Florabundance - Photographs of Flowers by Gary Michael Dault                

Flowers are protean. The take so many forms and come in so many colours—hues too complex and variegated to take in satisfactorily without botanical examination—that it is rather surprising that artists have found in flowers a boundless and ever renewable source of delight, rather than an admission of defeat in the face of perfection.

Flowers have clearly been a primary subject for artists since there were artists. Flowers were décor to the Greeks and Romans (all those acanthus leaves ornamenting the capitals if Corinthian columns!), theological symbols in the Middle Ages, objects of passionate study to the scholar-artists of the Renaissance (Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer), were gloriously commodified by Baroque artists such as Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, were enlarged to an almost surrealistically artificial stature by the great 17th century flower painters of Belgium and the Netherlands, and were finally re-naturalized and made into venues for subjectivity by 19th century French painters like Delacroix, Courbet, Renoir, Degas, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and, in the 20th century by Redon and Chagall—and of course by Warhol. Manet, weary of heraldic Italian and French history painting and its ponderous burden of allegory, once remarked to fellow painter Claude Toche [NOTE: THE “E” IN “TOCHE” IS ACUTE] that “a painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.”

The same holds true for photographers—who began saying it with flowers about the same time Manet was painting his exquisite, brushy, bedroomy vases of peonies, roses, carnations and lilacs. The last 160 years is full of photographic flowers, from the work of early practitioners like Henry Fox Talbot to canonical works by Edward Steichen, Karl Blossfeldt, Imogen Cunningham, to the flat, morphologically map-like flowers of Irving Penn, and the airless hieratic blooms of Robert Mapplethorpe.

The flower as a subject, then, has been pretty thoroughly examined. Is there any room left for another flower photographer? The answer is obviously yes (the answer is always yes)—although to be backboarded by such a rich and fertile history is bound to give any such photographer pause.

Eric Klemm’s inventive and wholly delightful approach to the already teeming, over-abundant, highly conventionalized world of the floral photo is the extremely canny one of deconstructing his flowers in order to reconstruct them again in alternate configurations—configurations in which the usual floral narratives are disrupted to the point where his hapless blossoms attain new and, invariably, strangely lucid morphologies. Klemm’s almost slapstick use of the lordly Heliconia (Bird of Paradise flower), for example, totally inverts a normally upwardly-yearning, vertical plant (usually called the Erect Heliconia) in order to hang it unceremoniously upside down from a coat hanger. In Klemm’s photograph, the lush, pink-gold, trophy Heliconia now looks even more other-worldly, in its captive position, than it normally does. Now, it looks like a rack of anthers, perhaps, or maybe washing on the line (albeit aristocratic washing) or a set of sleek electrical connections. Or none of these things. The point is, it does and doesn’t look like a Bird of Paradise flower anymore. The wicked coat hanger, by the way, is a deft and volatile touch: how amusingly intrusive it is, and how abruptly abject it makes this mandarin bloom, transforming the normally exotic flower into something it is now possible to see either as clownish or stricken.

Most of Eric Klemm’s flowers are isolated against stark white—as if they were the mercurial subjects of fashion shots (a photographic genre Klemm knows a good deal about). This makes his flowers more inspectable than usual, foregrounding the sort of floral detailing that normally gets lost when flowers nod somnolently in gardens or sit stiffly in proper vases. Here, against white, they are willy-nilly anatomized. “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,” wrote poet Thomas Gray in his famous Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), “And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” But not with Klemm’s theatricalized flowers. His flowers blush fully seen. Some of them, in fact—the blossoms that are made to throng together like dancers and are assembled from collaged botanical “costumes”—are terrible showoffs, swooping and twirling with extensions and pendants of berries, seeds, twigs and stalks until they end by looking like floral Issey Miyakes.

Not the least strange of Klemm’s flower-alienation effects is his penchant for the intruding of some rough shard of the domestic, everyday world into the normal aloofness of a flower’s beauty. Cute, cuddly, childhood flowers (petunias, asters, marigolds, zinnias) are more or less populist in their appeal, and to abuse or humiliate them would be as empty a gesture as a bad boy’s pulling the wings off a housefly. But the flowers that grace Klemm’s photographs (if “grace” isn’t too buoyant a word for the awkward and stringent conditions he imposes upon them) are of the distinctly haughty kind: the bluebloods of botany. All the more whimsical, bleakly amusing, sadistically satisfying, tragic, and disorienting, then, when he repeatedly touches his Olympian blossoms (most of them marshaled into the category of “exotic tropical plants”) with unlovely objects and materials harvested from home supply depots and hardware stores (the coat hanger is emblematic here).

So the pink gladiola buds that staunchly mount their vertical stalk, that ascends like a backbone through its white ground, are rudely wrapped with tape, its blue ends, with its helpful graphic chorus of directional arrows, clearly, almost insolently, visible. And to what indignities does he not subject the inescapably naughty anthurium, with its absurdly phallic proboscis? In one of his anthurium photographs, Klemm affixes a rich purple brooch to the flower’s “bosom”, as if it were the bosom of the hefty hostess of some uppity fundraiser ball. A paper clip curtails another one, its sexualized wings now pinched out of their natural expansiveness. In yet another anthurium work, the pale green flower is mostly covered over by a length of blue netting, the blossom’s rude pink organ erect, poking provocatively through its matrix of restraint—which now seems like fisherman’s net which has somehow landed an eccentric sea-creature, a being too hotly gendered for the usual kinds restraint.

What Klemm has made here are highly inventive floral constructions. They eschew the aesthetics of the flower (or at least its traditional aesthetic routines) for a new beginning in the ream of the flower’s mechanics. Things happen to Klemm’s flowers—things brought to them (tape, clips, hangers) from the built environment. Does this de-romanticize them? No, but it re-calibrates the weight and direction of their orthodox allure, paradoxically freeing them, through their new sets of restraints, to cry out anew as harbingers, still, of a new kind of beauty, generated from the orthodoxies of the old flower ways.