Jerome du Bois
I read recently that at least two local galleries will be highlighting Fashion this October. In the spirit of fanciful participation, let me offer a dramatic version of Catherine's recent online diptych about the color pink, It's Not A Rose-Colored World / And Wearing Pink Won't Make It So, which you can partially assemble below, on her posting, by moving your browser to the right and the popup to the left. I know, it won't fit most monitors, including ours, but it gives you a rough idea of its impact. (Women on the left, men on the right.)
Now. Take each one of those 154 rectangles in the diptych. Reproduce it actual size, about 12" x 18", as a transparency. Laminate it behind glass and back it, with the gap of an air buffer of 1/2", with an electroluminescent panel, for even illumination. Frame the whole thing in simple black metal frames.
Repeat 154 times.
Then hang the results on a large white wall in a darkened room, according to the pattern already laid out, neatly hiding wires and power sources. The diptych would be twelve+ feet high and twenty+ feet long overall, so one would need a big wall in a generous room.
Now let's stand back and admire this glowing matrix for a minute. All those talking heads, all that urgency around and behind them, pumping up the drama of already interesting times . . . and they're wearing pink, and that's not a minor point. It must be said.
And now let's move back and forth to see what we can see. Some panels are just downright funny at first, like this one, which I call "I Came Through The Dimension For You."
But look closer.
Marshall McLuhan called television the cool medium --distanced and ironic-- and film photography the hot medium, fine-grained, immediate and direct. Here Catherine interposes her digital camera to turn television inside out and make it hot, peeling its pretensions back, as if lifting a pixelated curtain.
That's cool. I mean, hot. I mean, new.
Long ago Bruce Nauman talked about his frustrated desire to present ideas directly, without any intermediary clutter, but he had a hard time with the notion until the Fat Chance John Cage piece. Andy Warhol had to shove his photos through a silkscreening process to make them interesting. Philip Lorca-Di Corcia? His secret street shots were great, but he made every decision. John Routson documenting his channel-changing moments? No, limp with the randomity. That guy who lays out every frame of a movie on a canvas? That's from hunger, a tour de farce. Nam June Paik makes nice sculptures, but the crazy accelerated images on the screens (often the identical loop on many of them) do nothing to help give one purchase on the world. Christian Marclay comes close, because of his thematic choices and his selections from movies --reality once removed. Hanne Darboven and Arakawa recording time? Very little to look at, yes? Impoverished. As David Bryne sang, "No information left of any kind." Fischl & Weiss's ten jillion snapshots on ten tables in a gallery? Was that some kind of joke, like the ultimate boring relative with the photo albums thinking the sun shines out their ass?
Life trumps art. Everything else is hand-waving. Catherine King captures some of the ley lines of what's going on and displays them in the classical, rational grid, all at once, for the best kind of contemplation and comparison.
Here she has taken what is given and presented it raw --no tripod, no plasma TV, no freeze-framing, no Photoshopping to eliminate black bands, no astringent desire to make every image AJ-squared-away. Just jumping up every time pink showed up on a news show, grabbing the camera, and firing away. She had her criterion and her itch. Life would deliver the details, since every pixel on the newsscreen, just as every cubic inch in the television studio, is produced by someone.
In Kinds of Minds, Daniel Dennett writes:
In her book On Photography (1977), the literary critic Susan Sontag points out that the advent of high-speed still photography was a revolutionary technological advance for science because it permitted human beings, for the first time ever, to examine complicated temporal phenomena not in real time but in their own good time --in leisurely, methodical, backtracking analysis of the traces they had created out of those complicated events. As noted in chapter 3, our natural minds are equipped to deal with changes that occur only at particular paces. Events that happen faster or slower are simply invisible to us. Photography was a technological advance that carried in its wake a huge enhancement in cognitive power, by permitting us to re-present the events of interest in the world in a format, and at a rate, that was tailor-made for our particular senses.
Catherine takes advantage of this exact phenomenon, arresting the ever-accelerating pace of visual news, but retaining the sense of urgency, of time passing fast, in the partially degraded images.
Here's another example. Amazing, eh? Those little crosses . . . And here's Shepard Smith breaking up in New Orleans; the photo reflects his --and much of America's-- state of mind at the time.
This huge panorama of heads and shoulders and pink is a detailed social document, a portrait of July and August 2005 as presented by cable news --a fabricated world, with sci-fi backgrounds bubbling like lava lamps, and sleek industrial railings running through Mondrian-like rectangles composed of eight different space-age materials.
Someone might object that a more accurate social document would be to take shots of the stories themselves, not the anchors. First, that's foolish; there is no feasible way to capture the richness of the daily world pictorially and accurately. Second, the key is in that word anchor. The stories begin and end with the storytellers, and Catherine's point is that the anchors are not heavy; they have no gravitas. We're at war, and they show up for a sock hop.
My final example --like a parody of the cover of The National Inquirer-- shows life trumping art with its multiple absurdities. It may seem funny at first, and second, and third examination, but eventually, as we look away, at the other 153 frames, the real world breaks through the futile pink scrim and we see the truth of her title.
Posted by Jerome at September 7, 2005 08:30 AM | TrackBack