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I want to deviate from the customary gallery review mode now for a brief comparative commentary [*1] about two recent projects:  Luis Jacob’s “Albums” (in particular, as seen in his recent exhibition at Art In General, “Without Persons”) and Ryan Gander’s project for the November 2010 issue of Artforum, “A Torrent of Ideas on a Beautiful Day”.  Both of these artists have developed a practice that is deep, variegated, and complex; these qualities are attractive and occasionally intimidating, because they instill in the viewer the sense that there’s always an important idea about the work that he’s not informed about.  And that anxiety discourages him to offer opinions.  But this viewer forges ahead, hoping that by limiting the scope of his comments, he can escape that particular doubt.

Luis Jacob, "Album II", 2004. Image montage in plastic laminate

First, some immediate differences between the projects of Jacob and Gander.  The Albums are artworks presented in galleries: they have a material presence with their laminated plastic, various photographic supports, and wall pins; and they are arranged in the space of the gallery such that a viewer engages the panels while “on the wing”.  He must walk one to the next, rhythmically pausing, enacting that conventional gait that characterizes the gallery-goer.  Gander’s work, on the other hand, is specifically for the magazine:  it has no other material embodiment; it is encountered sitting down (usually at a table, due to the unwieldy dimensions of Artforum).  These material and mode-of-engagement comparisons lay the groundwork for the more important issue, which is the presence and function of language in relation to the image.

Simply put, Jacob eliminates printed text from his work and Gander adds text to his.  Jacob’s images are found-objects.  They are circulating in the global-cultural matrix of various published sources.  Inevitably, images that pass through this system are accompanied by some sort of caption that tethers the visual component to an indexical reference.  (I do not use “indexical” here in the usual way it is applied to photography, in the sense of a direct imprint.  Instead, I mean it in relation, for example, to a search engine that indexes the textual content within a database.)  By excising the captions, Jacob creates a new matrix whose relationships must be completed by the viewer.  He insists that we must already have the wherewithal to assemble these “grammatical” elements into a functioning syntax.  But because photographic images are so inherently muliplicitous, so multivalent, one viewer’s act of re-assembly will never produce an understanding that maps unproblematically onto someone else’s, the artist’s included.

Ryan Gander, "A Torrent of Ideas on a Beautiful Day", November 2010 issue of Artforum

Into the space of this multivalence comes Gander’s project.  It takes the form of a 10-page spread in the magazine, with 67 images, each coupled with a caption penned by the artist.  Each is numbered and arranged on the page so that the narrative sequence is unmistakable.  The viewer is not invited to construct his own path through the thumbnail-like reproductions, nor is he expected to uncover the special syntax that governs the inclusion of any single image.  Gander’s source material is dizzyingly diverse, and it generates considerable pleasure following his leaps of insight that connect the images: a documentary photo of an existing work of his; a photo of a randomly observed moment; a piece of text, presented as an image; someone else’s photo, co-opted for his purposes; his daughter doing something; and so on.  For Gander, the border of the image constrains a space that is not otherwise delimited.  Anything picturable becomes a picture, and it does so primarily through the imposition of a language frame that gives it sense, that connects it to its surroundings.  At a certain point, one senses an inversion: the pictures have become support material for the captions.  The language-frame is the laboratory where the calculations are being performed.

I do not wish for the previous two paragraphs to suggest that Gander is beholden to written language and Jacob is not.  Quite the contrary.  It is my contention that the relationship of any image to the language that envelopes it is one of the most interesting and pressing issues for visual culture today.  Our fluency within a cultural space that is constantly iterating new and mutated forms depends on our ability to shift from the textual mode to the image mode, almost as if there is no distinction between them.  And perhaps, fundamentally, there is no hard-and-fast distinction.  These projects by Gander and Jacob point to two paths through the thicket of looking, reading, and the ownership of meaning.

Leslie Hewitt’s solo exhibition at the Kitchen consists of photographs from three different bodies of work, and a two-channel video piece.  All the works have been made since 2008.  The exhibition is curated by Rashida Bumbray.

