 |
 |
| Reciprocity Failure was at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, December, 1999. |
|
| Other articles by Siún Hanrahan |
|
|
 |
|
| Tom Gleeson - Fetish, New York, 1999 |
|
 |
|
| Aaron Plant - Untitled Sex Toy |
|
|
| Representing Representation |
|
| The abstract photographic images of the four artists featured in Reciprocity Failure are immediately baffling and intriguing. With only traces of 'the real' to be discerned, the images are baffling in their refusal to accord the viewer 'imaginary command of the look', and intriguing in that they are colourful, varied in format, and invite decoding. |
|
| These contrary impulses (intriguing/baffling) signal two possibilities for responding to these abstract photographic images. One is to view them as 'transcending the play of the real' and so engage with them as painterly images. Another is to view them as critiquing rather than transcending photography's fidelity to 'the real', and thus as interrogating a failure in reciprocity between 'the real' and its photographic representation. Viewed in this light, the works of each of the artists explore the construction of photographs - revealing the manipulation inherent in the processes of photography. |
|
| The most startling aspect of Paul Rowley's images is their circular format. Each of the three photographs in his Gwai-lo Series, are circular, while They Want Me To See All This..., is a circular composite of photographs on compact disks. Thus the works immediately confront the conventional nature of photographic composition. |
|
| The images in the Gwai-lo Series are close-ups taken from video-stills such that it is not clear what the 'original' image represented. Given that these are images of images, what is 'made strange' by their abstraction is not 'the world' but its representation. In this respect it is interesting that, compositionally, pure roundness spurns any relation to the coordinates of terrestrial space, centring attention on itself alone. |
|
| The abstraction of David Philips' prints is created at the point of exposure by using slow shutter-speeds so that the images are blurred. In one image, taken on a suspension bridge, figure and ground merge in a way that is reminiscent of Monet's concern with the effects of light and, hence, the Impressionists problematising of representation. This is revisited in another image in which a white streak on the print traces the movement of the camera during the exposure so that the artificiality of the camera's unique point-of-view is revealed. Furthermore, as this particular image is taken from inside a car, across the junction between the windscreen and the side-window, it draws attention to the fact of alternative 'windows onto the world' and hence to the choices implicit in selecting what to photograph. |
|
| The structure of this particular photograph is also reminiscent of the frame-by-frame structure of photographic film (and video) and thus draws attention to the fact of the photographic film itself. This 'making visible' of the stages involved in the photographic process is amplified by the fact that the difference between the shape of the image and that of the uncropped photographic paper alludes to a further transcription - from negative to print. |
|
| Aaron Plant's Untitled Sex Toy series feature translucent, colourful, and ambiguous sweet-like objects floating on a white ground. The prints are the result of significant digital manipulation of initially orthodox photographs so that the resultant images seems both seductive and alien. In their taste for the bizarre these images bear the trace of a surrealist influence. What they reveal, however, in their refusal of photographic truth is simulated reality, not the surreal. Thus questioning whether we can still understand the 'image world' in which we live as referring beyond itself to a prior reality. |
|
| As Plant's images are unframed there is no clear margin between the images and the wall to which they are pinned. This, combined with the fact that the matt white ground blends with the gallery walls, allows the images to hover in the viewer's space, further scrambling the distinction between the real and the represented. |
|
| Tom Gleeson's most visually ambiguous series is Fetish, New York, 1999, which features close-ups of bodies on a television screen. In these images both the idea of 'fetishism' (connoted by the images, content and titles) and the framing of the images within the prints draw attention to the question of the 'off frame' or all that is excluded from a photographic image. Whereas this space usually invites the viewer's imaginative projection, the television's isolation in a pool of darkness bluntly discloses our lack of access to the 'off frame' of the photograph so that such projection is interrupted. Also, knowing that the image is taken from a television screen requires awareness that identification with its visual field was interrupted for the purposes of the photograph, and that what the photographs offer us is a representation of a representation, a simulacrum. |
|
| Reciprocity Failure clearly reveals that even at an indexical level the photograph is not a simple trace of the real, so that, as Martha Rosler suggests, the manipulation integral to photography 'is best embraced and consciously directed'. |
|
| Siún Hanrahan |
|
