I love Roe Ethridge and have said many a time that when this
period of photographic history is distilled down, Alec Soth and Ethridge will
be remembered as what was happening. But this most recent book Sacrifice Your Body, the basis of this
show, has disappointed me with Ethridge’s output for the first time ever. It is
especially disappointing coming from someone who has numerous times declared
himself a book artist and not a gallery artist. What concerns me most about the
Sacrifice Your Body book is that it
feels indulgent. His Le Luxe book was
large and at times repetitive, with pictures that got more and more deadpanned,
until by the end you were just looking at screen grabs of images being
processed in photoshop. It felt like a fuck you to the viewer in the most
positive punk rock kind of way. Ethridge was challenging his growing fame in
the art world or at least the photo art-world, daring his fans to follow on him
a difficult artistic turn, like Black Flag doing long Dead-like instrumental
jams. Ethridge was inviting all those who loved his work to get on his artistic
path even if he wasn’t sure where it was going.
I for one found it exciting and was psyched to see where
things were going to end up. The Sacrifice
Your Body book is not much of a pay off. It is a step backwards, to what one
might have expected from an artist who had gained fame for his idiosyncratic
sequencing, and now shows at a blue chip gallery like Gagosian in Beverly Hills,
his West Coast gallery. Almost half of the book is made up of straightforward
snapshots of a car sinking into a roadside canal. By the time the car is fully submerged
and police divers are on the scene, the pictures start to feel like crime scene
photography. As mysterious as the pictures are, there are a lot of them, and they
don’t get past the style and skill of a driver taking snapshots for an
insurance claim. The pictures are mixed with the usual zoological selection of
pictures, still-lifes, portraits, interiors, and landscapes, which make up most
of Ethridge’s work. The skilled visual detritus forms a portrait of a worn but
recently wealthy Floridian community filled with luxury moldings and people who
have seen better days. The essay explains that Ethridge was driving to visit
his Mother’s hometown in Florida, when he got out to take a picture without
putting his car in park, and the car drove itself into a canal.
While not uninteresting, the car running into a canal seems
to speak more to the experience of the photographer and less to the visual
value of the pictures. The images from or about Florida are skilled and as good
as any Ethridge has done. But I expected so much more after his New Photography
show of photoshopped vernacular images and the end of the Le Luxe book. I had hoped we were on the verge of a major shift in
Ethridge’s work. Instead, we get the tried and true work, which makes up the
current show at Andrew Kreps. The show is distilled down to fifteen or so
pictures and only one image of a muddy wheel to acknowledge the large series of
pictures from the book of the car going into a canal. Leaving the viewer with a
solid, but not exciting Ethridge show, it would be tragic to see Ethridge go
the way of so many successful artists, making the same work for the next couple
of decades. For a time at the turn of this century, it seemed that everything
that could be done in photography had been done, and Ethridge changed the equation
and opened things up. I believe he has more to offer then a cover band version
of his earlier self. Or maybe the snapshots of his car in the canal was the
next phase, and it’s all serial snapshot from here on out.
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