns. The Navy ignored his request to serve as a photographer and made him an air traffic controller. Later, when he entered the University of Minnesota, he became a political science major “thinking law school,” until classes in international law, constitutional law, and business law convinced him that he did not want to be an attorney. Courses with Katherine Nash in the Art Department convinced him that he did want to be an artist.

Hallman began graduate school as a sculpture student, in spite of his involvement with photography. But he was attracted by the intense activity and debates among the photographers, and what he describes as “the endless possibilities of photography.” Hallman’s career coincides with one of the great periods in photography, from the time when it was becoming established in academia and the art world, to its transformation from a film-based medium to a digital one. In 1993 Hallman gave up his darkroom and went digital, a pioneering move.

In retrospect, it is apparent that Hallman’s artistic development has relied on both deliberate choices and serendipity. Early on, when he was trying to capture decisive moments out in the world, he took an extraordinary photograph of some men on Rose Day at the Rosedale Mall. His somewhat unusual response was, “I can never do that again.” He believed he had to shape the content more, and not be at the mercy of circumstances to reward his efforts.

What was arguably Hallman’s breakthrough resulted from a darkroom accident that provided a method for making “luscious” prints. He used the technique with his best-known picture, a night shot of foliage in a Minneapolis alley that appeared in Mirrors and Windows, a landmark 1979 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The nocturnal lyricism of the image is haunting, yet partly a result of working with flash, an experimental approach pushed to an extreme in Winter Fountain Cover.

At one point Hallman was without a studio, and turned to construction sites, looking for something edgy and unfinished. Around the same time Frank Gehry was using plywood and wire mesh as the basis for a refined rawness in his architecture, and praising the look of unadorned balloon framing. After Jim Henkel, a colleague and friend, convinced Hallman to use color, then a second-class citizen in the photographic world, the elegance and formal beauty of the construction images became unmistakable, as in New Construction Ladder.

Hallman recalls being “blown away” by the 1967 exhibition Persistence of Vision, which presented the work of photographers who manipulated their images with wild abandon, anticipating later mixed-media experiments. During the 1980s he briefly made prints by joining together images, some with hand-worked surfaces in a union of photography and painting. But the results did not meet his standards, especially because they relied on enlargements from 35mm negatives. He turned to the computer in the 1990s thinking, “I can do now what I couldn’t do in the ‘80s,” and soon began to get images that were “articulate.” That might seem an odd term, but Hallman’s work has always displayed clarity of vision and lucidity of expression.

Hallman says it is the viewer’s pleasure that is all-important. Yet for all the seductive qualities of his pictures, Hallman is no formalist. He has thought long and hard about male culture; the Rosedale photograph was about power, class, and gender. Armed with his digital tools, Hallman embarked on a series of eye-popping composites that showed men—sometimes corporate types in suits with briefcases, sometimes nudes, sometimes surreal hybrids as in Icarus Too. Originally Hallman planned to use volunteer models for his elaborate tableaux. Then he realized that would be a logistical challenge, and came up with a simple solution: “I’ll be all of them.” So he became his own model, playing all the parts.

Hallman’s theater of masculinity combines a playful absurdity out of Ionesco and Beckett, long-time favorites, with serious social critique. The backgrounds in these images are often the suburbs, which Hallman describes as “the landscape that fascinates me most,” with bubblegum pink skies at once picturesque and unnerving.

A recent project for Boynton Health Service at the University is a diptych illustrating a statement about health by the Greek physician Herophilus. The composition incorporates models of the world as well as of the mind, with imagery ranging from ancient vases to NASA renderings of Saturn, all set against background photographic images of Minnehaha Creek that suggest time flowing. It is a tour de force.

“Beauty” is a term Hallman does not shy away from, although he says what interests him now are the different kinds of beauty, and especially a beauty that is “a little more abrasive.” Hallman’s most recent work, the Tapestry series, shows him performing an artistic high wire act, balancing order and chaos. The large-scale images bombard the viewer with a riot of foliage; the effect can be overwhelming. Hallman felt a strong connection with the landscape as a child, and the lush vegetation recalls the Edenic world of his youth. In contrast, images of suburban homes and factory smokestacks represent what is happening to that ideal world today.

“It’s still photography,” Hallman insists. “There’s always a photographic sensibility in my work. Even without perspective, the space is still a plausible landscape space.” Inspired by Persian carpets and the challenge of creating equivalent floral patterns with photography, these are dizzying, dazzling pictures: a contemporary, computer-aided version of the baroque.

It is fitting that Hallman’s final images before retirement as a teacher should be his most ambitious work as an artist, a bravura display of technique and imagination. This is “articulate” art of the highest order, far from the simple cityscape projected onto wax paper, yet in its own way just as astonishing.

Catalog essay, “Retrospectives: Guy Baldwin & Gary Hallman”, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota, October 9 – November 8, 2007