VIEWPOINT

2007 / EVERARD READ / JOHANNESBURG

CATALOGUE ESSAY

THIS IS NOT A WINDOW

David Bunn, Viewpoint Exhibition Catalogue (2007)

I 

“Through ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds” Wallace Stevens

You might be forgiven, at first glance, for thinking you had arrived on the wrong date, and that the gallery had been cleared in advance for the future installation of award-winning new work by Alexandra Ross. Alternatively, you might already know her exquisite earlier paintings, some of which allude to photographic snapshots and which celebrate glimpses, movement, reflections, and peripheral vision. In that case, having entered very tentatively, you might very well turn around, in the expectation that you are in error and have passed by the subtle images already.

 This is not the case; the work is in front of you.

 Your next impression, therefore, may be of sparseness, followed by a faintly disturbing sense of being in the presence of quotation, as though the room knew your glance and was repeating it back to you, though shifted very minimally off centre. What seemed like apertures and windows onto an exterior world, are now, in a perceptual double take, apparently trompe l’oeil effects.

 Alexandra Ross was a runner-up in last year’s Everard Read award, and this year her winning entry eschews painting altogether. Unusually for new generation South African art, its subject is very philosophical, having to do with time and the nature of being, with what philosophers call “ontology”. To achieve that end, she has had to clear the gallery, so that it seems like a stripped down, generic, post-modern display environment without metaphor, without poetry and with an almost inhuman stillness. Standing in this clean space, however, you will quickly become aware of the artworks themselves. Each is a framed and displayed view, in exactly the same dimensions as the aluminium framed glass doors that lead out of the gallery, representing some aspect of the perceptual experience of the space which is not ours and which is in a past that is not ours. The room gives aspects of our glance back to us, from a time that is not the present.

The framed elements, therefore, are a nuanced representation of the look of the very recent past of the room, a subtle and complex past that is not our own and yet which seems particular to a time and space which is quite similar to our own. We have of course glimpsed similarly occluded perspectives while making our way to this interior space, but as we lose our faith in the overall illusion, we gain a faith in each image as a representation in which slightly different conditions of light, weather, and reflection prevails. A question looms: whose views are these? What neighbourly intelligence has preceded us and now offers its vantage points in the place of our singular experience? It is a radical contingency that is perhaps best explained through reference to the history of philosophy.

II

 Cultural theorist Jonathan Crary has argued that there was a revolution in the European understanding of visual experience in the mid nineteenth-century, with the introduction of new philosophies of subjective vision. This involved, he says, “the notion that our perceptual and sensory experience depends less on the nature of an external stimulus than on the composition and functioning of our sensory apparatus”. That is to say, he explains, “the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body”.

 Famously, the notion of the relative autonomy of the senses found its most elaborate early expression in French Impressionism: Charles Harrison has shown how five of the most significant early paintings that celebrate perceptual limitation, works by Monet and Renoir, station themselves at similar vantage points over the La Grenouillère bathing place on the Seine. All five are composed from a position that varies by no more than ten feet. Over the next 100 years in France, in the undertow of this secular fascination with contingent vision, another philosophical understanding develops. An entire ethics is constructed around alertness to the  perspectival awareness of another being, for whom I am an object. The most famous moment in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness concerns the growing awareness of the look of the Other falling upon me, and the consciousness of the Other as an originating, perspectivally situated consciousness is a humanizing force: “Therefore,” says Sartre, “I can not consider the look which the Other directs on me as one of the possible manifestations of his objective being; the Other can not look at me as he looks at the grass”. Being the object of another’s look brings the possibility of other consciousnesses into the world.

 Secular modernism develops this exploration of the problem of other minds by using perspectivally limiting narrative techniques like stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue. Writer after writer deploys the tactic of reduced narrative point of view, often centred on a consciousness that does not name itself, but inhabits a richly circumscribed and embodied spatio-temporal position. In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, for instance, an unhappily pregnant woman sitting on a slow wagon moving towards town hopes secretly, and frantically to find an opportunity there for an abortion:

The signboard comes in sight. It is looking out at the road now, because it can wait. New Hope. 3 mi. it will say. New Hope. 3 mi. New Hope. 3 mi. And then the road will begin, curving away into the trees, empty with waiting, saying New Hope three miles.

