Eponanonymous

Liz Deschenes’ austere new exhibition blends photographic convention and experiment, sculptural form, and architecture.   The exhibition title, “Tilt / Swing,” takes its name from the movements of the camera lenses used in architectural photography.  Deschenes turns the language back on itself with a large six-panel work, itself titled Tilt/Swing, creating a piece that imposes optical distortions onto the space rather than discreetly eliminating them.

Liz Deschenes. Tilt / Swing (360° field of vision, version 1), 2009. 6 unique silver toned black and white photograms - various dimensions. Overall dimensions: H: 136 L: 192 W: 58 inches

Tilt/swing lenses work by allowing a photographer to place the lens on a plane that is not parallel to the plane of the film.  The most common purpose is for making the straight lines of architecture perfectly parallel and orthogonal in the image, rather than allowing them to converge perspectivally.  This technique allows the photographer to create an image which, in Picasso’s formulation, is “a lie which tells the truth.”  But the irony is not that this “perspective-corrected” lie is displacing a truth:  in fact, it just displaces a different lie.

Deschenes’ piece exploits this ballet of half-truths through the delicate equilibrium of a reduced number of artistic elements.  The six panels of Tilt/Swing are arranged like facets on a large cylinder encircling the rear gallery.  The prints are mounted on thin dibond panels, which are placed variously on the floor, flat on the wall, leaning into the wall, leaning away from the wall, and hanging from the ceiling.  The prints themselves are photograms made by exposing the paper directly to the night sky and then silver-toning them.  In effect, they depict nothing, their reflective surfaces streaked by chemicals, small sepia blips, and the onset of oxidation.

The consequences echo back through the language and concepts that define their forms.  Silver-toning a picture of empty sky creates a surface that reflects more than it depicts; the print (in general, the result of light passing through a lens) becomes the lens “through” which the viewer sees.  The flatness achieved by tilting in conventional architectural photography is asserted by the planar severity of each panel, but their arrangement into a cylinder whose cross-section is orthogonal to the plane of conventional gallery viewing (one could say the panels are arranged on the y-axis, rather than the customary x-axis) reinstates the spatial geometry of “architecture in general.”  Flattened space is re-inflated, and again un-picturable.

Which brings me to the other primary function of the tilt/swing lens, the precise control over depth of field.  The great emotive distortion of wide-aperture photography, throwing all but a sliver of the pictured field into a blurry bokeh, can itself be tilted onto any plane of the photographer’s choosing.  Just as the architectural inversions of the panels produce a paradox of “architecture in general,” so too do the multiply reflecting, fuzzy panels exploit “depth of field in general.”   That is, the whole art of using shallow focus is that the photographer makes a point about what’s in focus and what’s out of focus.  The photographic moment is decisive, and what’s lost is lost.

But in Tilt/Swing, the form of the object is the only thing “in focus.”  Staring into the blurry emptiness of the panels begins a visual journey down the rabbit hole.  First, a viewer looks for clues to what the panels are depicting; the little sepia blips might be a hidden image, as if they were a solarized daguerreotype.  Finding no purchase, one’s eyes shift the tiniest possible distance closer, to inspect the chemical stains and oxidation.  Though interesting as phenomena, one can’t linger there, especially since the next shift in focus is to one’s own blurry reflection on the surface.  Suddenly the silver panels plunge into space, and the fact of searching for content within the image seems myopic.  As one looks more deeply into the reflection, beyond his own image, he finds the gallery space and the other panels.  Then, most radically, looking into their askew reflections, fragments of the space jostle at seemingly incalculable angles.  The abandonment of an aestheticized focal field for a constantly permeating and collapsing one supercedes even the architectural displacements as the experiential center of the work.

For some time now, Liz Deschenes has been getting a lot of action out of seemingly simple investigations into photographic seeing.  By engaging real space, and so elegantly combining process-intensive ideas with visual ones, this show proves that her position in the top tier of “conceptual” photographers is a deserved one.

Catherine and I walk through the Holzer show at the Whitney…

UPDATE: This post will continue to be edited and amended during the run of the exhibition which is its subject.

