Para-Phrase: Gideon Barnett & Peter Baker

(The following text is part of a collaboration with artist Gideon Barnett and is better viewed with reference images at Der Greif )

Growing up in Jasper, Tennessee – The alien concept of pursuing art – An onslaught of tourists eager to catch a glimpse of the Hope Diamond – The sheer enthusiasm & simultaneous consternation of testing hi-res digital cameras & more recently, an interest in debased, lower quality forms of photographic reproduction – Institutions & public space as artist studio, such as museums, libraries & the streets of cities themselves – A confined stretch of Miami’s South Beach – Xerox machines in the age of Photoshop – The changing nature & responsibilities of archiving – Vandalism & the intimate photographs of Edith Gowin by her husband Emmet – The IBM photocopy work of artist & writer Pati Hill – Mike Mandel & Larry Sultan’s Evidence – The relationship between photographing out in the world & carefully selecting from a random array of images to re-appropriate – The green blackboards of grammar school – Evaporation — Deafness in Dogs — American Sign Language – The Rings of Saturn & The Hundred and One Dalmatians

While engaging the assortment of disparate images posed to us in Gideon Barnett’s most recent work, one calls to mind the novels of the late German writer W.G. Sebald, wherein small, curious pictures accompany passages of text in both direct and ambiguous ways. These images function as a kind of subtle guide to the narrator’s consciousness, blurring our notions of fact and fiction, memory and history, loss and desire. By employing these images, whose origins are shrouded in mystery, Sebald magnifies a pathos that connects the reader to that which has become all but forgotten, made faint by the parallax of time. By immersing himself in the microfilm images archived in various university libraries under the heading “The History of Photography,” and enlarging said images with the library’s default Xerox printer, Gideon Barnett is exercising a similar transpiration, one that invokes in the viewer a sense of strange beauty and subdued malaise.

Considering such devices are designed to contain and condense large text catalogs, documents and newspapers, the use of microfilm to archive photographic materials is an almost comic prelude to failure. By recognizing this fact and finding delight in transforming these dubious processes into large-scale objects, Barnett is drawing from modes of image-appropriation that seek to scrutinize the nature of its own production. Historically, we have seen artists explore such methods to question and criticize the underlying effects media images have on the culture. In this case, however, the result is how a particular set of images are stored, chronicled and essentially forgotten. While sifting through these images the artist likens the intuitive selection process to that of pressing the shutter while photographing out in the world, as it were. Once selected and printed we are confronted with a sort of resurrection of pictures, some familiar, others inscrutable. So that when we see what appears to be an inverted commercial advertisement for Crown Royal Canadian Whiskey, targeting some susceptible consumer society of the past, we dismiss it as old-fashioned, defunct, and, emptied now of its aim to sell us something, it reclaims an innocuous form. Perhaps then, for the first time, we see it for what it is: an arrangement of glasses, liquid and ice, reflecting light, forming shadows, and placed accordingly by an invisible prop-stylist, for the three-quarter camera angle positioned by one of countless anonymous photographers, whose life’s work, by mere happenstance, wound up in this peculiar burial place. If we were to take Sebald’s cue that “the greater the distance, the clearer the view,” one could imagine looking back reproachfully at our habit of being unable or unwilling to discern this phenomenon in the present, as inconspicuous algorithms work to send us advertisements based on our search histories, texts, likes, location, and most disturbingly, voice recordings.

After making the Xerox print, Barnett frames the images with a green background, meant to evoke the blackboards used in elementary & high schools. Framed around images whose meanings evade us, this gesture hints at the loss of innocence that evaporates as we begin to question what we are taught as pupils. Oddly enough, I can remember now the streaks of chalk-dust left on the board after erasing it, followed by the sensation of washing it back to black with a damp sponge, noticing how quickly it dried, which, upon reflection, is how I came to learn the meaning of the word evaporation in the first place. Additionally, it reminds us that institutions of learning are equipped insofar as private and public funds support them, so that inevitably the apparatus of such places will range from state-of-the-art to, in the case of the microfilm archive and its Xerox counterpart, haplessly archaic. Not to mention, how the staff employed there and the unknown persons whose job it was to undertake such a task, remains as puzzling as the pictures themselves and how they came into existence.

While we can comprehend the purpose of the Crown Royal Canadian Whiskey image, the others in this body of work are less clear and create mysterious associations:

A snake on a branch — An orange on cloth – a pair of pills with the letters BL V2 — A group of figures in protective suits prepared for some unfathomable hazardous condition — A bronze sacrificial wine vessel — Variations of knots — A portrait of a nude woman concealing her face — The harsh landscape of snow-covered mountains — What appear to be two frostbitten feet — A faint sun setting over a field that can be anywhere — An older man holding a joint while exhaling smoke from his wrinkled face.