 These experimental renditions of mental life - as though subjectivity offers a louvered view of the world - are a feature of literary modernism and early postmodernism. By 1957, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie takes the art of the perspectival limitation to a new height. In that great work - the French title is a reference to the condition of jealousy, and a pun on the idea of “shuttered’ vision and louvre blinds - all pronoun reference is removed, and a series of apparently objective, cold, and camera-like views are repeated, obsessively, without reference to a commanding consciousness. We are forced to fall back upon these narrow, literalised perspectives for evidence of mood or emotion, but all we can infer is some obsession, or mania, to be found in the recurrent return to the same objects, or the lingering of the camera gaze on stains, textures, surfaces, or reflections, all emptied of metaphoric meaning.

So the great cycle of exploration of the idea of autonomous vision reaches a climax in literary and artistic postmodernism. By then, it has started to include the art gallery as subject, as the bearer of a certain kind of market-driven look and preference. Nowhere was this self-consciousness of the institutional limits of the gallery more evident than in the life and times of Robert Smithson. Smithson’s entire sculptural oeuvre is based on an understanding of tensions between the inside and outside of the Gallery, what he terms “site” and “non-site”. In one of his most notorious works, Yucatan Mirror Displacement,  Smithson and a friend follow in the tracks of a colonial explorer, pausing punctually at places in Central America where the earlier traveler had sketched some of the greatest monuments of Mesoamerica. At some of these sites, Smithson turns his back on the view, and installs a series of half buried mirrors which narrow, limit and fragment the sublime landscape into a series of dissembling, reflective shards.

III

 So now let us return to the Everard Read Gallery, in the presence of works that are also highly self-conscious and displacing of the space in which they are installed. Like more traditional works of art, these installations address us as bodies. The concept of “address” has been well theorised by Norman Bryson in a famous study of the impossible angles of Massaccio’s great Renaissance painting of the Trinity, showing how the work has two distinct vanishing points. The one is “consonant with the scale of the viewer’s body, as though the ground plan of the viewer’s physical environment were continuous with the ground plan of the painting,”, while the other, more theoretical, has to do with the scale of the body of God-the-Father.

 Alexandra Ross’s works appear minimal and strange, but they are of our scale as viewers, and they address us nonetheless. She has installed seven works of exactly the same proportions, 2.4 meters by 74 centimetres, as though blotting out a window or door vantage point they seek at the same time to represent. The illusion is exaggerated because they are, as it were, quotations of various scenes, and the general effect, then, is to disturb the space-time experience of the viewer in the gallery. Looking at these window-like resemblances, we are first driven to peer through them to a world beyond that is coextensive with our own somatic experience. As we look, though, we gradually become aware that these are representations replete with the contingency of someone else’s experience, some past person, for whom the glass offered up reflections and muted tones that were a function of the light falling on that day, at that time which can never be ours. In this fashion, a gulf opens between ourselves and that inevitably lost Other.

 In the digitally produced photographic images themselves, there is great interest to be had. View 1 and View 2, two part images of the same bench cropped at different heights, are balanced against the mundane ground of a grey, industrial carpet. The matte rag paper and inkjet printing gives a rich, tactile quality to the fibres in the muted shadow. In the View 1, moreover, there is what seems to be an elegiac, cross-hatched shadow, rather like the willow bough railing of a rustic bridge seen through the mist in a Zen garden. Crossing to the neighbouring image, however, we find that this poetic certitude is undone: the “bridge,” it seems, is not that at all, but the reflection of another object, a trestle table perhaps, behind the observer, casting its faint shadow on the plexiglass surface of what is being photographed.

 In View 4, the “viewpoint” into the outside formal garden, there is a denser and darker image of trees bending against each other. The fibrous, annular rings of a palm are beautifully rendered, as is the other tree, which appears to be some kind of Pandanus, reaching its trunk across the foreground space. Once again, though, another shadow haunts this surface. There is a vaguely discerned, ghostly feathering of leafy images from a reflection in another dimension.