“Popular Mechanics” is, at its core, a single large abstraction. It is composed of two main parts: a group of six large, highly saturated, geometric works on color photo paper, made by directly exposing the paper through color gels [*6]; and twenty-one black-and-white prints [* see comment 1] of the people, places, and machinery that played a role in the production of the exhibition. The large color prints are scattered individually through the gallery, alternating with groups of the b/w prints. Each of the two groups is presented in a uniform fashion, with the large prints in white metal frames and the b/w’s all matted, the same size, in black frames.

Much of Beshty’s work to date has been critically engaged with the material condition of photography. Mulched photo blocks, or folded-and-flattened direct prints, or negatives damaged by X-rays put forth a proposition about the material trappings enclosing a fundamentally abstract exchange (the visual consumption of photographic content); yet the works inhabit that proposition with a bit of wry irony that seems to wink, “or maybe not.”

And so it is that this critical posture expands its reach to the economic space that actually enables the discursive space. In the most direct way, this is meant literally: the b/w images show people who make a living providing services for the art industry, or ones who trickle the funds down. There is a strong leveling effect taking place by showing an art fabricator, and Nicolas Bourriaud, and a large-format Epson printer as equivalent entries in a catalog of production. This effort expands the field of photographic content to encompass as broad a cross-section of its own narrative as possible. [*2] The very idea of “material” undergoes a drastic re-definition here. That is, what used to be “immaterial” to the content of a photographic object (that content traditionally thought of as the drama that was contained by the special discursive space of the gallery) is here made utterly material to that drama, to the exclusion of any of the quaint means by which photographs might be aesthetically judged. One could say, then, that the content of the show has been “crowded out.” [*7]

Indeed, the large color photographs are little more than placeholders. They satisfy an admirably superficial conception of an ambitious photo image. [*3] There is nothing to recommend one print over another. Small physical incidents (a tear in the paper, or a creased corner) never rise to the level of inflecting a piece with any charged presence. The color works merely fill in the spaces between the people who made them.

And in this function they complete the circuit of articulating their bizarre economic existence. That the image of art should look so like a vanitas at this particular historical moment is tasty [*8]; without engaging in either class warfare or schadenfreude, this viewer is excited by the prospect of unfettered transparency.

Which brings me to a quibble with the checklist and press release. They don’t name names, settling instead for initials, and an outsider such as this viewer is left trying to eavesdrop on the conversations of more informed gallery goers. This decision feels like a hedge. And to extend the metaphor a bit, the hedge fund types have been held up for particular scorn lately. I’m just saying.

The Modernist project has long insisted that the artist and the audience both confront the ontology of the art object. In Post-War art, this became medium-specific purity, and then formalism. Process and performance shifted the focus to the acts preceding the object. Institutional critique emphasized the settings where “things” became “art”. But in each case, these modes still held their claims as their subject. Something destabilizing takes place with the Beshtian economic transparency –or infiltration– model in this exhibition. Instead of taking new content as the replacement for old, conventional modes, this images in this show exclude subject matter. Like those toxic assets, when the music stopped, they just evaporated…

[*4]

From Leah Sandals, writing in Toronto’s National Post:

At Gallery 44, you will find works that question the idea of photographic accuracy. Rising New York artist Nicholas Knight offers some standout work in this vein, taking a mathematical yet strangely fun approach. Knight treats photo prints of golden frames like origami paper, folding them until the power of photography seemingly succumbs to physical realities. His tearing of a long photo into two separate frames is also playfully effective. Buffalo artist Hans Gindlesberger’s series “I’m in the Wrong Film” takes a more poetic tack, positing the artist in pitiable, lonely situations — from dealing with spilled groceries to sticking out like a sore thumb at a children’s playground. In all cases, Gindlesberger gestures toward the ways that film is constructed, and perfect fantasies can unexpectedly turn the everyday grey.

