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This conception of modernist photography seems to discount what Greenberg cited as the guiding principle of modernism, that "modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized." The idea of recording an objective reality outside the lens seems highly suspect today as much contemporary work diverges from this. The world seen through the lens hardly seems a critical stance on the procedures of the medium.
A modernist approach to photography, which criticizes and dissects the procedures of the medium is hardly new, but remains a relatively unstudied history. There is a clear trajectory, which can be seen to start with the Dadaists and the Bauhaus, continuing in contemporary art with Adam Fuss, Marco Breuer, James Welling and Michael Flomen.
My work follows in this tradition. In the series, Light Compositions and Light and Objecthood, I have used only that which I deem essential to the photographic medium: light, photographic paper, and the action of the artist. Through the direct reaction of light on photographic paper, I create gestural lines, which are recorded by the photographic paper.
While the work bears comparison with the abstract expressionists and the post painterly abstractionists, much of the nature of photography is revealed, distinct from painting. Focus and the temporality of creation are experienced differently from any other medium. Flatness too is experienced distinctly from other pictorial art -- the sheer flatness of the materials is essential to the way they are experienced.
In Light and Objecthood, I establish the photograph as surface. Michael Fried, in his article "Art and Objecthood," discusses this use of surface in relation to Olitiski's work Bunga 45:
It amounts to something more than an attempt simply to "translate" his paintings into sculptures, namely an attempt to establish surface -- the surface of painting as a medium of sculpture -- that is flat but rolled...unlike ordinary objects and other sculpture [it is] all surface. And of course what declares or establishes that surface is color.
Light and Objecthood consists of three pieces, seen in relationship to one another. In Colours for a Large Wall, a large grid consisting of fifteen distinct photographs, the surfaces are not removed from the way in which we normally interact with flat works. The surfaces are, however, subject to deconstruction. Gestures are held in tension with those around them and viewing becomes an intellectual act of finding the work's internal logic. The subjugation of each individual element enters the work into a state of objecthood in which each element is merely seen as a part of a greater whole, or a gestalt.
In the Light Columns, five cylinders stand upright illuminated from within. They emanate colours through the gestural lines that mark their surfaces. The interaction between the viewer and the object, each being equal in size, is meant to evoke rapture. Unlike Colours for a Large Wall the experience of the whole involves a greater relationship between viewing the work in space and time. Experience of the liminal space between object and viewer becomes central.
Lastly, Wave introduces a certain skepticism into looking at the photographs as it shows the very materials on which the other surfaces exist as light, ephemeral, and most importantly, flat.
As Fried comments on similar works, they are in many ways inexhaustible as the action of viewing changes from all angles and the relationship between object and viewer, ever-changing, alters one's perception. The elements of the surface heighten this by being infinite themselves. The emanating circles have neither beginning nor end and push the eye towards constant motion.
