SAM FALLS

Sam Falls

Review of Apertures current exhibition The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in

Contemporary Photography

As a current student at the ICP-Bard MFA Program in Advanced Photographic

Studies it’s probably understandable that I was excited by the new exhibition at Aperture

Gallery: The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography. Beyond my

fascination with the medium of photography, I expected a lot from the show given it’s

title and the current trends in contemporary art, especially that readily present around

Chelsea galleries today, which is always trying to untangle itself from the history of New

York’s modernism and abstract expressionism movements without getting even more

entangled in the post-modern vines that leech out from modernism’s latticework, you

know, like trying to escape from quick sand; the more you struggle the quicker you sink.

And it seems like this leaning toward abstraction in photography has been something

radical yet intelligent, genuinely avant-garde without the preferentiality that always

hinders by never letting the baby breath on its own, never severing the umbilical cord. So

how does photography function in the realm of abstraction without being overtly

referential or reverential to painting and modernism? It’s simple, it refers to something

outside of the art world: the real world.

And that is why I am writing this article, because the show at the Aperture

Gallery, which I thought would shine a light on all those people I’ve been admiring as

they work freely and unassumingly in the world of subjective contemporary photography,

didn’t. In fact, about 78% of the work in The Edge of Vision felt like elementary

experiments by high school students who were excited by their initial findings in art

history books and photography surveys and attempted to work out some of the methods

and logic on their own. I’m not saying that this is bad, and I don’t mean to get down on

the artists involved so much as I want critique the curator Lyle Rexer. I don’t want to

point to the artist’s work chosen for the show and then for each an example by James

Welling or Wolfgang Tillmans where that very work has already been done better,

exhibited, and written about. I want to look at some younger artists working today and

contemporary writing about photography and abstraction that warrants a show much

more stimulating and encompassing than what is not worth seeing at Aperture right now.

In the press release Rexer defines abstraction as “a departure from or the eliding

of an immediately apprehensible subject”, yet this applies less to the images in the

exhibition than a more appropriate definition from the dictionary: “freedom from

representational qualities in art”. If that were what Rexer meant, it wouldn’t make the

show more interesting, but it would at least be true. But he was after something more,

like the second definition of abstraction in the dictionary “the quality of dealing with

ideas rather than events”. Now this sounds worthy of a show and I think this is what we

should expect, since abstraction has meant more in art than ‘non-representational’ for at

least 50 years now. In fact, Rexer’s definition doesn’t imply non-representational at all,

but I couldn’t make out a single noun in the entire collection of images. To help us

viewers with this Rexer decided to put up a paragraph of wall text next to each image and

call me old-fashioned, but if that’s what it takes to understand/ get into the piece, separate

from the artist’s title, than maybe there should have been more work done on the artist’s

end. It is appropriate here to look at George Baker’s recent essay Photography and

Abstraction, in which he draws the parallel between photography and Frederic Jameson’s

model of finance capital:

We must begin to imagine an earlier, modernist abstraction not happily

canceled, but in fact redoubled – raised to a higher level in both social

forms and aesthetic language. For, as Jameson asserts, “postmodernism is

not really figurative in any meaningful realist sense or at least… it is now

a realism of the image rather than of the object and has more to do with

the transformation of the figure into a logo than with the conquest of new

‘realistic’ and representational languages.” (Baker, 8)

In returning to an idea of an image relying solely on its non-representational quality with

this in mind all we are left with is something decorative, a practice in modernist

aesthetics where autonomy was a worthy artistic dialogue, but that debate is a dead horse.

Photography in its own right, without the help of the artist, has entered a phase beyond

representation, even in the most documentary standpoint, as the world itself exists in our

era of ‘post-production’ late capitalism as metonym, and to exercise a simple work in

non-representational abstraction is in a sense self-indulgent meaningless “abstraction of

an abstraction”.

The way that the Nike Swoosh was created as a unique image reference and used

to directly imply a shoe company 50 years ago is analogous to the way that Silvio Wolf’s

abstract prints from blank film exposed to light or the end of a roll’s color field refer to

photography without employing the medium’s actually function of representation. They

are both modernist approaches, the later still functioning in the Aperture show the way it

would have 50 years ago, while the Nike Swoosh presented now exactly as it was 50

years ago in all its non-representational glory implies something infinitely more

complicated and abstract. As Baker implements Jameson again:

As with finance capital, Jameson will find this new structure in the

‘recoding’ of a previously abstracted form; as he puts it the difference

between modernist and postmodern abstraction is “the distinction between

an object and its expression and an object whose expression has in fact

virtually become another object in its own right.” (Baker, 10)

This duality was directly addressed by Walead Beshty’s last show Popular

Mechanics (March 3 – April 4, 2009) at Wallspace in New York. There were two very

distinct types of images shown together here, at once juxtaposed and merged. One set

were large (all roughly 100 by 50 inches) non-representational colorful C-prints sharing

the same title (except the dates according to when they were printed): Three Color Curl

(CMY: Irvine, California, August _, 2008, Fuji Crystal Archive Type C. The other images

were black and white portraits titled first by the sitter’s profession and then their initials,

such as a woman sitting in her office labeled Curator (American), EH, Washington, D.C.,

August 22, 2008, Epson Ultrachrome K3 Ink jet print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag paper

(2009, 35 3/4 by 25 3/4 inches). These black and white portraits, all the same size, are

accompanied by several matching black and white prints of places and things involved

with the photograph’s life, such as Wide-format Inkjet Printer (Epson), Los Angeles,

