Damage Done |
2005 • page 4 of 4 |
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Artists • Damage Done Thomas Barrow Another artist who trained under an eminent modernist, as did Brett Weston, is the American Thomas Barrow. Barrow studied with Aaron Siskind in the early 1960s at the Institute of Design (Chicago). However, Barrow’s work eventually challenged many of the premises upon which the work of Siskind, Adams and Weston was based. Barrow violated the prevailing aesthetic of fine art photography that dictated a pristine photographic surface. The intention behind the relentless “spotting” (retouching) of dust and scratches considered de rigueur by photography teachers everywhere was to facilitate the illusion of realism, reminiscent of the suspension of disbelief necessary to watch a Hollywood film. Barrow “cancelled” his negatives by adopting the printmaking tradition in which, upon the completion of an edition, the stone or plate is marked, rendering it unusable for further printing. Barrow did this by scratching a broad “X” into his negatives with an ice pick or bent coat hanger or, in a less common variant, by punching holes. He would then print from these damaged negatives, 18 compiling the results as his Cancellation series. Working primarily in the 1970s, the exceedingly bland subject matter “behind” Barrow’s Xs was similar to the work that appeared in the seminal exhibition New Topographics at George Eastman House (Rochester) in 1975. Including artists such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Frank Gohlke, New Topographics was itself portrayed as a movement critical of earlier photographic representations of a romanticized landscape that failed to acknowledge the true degree of human interference in nature. One can speculate that Barrow enacted a kind of double critique with his Cancellations. His “X” sits squarely on the border between photograph and image so that, even as he summoned up the New Topographics vision of a defiled nature, he also made the viewer conscious of the act of representation and its transformation of the real. Barrow’s pictures acted as reminders that both romanticized and “realist” visions of the landscape were still representations with all of their attendant issues of subjectivity and contingency. His question may well have been: does substituting one form of unquestioned ideology for another not potentially act as a form of “cancellation”?
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Fiona McLaughlin Fiona McLaughlin’s untitled video proposes an almost clinical scenario in which, like Dean, an impersonal, pre-programmed process appears to be at work. The “experiment” is both destructive and transformative for the photographic transparencies that are its object. McLaughlin, a Toronto artist and recent graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, uses discarded slides from her former school’s slide library as fodder for her work. She places the slides on a light table, tightly cropped within the video frame. For the first several seconds, we see an image that has been copied from an undocumented art history text. Then, we see a clear liquid (bleach) being dropped onto the transparency’s surface. For a second or two, the image remains intact, the drops of liquid pooling on its surface. Then, explosively, as the dyes that make up the slide’s colours run in all directions, the image transforms before our eyes from an art historical masterpiece, such as a Byzantine mosaic, into something that resembles an abstract expressionist painting. The kind of uneasiness that accompanies the destruction of family photographs by Max Dean’s robot echoes in McLaughlin’s dissolution of images of well-known artworks. Her scenarios have the power to disturb and, yet, enthrall. Even though we recognize that we are viewing copies of an original artwork, our imaginations summon the destruction of the original (as actually happens in times of barbarity, such as war). And, yet, the dissolution process creates abstract images of great beauty in themselves. The price of that beauty is the forgetting of that which precedes it. McLaughlin’s alchemical laboratory also references the ongoing transformation of the time-honoured tradition of the slide lecture, the staple of her recent art school experience. “Smart” classrooms wired for digital projection, the proliferation of laptop computers and the convenience of presentation software, such as PowerPoint, have combined to increasingly usurp the role of the 35mm film transparency in art education. Digital image databases for teaching use (complete with looming copyright issues) are now under construction. In spite of the many benefits arising from the digital formatting of presentations, there remains one significant drawback – the attainable resolution of the projected digital image is decidedly inferior to what it is replacing. At the present moment, data projectors cannot match the clarity of a projected 35mm slide. In this sense, the technology performs an “edit” on its subject through the very act of presentation.
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