Layering and Flattening in Site-Specific Photography by Nick Balmforth
This article is a response to David Everitt How's article, The Expanded Photograph published in ArtReview's May 2014issue. This response was originally featured as part of the publication for the exhibition, 'An image is no substitute for anything' 2014 initiated by Rachel Wilson. The publication was edited by Wilson and Daniella Valz Gen.
Photographs can increasingly be understood less as end products and more as stages in ongoing processes of transformation. After a photograph is taken it can pass through any number of transformative stages, such as being edited, blogged and combined with other images as recycled content for revenue generation. These processes can of course continue indefinitely, determining over and over again the meanings and effects that photographs have. This is not to say images once existed in a vacuum in any sense. However the potential of modification is now vastly expanded, owing to networked technology and developments in image editing tools. As a result there is now a much greater sense that images are deeply enmeshed in larger networks. We know this frenetic circulation is happening constantly and that it helps shape our image-mediated environments. Here I want to argue that a recent turn in Contemporary Art photography deals with how photographs are often only layers within larger frameworks in this way. At the same time I believe these works speak of how photographs are in fact unable to deal with a layering of elements within themselves. The specific works I am referring to were recently addressed by David Everitt Howe in Art Review. In a feature for the May 2014 issue he focussed on the work of three artists: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, David Gilbert and Jonathan VanDyke.
VanDyke’s Eddie Saint Mondrian (2013) depicts an attractive male model wearing only white underwear. Randomly but artfully covering the rest of his body are marks of black paint. The model is pictured in a fashion shoot-like pose. He reclines on a large sheet which also forms the entire backdrop of the image. This sheet is also daubed in painted marks resembling those on the model’s body. That the sheet came to be in this state owes to VanDyke’s previous choreography of a performance. For this he had invited two dancers, Bradley Teal Ellis and David Rafael Botana to perform a movement on the sheet. Their costumes were filled with paint which then trailed over the sheet as the performance took place. It was then only later that the sheet was used as a backdrop upon which to photograph the model. On top of this, the background sheet - once a space that was performed on - was later sewn into canvasses which were also exhibited by VanDyke.
In his interpretation Howe notes that the presence of the studio is abstracted in VanDyke’s work. It firstly acts as a site for the production of the performance. But it also acts as another site for the production of the photograph of the model, before later also being converted into material for exhibition. Howe sees value in VanDyke’s work as an exploration of photography’s conventions. Part of the interest lies in the variety of ways in which the studio can be made to feature in the image. For Howe, this acts as a reflection on the nature of studios themselves: Studios are spaces of continuous experimentation and development. To visit at one point in time is only to understand a segment of the wider situation. So the way the studio keeps cropping up in different ways is suggestive of how it itself is in constant change, whereas the image can only capture a specific place and a specific time. I would argue that we can also see VanDyke’s work as engaging with the way images behave in our society. By exhibiting not just the photograph but the canvasses too, the artwork he creates becomes spatially dispersed and so de-centred at the site of exhibition. Given the way the artwork involves different processes across time, it is also temporally de-centred across its multiple sites of production. The resulting Artwork therefore becomes disparate and multiple. This is in tune with the effects of blogging platforms, where in some sense, readers become writers and the flow of images is radically de-centred.
The relations of VanDyke’s work are also complicated by his own intervention. The paint marks on the model, while appearing similar to those on the canvas were applied at another point in time, in a different situation. The model also wears a square painted object around his neck like an oversized accessory. On the square’s white surface is painted an abstract, non-uniform but grid-like composition in blue, orange and red, like Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1943) as Howe notes. Although differing from the other patterns within the image, by adding another patterned surface, the overall visual affinity based on pattern is reinforced. However the backdrop and the model’s appearance were created at different points in time. The backdrop having been the result of the performance, and the model later being photographed on that backdrop. So the formal continuity between the different elements was actually superimposed after the fact by the artist by means of their inclusion within the same image. This artifice reflects the way images are constantly combined and recombined in varying configurations, in ways which are disconnected from, and perhaps antagonistic to their original contexts.
Jonathan VanDyke, Eddie Saint Mondrian, 2013 Archival pigment print, edition of 3 + 2 AP, 55" wide x 36.5" high Courtesy the artist
In Darren, September 8. 2011 (2011) Sepuya has photographed a scene which itself includes a group of framed photographs. In the image we see a range of objects resting on wooden flooring, or perhaps a desk which meets a white wall behind. In the centre of the image stands a monochromatic framed photo-portrait of a man. He is naked apart from a watch and trainers and stares earnestly at the viewer. Even though we are seeing a photograph of this photograph, given that it is positioned squarely, the subject still looks out at us directly. The man is pictured reclining against a white wall on a wooden surface, which matches the setting in which his portrait is itself placed. Behind and so almost totally obscured by this portrait, is another framed photograph leaning against the wall. All we can see is the top part of a head scarf and the side of a back and arm. There is another framed photograph leaning up against the wall too, but we can only see a slither as most of it is outside the frame. On the left hand side of the image is a loose pile of three books, cropped as so to remain unidentifiable. Finally there are some scattered pieces of orange peel. The items are not deliberately composed, but photographed as they lay in Sepuya’s studio.