California, July 25, 2008, Epson Ultrachrome K3 Ink jet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag

paper and 8 x 10 Horizontal Enlarger (Fotar), Irvine, California, July 18, 2008, 2009,

Epson Ultrachrome K3 Ink jet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper. While Beshty’s

beautiful abstract prints could have alone carried the show and could have fit right in The

Edge of Vision show, they don’t, because that modernist appeal is not Beshty’s intent,

they are only implemented as the seduction to get at a much more interesting and

contemporary issue. By including the portraits of an art student, a collector, the

collector’s private gallery, a curator, an artist, and the machines used to create all the

prints in the show, Beshty is exposing the loaded socio-political world surrounding not

only his own artwork, but the art world in general. In doing so Beshty points to the

industry of art and where abstraction in modernism pointed to the subjective genius of the

individual artist, Beshty redefines abstraction and turns it on its head in Popular

Mechanics as we realize that his sublime abstractions are produced by and for so many

other people and reasons that he himself disappears from the picture.

At this point it would be unfair not to mention the book by Rexer, published by

Aperture, which accompanies the exhibition, or vice versa. The book is much more of an

encompassing survey, even including images and text on the aforementioned foremen

and contemporary examples of full-bodied artists working with abstraction in

photography. It is also important to point out that even though Rexer includes images by

Beshty, Tillmans, and Welling in the book, which works like a survey of ‘abstraction in

photography’, he is only leveling them out and pulling them down to the field where

people like Bill Armstrong and Silvio Wolf play, which is a regressive and actively

boring place. As the press release informs us, “Bill Armstrong creates optical

reverberations by photographing his subjects with the lens set at infinity, then taking the

results and rephotographing and processing them. The outcome is a visually destabilizing

experience that undermines the eye’s ability to resolve the image and explores the

position of the viewer in relation to the work”. I think it is safe to say by looking at

Armstrong’s work, such as Mask and Mandala (which graces the cover of the book and is

in the show), that this nice extrapolation from his fuzzy work could also be summed up as

‘intentionally OUT OF FOCUS pictures’. It doesn’t take a genius to focus a camera,

which I’m sure Armstrong can do, but it certainly doesn’t make one a genius when you

un-focus the camera and then take a picture of the out of focus print, and print it again. I

would like to deduce that this makes one the opposite of a genius, and the work is just an

example of exercises in futility and brain numbing conceptualism. I could say exactly the

same for Silvio Wolf, whose images are just extravagant prints of film exposed to light

then processed so the image gets wiped out, yet the press release likes to phrase it as, “a

journey into photographic comprehension and personal contemplation. These images,

documentary but ambiguous in their references, invite us to suspend our compulsive

desire for resolution and meaning in favor of an unfolding range of metaphoric

associations and intellectual speculations”. First of all, I think our “desire for resolution”

passed out a century ago with people like James Joyce and Picasso, and if Rexer or

whoever wrote this tuned in to western civilization they would find out that Wolf isn’t the

only one “in favor of an unfolding range of metaphoric associations and intellectual

speculations”, he just happens to appeal to the intellect of a seventh grader on acid. If

anyone who had the most minute understanding of film photography were to look at his

“Voyager” images they could immediately infer how and why they are abstracted –

because of pre-empted exposure to light or the end of a roll’s always pleasant yellow to

black fade – and this kind of shoots the metaphorical/intellectual excuse in the foot.

But enough criticism on the Edge of Vision, it could go on forever and only get

more frustrating. Let’s offer another substitute. Again, I want to forego artists who have

already done everything that is happening in the show here and been recognized for it,

like Uta Barth and Sarah Charlesworth, and look at someone who has acknowledged

these and other artists and made artwork that advances the dialogue. Paul Pfeiffer, who

works with appropriated imagery in his project “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”

(begun in 2000), subtly caries out a process of digital erasure and camouflaging that

looks at issues from race and religion to fame and the modern spectacle. Using pictures

from online archives, magazines, television, and film, Pfeiffer takes iconic images of

basketball players in action with their face hidden by their arm and erases the ball to

create an picture of what looks to be a man in a state of epiphany or religious reverie, or

completely erases Marilyn Monroe from some of her famous studio shots so that all we

see is the image of the backdrop completely filled in. These pictures exist as mural prints

and we look at them as viewers of a spectacle, but a scene completely removed from the

image’s original context and intended spectacle. As Gloria Sutton explains, “Pfeiffer’s

appropriation and subsequent erasure of found imagery in ‘The Four Horsemen of the

Apocalypse’ pressures the formal conventions of the figure study and at the same time

suggests a catastrophic or violent end for figural representation.” Like Beshty, Pfeiffer is

working with a truly updated sense of photography and abstraction, where it isn’t about

exploring the “mechanics of perception and its relation to form and meaning” as the press

release suggests, which sounds like a student’s vague application to an MFA program,

but actually looking honestly at how photography functions in society today and informs

both the art world and western culture now, which is, as we’ve already discussed, already

abstract.

SAM FALLS

11/03/2009

NEW BOOKS

night vision exhibition, vancouver, b.c.

10/08/2009

Fecal Face

9/22/2009

NIGHT VISION

8/15/2009

NEW BOOK

7/14/2009

Open studios

5/27/2009

Aperture : The Edge of Vision, Review

4/10/2009

SWEDEN

3/22/2009

CAPRICIOUS SHOW

1/10/2009

Emerging Photographers Auction

1/09/2009

Longislandcitycritical

7/22/2008

shanagram

fawn

archive

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