Four Clay Scrollbars And Several Rocks, 2012
Digital Print, variable sizes
© Rachel de Joode

Untitled, 2011 [from "Untitled Portraits"]
Digital Print, 15.7 x 23.6 in
© Rachel de Joode

Venus, 2009 [from "The Residue of those Celestial Objects bound to our Sun by Gravity"]
C-Print, 39.4 x 47.2 in
© Rachel de Joode

The Small Blue Gradient, 2011 [from "The Small Blue Gradient"]
Digital Print, 19.7 x 27.6 in
© Rachel de Joode

Neptune, 2009 [from "The Residue of those Celestial Objects bound to our Sun by Gravity"]
C-Print, 39.4 x 47.2 in
© Rachel de Joode

Install of Knife (J.G.), 2011
© Owen Kydd

Lucas Blalock: Can you talk about the transition in your work from more episodic videos that produce a sort of serialized experience to the very tightly contained loops you have been making recently? I further wanted to ask a sort of goofy question about whether you think of these static, durational, looped pieces as still films or extended photographs?

Owen Kydd: I began by working with a duration of about 30 to 40 seconds per image. I found it was a good length to investigate still/motion, because it seemed enough to provide the manifest of a moment while also giving me the chance to create a montage. I made projects that would slide between a series of 9 or 10 of these images (with ellipses in between). Through this process of looking and editing I began to learn more about making pictures that responded to an extension, and I eventually felt like I could make some singular works.

One thing I found was that durational photographs worked better when they lost the indicators that tied them to a past, and began to confuse the moment of filming with the experience of viewing. Cinema or video works that have a long duration usually quote a recorded or lived time, and even in early pieces like Warhol’s Empire, which is close to losing its temporal markers, one is always made conscious of at least the possibility of an end point. This awareness could also be the tied to the projector’s flicker and the grain, but I also have found this condition in more recent video works. I am interested in trying to locate a more hallucinogenic or endless quality.

Still from Sighting, 2010
© Owen Kydd

In terms of the loop’s designation, I can say that when I think about making a still film, I think about changing a momentum and this feels decisive. But when I think about extending photography it suggests continuing a photograph’s inertia, and this seems more indefinite. My works are technically films because they rely on apparent motion, but the movement is limited within the frame, the effect is minimized, and often the same image is overlapped for many seconds without interruption. This process allows me to consider how a photograph can involve itself in motion.

LB: It is interesting to me that through this ambiguity between the still film and the “durational” photograph you end up bringing into question the boundaries of the device and even the strict usefulness of these categories. I feel that this is akin to the kind of interrogation that has prompted artists of late to return to the darkroom (amongst other strategies), but we are really discussing different limits here altogether.

OK: My pieces are exhibited on backlight screens or monitors. So, as with photography, there is a picture merged with a surface, albeit one that has a CFL light and a refresh rate. I feel that there is still an implicit tension between the screen and the subject. And because I am interested in making a picture of something in the world, I hope this tension presents something like the “possibility of reference” (to borrow Walter Benn Michael’s terms) rather than a fight against it. This is wrapped up in the forced distinction that the flatness of the photograph (and here, the screen) must make between itself and the exterior of the object it depicts, and this is a separation that I’m not sure fully exists in the projected image. I can also say that (with the monitor in mind) I find myself looking for specific surfaces.

Still from Yucca Color Shift, 2011
© Owen Kydd

LB: Thinking now of the refresh rate, I am also beginning to feel two competing senses of time in these works – one that relates to the possibility of a totalizing photograph achieved through massive accumulation and the other a very slow, meditative temporality that fluidly elongates our looking.

OK: I think the temporal modes you are describing always appear together, although in different ratios, and probably stem from distinct types of photographs; the totalizing image probably begins with a snapshot while the more meditative likely comes from genre imagery. I made a picture of a carving knife in a store window that I think begins with the former. It has the found street ambience of an object that has been framed or chosen out of a passerby’s field of view, and in this sense it is a snapshot – a photograph that exemplifies an instant of lived time.

The Knife begins with this traditional correlation, where a frozen segment of time comes to denote its opposite – that is, fluidity. It adds back the perception of lived time, and this is mixed in with the occurrence of watching the video. In this sense I am trying to intensify the elongated sense of looking that is less pronounced in the imagined photograph of the knife, or the moment the head or camera turns to see it. It reenacts the moment the image was taken.