Could it be possible that the torso of a black body split in half is an advertisement for an exercise machine as suggested by its title Soloflex? What exactly are sub-globular microsclere spicules? And what are we to draw from the pill-identifier that informs us that BL V2 is the antibiotic penicillin v potassium to be taken orally? Who made these pictures and for what purpose? These are just some questions you may find yourself asking.

However, for some reason I find myself returning to the half dozen Dalmatians sitting for their portrait. The six of them sit ghostlike in front of a black backdrop, as the tops of their heads catch the light. It is unknown whether such contrast is the result of poorly exposed film or perhaps more likely the crass limitations of Xerox printing, but one can’t help but find some minor amusement in these black and white spotted hounds as the perfect study for contrast in photography. What we do know is that roughly one in three Dalmatians suffer from deafness in one or both ears, a fact unknown to early breeders who confused the dog’s unresponsiveness with a lack of intelligence, before later coming to learn that, due to the absence of melanocytes, deafness is frequent in piebald animals and other creatures that share a propensity for light pigmentation. Looking at this picture, and drawing from my own experience from working on sets with animals, it is almost certain that in addition to the photographer, a dog wrangler is standing just side of camera. And while we might be tempted to imagine her commanding the dog’s attention with a treat of some variety, as is the ordinary custom for rewarding our well-behaved companions, a certain lack of eagerness from the six canines, particularly the two withdrawn dogs sitting in the back, leads me to surmise that they are responding to the American Sign Language symbols to freeze and watch the wrangler, which the ASL training center for dogs tells us is communicated by extending one’s thumb and pinky out while tucking the three middle fingers in and making a firm thrusting motion of the hand slightly down.

Deaf dogs are capable of learning upwards of fifty hand signs, but what I find most astonishing is that deaf dogs are prone to higher sensitivity to human facial expressions, so that in addition to comprehending sign language, they will respond to the pleasure or disappointment of their owners gaze. Upon learning this fact I dreamt again of Sebald and his most enigmatic book, The Rings Of Saturn, wherein a nameless narrator takes an aimless walking tour of the coastal county of Suffolk, England under the sign of the Dog Star. Going back to Sebald’s curious archive of pictures one could, with minor effort, see this image of Dalmatians accompanied by a story about the nameless narrator coming across a stray dog, with the uncanny suspicion that this dog could sense the melancholy air about him by looking at his face. When it was brought to my attention by Gideon Barnett that a note of text suggested to him that this photograph was made for the promotion of Disney’s film adaptation of the children’s book The Hundred and One Dalmatians, I decided to conduct my own library search for a copy of the book in order to confirm my vague remembrance that the ninety-seven puppies kidnapped for the intention of skinning them for their spotted fur, were discovered and eventually rescued by their Twilight Barking heard from a great distance away. But when I read that the dogs were found in Suffolk, England, I became convinced, against my better judgment, that it was Sebald’s nameless narrator who came to their rescue. And, at the very least, the remedy for accepting that this of course was not actually the case, is that Gideon Barnett rescued these images from what otherwise would have been their permanent captivity.

-Peter Baker

Ellen Brooks: Screens

(The following text was written in conjunction with Ellen Brooks exhibition Screens and can be read with reference images at Lord Ludd )

"I’ve never liked ‘nature’ photographs." – Luigi Ghirri

Since the onset of photography we have seen nature depicted profusely, from the earliest glass plate negatives, to pristine silver gelatin prints, to postcards, calendars, automotive ads and the like. Even the naming of Fuji film, after Japan’s largest volcanic mountain, implicitly tells the customer what they might want to take pictures of; that ultimate Other, impenetrable, sublime. It has been a staunch subject for tourists, hobbyists and artists. In fact, perhaps the reason Ghirri never liked nature photographs is because the history of images has in many ways been an ongoing document of the erasure of nature. Apple’s generic wallpaper image of El Capitan, one of the highest peaks in Yosemite National Park and the namesake of its now universal operating system, is a particularly perverse attempt at conciliating our desire for nature, while evermore engrossed by screens. 

In her latest body of work, Ellen Brooks’ Screens puts to use an image of nature that is at once a rather debased reproduction, yet functions reliably in the wild. I’m referring to the transparent camouflage nets the artist uses to obscure, abstract and inevitably transform into another image altogether. While taking in the world of these beautiful and densely detailed photographs, the natural inclination today is to assume ostensible layers in Photoshop being applied and painted throughout. However, Brooks’ process is all done in-camera, as it were, in the confines of her studio in Brooklyn, that distant terrain beyond the river from Manhattan, where she had worked in several modes for many years prior. 