Looking at Hewitt’s photographs is a fascinating encounter with the problem of reading.  They are, first of all, beautifully made.  Their beauty and tranquility is an invitation to linger.  This makes them very generous, without being cloying.  The compositions are generally centered and symmetrical, the images in sharp focus, the light clean.  They generate pleasure in the act of seeing.  This quality in the depicted subjects easily transfers to the photographic objects themselves.

Untitled (Geographic Delay), 2009. Digital c-print, 30.875 x 36.875 inches

From their slowness emerges a “problem of reading”: a gulf opens between the visual clarity of the image and the complex referentiality of the objects within it.  Even a superficial engagement with the work makes it obvious that the books, photographs, and common objects that Hewitt arranges in her photographs are all voices in a serious discourse.  They all seem to be talking to each other, in a tone that is focused and deliberate.  The “problem”, then, is how to integrate the visual “reading” and the content of the discussion taking place within the image:  how much can a viewer rely on inference and implication, and still claim a full understanding of the work?  How necessary is it to extract the specific literary and cultural references, re-assemble them, and gain fluency in their language?  And failing our ability to achieve this, to what extent are we to be indicted for seeing these citations as oblique? [*1]

This makes me want to walk my terminology back a bit.  The “problem” of reading feels more like a dilemma, and a productive one at that.  Hewitt’s work is multivalent, and positions its legibility like a prism: each angle of entry breaks the view into a different spectrum.  Hewitt is African-American, and much of the material that her work references is drawn from the literary and cultural record of the black experience in America.  Or, at least, that’s what I gather from much of the critical reception of her work, like Huey Copeland’s text in the February 2010 Artforum.  Copeland reconstructs a narrative from Hewitt’s images that, to this white male, is detailed to a degree that is far beyond my present visual ability to grasp.  But looking over the checklist and press release provided by the Kitchen, one finds just a brief description of the film installation in terms of a text about 1950’s Harlem, and a single reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness.  So how available is the narrative intended to be?

And it is precisely in this space between the clarity of her imagery and the restraint of her intention that I locate the dilemma.  The highly structured compositions, the delicate balance of their constituent parts, the very specific way the work is presented in the gallery: these things all “say” a lot about the pictorial content of the photographs.  But in the absence of reading that content on its own terms, those formal qualities become the content.  Or perhaps one should say that the formal qualities perform their operations on a depicted content whose meanings are withheld.

But withheld by whom?  Hewitt?  That doesn’t seem right.  After all, there’s nothing actually private about these sources; they’re part of a public heritage; and they’re currency within a cultural community that stretches all across America.  It is no secret that the contemporary fine art world is no more racially integrated than society at large, and may be even less so.  The majority of Hewitt’s viewers are probably white.  And yet her engagement with race as a subject takes a form drastically different than, say, Kara Walker, or Ellen Gallagher.  I’ll risk oversimplification here, and suggest that both Walker and Gallagher take mass culture (read “white”) representations of black folks and give them back to the viewer as exaggerations, meant to expose the latent pathologies present in our collective racial attitudes.  I think the reference to Du Bois and double consciousness is pertinent here, seen within the idea of “positioning” the images.  One understanding of double consciousness, according to Du Bois, is that black folks’ self-awareness is always both as an individual and as how they’re perceived by others.  Hewitt’s work enacts a reversal of this split awareness.  Her source representations are African-American self-representations, given back to the viewer in a visual idiom that does not obviously elicit “blackness”.  That is, one might venture the claim that Walker and Gallagher exploit the shame the adheres to overt racist depictions, where Hewitt elides it.  And what is gained by this elision?  A new double consciousness:  one is not being shown that what he knows is wrong, but that there’s something he doesn’t know that is right.

The thinking and writing I’ve been doing on this site, especially as it regards photography, has generally been done as an analysis of the fundamental ways that artworks contain their meanings.  Artists who make an issue of this balance their pictorial content within an image that calls attention to its own techniques of depiction.  Hewitt is no exception to this, and were it not for the powerfully philosophical way she structures her images, I doubt I would try to write about her work. [*2]  But the specific nature of her content compels me to venture into a discursive space where my footing is much less sure; I admit to real anxiety treading onto racial grounds about which I am obviously so ignorant.  But the work also tells me that to be polite and gloss over the subject would be doing the most egregious sort of disservice:  “hidden in plain sight” would be no accomplishment here.