Still from Knife (J.G.), 2011
© Owen Kydd

LB: Your description makes me think of Barthes and the melancholy that he associated with the temporal/photographic relationship. I am wondering if you could talk a little more about what you meant by “looking for specific surfaces”?

OK: You could say it’s a bit like adding-back-in Barthes’ lament, trying to apply duration but after the fact, and usually to an image that doesn’t contain a high degree of trauma in the first place. I’ve been concentrating on documentary or street images for this, somewhat to the chagrin of photographers in my life, because I find these images fit the performance better. I think the pictures I’m looking for also have something to do with that sense of inertia I was describing, not necessarily in terms of a compositional arrangement that draws the eye around the image, but more in terms of the things themselves, objects with a resistance to change. The monitor contains this same constancy, always on, or sleeping, it’s pixels perpetually repeating in the same place.

LB: There is something rather sci-fi about that and it is interesting to think about this stillness or constancy as a cultural metaphor of the digital age where the same binary code and pixel matrix underwrites an extraordinary breadth of information. Seeing the material of the “information super highway” as inert opens up some really unusual relationships to the inertias of the objects. For me these objects occupy a really tense environment. To stand still for some duration in the world, particularly without peripheral vision, as the space of your videos ask us to do, introduces a sense that something could “happen” at any moment. But for me it is not so much that I am waiting for something to take place in the video as much as I find myself bodily anxious as if the parameters of vision leave me both highly attenuated and at the same time vulnerable.

OK: That’s a great way to describe that sense of anxiousness. I think it stems from the fact that the snapshot image is made continually strange by duration, instead of being completed by it or reassured by it. When time is added, it is akin to an accumulation of snapshots all pointing to the flow of time, or the ‘before and after’ of the moment the knife was photographed. As a series it could appear as a bit of a paradox. But at 30 frames per second and 60hz, the accumulation masks the illogical nature of the sequence. The result is an unreal and impossible time and I think the ultimate effect of this is a more traditional ‘distancing’ between us and the picture, albeit a heightened separation.

Still from Canvas Leaves, Torso, and Lantern, 2011
© Owen Kydd

LB: To end I’d like to ask about Canvas Leaves. This is a new work that uses the same presentation device to ponder a very different, highly contrived tableau.

OK: Canvas Leaves is intended to reverse the distancing process. It is a studio-set with a window box chiaroscuro made as a compendium of several storefronts on Pico Boulevard. Everything in the arrangement is plastic or artificial and even though it is static, I tried to make its arrangement unpredictable. The white canvas leaves hanging upside down, rotate left and right with the flow of air in the room (I had to rent an air-conditioner because it was a really warm August).

I hope in a way this piece takes a type of still-life that concerns the effect of time across objects, and doubles down on its imaginary time by adding a perpetual loop. There is no original ‘before and after’ and also no specific space or time that is chosen out of ‘reality’, so something like a psychological rupture occurs when it is brought into the framework of a lived interval. I think the autonomous and abnormal time of the still-life is actually normalized by this process and that is what is really unsettling. This is hard for me to apprehend though, because I filmed it – it exists as a memory as well.

Clusterfall, 2010 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
C-print, plywood, rubber, nails, 30 x 20 x 2 in.
© Letha Wilson

Hu Grand Tetons, 2011 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
Unique C-print, cheesecloth, cement, 24 x 20 x 7 in.
© Letha Wilson

Extrusions of Jack and Carol outside Mesquite, Nevada, 2003 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
Digital print, wood, styrofoam, plaster, paint, 60 x 84 x 64 in.
© Letha Wilson

Sailor’s Delight, 2009 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
C-print, wood, Aqua Resin, paint, 48 x 10 x 45 in.
© Letha Wilson

Flaming Gorge Rock Concrete Bend, 2011 [from "Photo Sculptures"]
Unique C-print, concrete, wood frame, 25 x 31 x 2 in.
© Letha Wilson

Images courtesy of the artist.

View more work by Letha Wilson here.

Skeleton 1, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 27 x 22 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 6, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 21 x 21 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 10, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 73.5 x 88.5 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 7, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 69 x 80 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Skeleton 3, 2007 [from "Skeleton"]
Collage, 64.5 x 77.5 cm
© Eftihis Patsourakis

Images courtesy Eleni Koroneou Gallery.

View more work by Eftihis Patsourakis here.

50,400 combinations of a 3×3 grid, 4 colors – BBC1BD, 6FACAD, AB98AC, 5A292F, 2011 [from "Aggregates"]
15 x 18 in. framed, Creased Archival Pigment Print
© John Houck

Lucas Blalock: Can you begin by explaining what it is we are looking at, and how this piece was made?