Gilbert’s Small Erotic Picture (Spring) (2013) can be seen in similar terms as the camera is also directed back to the studio in this work. In contrast to Sepuya, rather than photographing chance arrangements, Gilbert has created a deliberate assemblage. He made it out of objects which would not look out of place in a studio. For example in the centre of the image a white jug containing flowers stands on a table. Underneath on the floor is a pink painting of an erect cock and balls. The painting is perhaps unfinished as the rest of the canvas is left totally empty. The image contains an assortment of other objects. For example there are bright red pieces of card attached to the back wall. Large pieces of torn fabric, washed yellowy-green with occasional black paint streaks are also tacked up on the back wall. In the foreground at the very edge of the image we see a paint covered tooth brush and the tip of a wooden board covered in black paint marks.
When considering Sepuya’s work, Howe focuses on how the artist has turned his camera back on his studio. Howe interprets the work as an evocation of absence given how the studio is missing the crucial human element of the models usually present. He also sees both Sepuya’s and Gilbert’s works as reflecting on the process-based nature of the studio in the same way he sees Howe’s work as doing: The studio is an evolving thing and photographs are by contrast always rooted in a certain place and time. However I think we can also find additional significance within the actual act of photographing the studio. This act is a way in which Sepuya’s work - and also Gilbert’s for the same reason - also explores how images operate in contemporary culture. The self-referential gesture of an artist photographing their own studio - lent rhetorical power by its absurdity - resonates with the ways images are now so interconnected: Our situation of endless blogging and re-blogging, of cynical aggregation and re-aggregation. The works reflect this connectedness via the creation of a chain rather than an end point at the structural level of the Artwork. As well as speaking of the way images behave, I believe all these works speak of photography’s inability to deal with layers of relation. Common to both Gilbert’s and Sepuya’s work as just described is the focus on a subject matter with two layers: Firstly there is a site of production of the studio space. The site in these works here is defined both in terms of a physical space, but also to include the objects which circulate within that space during its normal functioning. Secondly there is a product of the studio: This would be photographs in the case of Sepuya, and the assemblage in Gilbert’s work. The key point is that in both pieces we see how the relations are muted and obscured in the final image. The site of production and product of it are however made indistinguishable by various means. Howe picks up on this partially when considering Gilbert’s work. He notes how the border between the assemblage and its environment is imperceptible. We cannot tell where the studio and its objects end and where the composition begins. For example is the table that supports the jug of flowers part of the assemblage? Or is it part of the studio furniture? However to build on Howe’s point here, it is not just the choice of material that causes this imperceptibility. In fact, it is also the very act of photography that is behind this. The unity afforded by the containment within a common picture plane deters us from appreciating the layered quality of the subject matter of the images.
In Sepuya’s piece, the arrangements are left as they were found. In the ordinary workings of the studio the things made are intertwined with the space that was used to make them. Sepuya takes advantage of this and uses this intertwining as a way to demonstrate this blurring of site and object. However again it is the flattening power of the image, the placing of everything on the level of subject-matter that fully condenses the layers into each other.
The flattening tendency of images is again explored in VanDyke’s work. He creates a more layered Artwork. For example there is the site of production of the ground sheet. Then the sheet also becomes a product of sorts as it accumulates paint which therefore adds a layer of meaning to the image. The model who is the central subject of the photograph represents an additional layer as he is placed in front of the ground sheet before being photographed. Just like in the other two works, all these layers are present in the image. And again the photographs seem to conceal them. We cannot understand all the different aspects that appear in the image from the image alone. But the crucial point remains that the act of photographing stages a collapse of the object back into its site of production. In the VanDyke piece, the formal uniformity which is based on pattern but enhanced by the flatness of the image diminishes the difference between the various elements. In the face of a harmonious composition our desire to disentangle the layers is decreased. So these works on the one hand point to the way images are increasingly enmeshed in wider networks. Yet on the other they show how images seem unable to communicate layers of relation themselves.
As Howe argues, these works do indeed apply site-specific methodologies to the realm of photography. And I agree that this does expand our understanding of the inherent potentials of photography. But the layered quality of this site-specificity also emphasises how photographs can now be seen as mere parts of wider transformative processes; processes of editing and aggregation and so on. In certain situations this context becomes important. For example who tweeted a certain image or whether or not an image has been manipulated becomes the focus. These works address how images are connected nodes in wider networks and how they are being constantly aggregated and re-aggregated. At the same time however they reflect how images fail to reveal the processes of their own transformation, instead hiding them in plain sight.