Like many artists of her generation, Ellen Brooks came of age at a moment where questioning and critiquing the various uses of images in media, entertainment and advertising, became a wellspring for expression and empowerment. Growing up in Los Angeles, Brooks was obsessed with all kinds of magazines, but was especially interested in how nature was presented. Various publications like House & Garden, Better Homes and Gardens, and other shelter magazines, tapped into a new market for gardening as a form of hobby, as well as showing off how the wealthy could surround themselves with the best sense of nature money could buy. The canyons and hills of Los Angeles display this concept perhaps more evidently than any other place in the country, in terms of the artifice of nature bleeding into the sprawl of the city. Manicured lawns abound, while more environmentally conscious homeowners use Astroturf to save water and receive a tax rebate to boot. Consider the palm tree, an emblem of the region, is not even native to Southern California, but rather, was transported from Mexico (fan palm) and the Canary Islands (date palm), and planted throughout the city purely for aesthetic and decorative purposes. As the life span of the original crop of palm trees from the 1930’s comes close to its end, questions about sustaining and planting new palms come under scrutiny, since they provide no shade, and the urban heat island effect of Los Angeles has increased significantly since. Projecting this kind of aspirational version of nature onto the landscape informed the work of many photographic artists, from New Topographics, which drew from the sober gaze of vernacular real estate images, to social landscape photographers who saw what was posed as the real world as kind of curious figment. Meanwhile the artists that became known as the Pictures Generationundermined idyllic cultural tropes by appropriating or re-presenting magazine and advertising pictures, to use it against itself. Many of these ideas bring to mind Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, which argued that to navigate our contemporary culture is to more often than not, find ourselves immersed in a reality of copies without an original. Or, that nature is receding, copied, confined and commoditized. 

By appropriating camouflage netting as a veil to enhance the picture plane, Ellen Brooks has adopted a remarkably cunning strategy. The process itself is fairly straightforward. The artist drapes the screen in front of the camera and proceeds to explore the amalgamation of objects and other bodies of work within her studio. For an artist who identifies as a conceptualist, it is somewhat amusing that Brooks insists she does not alter any of the objects in the studio for the making of the picture. Things are how they are. The only intervention is the thin material obstructing the view. It is relevant to note that this material can be found easily online or at outdoors supply stores. Among the various uses by customers who reviewed the large camouflage tarps, were World War II celebrations, going away and coming home parties for soldiers in the Army, tailgating, home decoration, and mostly hunting, namely, coyote, deer, wild turkey and waterfowl hunting. To do an image search of this thing is to delve into a masculine realm of weekend warriors, exceedingly decked in camouflage, intent on conquering some aspect of nature that eludes most of us in our daily lives. That a woman artist has decided to use the same material to investigate the apparatus of her life’s work is both sharp-witted and gratifying. But lets take it further. Camouflage itself may very well be the lowest echelon of quality in terms of image reproduction, while achieving the maximum level of deception in the world. It is a constructed image that enters and plays along with nature, an image attempting not to represent, but to pass as the real, with deadly consequences. 

A customer review written by the artist herself as to how and why she is using this material might look something like this: “I was looking for a mass produced, synthetic, see-through image to mediate ideas of nature and concealment and elaborate on the innate illusory characteristic of photographs. The screen became a kind of veil one must pass through in order to discover the environment of my studio.” What resulted are a series of large scale, chaotic photographs, where within the image of nature, we can discern fragments of a studio and remnants of other bodies of work by a prolific artist. In his essay The Vanishing Point, Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri writes of the experience of looking at photographs that evokes the sensation of viewing Ellen Brooks’ Screens. Its “as if there were a gossamer-thin sheet of film between us and the landscape we observe, between the world and its representation – one which, paradoxically, does not stop us seeing clearly but, on the contrary, becomes the point of balance between vertigo and precision, time and space.” An unmistakable orange extension cord runs through the frame of an image, mimicking the frenzy of blurred, brown branches. Among the array of other objects, some clear, some abstract, is a shopping cart, wire fencing, a magnifying lamp, painter’s tape, the blue light of dusk through a window, and an inflatable yellow ball, like the one a child goes searching for deep in the woods, before finally giving up and letting it join the ever growing image of nature.

—Peter Baker

Ellen Brooks (b. 1946, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. She has shown internationally, at galleries and institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Centre Pompidou, Hauser & Wirth, Roth Gallery, Barbara Gladstone, Leslie Tonkonow, and Gallery Luisotti among many others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the MoMA, the Whitney, SFMoMA, the International Center of Photography, the National Museum of American Art, the Getty Museum, and the Albright Knox Museum among others.
ellenbrooks.net