John Houck: This is a work from a new series I’ve been working on for a couple of months, thinking through the digital din of photography. Last year I wrote some software to generate every possible combination of a given grid system. I can specify how many rows and columns the grid has and select a series of colors to fill the grid. This creates a lot of images: a simple 3×3 grid with four colors has over fifty thousand possible combinations. There is no software that can handle this many images, so I wrote another program to turn all these images into an index sheet.

I then print these index sheets and crease the paper. I light it, re-photograph it, and then print it out again. I continue this process several times as a way to reclaim and alter the highly rational system of a generative index sheet. The recursive process of re-photographing also reveals itself in the layering at the edges of the print. I show them mid process, so some of the creases are photographic and others are actual creases. It’s a bit hard to tell on the web.

Installation View, 2011 [from "Aggregates"]
© John Houck

LB: It is also true that a grid like this (each individual unit on the index sheet) expanded exponentially has a very real relationship to the informational realities of a digital photograph? And could this collection of possibilities be activated in this way?

I also wanted to touch on how these pieces are called “Indexes,” and was wondering if you would talk a bit about how you see their index relates to the index(ical) classically associated with photography. On the surface it is ‘indexing’ the creases but there is a sense that the investigation goes much further?

JH: You’re right, I am trying to address the way the “informational” has shifted. When I was in the Whitney ISP last year, we had a series of seminars on the history of photography and I started to think through what it means to move from the recording of light on a surface to the encoding of light into bits. One thing that happens is the image is now backed by a symbolic system or language. It is only temporarily fixed and can be manipulated. It also means I can write software to generate images as opposed to taking them. My software isn’t terribly sophisticated and generates a lot of noise, so once I generate these images I still have to make the rather photographic choice and select images from this field of generative images. Similar to Lacan’s claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” these combinatorial images act as the unconscious of the digital ground. With computation, everything is structured as a language.

Flusser’s book, Towards a Philosophy of Photography also made sense to me in terms of the camera as an apparatus the idea that photographers are consumed by its combinatorial game. I wanted to play out this game as a way to subvert it. I started with the idea that this software could generate every possible image that a typical computer screen could display. Each pixel on your screen is a discrete number of colors. There is a limited set of images that can be shown on a screen and I wanted to generate all of them. Lay claim to every photograph in this set. The image of you reading this text is in that set. I quickly realized this would take thirty thousand years to generate every combination and would be almost entirely noise, and so I simplified the variables.

20, 735 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 12 colors – 8A9CB2, 43383E, 8F8383, 71778D, 524149, 4A6578, A6A5AA, 578F8E,ADCFD0, C08A6E, E39D57, DD9E25, 2011 [from "Aggregates"]
15 x 18 in. framed, Creased Archival Pigment Print
© John Houck

LB: I am interested in this idea that with “computation everything is structured as a language.” It also reminds me of Flusser and his contention that the “technical picture” has textual underpinnings that become obfuscated by the image. But I feel like in these works you are also recording another layer (in regards the creases) that bring this textuality back into the physical world. It seems like you are accounting for another materiality altogether?

JH: I like that you are pointing out the layered nature of the work. I started with the layer of the digital, that is the index sheet of pixel patterns. I had these hanging in my studio for a few weeks and they were too rational and predictable, but I did like that they resembled some absurd linguistic system.

I then remembered this definition of what constitutes a language from an intro to psych course I took in undergrad; that a language contains combinatorial symbols that are used recursively. Thinking about recursion, I started to re-photograph them and crease the paper. I wanted to reclaim them and make them physical because they were such virtual objects at this point. To overlay an intuitive system on a combinatorial system was the way out of the dead end of a predictable notational system.

The creasing also has to do with desire. This layer was the important to me. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler would say that today there is a fall in desire that is linked with the rise in drives or repetitive behaviors brought about by technology. This is a big simplification, but highly repetitive tasks like checking your email a hundred times a day result in the waning of desire. Desire is outside of repetition, its object is continually shifting. The initial contact sheets are repetitive and creasing them and re-photographing them made them more subject and specific.

The last layer is the digital camera itself. As I was re-photographing these pieces I noticed that the digital camera was color fringing. Around each pixel would be a purple or cyan fringe of color. This error of the digital camera begins to accumulate after they are re-photographed a few times and the colors in the piece shift and new gradients of color are added by the simple act of photographing them. It’s a way to engage the structural possibilities of the digital camera. The camera also wants to expose everything to fifteen percent gray and so the white of the original index sheet shifts toward gray as do the colors as they are re-photographed.

