Photography Quarterly #69

The Center acknowledgessu/Jportfrom individuals, members,corporations,foundation,and /Jublicfunding from the New York State Council on the Arts.

STAFF: Executive Director, Colleen Kenyon; Associate Director, Kathleen Kenyon; Assistant Director, Lawrence P. Lewis; Program Assistant, Kate Menconeri.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS: Sheva Fruitman, Edward Garbarino, Rollin Hill, Kenro lzu, David Karp, Colleen Kenyon, Arie Kopelman, Rebecca E. Lawton, Ellen Levy, Marcia Lippman, Joan Mack, Tanya Marcuse, Marc Miller, Lila Raymond, Ken Shung, Alan Siegel.

ADVISORY BOARD: Ellen Carey, Philip Cavanaugh, Susan Ferris, Julie Galant, Howard Greenberg-Founder, Sue Hartshorn, W.M. Hunt, Greg Kandel, Peter Kenner, Laurie Kratochvil, Carol Lefluffy, Peter MacGill, Kitty McCullough, Elliot Meisel, Ann Morse, Sandra S. Phillips, Jose Picayo, J. Randall Plummer, Ernestine W. Ruben, Julie Saul, Susana Torruella-Leval, Neil Trager.

VOLUNTEERS: David Gurwitz and Bob Wagner. ARTS ADMINISTRATION INTERNS: Autumn J inqiu-Lin and Andrew Cine.

PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly #69, Vol. 17 No. 4, ISSN 0890 4639. Copyright© 1997 Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498. TEL 914 679-9957 FAX 914 679-6337. Visit us at http:// users.aol.com/cpwphoto. EMAIL CPWphoto @aol.com.

Catalog essays© 1997 Joseph Wolin, John Paul Ricco, and Lia Gangitano. All photographs and texts reproduced in this Quarterly are copyrighted by the artists. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. The opinions and ideas expressed in this publication do not represent official positions of the Center. Printing by Kenner Printing Co., NYC. Editing and design by Kathleen Kenyon, Assistant Editor, Kate Menconeri. Copy editing by Teri Roiger and Joan Munkacsi. Composition by Digital Design Studio, Kingston, NY. The PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly is distributed by Bernhard DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07110; and Desert Moon Periodicals, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Pq#69anxiety

lawrencebeck,darrenclark, petergarfield,danahoey,jin lee, barbarapollack

lia gangitano

calling all volunteers! josephwolin john paulricco

kate menconeri

CPW appreciates the efforts of its many volunteers who support the Center's activities. We offer supervised internships for high school and college students, for those who are returning to the work-force, changing careers, or want experience in arts administration. If you have talents to share and time to spare, contact Kathleen Kenyon. of note

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portfolio viewings at the Center

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COVER: Dana Hoey, Beware Little Foxes, 1995.

high anxiety

These i,nages plnre the viewer in a region between k11ow,i1g and doubt, realilty and artifice,111eani11gandnonsense.

negative, desired

They wf'rP thP .fantasies and daydreams q/ chilrihoorl and adolescence, anrlfor thosf' ofus 1uu·Prtnin as to whPtlzPr we would nzake it lo school to111,orrow( or ever again), they wPrP visions q/survival.

artists' statements

integer

noted books, opportunity knocks, PQ index, in light

guesteditor'sacknowledgments

This issue of PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly would not have been possible without the assistance of many individuals. I would first like to thank the Center staff and volunteers; they earned my gratitude for their dedication and professionalism. I must extend great thanks to Elizabeth Ferrer,who introduced me to the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and whose work has long been an inspiration and a model. I am grateful to Lia Gangitano for her exhilarating video program, Integer, and the accompanying text included here; to John Paul Ricco, for his very beautiful meditation on photography and blind spots; to John Alan Farmer for his support and research assistance; and to the following, for their introductions to artists, some of whom are included in High Anxiety: Sandra Antelo-Suarez, Doug lschar, Silvia Malagrino, Ricardo Mazal, Richard Phillips, David S. Rubin, Martha Shade, Ken Shorr, Joanne Stuhr, Simon Watson, and the late Neil Winkel. Most importantly, I extend my gratitude to Lawrence Beck, Darren Clark, Peter Garfield, Dana Hoey, Jin Lee, and Barbara Pollack. It has been a true pleasure to think and write about their work, which they have so graciously lent to the exhibition. They have likewise been generous with their time and labor during my curatorial investigations and preparations for this project. Finally, thanks to Christian Oleksiak for his steadfast entertainment of my ambivalence.

- Joseph Wolin

introduction

High Anxiety a BUILDING LINKS project of education, exhibition, publication, curated by Joseph Wolin for the Center (September 29 to December 15, 1996 and traveling to Dade College Florida) showcases landscapes, still lites, and portraits. The artists use traditional photography genres in most unconventional ways .

Lawrence Beck's ''fake"bouquets, Darren Clark's peephole people, Peter Garfield's flying tools, Dana Hoey's tense girls, Jin Lee's body parts, and Barbara Pollack's "family" album are an unusual manner of usual subjects.

In conjunction with Wolin's photography show, curator Lia Gangitano presents Integer, a video exhibition on the topic of care and fear.

With this special issue of the Photography Quarterly, we tie it all together with writers who observe the artists' concern.

The Center's anxiety takes the form of care.

We stop, look, and listen at new artists and their images new curators and their preparations and new writers and their insights.

At this vigil we are hopeful and expectant.

The Center is alert to contemporary visual art activity.

