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Chris Kraus’ book of essays Video Green is easing me through this work week, but at first her references to international travel and upper-echelon art world connections made me sour. When I went to catch the production of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking a couple weeks ago at the Strand Theater I was reminded how Didion used to hurt my feelings the same way. The mentions of her jetset lifestyle shattered the illusion with which I’d flattered myself, that she and I could be peers.
This is a personal problem. It sounds a little like envy. It’s an impediment and turns art/writing into a nasty little ego game rather than an activity that might generate meaning or enrich communication. And it’s embarrassing because it makes me feel childish, makes my own limitations so apparent. I am currently struggling to curb outward shows of negativity, both because I don’t want to embarrass myself and because I hope to turn my negative energy into drive, so I can work harder, get further, and won’t have to feel so spiteful of others’ accomplishments.
Nate Larson’s Small Magic is on view now at Maryland Art Place. Larson is a graduate of Maryland Art Place’s Curators’ Incubator program, a project that grooms novice curators to pull together professionally couched group shows. The walls at MAP are white, the art is framed, and there’s both a snack-sized blurb in vinyl on the wall near the entrance as well as a lengthier interpretive essay available in PDF form from MAP’s website, both of which work to synthesize the plausibility of the works’ grouping.
Michael Sherwin’s Minor Planets consists of twelve photographs of rocks. Each rock is photographed alone, on a black background. These are delicate, highly-detailed still lifes of a husband and wife’s rock collection. I’m thinking now of the way the waning moon looks in the night sky, or those NASA photos of the earth viewed from the moon, where the earth is half in shadow. I’m thinking about this now because, in an effort to figure out just what bothers me about his writing, I’ve read Larson’s PDF catalog several times:
Sherwin’s contributions to the exhibition appear to be simple photographs of planetary bodies in the vast depths of space… Rather than satellite photographs, closer examination reveals that they are in fact small rocks, collected by the artist and his wife over a period of ten years… In Sherwin’s Minor Planets, this exercise in scale confounds our understanding of space and snaps the viewer from the finite to the infinite.
I had not mistaken the photos of the rocks for planets. I understood from the title that the artist is saying something like the earth is nothing more than a large rock, but I took the photos for rocks. I think most people would. Yet the catalog essay offers a narrative in which the viewer first mistakes them for planets. Upon stepping closer the viewer is struck with the realization that they’re really rocks. “…his exercise in scale confounds our understanding of space and snaps the viewer from the fine to the infinite.” This is a trope of art writing, to provide a narrative of the viewer’s interaction with the work. It’s a little like cheerleading, such writing is, and the intention, I think, is to displace doubt with drama.
The introduction to Larson’s essay is well-researched and compelling. Larson chooses photography’s “complicated relationship to the actual” as his analytical axis. He talks about the “tension between factual recording of the world and fictive approaches to staging objects and people for the benefit of the camera.” Then he delineates three categories for the show’s photographs. I’ve only recently begun to think about photography critically, so I appreciate Larson’s informed approach. Photography is a difficult medium to discuss on account of its ubiquity and its tacit claim that, insofar as it has been garnered through mechanical means, mimicking the eye’s physiology, it is not an interpretation of the world but a document of reality itself.
Libby Rowe has four photographs in the show. Each of them employs that simple house shape, the box with a window, a door, and a pointy roof. Two of her photos involve heavy-handed digital manipulation. Although quite prominent, the Photoshopped elements are not discussed, which is curious since, judging from his thesis, Larson seems primed to discuss digitally manipulated photographs as a fourth or fifth category. Perhaps these photos actually belong in Larson’s third category, the one in which “the staging artifice is decoded and revealed in the work”, instead of the second, the one in which “a still life has been carefully constructed and presented as a delicate tableau.”
Rowe’s photograph “Provider” is particularly strange. In this instance the image of the home shape exists somehow in the matrix of a young white man’s ill-kept beard. It might be mustard or house-shaped food remnants except that it’s apparent that it’s digitally imposed. I mean, rather than beard hairs encrusted with food, the image hovers in the beard. It’s not my intention to joke about the work so much as it is point out that there are prominent elements to these works that the catalog ignores. Larson’s writing avoids apparent elements of the work that might point us to a more plausible meaning. In an attempt to establish the work’s relevance, Larson asserts that
Through her use of materials, she hints at the precarious nature of our everyday lives, pointing to the tension between our sense of security and the possibility for disaster. This fragility is amplified by recent incidents in homeland security and the knowledge of an unstable global climate.
It is a struggle to locate meaning in work, both in the work we make and in the work we view. Curation is an attempt to synthesize meaning, as is writing. In writing about Rowe’s work, Larson brings up poignant issues. Generally, I choose significance over meaninglessness (though sometimes meaninglessness can be significant, too), but I get cynical when an authority fails to account for obvious considerations. Especially if he’s bandying issues like homeland security and climate change about.
Unfortunately, gallery presentation and writing are both one-way streets. But that’s why I try to write, to diminish the distance between myself and what is presented to me in the gallery or through the essay.
Small Magic Curated by Nate Larson February 3 through March 19 Maryland Art Place Power Plant Live! 8 Market Place, Suite 100 Baltimore, MD 21202 www.mdartplace.org 410.962.8565
I agree with you about this kind of art writing. Too often the writer is attempting to place so called meaning on the work in order to tell the viewer what they should think. The sentence concerning “the precarious nature of our everyday lives” has been used to describe so many different artworks that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. What is worse is when the artists themselves supply this blather in the form of an “artist statement”. This practice should be done away with; let viewers think for themselves!
March 15, 2011 12:52 pmI feel it important to make a factual clarification that none of the photographs in the exhibition are overtly digital manipulated. In conceptualizing the exhibition, I did initially consider work that was overtly digitally manipulated, and as I narrowed the scope of the exhibition, I made a deliberate decision to only include work that was physically constructed and/or optically manipulated in the process of photographing.
Libby Rowe’s “Provider” is created by the artist in an elaborate sculptural process using glue and hair extensions woven into a man’s beard. The photograph records the results of the artist’s careful manipulation of her physical materials, and is not created through digital imposition.
April 10, 2011 7:05 pm