Ultimately, the contingency of working with the photographic print in real physical space lead me to all of these discoveries. To go back to Stiegler, I think I’m trying to deal with the digital in my practice without being reactionary against it nor embracing it in a naïve way. Getting away from the screen is one way for me to do this.

16 in. o.c., Constructed Anamorphically, 2010 [from "Crisis of Accumulation"]
© John Houck

LB: You had mentioned to me before that “index” had become an important touchstone for you in making these pictures, both in terms of the index (of a book) and also the indexicality of the photograph. To me it seems that the both of these indexes relate to the limited possibilities of the referent; a position primarily characterized by standing outside and looking in (I am sort of obliquely thinking of Sontag talking about the sexual metaphor of the camera in On Photography). I feel like these works as you have been speaking about them are interrogating the workings of a picture making apparatus and developing a map or model for thinking about these issues. Could you talk a bit about the confluence of indexes at work here? And how a position of neutrality or suspicion without dismissal can open to generative production?

JH: In a rather general sense I think there has been a shift from the index as a singular thing to the index as multiple thing. From a single truth claim to a work that is a multitude of truth claims. In a broad sense, Google is an example of this. They have arisen to prominence simply by indexing things. For photography, this is akin to the move from the “decisive moment” to a photograph of a photograph. I’m also thinking about how photographs are more and more experienced as a multitude of photographs, a contact sheet, an image search result page, or a blog. Unlike a written story, we can see a photograph all at once, and now we continually see a number of photographs all at once. It’s impossible not be overwhelmed by this.

One reaction is to retreat into outmoded forms of photography. I’m not sure that is so productive. It’s the other side of the totalizing embrace of technology. In the aggregates, I’m photographing, and re-photographing indexes or contact sheets of images to work through this condition of the index. The folding then becomes a way to make them singular again, to slow them down, and resist the overwhelming nature of the all at once index.

LB: I really like your idea that the folds slow the pieces down or a system of resistance for an informational system. I would like to shift gears a bit and ask about the video work you made for Parallelograms. I feel like this investigation relates to the Aggregates as it also sort of indexes the effects of an action. Can you talk about this and how you came to make this work?

JH: Yes, resistance and in the case of the Parallelograms work, a failure of the machine of display. I used to do some hacking and the best way to learn about a system is to break it. The failure of a system is also perhaps when it is most human or affective. When I was editing photos of the Aggregates for my website, I zoomed way out in Photoshop and noticed the way the computer screen started to create moiré patterns. As the grid of grids of the Aggregates reached the size of the grid of pixels on the screen a third visual system emerged.

I made movies of this zooming in and out on the screen and the resulting breakdown of the display. Then I decided to create some software that would simply draw a grid and decrease the size of the grid by one pixel each frame. As the grid decreases in size and approaches the size of a pixel it creates patterns. Rounding errors also begin to occur because you can’t draw something smaller than a pixel on the computer screen and I was quite surprised with the amount of different patterns this created. It’s a novel form of structuralist film that uses the material of the computer screen and software. At the time I was looking at lot at Lichtenstein and his notion of ground directed painting and use of the Benday dots had a real influence on me. I wanted to take the elemental pieces of the computer display and hack them to see what I could find.

Sweep First in Front of your Own Door, 2010 [from "Crisis of Accumulation"]
© John Houck

LB: Before we finish can you talk a bit about your new publishing project, Loosee?

JH: Loosee is a new publishing project I put together earlier this year. I invite an artist every few months to make an editioned work. There are a few rules the artist has to follow; the work has to be shipped flat to the buyer and the buyer has to complete the work through some set of operations. Letha Wilson was the first artist. Her piece is a double sided print that can be folded in three different ways. The instructions for folding the piece are part of the work. I like the way this activates the spectator and encourages the artist to encode the rules for their pieces activation linguistically. Hopefully these rules encourage the medium of photography to engage with the history of installation and conceptual art.

Special thanks to those that came out for Meta Revisited / Studious, the SPE Closing Party at Spark Gallery in Syracuse, NY!

