You there God? It's me.

What it's like over here...

When I wake up around 8, I ask if I’ve been snoring again. Yes she says.  

A stretch, a yawn, some lemon in hot water, a hot shower, granola with yogurt.
I put my jeans on. Have I been wearing the same jeans everyday since November?
I wonder.
I wonder if I’ve made a mistake.
I wonder if I’m out my mind.
I wonder what the day will bring.
I wonder if I’ll see my brother today.
I wonder what surprises await me.
I wonder about my email.

I check my email. Twitter. Facebook. 

This room can get warm. It has a giant sliding patio door, facing south.
This room has all my good books in it, they are behind me.
This room, my desk. Tape measure. My Jenny Holzer poster.
Fischli & Weiss’s HOW TO WORK BETTER. 8 SAY IT SIMPLE
This room, has two desks. Mine but also her’s. We’re learning about each other.
We’re living.
This room, our living room.

There’s been lots of picture taking lately. The blossoms are in full swing.
Spring is springing.
The light in Vancouver is variable, sometimes, pink, white, gray but always sharp.
There’s been a lot of sushi lately. 
The joy of being back in fresh fish fields has worn off…
The stress of a lack of income has set in but
It’s amazing how well I handle. Maybe too well.

Arthur Russell beams from the computer that seems to make sense out of all of it.
And now Public Enemy.
That’s better. My nephew, Luke, needs to learn about Public Enemy.

I’ll listen to Michael Snow talk to me about flying later.
Maybe i’ll go for a walk because if nothing else, it’s delightfully sunny.
I’ll do paper work today. And make some art too. 

Later, I’ll talk it all over with her. She’ll kiss me, I’ll kiss her and we’ll laugh making love
In the bedroom, I’ll fall asleep on the white sheet under the white covers and
when I wake up around 8 I ask if I’ve been snoring again. Yes she says. 

re: phot(o)bjects

phot(o)bjects @ Presentation House Gallery, April 10 – June 7, 2009

Organized by Bob Nickas. Featuring: Alan Belcher, Walead Beshty, Gil Blank, Jennifer Bolande, Trisha Donnelly, Roe Ethridge, Guyton Walker, Rachel Harrison, Robert Heinecken, Matt Keegan, Annette Kelm, Louise Lawler, Carter Mull, Torbjorn Rødland, Alex Rose, Sam Samore, Wolfgang Tillmans, Josh Tonsfeldt,  Sara VanDerBeek, B. Wurtz

Isn’t it funny the way things go? A couple weeks ago, in Toronto, teaching myself about photography, I was reading about Wolfgang Tillmans. He’s an interesting photographer who’s made a mark in part by interpreting photography through the not-so-fine arts: fashion photography, magazines, books; an art, employing a width and breadth wider than the usual entanglement. My cursory inquiry in regards to this contemporary master revealed the following intriguing quote “A photograph is always seen through its content and rarely through it’s presence as an object in itself, whereas when confronted with other art objects one always deals with both aspects.” It sat in my head for days and days…

I arrive in Vancouver last week and there’s an exhibition that’s just opened about photography and its status as object. Isn’t it funny the way things go? The show features works that aim to prove for us that photography is more then its content: it does indeed have status as an object. 4 works from Tillmans hang: 2 of them are near monochrome abstracts housed in a Plexi box, the orange one with a neat fold, the other, a green crumpled mess; then a photo of a flattened clothing shot from above emphasizing the flatness of the picture, and finally a photo of a curled photo seen from the side, nearly indecipherable, a gray and vague mess but one decides it’s a photo of a photo from Wolgang’s angle and pointing as to his real meidum: paper. Walead Beshty folds photographic paper and exposes it strategically, in the darkroom, to create a well dented, marked and dinged, but colourful picture that could rival any colourfield painting, old or new. Sam Samore shreds paper up in to strips and seals it in garbage bags. Alex Rose burns them. Guyton/Walker use the paper of photographs to wrap paint cans. 

Object is considered less literally by Roe Etheridge, Carter Mull and Robert Heinecken: these 3 consider the layering of images as an object act, and point us to consider images as physical objects dense with layers of information. Trisha Donnely forces us to look at how photos can densely veil their subjects: what is it we’re looking at in pictures anyway? Matt Keegan takes another route and frames the corner of the walls in an inversion of Malevich’s square and forces a highlight of the architecture with two framed photos of sky and tree tops. Alan Belcher uses photos as wrapping for his suitcase sculptures and reflexively wraps a photo of tire swing on a tire swing. Continuing the strain, Jennifer Bolande takes a photo of plywood’s grain, prints it on fabric and slings the fabric back on to the piece of wood. Similarly B. Wurtz’s work of a perforated cylinder in front of its photographed counterpart, draws our attention to the way objects are distorted in photographs, and in fact how photographs can make something so modest look so grand, powerful. Maybe it was the size of the photo itself, well over a metre tall. Or maybe I’m tired.

 
I remember the show as being fairly smart, but now considered anew and after reading Bob Nickas’ statement, I’m not as intrigued by these formal investigations as I first was. Maybe they’re necessary, it’s true, and these formal experiments are opening another way to re-consider the familiar, fine fine fine okay. I recall a few other works in the show, for me the 3 strongest. Gil Blank presents a 3 foot square photo, in it a life-size Polaroid photo pinned up by a magnet: its brevity asks us to be skeptical about the construction in photos; Josh Tonsfeldt’s installs objects in the gallery, photographs them and installs the photos elsewhere in the gallery and thus asks us to be skeptical about the frame around the presentation of photos and galleries; and finally Torborn Rødland’s amazingly simple photo of a baby, sitting, simply sitting and looking back at us, destroying my, yours, our gaze with his newborn eyes. Silently, the baby asks us to be considerate of photos, pictures, objects and entirely everything. Torborn’s Baby, seemingly lacking formal reflexivity and any tautology, is freshly engaging us in the everyday dialogue of looking, forcing upon us a space surpassing inherent formal logic and transcending what Artur Żmijewski calls “the autonomy of art,” a space he says: 

Instead of drawing enjoyment from the outcome of their actions, the visual and performing arts are content merely to dream of such outcomes: fantasy has supplanted reality. The autonomy of art has therefore made it “inconsequential.” The actions of art no longer have any visible or verifiable impact. The deficit that Peter Bürger once discerned in bourgeois art has made its way into high culture: the exaltation of art above day-to-day experience [is] typical for the status of a work of art in a bourgeois society… Aestheticism is also a manifestation of art’s failure to produce social consequences.

The consideration of photography’s formal logic in phot(o)bjects is necessary to create an infant understanding, like that Baby has, of looking at, being looked at, making and understanding the objects around us, those physical, symbolic and cultural markers which can and should have deep social ramifications.