One clue to the absence of surprise in the invitational lies in the selection process -- an exhaustive filtering of nominees through nine recognized authorities (advanced teachers and critics), a series of lectures given by curator Van Deren Coke which highlighted significant contemporary trends, and a final jurying by sixteen SECA members. The work of the eleven photographers selected, which is described in the catalog as "widely disparate in style and content," actually plots a familiar course from straight images through "beautiful and stylish manipulations." Given Coke's thesis that photographic activity in and around art school/departments encourages photographers to "deal with some of the same issues as those challenging paintersÓ -- whatever those might be -- the failure of the SECA search to uncover any photographers dealing with social issues is somewhat predictable. Of equal significance is the current status of photographic certainty which, like many other certainties at this cultural juncture, is in a serious ebb.
Straight photographers in the exhibit include Art Rogers and Doug Muir. Rogers, whose color work was reviewed in Artweek, July 3, 1982, has inexplicably opted to show only black & white images from the mid-and-late Seventies. These, while generally less intense and resolved than his color work, provide a reference for the evolution of Rogers' visual encounter with Point Reyes folk. Puppies, a formal, old-fashioned portrait of a couple holding up eight squirmy puppies for inspection, is a corny, delightful exception. Muir's color studies of small-town houses and yards are familiar, rather tentative evidence of wanderings among the banal. In some of the images there is an indication of the range of Muir's potential -- among them two formal images (one of a small stone column set upon a geometry of pale pink and blue tiles and grayish slates, the other of an attenuated red flowering plant reminiscent of Japanese floral arrangement) and a spontaneous, rather casual rendering of an unkempt white house with a blue tarp-covered motorcycle in the wet, cluttered front yard.
Laura Volkerding moves from straight photographs (Yosemite as seen from inside a car at the end of a very long, tedious line of tourists, and China Camp, its access barred by a vertical pole bisecting center frame), to cool, very precise four-frame panoramas (Bodega Bay; Rolf Hongell's Saw Mill, Oregon), and includes two strikingly precarious long views of steep San Francisco stairs or streets. Michael Narciso's highway series (Almaden/280, Hwy 17 Dusk and Hwy 17/280 Winter) is represented by a very small selection of modest black & white prints mounted two or four to a piece. Unfortunately, these are not sufficient to give either a sense of series or a very clear understanding of what Narciso intends by his comparisons of architectural or highway fragments.
Paul Klein's long night exposures, with predictably strange colors, blurred shapes and banal subjects, reiterate what is certainly -- by now -- a photographic ultra clichŽ. A mauve gravestone flanked by a pair of stiff topiary shrubs in a field of acid green, a door surmounted by a hovering gray square, and a steep, pink-lighted stairway are all very handsome uses of this vocabulary, but the unavailability of usable energy in this genre -- far more a look than a way of seeing -- is patently obvious.
Barbara Thompson's studio constructions, using fake stuff placed or taped on ordinary household surfaces, are the strongest and most individual of the SECA works. Plastic figs, crimson brushstrokes over embroidered black silk and false white flowers, various artificial grapes taped to a blue dresser, a vile green crepe scarf with glowing ersatz fruits, or pink construction paper squares festooned with hot pink rose-shaped lights comprise a vocabulary of artifice and invention which is at once ordinary and unique, straightforward and romantic. More extravagant constructions by Thom Sempere, using nearly discernible flowers, picture frames, chairs, flashlights and the occasional cat or Rubik's cube, are dark fields written on with light. A notion frequently ignored by those using words in/and/on photographs is that words -- while they are often beautiful physical objects -- are irrevocably linked to their signifieds. When Sempere maintains some thread of literal meaning (as in Adjusted, on which he writes "try to know . . . talk to myself . . . adjusted dogma," or Circle of Violence, which invites us to "cross the line," or Interjection of Time), his work is most intelligible. The traditional problem with work of this nature, whether to attempt real experimentation with its rough edges and risk of failure or to produce controlled pseudo-surreal objects, plagues Sempere throughout.
The remaining artists are mostly involved with "issues that are challenging painters." Bruce Van Meter's tiny, delicate arrangements of patterns produced by stripping emulsion from SX-70s and affixing it to drawing paper, and Jeanne O'Connor's layered litho films over painted grounds, are somewhat more interesting for technical panache than for content. Of John Bloom's three series (in which nothing serial is evident), Conflicting Assumptions, with its transparent painted planes on photographs of construction materials, is most nearly resolved. Lynda Frese's murkily toned, defaced multiprinted nudes engage wedding veils, broken wine glasses, and ominous brackish lakes in a metaphoric conversation which remains essentially private.
Perhaps the most significant work in the SECA Invitational is that of Nicholas Hondrogen, who is not part of the Invitational at all, but who is showing in the connecting gallery between the two halls of the SECA exhibit. With mock-scientific seriousness and wonderful lunacy, Hondrogen structures several theoretical series (and these are series) around notions of intention and chance, color and time. The four Rational(e)s Series create visual fields on which points of occurrence are marked and trajectories plotted, according to the movements of cat(s) or fish(es). In Series 5B from Additive/Subtractive Series, various permutations of light primary colors, pigment primary colors and the golden section are befuddled by the innocent meanderings of a cat which provides a "metaphor for the creator's irrationality." Hondrogen is essentially concerned with seeing and thinking, rather than with hacking out a personal style. The physical look of his images arises naturally and necessarily from their intentions; in his series there is still available and usable energy, and uncertainty, disorder and information.