On the walls: selected works from Lay Flat 02: Meta as well photographs by students of the SPE conference, curated by Shane Lavalette. In attendance was John Gossage, Doug DuBois, Robert Lyons, W.M. Hunt, Brian Ulrich, Mary Virginia Swanson, Ariel Shanberg, Andy Adams, Molly Landreth, Amy Stein, Colette Copeland, Paula McCartney, Jon Gitelson, Carlos Loret de Mola, Ken Schles, Chad States, Sharon Harper, Laura Heyman, Tate Shaw, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Susan Worsham, Scott McCarney, Light Work staff, among others!

In addition to the exhibitions, we had a pop-up shop, featuring current titles from the Lay Flat catalog. During the event we SOLD OUT of signed copies of Misha de Ridder’s DUNE, and nearly sold out of both signed copies of Sam Fall’s Visible Library and the screenprinted Lay Flat tote bag — there are only a few left, so we suggest placing an order now if you’d like one.

See more photos from the event here.

DUNE by Misha de Ridder
24 pages, saddle stitched, softcover
9.5 x 11.5 in. / 24.13 x 29.21 cm.
ISBN 978-0-9842973-2-0
Published July 2011
Edition of 750

$35 / ORDER

$55 / SOLD OUT / Signed Copy

$155 / SOLD OUT / Special Edition
Includes archival 9.5 x 11.5 in. color print by the artist.
Limited to 20, signed and numbered.

Description

Somewhere in densely populated Holland exists a twilight zone where it is possible to travel in time: a small strip of dunes separating polder and sea, just a twenty minute drive from the city of Amsterdam. In DUNE, Misha de Ridder unveils natural scenes so estranged and mysterious that they could be described as unreal realities. Lushly presented in this limited-edition artist book, De Ridder’s precise and highly detailed photographs call to mind Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th century and Romantic Era. In the barren and tormented nature of the dunes, it is light, color and atmosphere that salvage the memory of a wilderness lost.

Artist Bio

Misha de Ridder (b. 1971) lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 1996, he graduated from the Utrecht School of the Arts. He has exhibited amongst others at The Museum of the City of New York, FIAC Paris, PhotoEspaña Madrid, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and his solo exhibition “Solstice” will open at Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam in June 2011. Publications include Sightseeing (De Balie, 2000), Wilderness (Artimo, 2003), Abendsonne (Schaden, 2011) and DUNE (Lay Flat, 2011). Misha de Ridder is represented by Juliètte Jongma Gallery in Amsterdam.

Visible Library by Sam Falls
32 pages, saddle stitched, softcover
9.5 x 7.75 in. / 24.13 x 19.69 cm.
ISBN 978-0-9842973-3-7
Published June 2011
Edition of 750

$25 / ORDER

$35 / SOLD OUT / Signed Copy

$95 / SOLD OUT / Special Edition
Individually spray painted by the artist with hand-written poem.
Limited to 20, signed and numbered.

Description

In a departure from the colorful still life photographs he is known for, artist Sam Falls brings together a series of black and white images for the first time in his limited-edition artist book Visible Library. With a large format camera and a few boxes of expired film, Falls spent a day making these beautiful and haunting pictures in the stacks above the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Like “walking alone in the woods,” as he refers to it, Falls created what can easily be considered his most intimate body of work, a personal meditation on art, history, preservation and the photographic medium.

Artist Bio

Sam Falls (b. 1984, San Diego, CA) spent his formative years in Vermont and now resides in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BA from Reed College in 2007 and his MFA from ICP-Bard in 2010. He has self-published over ten books in addition to titles Color Dying Light (Hassla, 2009), Dans la Chambre Verte (JSBJ, 2010), Light Work (Gottlund Verlag, 2010) and Visible Library (Lay Flat, 2011). Falls’ work has been included in group shows at the International Center of Photography, OHWOW, Blackston Gallery, Bodega, Center for Photography at Woodstock, as well as solo exhibitions at Fotografiska, Capricious Space and Higher Pictures.

I’d like to thank Gil for allowing me to pick his brain over the course of the last few months for this interview. It was a sincere pleasure.

Untitled, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

Shane Lavalette: At what point did you become interested in images?

Gil Blank: Honestly, I couldn’t say. There was never an epiphany moment, which I think is indicative of our age: anyone alive now was born into a culture of images. There is no contemporary existence outside of the image realm—what thirteen-year-old doesn’t already know her way around Flickr or have a camera phone with her at all times?—so I don’t know that anyone can speak of “coming to” or discovering images in the way that earlier photographers might have. The challenge then is to reckon as transparently as possible what meaning and value is sustainable for images within that flood.

SL: What sort of meaning and value have you found?

