A catalog essay I was asked to write for a group show.
Nina Yoh
In this age of failed
political bipartisanship where Congress cannot pass even the most basic of
bills, a period of artistic bipartisanship has arrived in the small world of
art photography. With the arrival of conceptual photography in the early 1980’s
(featuring appropriation and staged narratives), there has been a simmering
cultural war in photography between ardent supporters of straightforward image
making and a vanguard trying to bring photography into a more mainstream
artistic dialogue. But at the turn of the 21st century with the inclusion of some
very traditional photography in the last two Whitney Biennials, it is clear
that photography as it has been practiced since its inception no longer has to
be shunned as regressive. Straightforward photography has been accepted as mainstream
art. The medium has reached a point painting had in the early 70’s when it was
declared dead. Contemporary photography is now at a place where much of what can
be done with the medium has been done, and it no longer has to struggle to
define itself. It can just exist, creating a big tent where heavily conceptual and
completely abstract work can stand side by side with straight picture taking.
Conceptually, traditional
photography is still what the art world of the late 1800’s thought it was, the
pointing of a dumb machine to make mechanical drawings. But unlike in other
arts, that simplicity also allows for a void, which allows one to directly show
what is in the artist’s mind because photography’s strongest feature has always
been its ability to deal with the world as it is. Photographers constantly harness
the visual bounty of existence into art that reflects how they feel and think
about the world. Photography’s reliance on the physical world for source
materials also positions it as a medium with a unique ability to deal with the
immediate events that surround us.
Each of the artists
in If This Is It reflects their own specific world outlook but also articulates
an underlying collective dread that is felt today in the dwindling approval
ratings for elected officials, the percentage of the unemployed dropping
because people have officially stopped looking for work and the viability of
Ron Paul as a presidential candidate. For these times of dim futures and
disappointing existences, these pictures represent both a personal and
political point of view of America.
There is an amazement
to be found in the world around us that is drawn out of the small moments in
our everyday life. The routine slices of life as Leopold Bloom wanders Dublin
build into a reflection of Joyce’s outlook on life, Ireland, and writing. Glimpses
that Nina Yoh uses to draw the viewer into her world where the ordinary becomes
something more, where the visual world becomes a reflection of Yoh’s feelings
about her own existence. And where, despite an underlying sadness, there is
still an emotional range where humor, solitude, determination, can all be found
on the faces and in the moments of otherwise ordinary people. The pictures are
able to do what good pictures do, capture a personal point of view of the world
in the constant flow of minutia in our everyday lives.
There is something
about a wide wood-planked path through a forested area that screams the
familiar setting of anonymous American vacation spot. Matthew Schenning’s
photographs constantly place bored children alongside adults who have an
uncontrollable urge to pull off the interstate into nondescript scenic
overlooks. Locations where nature is fenced and regulated to allow tourists to
experience the outdoors while minimizing ecological damage and avoiding any liability
that might arise from getting too close to the wild. Locations that most of us experience
as the natural world, manicured, packaged and explained by plaques. Schenning’s
pictures reek of the inevitable disappointment these places hold, sights that are
never visible, just paths, steps, railings and an occasional tourist ambling up
and down hills looking for a genuine experience.
Jason Wurm’s pictures deal expertly with the
surface of things. Rainbow oil slicks compete with rainbow graphics on a street
fair stand, luxury goods are unconvincingly rendered in two dimensions while
equally two dimensional crowds look on approvingly. Wurm’s work on first
inspection reads like something out of a book of visual theory that might use
words like simulacra or appropriation. But what this kind of academic thinking misses
is that the world in front of his camera lacks any kind of a life worth living.
Things are broken, people are alone, and luxuries are rendered as flat, shallow
replacements for happiness. Wurm’s work, like much of the work in If This Is It
very pointedly encapsulates a national mood, adrift with little hope for
rescue.
Through Mar. 30th
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