UNFIXED: The fugitive image at the Transformer Station
By Christopher Alexander Gellert for love, -j.
“The contingency of photography confirms that everything
is
perishable; the arbitrariness of photographic evidence
indicates that reality
is fundamentally unclassifiable."
-Susan Sontag
Look on my Works, ye
Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside
remains...
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandius”
I’m almost hesitant to label UNFIXED: The fugitive image as
a photography exhibition. The show, currently on exhibition until April 3 at the
Transformer Station (the Cleveland Museum of Art’s West Side annex), resists
traditional assumptions about photos as pictures. Instead, it asks us to
approach photography, and video, as a process that does not immortalize, but
like all things inevitably dies. That death is written into the works
encourages us to treat them as living objects, to find beauty in their
movement, meaning in their brief passage, as in our own.
Fred Bidwell, one of the gallery’s co-founders, with his
wife Laura, opened a recent gallery talk by suggesting that photography has
outgrown the need to try to prove itself as an art form. Photography can
finally let loose.
But if photographers no longer concern themselves with
respect and acceptance from the establishment they now take for granted, they are
threatened by their own success, the sheer volume of photographic images— a
world in which everyone wishes to be a photographer, and our immediate thought
on seeing a thing is to ask ourselves if it would make a good photo.
Susan Sontag
eloquently addressed these difficulties in her prescient work On Photography. UNFIXED: The fugitive image shrugs its shoulders at the hoary debates between photography and art and the ubiquity
of image in our lives. It disregards the question by effacing it.
The first piece in the exhibition, Phil Chang’s series of
unfixed silver gelatin photograms, reveals the memory and the trace of the rectangular
forms imprinted on the negative that began to disappear within hours on opening
night when the image took flight after the plastic seal had been broken and the
photographs were exposed.
“He’ll supply us with two extra copies,” Mr. Bidwell ribbed
during his gallery talk. “We can experience this change two more times.”
We all appreciatively chuckled, but the conceit itself serves
as a kind of haunting joke about the transience of all things and the folly at
our longing for permanence. We collect the world through photos. Sontag defined
the photographer as a Baudelaire’s flâneur, the wanderlust plagued promeneur in
search of the picturesque.
“Everything that the big city threw away, everything it
despised, everything it crushed underfoot he categorizes and collects,” Sontag
writes in On Photography, quoting
from “The Painter of Modern Life” to articulate the character of the
flâneur/photographer. She opposes this vision of the photographer to the
painter, and the conflation of the two by the mob. “Some democratic writer
ought to have seen here a cheap method for disseminating a loathing for history
and for painting among the people,” she argues. And yet, some of the images in
the exhibition resemble paintings more than they do photographs.
A pair of twin
triptychs by John Opera in the larger gallery space illustrates this slippage.
The works are not photographs exactly but anthotypes (images developed using
the photosensitive materials of plants). Each work pairs a portrait in
silhouette, a light shadow against a darkened background in the same color,
with two progressively larger images of paired twin radials sprouting from a central
axis, recalling mirrored fans. Mr. Bidwell introduced the artist by saying, “John
is a photographer who thinks like a painter, and I think maybe he’ll actually
stop using photography altogether and become a painter.”
Opera’s work brings to mind color field painters like Morris
Louis and Kenneth Noland, who played with warm tones in the space of the
canvas. It is neither a photograph, as we conceive one, nor a work of art to be
tended and preserved. The plant dyes Mr. Opera used (beet and blueberry) are
perishable. His work will escape conservators and posterity.
Art is no longer an eternal monument, but something that
breathes.
In the next room Tom Persinger plays in “The Past,” “The
Present,” and “The Future.” “The past” is a blue field cyanotype fixed and
immutable, “The Present” develops throughout the life of the show as the agent
continues to be exposed to light and the image evolves. “The Future” is blank,
virgin paper with a pencil outline. Persinger will round out the show's closing on April 03 with a gallery talk and performance.
UNFIXED: The fugitive image is on display now through April 3.
I strongly suggest you witness the tremendous power of the works in the
exhibition for yourself.
(If you go, consult the online catalog at tsguide.org as you
wander to offer some needed perspective.)
Images courtesy of the Transformer Station.