GB: Well, first I’d say that any meaning that the pictures might have can only be understood within the context of the pictures themselves. In fact, I think that one effective indicator of a photograph’s failure is whether its meaning as such can be wholly explained away or attain an equivalency with some other means. This isn’t a plea for medium-specific Formalism by any stretch, but rather an endorsement of the obdurate potential of images within the image-world, as a slippery category the potential of which we have only begun to understand.

In a larger sense though, I think that the lifelong practice of photography provides a further meaning, in that it becomes a model of lived experience, and not just its depiction. As a means of social analysis and interaction, of historical and personal questioning, of reckoning with the possibility of Realism at one’s exact moment and place, and finally, as the lyrical inversion of all those things, photographic images are unique. Of this I’m convinced.

Untitled, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: My first real encounter with your work was your solo exhibition a few years ago at LaMontagne Gallery in South Boston. The show featured a number of large-scale images, ranging from firework explosions to a B2 stealth bomber to a small room dedicated to your minimalist “cities” series. How would you explain the relationship between your various works?

GB: I never make pictures with the idea of a series in mind—at least not in the classical sense. The conventional structure of the series or photo essay is linear, often didactic, and circumscribed in a way that’s beautiful, but absurd. I’m sure some critics would go further and call it poisonous, but in any case I think we can settle on its uselessness to us by now. The natural proliferation of photographic images, though—their force in numbers—can’t and shouldn’t be simply ignored, so the question remains how we might leverage that multiplicity in a way that affords the creation of new meanings and possibilities.

I think that dovetails with the modeling I mentioned: the open-ended recombination of images that refuse the neat categorization of the series provides instead the possibility of different meanings with each arrangement, and each viewer. The photographs of fireworks and city names you saw in my exhibition are examples of such an operation, and were made with that blank ambiguity very much in mind. There are many individual variations of each (I have several hundred pictures of fireworks, for example, but it would be ridiculous to think of such a flat-footed mass as a “series”), and I often combine them with any number of other types of images. Both their content and design are highly specific and immediately identifiable, which creates a productive tension with their existence as stark, factual vacuums.

So both types of pictures adopted a very different feel and implication in the LaMontagne show than they would have on their own, because they were interspersed with images of the nuclear bomber and a memorial to FDR.

Untitled, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: I’m glad you brought this up. The notion of working with images that exist outside of the confines of a ‘series’ is extremely liberating, yet it seems as if relatively few contemporary photographers are working this way. Do you think it’s that there is still pressure (from institutions or galleries, for example) to create ‘bodies’ of work?

GB: The pressure is two-fold. It stems first from the presumption that photography’s inherent multiplicity somehow implies that it is also inherently didactic. This is a quintessentially Modernist conceit, upon which is based everything from Urformen der Kunst to The Americans to Life Magazine. Publications like those—which are important to cite, because beyond all other institutions, the press is most responsible for entrenching the series structure—laid the initial, and perhaps idealistic foundation for the later media tautology that supposedly seeks to inform, yet of course only does so by enforcing a recognizable and highly sellable format. The second source of pressure—the market’s demand for monetizable product—grows out of and reinforces the first. This is how ideology is maintained by, and in some sense equivalent to, its images. It’s also how you end up with deluxe, signed, third-edition volumes of Sleeping By The Mississippi a full half-century after Robert Frank, or for that matter, seven years after Sock Monkeys. In the end, a farce like that could only be liquidated by its own devices.

Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations and Dan Graham’s Homes for America were both highly effective attacks in this vein, but ultimately, they were only skirmishes. (Even so, bear in mind that they date as far back as the early 1960’s.) It may be that the most complete and effective upending of Blossfeldt’s tradition could only have been possible at the hands of other Germans, who were willing and able to address the full range of implications for such organizational schema within the context of their larger social history. To my mind, then, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s greatest achievement was to build an oeuvre that fulfilled and annihilated the series legacy simultaneously. No one after them can legitimately pursue that structure the same way again, though god knows that book publishers and newly minted MFAs are constantly trying.

Untitled, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: The dispersed nature of your work is of course intended to promote cross-readings, but how would you yourself explain it? With which other artists, past and present, do you see yourself in dialogue?

GB: I used to edit a magazine (Influence) that consisted for the most part of extended interviews with people whose work I thought was interesting or problematic. That might be an over-literalization of the kind of dialogue you’re talking about, but I do value the interview format quite a bit as a means for testing the strength of ideas. It also provides me with a passport, one that’s led to highly productive exchanges extending over several years with people like Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Roe Ethridge, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, with whom I can speak regularly and really take to the mat on topics of practice. Walead Beshty, for example, is both a trusted friend and a formidable sparring partner, someone whose relationship epitomizes for me the principle and positive value of dialectic.

