A deep connection to materials at ICP

Breuer, Untitled (C-1189), 2012

(The following is a guest post by Eva Nikolova)

Currently on view at the International Center of Photography under the title "What is a Photograph?", a selection of the work of 21 contemporary artists purports to challenge our very notions of photography.  A provocative title, and while we may not be able to put the answer into words given the range of photographic experimentation from the last four decades that are the focus here, we still assume: we’ll know it when we see it.  But an ostensive definition can no longer encompass the works of those artists who are engaged in stripping bare the very basis of that recognition.  So what must be still present for a work to constitute a photograph?  Clearly not the camera: fully a third of the artists in “What is a Photograph?” have abandoned the iconic device, and some have gone much further, casting aside almost everything assumed indispensably photographic.

                                                                                                                                  

Breuer, Study for (Metal/Day), 2000

Dispensing even with the action of light or chemistry, here are some of the highly tactile, deliberately modest-in-size works of Marco Breuer.  Dazzling in the inexhaustible inventiveness of his methods, Breuer scrapes, scratches, sands, folds, burns, drills, and otherwise mutilates his photo paper creating unsettling tension between image and surface violation.  “Deliberate misuse” is his own phrase for the way he treats his materials, but plain "abuse" seems more apt: how else to describe scorching the paper with red hot coals, dynamite or a frying pan, or shooting - with a gun not a camera - a box of photo paper?  In fact, shooting with a camera is what Breuer has done the least of, even when starting out – his introduction to photography was through photograms.

Rossiter, Defender Velour Black, expired Jan 1946, processed 2011 (C), 2011

 

Rossiter, Fuji Gaslight, expired date unknown, ca. 1920s, processed 2009 (D), 2009

And then, there are the works of Alison Rossiter, which she describes as “found-photograms”. Rossiter seeks out gelatin silver papers that have expired many decades ago, and as if out of veneration for these relics of the photographic past, keeps her interventions minimal: she simply develops the entire sheet of paper, or else applies a little developer to a part of it.  For all the evocative shapes, planes and shadows that materialize onto the papers as a result, the subtly colored monochrome abstractions represent nothing external, just their own particular histories – ghostly traces of time made visible through darkroom chemistry.  In a one piece on view, the photographer withdraws almost completely: she presents to us a small rectangle of Eastman Kodak Solio, presumed to have expired around 1910, that she has left unprocessed.  Perhaps she felt the one hundred-year-old paper had endured enough - its incredibly rich, copper-like surface certainly suggests as much.  Like commemorative markers, Rossiter’s works simply bear the names of the paper, the year of expiration and that of processing.  If this elegy for darkroom photography seems merely nostalgic instead of poignant, and the concerns hermetic instead of urgent, it may be that to fully take in the impact of the work, you’d have to feel a deep connection to such materials and a personal stake in the continued existence of analog photography.  But even if you are not similarly moved, the works’ sheer visual presence - at once sumptuous and spare, sensuous and severe – may feel like a revelation.

Although working at seemingly different ends of a spectrum, Rossiter’s principled withdrawal and Breuer’s intensely physical engagements both share in the creation of objects that operate at the very edge of our assumptions of what a photograph is.  And where exactly is that elusive edge?  Perhaps it has become so razor-thin, so exquisitely whetted by the attempts to penetrate the obdurate essence of the medium in the last forty years, that it’s invisible until touched by the right hands, and then, suddenly, we see the mystery and beauty embedded in the materials we have taken for granted, laid bare before us.

Eva Nikolova

www.evanikolova.com

Marco Breuer

Breuer, C-995, 2010

His show has just ended at the Von Lintel Gallery on 23rd St, quietly, the way he might have wanted.  But for those lucky enough to have seen it, the lessons of this part-time farmer from upstate New York are not easily forgotten.  For Marco Breuer's work is like a series of urgent dispatches from the field, the results of his ambushes on and abuses of the silver gelatin emulsion he so much loves.  This is point zero of cameraless photography, the ground state.  It doesn't get any more basic.

His method is to violate the photographic surface to see how far he can push it; he pounds, pummels, scrapes and gouges it, and even burns it.  Likening himself to a sculptor, he chisels away layers - literally - until he forces it to give up its expressive core.  The results can be stunning visually - these colors are hidden in photographic emulsion? - but they also can have the provisional and elliptic quality of laboratory results, maybe not everyone's cup of tea.  A picture I like very much, C-1012, may also look, to some, like the electrical discharge from a poorly wired socket.

Breuer, C-1012, 2010

But this is what you get when you strip it down and use the right tools: an utterly gorgeous image.  We will never completely master the sheer physicality of the materials of our art, in their mute resistance and mystery.  Yet we are locked in an eternal embrace with them where we must make them respond or we have failed.  In this struggle, Breuer takes no prisoners.  More of his fine work can be seen on the Von Lintel website.

The recent exhibition had another component, a bit of theater in which the gallery walls were redone in black, scratched with chalk markings, lines, symbols and formulae, as though we were inside the darkroom, sharing intense moments of creativity with the artist.  As I say, a bit of theater.  We sent our man-in-the-street, John LoCicero, to go have a look, and he filed this excited report:

Hand-Tool-Material: the chalked flashes and ghost swipes of a lesson plan - far now from W. H. Fox Talbot, this "pencil" re-draws upon photographic traditions/materials to index immediacy/measure/media - in this outlier darkroom: the power of the center is enacted through a triptych of approximations - angular hard lines score the edges of mysterious colors, tints and complements, miracles of multiple exposure - chalked agitations amplify onto the wall the scratched excavation of chromogenic paper coatings - evoking "the riddle of lumen", cresting angular slices graph sharp anxious contrasts from the containing black.

That pretty much says it all.