In this beautifully dissembling work by Alexandra Ross, there are four planes of visible experience: there is the domain of the imagined real world, which the viewpoint installation seems to obliterate; there is the ontology of the original object, photographed in an earlier time; there is the reflective and mediating glass surface through which the camera looked in time past; and finally, there is the rich epistemology of the present, with the viewer becoming conscious of the weight of her body in a sparse room, the whisper of visitors, and the materiality of the reflective presences in the plexiglass of the works now directly before you.

Between these subtle and lasting impressions there is only the experience of time.

CATALOGUE ESSAY

VIEWPOINT: POINT OF VIEW

Alexandra Ross, Viewpoint Exhibition Catalogue (2007)

Imagine you’re on a road trip, going nowhere in particular, just taking the scenic route. Along the way you notice an official, brown, arrow-shaped sign that says: Viewpoint. (There’s an accompanying graphic of a mountain peak on the board to illustrate this.) Since you have some time to kill, you decide to turn off the main route and head for the designated spot. You arrive, stop the car and get out to stretch your legs and admire the view. For a while you do nothing more than just look. But then, you feel compelled to take a photograph.

Now imagine you’re standing in an empty room in the Everard Read gallery. Imagine that you can see through the walls. The title, Viewpoint, sets up the anticipation of seeing something predictably spectacular, something worth photographing. But surprisingly, these views have already been photographed and moreover, are quite unspectacular. Six large, colour photographs reveal elongated sections of blank walls, long, thin strips of carpeted and wooden floors, narrow bits of foliage and bark. These sliver-like images are conceived of as a series of photographic trompe l’oeil or fake windows that show imaginary views into the adjacent rooms and courtyards of the gallery itself. The magnified views through the walls allow us to scrutinize at leisure what we would usually overlook – the gallery itself. They shift awareness from the art to the walls and spaces behind and beside them. And so, what was in the background is now foregrounded. What was peripheral becomes focal. The props take center stage. Viewpoint - photographic installation or architectural intervention - renders the invisible visible, penetrates the impenetrable and monumentalises the banal. Though this site-specific body of work is physically limited to just one of the gallery’s four exhibition spaces and ultimately, to this particular gallery itself, conceptually it is as unlimited as the scope of our imagination. While it expands - enabling us to move beyond the confines of the room in which it exists and into the neighbouring spaces, it also contracts – offering my POV (point of view), which are physically narrow and fixed views. Viewpoint then, is something of a paradox – at once simple and complex, playful and profound.

 This show is also a manifestation of my desire to always see the world through fresh eyes, to respond to my environment with imagination; to perceive beauty in the banal, to find mystery in the mundane and to recapture a sense of enchantment in a world suffering, amongst a plague of other malady’s, from visual pollution, sensory overload and gross materialism. In many ways this is simply a more considered, philosophical and mature manifestation of my childhood desire to move objects with my mind, to bend spoons, to fly, to become invisible at will, to make magic real and to pass through walls.  It is an expression of hope, defying closure, defying boredom.

 Finally, it allows the impossible to become possible... But only for as long as we believe it to be true.

INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRA ROSS: RECIPIENT OF THE 2007 BRAIT-EVERARD READ ART AWARD

Michael Smith, Artthrob (2007)

Everard Read Johannesburg has, over the last three years, joined with Wits University School of Arts (WSOA) to make an award to an artist who is either currently engaged in or who has completed the WSOA Master's programme in the last ten years. The award gives the artist R30 000 with which to mount a show at the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg, as well as the production of a catalogue. This year's recipient is Alexandra Ross, who has departed from her usual practice of painting to produce a subtle yet complex series of large-format photographic works for a show entitled 'Viewpoint'.

The works take the gallery interior as their subject, and Ross has constructed something of a self-referential maze of spatial illusions. The works are sized and framed to mimic the gallery's aluminium-framed doors, and Ross's selected views are either deliberately so incidental as to be anonymous, or tantilisingly clipped. The results are nonetheless extraordinarily beautiful, or in her words, “reminiscent of the intense quietude of Vermeer's interiors but taking their subjects from peripheral vision”.

I interviewed Ross in June, two weeks before her show was due to open. Amongst other things, she spoke about her shift into photographic work, insisting that her formal and conceptual concerns were the same as with her paintings, speculating that she was possibly still 'painting', only now with photography.

