Photography Criticism: Donna-Lee Phillips

All of Recent Color has been done in or from the studio. In a letter to Afterimage, Dave Kueppchen "respectfully suggest[ed] the following categories" for studio setups: "Studio clutter, studio tables with funny legs, colored blocks and balls, spray paint and colored string, and torn background paper and wire." Here, David Haxton, using torn background paper -- gray, black, white, or red -- and light of various colors, creates a series of extremely minor variations within one category. Lucas Samaras shows 20X24 Polacolor prints in a selection from his seemingly endless self-portrait series. These nearly identical images incorporate studio clutter, naked subject(s) seated in a chair in front of sleazy fabrics, and dim illumination through colored gels. Samaras peers from the left edge of every single frame. Vahe Guzelmian works with flash-in-hand, multiple exposures, muffin tins, toys, gravel, and other urban remnants, making mandala-like images in which we glimpse parts of bodies.

David White and Reed Estabrook work with collage/constructions. White's Still Plus Life pieces recycle and reprocess other artworks. Good Times makes an altar with drawing, toy truck, ruler, flowers and burning votary candles; Ruler, Paper, String, a spare white arrangement opposes drawn and three-dimensional triangles; This and That utilizes string, a paper tube and carpenter's plumb. All of these works function as documents of ephemeral constructivist occurrences. In contrast, Estabrook's Exercises in Solid Geometry are legerdemain with grids, rulers, and garishly painted surfaces -- puzzles worked in perspective and illusion. #30, with its glowing silver form, and #23, which warps the laws of perspective by drawing a line of pink reinforcing bar, tape and paint across a chrome curve, particularly invoke genuine photographic questions about perception and expectation.

In science and in art, many of the most important discoveries have resulted from this curious moving-thing-around-to-see-what-might-happen-if . . . Photography, particularly large, carefully constructed color photography, is not an especially hospitable medium for such experimentation. Often the difficulty for the viewer lies in discerning which experiments have culminated in meaningful results and which have not.

Mary Arendt's large vertical triptychs use the notion of studio in a very different manner. With sources somewhere between the forensic specimen and the death mask, these stele-like self-portraits contain disjoined, flattened fragments of hands, feet, torso and head which float silently in fluid fields of somber color. Arendt's images are very disquieting, grave reminders of how temporary a state being alive actually is, and how much more permanent the photographic trace.

Cindy Sherman has featured herself as starlet in ersatz black & white glossy movie stills for some time. In the work included in Recent Color, she uses reel movie color and familiar, film-like frames: a woman (medium close-up) alone drinking a beer; a woman (medium close-up) open-mouthed, wearing a dowdy pink dress; a woman (extreme close-up) alone at night in an electric-blue park. Sherman thoroughly understands the conventions of film and the dimensions of ideology and myth. The 16x20 prints suffer somewhat from an internal contradiction -- they are film scenes presented in an art-photography format which lacks the true physical resonance of the 8x10 glossy. Two large prints, one of a sweaty blonde wrapped in a blue robe and the other of a lonely redhead waiting by a white phone, are framed in the appropriate wide screen of the Hollywood product. Sherman's stills are iconic, authentically American B-movie images: larger than life, flatter, but somehow culturally accurate in a country which gave a gold medal to John Wayne (who never went to war), and the presidency to Ronald Reagan.

Bernard Faucon's scenarios with mannequins and occasional people are a well-chosen counterpoint to Sherman's images. Descendants of Bellmer's La PoupŽe and the ordinary bourgeois snapshot, these meticulously staged, life-size events exploit the uncanny likeness of man and mannequin: Premier Communion, a traditional portrait of two sailor-suited boy communicants -- one fabricated, one flesh -- in front of a gray church; Colin Maillard, which pictures an ominous game played by several blindfolded imitation boys and a single real girl; and Les Amis, which discovers a nearly naked boy in intimate conversation with a papier-mache friend. These scrutinize both the snapshot ritual and adolescent social/sexual curiosity. The eerie, very French verisimilitude of the mannequins, as well as Faucon's sensitivity to the elements of his events, are complemented by the suitably nostalgic Fresson color used in the series.

The name Manual, behind which Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill have collaborated for several years, can mean either instruction book or made by hand; in 13 Ways of Coping it functions as both. Manual offers thirteen maxims on conventional, received notions of seeing, which are then dissected and reassembled in the images. Art Mirrors (our idea of) Nature expresses the attitude of this process. In Deer, a pastel drawing reconstructs the idea of the animal which hangs, dead, in the central snapshot. Torn Landscape superimposes a corrected color print over a larger proof print of the same scene which has been torn and reassembled. Tissue House contains a house sketched on tissue and pinned to its photographic (potential) landscape.

Manual allows each question to structure its own visual realization. Video Landscape is an apparently straight shot of a landscape on a color TV; Dale's Light is a homely construction in which two photographs -- an old barn in one, a prefab new house in the other -- are mounted at right angles to each other on a slab or rough wood, and illuminated by Dale's bare, low-wattage bulb. Manual's work requires us to unreceive many of the received ideas we hold about the visual world and to analyze situations we usually accept as natural but which are, in fact, only constructed to appear natural.

Recent Color provides an excellent survey of the concerns of contemporary color photographers, from minimal to highly realized theory.

Ed. Note: The exhibition Recent Color was curated by Dorothy Martinson.

Notes

¹Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill, "Wringing the Goose's Neck One Last Time, painting vs. photography and the deconstruction of modernism," Afterimage 9 (1982).