I want to make one brief, somewhat analogous mention in this context.  Zoe Crosher’s recent show at DCKT on the Bowery, “The Unraveling of Michelle duBois,” (that’s a funny connection!) had some of this dynamic in it.  The work was self-consciously and explicitly about the material and visual nature of photography “as such”, with ideas applicable to the evolving discourse about the medium.  And yet one could not, in good faith, separate the sophistication of that inquiry from the charged subject of a conflicted and imagined female identity.  I think this approach is necessary to understanding and appreciating Leslie Hewitt’s work.  In the end, the advanced pictorial strategies (which are fascinating to contemplate and are, on their own, generally the subject of this viewer’s interest) must be seen as a tool in pursuit of a broader and more fraught agenda.  May she continue to pursue with such aplomb.

While Shannon Ebner’s impressive current exhibition at Wallspace, Invisible Language Workshop, stands as a fascinating document in its own right, it is more richly appreciated against the backdrop of her recent book, The Sun as Error, published this year by the LA County Museum of Art.  The two projects are complementary, in that they share many of the same images; and yet each devotes special energy to engaging the discursive possibilities unique to its own mode of presentation, the gallery exhibition and the photo book.

Chief among these unique possibilities are scale, placement, and material.  The gallery allows Ebner to enlarge and reduce the size of the prints; to hang them at conventional heights or scattered about the wall; and to mix objects and projections in among the framed prints.  The prints, sculptures, and projected images in the gallery are all black-and-white; the same is true of the contents of the book.  The sole exception across both projects is the book cover, with its bright yellow “sun” against a white ground.

Some Clouds, 2009, Chromogenic print, 31.68 x 44 inches

Ebner’s work is dense with historical, social, and political reference.  It simultaneously ruminates on the philosophical conditions that allow images to contain such meanings.  The leitmotif unifying the work is the moment of differentiation between world and thought: the moment when language cleaves the world into irreconcilable fragments.  Furthermore, she actively pursues her subject through the terrain, making claims as she goes.  So, a photograph of a her pegboard with the black diagonal “strike”, usually presented as space between words, is shown as an finished image.  But that proves to be not foundational enough, and we’re given an image of the empty pegboard: the field that makes a blank space possible, the set that contains the null set.

My thinking about these images keeps coming back to two concepts that I normally don’t associate closely: granularity and inter-textuality.  The pursuit of a foundational set of images that represent the division of the world into its constituent parts is the granularity.  But as each image is put forth as a proposition that its content is a single grain, that it is fine enough to reverse field and start putting the world back together again, that image is despoiled by an intrusion:  and insofar as the intrusion can be “made out,” that it can be identified and described as the presence of two things, it is because the intrusion can be “read”, that it already has a name, and that the cleavage the image had hoped to stave off has already take place.  This is the intertextuality of the image, an “always already” penetration of language’s analytical function into the pure empirical space of the mechanical photographic device.

That is some fairly dense stuff, but I hope to make one other important point about these images and works, by way of an example.  The illustrated image above, Some Clouds, shows a daytime sky, although it seems underexposed to give us more detail in the clouds.  But right in the center of the image is a tightly scribbled circle; moving up and to the left is a jagged scribbled form, and then another in the upper left corner, cropped.  Suddenly these marks turn into letter forms, and are recognizable as graffiti, even if their message is hidden from us.  But while the literary content may be “invisible language”, we are still forced to realize that this picture of the sky is either photographed through some heavy glass or is a reflection on another surface (my hunch).  In either case, what had seemed like a picture of nature turns into a picture of the intermingling of nature and our own unintelligible urge to inscribe language onto the world.  And if this conjunction of ideas is the real subject, and this conjunction is an object of thought rather than physical mass, then the photograph might properly be said to be “abstract.” [1]

Now a couple comments about the relationship between these ideas, the book, and the exhibition.  The book is beautifully designed and printed (with the participation of Dexter Sinister).  With its bounty of images and its textual notes in the back (mostly), my reading of Ebner’s broader goals leans more heavily on the book than the gallery.  But it is worth noting that Ebner’s foundational approach to her work rightly accounts for the means of presentation of it, and so the book is a delivery system for images and also a depiction of a book.  Each spread shows us eight numbered locations, moving across the top of both pages and then across the bottom of both pages; each pair of numbers corresponds to a double-page spread in yet another, hypothetical book.  The footnotes in the back then collate a broad cross-section of referential material into a polyglot’s guide to conceptual photography.  It’s intertextuality as a form of publishing poetry: the play of back-and-forth, both as an act of turning the pages and as a conceptual subterfuge, is wonderful.