Michael Smith: So Alexandra, congratulations on your win. Tell me briefly about your body of work for this show.
Alexandra Ross: The show comprises six, large-scale colour photographs each 2.4 metres high x 74 cm wide, mounted in one of the Everard Read's four gallery rooms. It may at first seem a radical departure from my oil paintings, but in conception, it's not. It is an attempt to perceive beauty in the banal, to find mystery in the mundane and shift awareness.

MS: Tell me about the prize and the process.
AR: Well, the competition is a collaboration between Brait, the Everard Read and the WSOA. The concept was developed by Mark Read and Mary-Jane Darroll of the gallery together with Professor Alan Crump of Wits. Entrants submit a proposal which is judged by about 7 - 8 judges.

MS: The works are shown in the gallery interior, and are actually also of the same gallery interior. Is this accurate?
AR: Yes, this site-specific work is also very much about exploring the intersection between artist, art and the gallery space.

MS: How did your working process unfold? Did you go to the space first?
AR: Yes, this body of work is very much a response to the space. I was interested in how to use the gallery space to explore and propagate some of my ideas. My work is often about the environment I'm in at the time of making, so it made sense for me to view and respond to the space first. This installation does shift from my previous work. I usually work quite impulsively, within a fairly established framework of course, but with these images I needed to be quite calculated and systematic. Because the images were going to be so enlarged, I couldn't work with my usual 'point-and-shoot' camera: I had to hire a Hasselblad and enlist the help of a professional photographer. I worked with my brother David so in that sense it was a collaboration, and the production of the works also involved a degree of collaboration with printers and framers, which is all quite foreign to my usual way of working.

MS: One of the perennial debates in contemporary art over the last 40 or so years, pretty much since Gerhard Richter came into public view, is the connection and overlap between painting and photography. I've always known of you as a painter, but when we had adjoining studios at Wits a while back, I sneaked into yours and found some very beautiful, very complex source photographs.
AR: Well, I've always painted from photographs. That's very much what my work has been about for a long time: scenes, objects and transient moments usually on the edges of one's vision, outside conventional focus. Photography allows me to capture those things spontaneously but also accurately. There are also certain photographic effects - blur, bounce, refraction, reflection - that are not visible to the naked eye or difficult to recreate that interest me. And I'm particularly interested in the mediated view, looking at things through 'screens' like glass or smoke, mist or reflected in water. If I want to capture an image while moving, driving for example, photography gives me the freedom to do so very easily.

MS: So formally speaking, how are these works different from your paintings?
AR: They're different in that they're sharper and more static and this show is conceptually more considered, but at the same time they continue my practice of looking at things on the margins of my vision and consciousness: things that are not the obvious choice to photograph. And there's a kind of quietness, something pared down that's common to both.

MS: Do you think viewers are going to find the sections of the gallery interior you've photographed?
AR: They'll have to be fairly observant. These are very niched views, and some are quite abstract because of this, but I don't think impossibly so.

MS: Is there something particular about the Everard Read Gallery that you wanted to engage with?
AR: Well, yes, in the sense that I'm playing with some of the ideas that the Everard Read stands for. It's very much about investment art, and I'm quite non-materialistic, I believe in foregrounding the ephemeral, the imaginative, even the magical.

MS: So are the works for sale, then?
AR: Yes, they are, but I understand what you're saying. I suppose the irony is that the art that is bought in this case is really a window, a view, not a 'saleable' product. And there will be no name tags next to the works. More than financially, I want people to buy into the illusion, the fact that where they expect to find 'art' will be these fake windows - photographic works carefully constructed to mimic the doors and windows of the space. Also, although the works are photographic, I won't make editions: they'll be one-offs. This relates them more closely to painting, and that also establishes a continuity with my previous practice.

MS: Do you think this body of work will signal a future path for you? Will you continue to work in photography?
AR: Yes, I think I will. What's interesting for me is that I'm interpreting a very old painting technique - trompe l'oeil painting which has its origins as far back as Roman times - in a very contemporary way, using photography and installation. In order for the illusion to work, they needed to be hyperreal but I'm not interested in painting in that way. So it made sense to work photographically. But I still regard myself as a painter. Maybe I'm just painting with photography. This whole process has put me into another realm as an artist: I don't feel I have to restrict myself to either painting or photography.