From Marissa Neave, writing on her blog The Last Place on Earth You Probably Want to Be:

I think my new favourite artist is Nicholas Knight, whose work is on exhibition at Gallery 44 until February 14th. Despite his work being relegated to the smaller gallery in the space (as well as the vitrines,) it packs a pretty wicked punch. Knight, in his seemingly site-specific installations, takes the mechanics of photographic display (including printing and hanging,) and remixes the materials to produce the content. Paper, pencil marks, registration bars, repeated patterns reminiscent of Pantone swatches — the installation is full of familiar tropes of photography and design, but mashed up and repurposed in a completely fresh and innovative way. It’s clever and masterfully executed.

Or, The Curious Condition of Democracy in the Age of Obama

This retrospective of William Eggleston’s photographs opened at the Whitney on November 6, 2008. It is remarkable for the high-caliber of the image-making, no doubt; it is relevant to artists now for its fountainhead-like power of influence; and it is unsettling for the calendrical uncanniness with which it presents its myths of democracy, coming as it does in the same week that Barack Obama turned American political consciousness on its head.

William Eggleston / Memphis / 1968

Eggleston is roundly acknowledged, along with Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz, as standing at the beginning of American color fine art photography. This trio wed the new chemistry with a particular brand of “beat” image-making (”beat” in the Kerouac sense rather than the “beat journalism” sense, although there’s a dash of that too). This show justifies the acclaim. Nonetheless, there is a sense of being a victim of his own success. As the decades pile up, and his photographs come only occasionally to the fronts of our minds, the ubiquity of his aesthetic invention threatens to swallow the particular degree of accomplishment that he brings to the photographic image.

That is, the oblique, saturated, odd-cropping detail of daily life is now mundane. It’s not challenging, on its own, to be confronted with this type of image. Its penetration into the vernacular of our image-culture is complete. That is not to say that his own photography is indistinguishable from the general method. Quite the contrary, in fact: seeing again the specifics of Eggleston’s subjects and techniques is a reminder of his uniquely attuned vision.

Which brings us to the curious myth of the Democratic Camera. “Democratic” cuts in two diverging directions here: there is the sense of all those details out there in front of Eggleston, and all of them equally potent for the task of generating meaning; and then there’s sense that, per the democratic imperative, anyone armed with a camera can do it, too.

I posit that both these directions are wrong.  In the first place, a group of images of this sort draws its power from the context of all the other images surrounding it. Once the viewer is inside a clearly-drawn world, individual images unfurl the beauty of their blossom, or their decay. But that world of images owes as much to an exacting editing process as to creating the exposures themselves. Editing - selecting, building, excluding, juxtaposing - could hardly be less democratic in that it depends entirely on the refinement of a heightened sensibility for its success…heightened, that is, relative to the base urges of the hoi polloi.

And if this is true of the set of images within which any single frame is articulated, it is doubly true within each single frame. It’s not the case that the camera can be pointed literally anywhere, and just because Eggleston pushes the shutter it comes out meaningful. Instead of the even field of “one detail, one vote”, the democracy of details is revealed as merely a comforting fiction.

From there the possibility that you, too, could be William Eggleston, and hey, aren’t we all William Eggleston, collapses. A quick browse of Flickr proves this. (Flickr is an utterly fascinating repository: in fact, a follow-up to this post could be written to argue about an alternate nature of the democratic camera, with Flickr as Exhibit A. But so far as I know, the Whitney has yet to mine that particular website in search of future subjects for comprehensive retrospectives.)

And so we come to the uncanniness of this myth playing itself out in public two days after the election of Barack Obama. We the American people ratified our core beliefs to a degree that left us stunned and amazed. It DOES matter if the people are engaged with the process, and if they understand that they have a stake in the outcome. And furthermore, enacting the truth of these core principles inflects our history with a type of meaning we couldn’t really assign to it before Tuesday night. It wasn’t possible to walk through this exhibition and understand images from the American South in the 1970’s without the knowledge that these particular threads are woven into the blanket of American life that warmed us Tuesday night. Such a thesis is disastrously pre-Post-Modern, I know. But if the “Democratic Camera” has any meaning, it must be found in the ability of the lens to create documents whose full story is not told at the moment of their creation: the democratic quality is that their stories are connected in a living way to our own, and that we all have a role to play in shaping the arc of their narrative, in determining whether it bends towards justice.