Some thoughts about two shows I saw last week where photographers used computers to manipulate their work.

Thomas Ruff at David Zwirner. The initial impression of these extra large images is favorable. Presented in this show are jumbo framed photographic works which initially suggest some of the characteristics of painting. The images appear to be built up in a grid like arrangement of  sizable rectangles in muted colors. For a moment, the blocks begin to work abstractly, in that one block appears to move spatially back or forward relative to the adjacent blocks. Any person who has used  a digital camera and a computer will recognize that these blocks are pixels. After a few moments, by stepping back from the work, the overall image can be perceived, not unlike an impressionist painting. According to the press release, Ruff merely applied the simple technical device of  enlarging the image until the pixels themselves were each as large as a wallet sized photograph. That there was no further thought or intervention applied to these works by the artist, I found disappointing. The rubric of the gallery press release describes the artist’s motivations:

A  continuation of Ruff’s interest in the mechanical production of images and their subsequent  degeneration (as in his nudes and substrat series), these JPEGs draw attention to the abstraction that occurs  when recognizable images are digitized and distributed via the Internet. How  this degeneration affects our  understanding of and reaction to images, whether benign or visceral, beautiful or repulsive, familiar or  unrecognizable, is at the root of Ruff’s exploration. The release continues:  Visible pixel lines are embedded in the image, creating a  juxtaposition  of biomorphic and geometric shapes, suggesting the imposition of technology on the natural world.

The technical device used to produce this show in fact produces nothing more than technical gimmickry. The press release  attempts to pad out a thin concept with post modern jargon about computers, media and memory.  Ironically, I went to the gallery web site to refresh my memory of the show, and found scaled down versions of the photographs. On my computer screen the pixels disappeared and the images became nothing more than ordinary pictures.

Doug Hall at Feigen Contemporary.  These large photographs of prominent tourist attractions,  “are constructed out of multiple images of a location, often taken over several hours. As the press release describes ” Elements from the negatives are then pieced back together to form one coherent image. Therefore, while the photographs appear to document a single moment in time, this instantaneousness is an illusion, as the photographs are actually composed from a composite of many such moments.”

To further distinguish this work from ordinary travel photographs the press release continues.

“Doug Hall’s most recent series of large-scale photographs encourage us to reconsider familiar places and address how our perceptions are framed and defined by the spaces we occupy…  Hall’s detailed and color-saturated panoramas show us how these public spaces circumscribe human activity. “

It is difficult to see how any of these images, which could faithfully describe actual scenes, in broad daylight, absent any distinguishing point of view atmosphere or insight, could inspire any reconsideration.

Hall is quoted in the press release where he emphasizes,  “the role that institutions play in constructing our experiences of the world and of ourselves in it”. The release goes on to explain how Hall, “by working on the “world stage, “, demonstrates how we are participants in a grand theater that seeks to direct our understanding of the world. “His photographs are meant  ” remind us of how hierarchies are embedded in the world and how the physical and cultural constructs that we often take for granted have power over us, perhaps until we take a closer and longer look.” Can any of these points be perceived from the work itself?

Overall,  the images are utterly believable, betraying absolutely no hint of untruth or manipulation.  One image, from Yosemite National park is a particularly well composed gathering of people,  showing a complexity lacking in the other work. I wonder why go to the trouble to assemble the many components when the results produce so little affect. The results are perfectly ordinary, and interchangeable with souvenir  postcards.

In the same way Hall feels that visitors to the tourist attraction are being manipulated “to  behold the spectacle before them from specific, pre-ordained vantage points”, the visitors to the gallery are being manipulated by the gallery’s press release. . In both of these shows, The  gallery explanations asserting theoretical underpinnings of the work seem specious. No matter how intellectualized their explanations, the photographs remain mundane

Normally I like to share work that inspires me and I hope inspire others. But in these two cases, I left the galleries with the feeling that I was being manipulated.

Photographs by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga apply the methodology of aerial photography to interior photography. Customarily, interior photographs might be made from a high vantage point, with the position of the camera oriented from high up at the corner of the room, looking towards the opposite side,  pointed at an angle down towards the floor. Akin to satellite photographs, these images record the entire contents of an assortment of interiors taken from a vantage point directly overhead. Replete with detail, the photographs present all of the furnishings as flat planes.  Rugs, table tops, beds, a cat,  all become part of a complex formal arrangement.  The picture plane of these photographs, being parallel to the floor betrays no indication of depth, since no view of table legs, for example, can be seen. These prints are presented without mattes or frame, and the edge contours of each print is cut to conform to the room perimeters. Thus each all of the floor area of the room, and some indication of the room walls are rendered within the confines of the print. Some of the photographs include the room occupants, lying on a bed, soaking in the bath or sitting on the toilet.