If the questions and the ideas behind them are going to remain vital though, then I think you always end up finding your way to different people. In fact, the artwork that left the deepest impression on me during the last year wasn’t materially visual at all, but a novel: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. It’s a tremendous achievement, and has very relevant implications for anyone, in any field, who’s grappling with the riddle of contemporary Realism. Little wonder then that it fed into other, equally interesting and fertile debates, including the one we’re having now. That’s the kind of dialogue I’m enthusiastic about.

Untitled, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: Could you talk a bit about your own process of exploring a new idea photographically? Where does it all begin?

GB: There’s no fixed process, and I do whatever I can to resist the settlement it implies, because that inevitably leads to visual stylization. It’s a short slide down from there to all the other mythologies of the photographic death-spiral: the athletic technique, the exceptional subject matter, the ongoing neuroses about authenticity and its lack… all of the usual lies.

I try instead to prioritize the impulse to transparently reckon with the double-bind of Realism, of using a wildly flawed pictorial method to make sense of lived experience. By no means does this imply that I’m after any sort of explanation or illustration, but rather that I find the photographic image’s own continually manifested inadequacy as a fractious experience’s own best parallel. The obstinacy of images—their continual persistence beyond what we perceive to be their failure—is the thin area I find most workable. I quite like what Mark Wyse told me recently, that if the old lie was that photographs always tell the truth, the new lie is that they never can.

Untitled, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: The images of subjects placed into flat fields of color… what sparked this method of working? What’s the significance of the field?

GB: The fields function first as an immediate impediment to the notion of entitled access to subject matter that we’re conditioned to grant pictures in general and photomechanical images in particular. By isolating a given subject in such a flatly and obviously synthetic context, I think the fields paradoxically invert the very presentation of the subject as something hermetic, and implicate instead the contingency of all such images.

The fields don’t operate in isolation, or as discrete visual features. Each is intended to operate as an element in a larger system of visual communication that takes into account all of the conditions of display. The fields themselves, for example, are always surrounded by a secondary broad white border, one that might seem less immediately noticeable, and is therefore more deceiving. That field-and-border pair then gets placed within (and thus invokes) the physical picture frame, and then the room beyond it… all of which ultimately implicates the viewer herself as part of an ongoing process of encounter, rather than mere or stoic reception.

You can think of the field—which historically has denoted an area of contest, activity, or flux—as precipitating in microcosm the same effects of complication and articulation that the oeuvre develops in macro. It’s a process of auto-differentiation, of insinuating an intrinsic complexity and contradiction within the image itself, at the granular level.

Untitled, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: How important is the physical encounter with one of your pieces? Is there something more to be discovered in the flesh?

GB: Beyond the now-older issues of Minimalism and objecthood, I think this question opens up into vastly more interesting territory with the onset of digital media. I don’t think it’s so interesting or even necessary anymore to formulate this binary opposition between image and object so much as to ask where within that now ambiguous matrix the encounter occurs. What, in other words, is the nature, limit, and—paradoxically, perhaps—the source of the encountering subject’s sovereignty?

I try to sustain a tension in my work between the desire implicit in pictorial viewing and the transparent reckoning with its material context. Not because of anything I find interesting within that tension itself, the literal explication of which gets bogged down in those older arguments I just mentioned, and automatically destroys any remaining interest in the picture as a picture. It’s rather because that tension models a larger, and to me at least, vastly more important conflict that already lies within each of those individual viewers you rightly include as part of the process of understanding pictures: namely, the state of exile to which every conscious individual is subject.

In the color field images, as I’ve already described them, the partially obliterated subject matter, the iterated framing devices, and to be sure, the physical aspects of their presentation in space (their lamination, framing, sizing, sitting, and so on) all operate in a way that hails the viewer’s immediate presence implicitly, but never makes an end of this operation unto itself. As physical precipitations of digital (and thus ostensibly immaterial) images, they automatically generate a cognitive disruption that cannot fail to make a viewer self-conscious. But at the same time, the surfeit of visual information provided by each sharply rendered picture, as a picture, likewise cannot fail to manipulate the subconscious faculties of recognition and projection that inevitably compel a state of desire for a transcendental communion. So the exile recommences.

