Eponanonymous

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.