For photography to transcend mere description, I believe that imagery should do more that merely describe what exists at a particular time and location. Yet these images succeed perhaps because of the obsessive attention to pure description and inhuman objectivity.  These photographs are also technically astonishing. The images are extremely clear, inviting endless scrutiny of every detail, from tooth paste tubes to nuggets of cat food spilled on the floor. Apparently the artists have used the computer to combine multiple photographic frames seamlessly into each print. Their efforts all add  up to an inventive study of quotidian life.

Another recent graduate of the Yale Masters program, and one whose work, I believe is significantly elevated beyond student work, despite her short time out of school. The obvious inspiration for her work is  Edward Ruscha’s  paintings but this work is completely photographic.

Shannon makes actual word signs and places them in landscapes. The words are constructed in the manner of the Hollywood sign, thinly cutout letters each propped up in the landscape. This work is a blend of the concerns of conceptual art traditions and some of the traditions of black and white photography. Ebner is sensitive to the expressive potentials of highlight and shadow and her prints have the rich textures of some of the best landscape photography. Most often, conceptual artists using photography have little concern for or understanding of the expressive aspects of the medium.  But her command of the materials yields images of poetic and conceptual content that are also finely made prints. Additionally, she also works with color materials with equal facility.

The conceptual foundation of this work is perhaps best summarized with the gallery press release.

“Dead Democracy Letters documents temporary landscape installations that briefly lay claim to the urban-pastoral expanses of undeveloped land in and around Los Angeles. Ebner’s Letters offer a critical investigation into social and political injustices; they employ language to address its fallibility in a time of perpetual war when words such as freedom, liberation and democracy are drained of meaning and left corrupted.”

The work on view seen on Saturday in three hours of Chelsea gallery going, was surprisingly satisfying. Oftentimes, an afternoon can be spent looking at galleries, and my reaction is little more than a shrug of the shoulders.  From this last foray, I have four shows which I can recommend.

David Maisel at Von Lintel gallery (555 W. 25th) This is a continuation of Maisel’s accomplished aerial photographic studies of damaged and abused environments. “It looks  like a painting’’  has been a cliched appraisal of many photographs. Because we seldom see the bird’s eye view, we can be seduced by the novelty of seeing the ordinary from the air. Maisel’s photographs navigate the shoals of these two aesthetic pitfalls,producing images that stimulate formally, spatially, and conceptually. Flying  over the Great Salt Lake  which has been diked and bermed in various industrial operations, Maisel fixes with his camera these ephemeral and  unintentional earthwork compositions. The palette of his subject is extraordinary, but Maisel shows particular sensitivity to drawing, line, and ambiguous space.  As in painterly illusion, that which is flat becomes spacial and volumetric. Maisel is intuitively sensitive  to the expressive potential of photography, and produces images with this technical medium that are faultlessly precise and unusually vivid.

Christian Marclay at Paula Cooper Gallery. Marclay has applied his sensibilities to photographic materials. Using 12” transparent vinyl records as “negatives” Marclay made a series of photograms by placing the record directly along with some long human hairs on the color print material, and then exposing the assembly to light, producing cobalt blue prints of the grooves of the record, now white tracings against the blue ground. Adding to the regularity of the record grooves, the hairs cross over the grooves and flow out from the circumference of the record. After much deliberation, I purchased one of these. Other photo- grams incorporate hands and record sleeves. . Another group of prints was made by putting the record in a photographic enlarger, and making a print as if the record was a negative. The resulting prints are made from approximately 1/4 of the record, the image being comprised of the radial grooves of the record. Because of the high magnification of the record, the grooves render as wavering lines drawn by an unsteady hand. This is surprising and intelligent work.

Kim Keever at Feigen Contemporary. The world of constructed photography grows more complex with each year, and Keever adds his own world view. As if seen through a porthole that has just emerged from beneath water, these very lurid fabricated images  are illusively rich and add upon the work of Thomas Demand, Oliver Boborg and Sonja Braas.

Tanyth Berkeley at Bellwether (134 10th Ave) Color Portraits made mostly of young women and adolescent girls. Berkeley approached he models on the street  and invited them to sit for a portrait. The photographer’s selection shows a particular line of investigation: that of women who are the polar opposite of the beautifully complexioned perfectly proportioned visages that are seen on TV and in magazines. Upon seeing this work, it is uncertain as to whether or not this  enterprise has been done with a somewhat cruel selective process. Berkeley has made fairly straight forward portraits in the outdoors with natural ligh and the portraits yield little affect, either of the artist’s sensibilities or of the subjects’ personalities. Viewed independently, no one photograph breaks no new ground visually or conceptually, but in aggregate, the show did stick in my mind. That the women sitting in Berkeley’s gaze are unattractive is inarguable, and she hasn’t tried to make them pretty. But it is not clear that she hasn’t collected her subjects simply to make an exploitative treatise on beauty. This notion is open to discussion. Also in her show were one irrelevant landscape and a few lack luster full figure photographs of men. Perhaps this is an artist whose work should be followed, rather than committed to at this moment.