You can see how things get more complicated from here once we introduce other aspects of digital distribution and encounter, and much more interesting: where, within that further diffusion, does the image exist at all? And further, by connection, how and where do we?

Untitled, 2009
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: What we call “photography” seems to be evolving at an accelerated pace, which of course requires periodic redefinition. How would you describe the medium at this moment? More importantly, what are you excited about?

GB: More than periodic, I would say that photography’s redefinition occurs and is necessitated continually, along a dynamic scale. In fact I challenge anyone to provide anything like a tenable or useful definition of what “photography” or “photographs” can be at all by now.

It’s possible that at some point—maybe as recently as two or three generations ago—we could have come up with a description of photography at least on a strictly material or formal basis, and thus, by extension, one that could serve as a point of departure for more expansive theoretical analyses. But it’s precisely as a result of such analyses over the last forty years that photography as it had been traditionally and categorically understood has since reached an ontological impasse. Then, either as a coincidence of timing, or perhaps as a result of larger socioeconomic forces that in fact aren’t coincidental at all, the arrival of digital technologies delivered the coup de grâce.

All of which, I want to emphasize, is to the good: by far, the most productive image-making practices that I’m aware of now operate out of that void, whereby images, freed of their didactic and categorical imperatives, are able to model the continually auto-differentiating contemporary experience, rather than serve as its mere illustration and instrumentalization.

Wiederholungszwang III.4, No Date
© Gil Blank / Courtesy of the artist

SL: I’m curious, what are you working on now?

GB: I’m always working on singular images that function independently of any unified series or project, the better to make them contest one another, and continually build a critical complexity into the oeuvre. It’s my conviction that originality—both in the photographic process and as the model of an individual subjectivity—isn’t maintained in the traditional cultic sense, within supposedly iconic images, but rather across the span of the oeuvre, as a much wider and variably articulated structure.

In a similar—and similarly different—way, I’m also now in the production stages of a multi-year cycle of works called Wiederholungszwang. Its first images were made in 2004, and it will likely occupy me for some time to come. As a larger cycle, it breaks down again and again into sub-cycles, its images endlessly replicating and mutating. It touches on some of the questions we’ve talked about here, like the viewer as consciousness in exile, and the image as material body of the virtual, but does so with a whole range of forms that I haven’t used before, from antiquated printing processes, to projection, and hard carbon bricks. So maybe that’s a route into another, different conversation.

–

This interview (text only) can also be viewed as a printer-friendly PDF.

To see more of Gil’s work, visit his website.
Read Gil’s interviews with other artists (including Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Eve Fowler, Ulf Lundin, Ken Miller, Julian Opie, Torbjørn Rødland, Thomas Ruff, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth and Wolfgang Tillmans) here.

Lay Flat 02: Meta
104 pages, perfect bound, softcover
7.75 x 10 in. / 19.7 x 25.4 cm.
ISSN 1948-2876
ISBN 978-0-9842973-1-3
Published February 2010
Edition of 2,000

$30 / ORDER

$95 / ORDER (Signed Copy) * Exclusive offer.
Includes signatures of editors Shane Lavalette and Michael Bühler-Rose, contributing writers Lesley A. Martin and Adam Bell as well as artists Jessica Eaton, Sam Falls, Lucas Blalock, Talia Chetrit and Lisa Oppenheim.

Description

Lay Flat 02: Meta brings together a selection of contemporary artists whose photographs are conceptually engaged with the history, conventions and materiality of the medium itself. Photographs by Claudia Angelmaier, Semâ Bekirovic, Charles Benton, Walead Beshty, Lucas Blalock, Talia Chetrit, Anne Collier, Natalie Czech, Jessica Eaton, Roe Ethridge, Sam Falls, Stephen Gill, Daniel Gordon, David Haxton, Matt Keegan, Elad Lassry, Katja Mater, Laurel Nakadate, Lisa Oppenheim, Torbjørn Rødland, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Joachim Schmid, Penelope Umbrico, Useful Photography, Charlie White, Ann Woo and Mark Wyse are accompanied by the textual contributions of Adam Bell (Co-editor, The Education of a Photographer), Lesley A. Martin (Publisher/Editor, Aperture Foundation), Alex Klein (Editor, Words Without Pictures), artists Noel Rodo-Vankeulen and Arthur Ou, as well a conversation between Lyle Rexer (Author, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography) and James Welling, an artist who is seminal to this dialogue.

Edited by Shane Lavalette and Guest Editor Michael Bühler-Rose.