The show at Wallspace depends less on actual text for its subterfuge, and more on the haptic experience of moving through the gallery.  Whereas the book flattens each image into an indexical entry in a numbered sequence, the exhibition makes full use of the work being all around you, jostling for your attention.  Large prints in a row, medium prints scattered on a wall intermingled with objects, small serial prints in linear arrangement, a dark room with a projection and a print of a shadowed wall (!)…the strategies amount to a “catalog” of approaches to getting the images off the page and into space.  The granularity of any single image is ultimately held up against the “neutral” container, and found to be always already impacted by a group of decisions that prevent any true singular condition to hold sway.  It’s a brilliantly integrated meditation on photography and images in our present moment.

The press release for my show in San Francisco at SWFA:

Taking Pictures
Nicholas Knight
September 11 - Oct 10, 2009
Opening Reception Friday,
September 11, 6-8 pm

In Taking Pictures, Nicholas Knight haunts the galleries of art museums, photographing people in the act of taking pictures. Like an anthropologist in the bush, Knight captures the peculiar comportment of the museum-goer, and finds that directly looking at an artwork is often replaced by the need to see the thing through the camera’s screen.

His own pictures of pictures of pictures create a breathless daisy chain of picture-taking that finds its endgame in a crepuscular video Gotterdammerung, in which the artist is seen hand-cranking a slide projector show of his own picture-taking. It’s picture-in-picture as a repeating decimal.

Like the painter of yore establishing his frame with outstretched thumb, Knight uses people’s hands-holding-cameras to organize the compositions in this series. Sometimes the back of the photographer’s head is seen. But it is the hands that grab your attention, as though they were trying to message something beyond the functionality of their gesture. They recall John Baldessari’s finger-pointing photos of the early 1970s and Wallace Berman’s mystical verifaxes of the 1960s, in which hands hold radios with mysterious images inside of them.

Michael Kimmelman’s recent lamentation in the New York Times that tourists speed through museums, stopping only to take pictures, is rooted in the conventional wisdom that the original is preferable to the reproduction, and belies a pastoral distinction that a thing experienced through the five senses is more real than one mediated by technology. Knight’s moral compass doesn’t point in that direction. His photos luxuriate in the details of the new world of appropriation: the twinkling lights of the camera’s viewfinder, the simultaneity of the image and its reproduction, and the digitization and miniaturization of the masterpiece.

For art historical purposes, Knight’s photos are the punctum in the story written by the Pictures Generation, in which artists like Sherrie Levine came to prominence by rephotographing original works by other people. Taking Pictures documents how the public has bought into the new authority those artists conveyed on the reproduction, personalizing the democratizing process. What photographer Louise Lawler did for art in the back rooms of auction houses, the public is now doing for art in the public realm, and we can all watch it on Flickr.

The most compelling art in these photos, however, is not the one on the camera’s screen but the tableau created by Knight. In staging this duel over representation of the object, Knight has created photos whose bipolar dynamic entertains to the extent that it destabilizes. And while these photos, just like the reproductions within them, are almost clones of each other, the compositions that emerge and the particularities of the subjects are distinctly original and, ironically, reward a close reading. One set of female hands with a Goth manicure snaps a jpeg of a monstrous de Kooning female. In another, a bald male head with biker jacket and silver skull ring hones in on Jean Baptise Carpeaux’s marble grouping Ugolino and His Sons. And in a miracle of metaphorical self-reference, the light from a Dan Flavin fluorescent tube sculpture illuminates Knight’s camera, as the Flavin itself alights on the subject’s screen, with a glow part Heaven, part Westinghouse.

Steven Wolf Fine Arts