We keep an eye on new views.

So look sharp; keep your eyes and mind open.

Our current plan to renovate our hometo better "invite in" our communityhas the Center's attention.

We hope you can make a donation to COMING HOME by giving to the Center's CAPITAL FUND through checks or MCNISA.

All donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

-Kathleen Kenyon, PO editor

Jin Lee, Vignette series, 1996

high anxiety

The fast-encroaching century will be starting with a whimper, not a bang. Any millennial visions, utopian or otherwise, seem to have atomized in a fine mist of petty dystopias and familiar circumscriptions. Our last nerves have been worked, our teeth set on edge, and comfort and assurance are the chimeras that trouble our restless dreams. We seem to exist in a state of distemper, "a social and cultural anxiety that permeates the West as the end of the millennium approaches." 1

Like the last fin de siecle, this one is producing its fair share of neurasthenic aesthetics, art that invokes and embodies contemporary unease. The photographs under discussion here do not easily allow themselves to be sorted into the compartments of epistemological certainty. Rather, they fall into the spaces between. They are unsettled images, ambivalent and anxious. They are photographs that fidget under the cold glare of a transfixing gaze. More an operation than a theme, anxiety in these works is not so much pictured as incited; these images provoke and produce apprehension and frustration. They do not provide one with an unmoving place to stand, nor a stationary point of view from which to see them. These images place the viewer in a region between knowing and doubt, reality and artifice, meaning and 4

nonsense. As much as choosing to signify, these photographs, like an abstract painting in an Ad Reinhardt cartoon, ask what we represent.

At first glance, JIN LEE's photographs of outstretched arms and legs look like evidence. A crime has been

committed, a rape or murder; the isolated limbs, pale and bloodless, must be those of a victim. Various backgrounds-a bed of thick grass or a field of flowering clover, the clear blue water of a swimming pool, clean white sheets or a crimson cushion-are the scene of the crime, and the body parts

are only waiting to have the chalk outlines drawn around them. Strange perspectives and distortions at the edges of the images, however, indicate that the pictured extremities are those of the photographer. Peculiar self-portraits, then, Lee's vignetted images portray the body as a parti a I object, fragmented by the investigating and recording camera, always already dismembered by the operation of photographic vision itself. Like that of a butterfly collector whose study is so ardent that he pierces the subjects of his interest with pins and mounts them on boards, Lee's project might be described as one of "epistemophilic sadism." 2

Conflating objectification and selfportraiture, Lee fetishizes her own limbs and images the violence inherent in representation. Photography's scopophilia is equated with a morbid interest in the image and appearance of the body. Voyeurism folds onto narcissism in a pathological erotics of looking. As well as referencing standard portrait photography, Lee's vignettes recall the peepshow view of the sexual voyeur, bringing to mind the restrictive spectatorship of Marcel Duchamp's Etant Oonnees, as well as that work's cropped and anonymous naked woman nested in a bed of twigs. While Duchamp's diorama, with its splayed and corpselike nude, mani-

Jin Lee, Vignette series, 1996, color, 14x11 x1"

These images ... invoke the miasmic disorientations one might experience upon waking up after having been knocked unconscious, or the queasiness produced by vertigo or a loss of equilibrium.

fests the mechanics of the male gaze, Lee engenders a female gaze and pictures women's pleasure in viewing women's bodies. Lee's fragmented body, which is both cropped (severed) and phallic, readily corresponds to Laura Mulvey's now classic conception of filmic depictions of the female as anxiety-producing icon. In her succinct formulation, "woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to

JOSEPH R. WOLIN

circumvent that threat." 3 But woman is here both the bearer and the maker of meaning, and Lee's photographs seem to slough off any unitary psychoanalytic reading, unsettling the relation between the viewer and the viewed, and locating themselves in the perverse and the polymorphous.

BARBARA POLLACK also engages portraiture, producing "headshots" of unnatural aspect and unnerving affect. Bust-length unlikenesses, Pollack's images are out of focus, disfigured by streaks and glare, and blurred by the motion of her sitters. Unexpected, grainy, and yet oddly gorgeous hues suffuse the pictures. Much like the unfortunate attempts of a beginner with

a camera, these photographs appear configured by a snaps-hot aesthetic: point and shoot and hope for the best. Pollack purposely cultivates the chance results of an amateur's unsuccessful exercise; keeping only the dis-. cards, she renders a practice of failed representation.

Spectral blurs, not quite recognizable faces (or not quite recognizable as faces), loom luridly in Pollack's photographs, larger than life, and appear

portraits seem myopically unfamiliar, seen without the focusing lenses of rationality. They infer a subjectivity fraught with panic and revulsion in the face of social intercourse; inducing fortuitous effects, she visualizes neurotic relationships. Ultimately, her cumulative depictions of others add up to an image of the self, one ridden with anxiety because of an inability to separate psychically from the surrounding world, as if in a primal moment of plea-

deformed, minatory, even monstrous. These strange images give the impression that one's perception is distorted, and they invoke the miasmic disorientations one might experience upon waking up after having been knocked unconscious, or the queasiness produced by vertigo or a loss of equilibrium. Pollack seems to picture apprehensive confrontations between a viewer-the photographer and, by extension, the viewer of the photographs-and other people; she situates human associations in the arena of fear and loathing. That her sitters are family, friends, and acquaintances suggests a personal investment in her subject position. As if too near, Pollack's

sure and terror before individuation. Both Pollack and Lee make unconventional portraits that favor the fragmentary over the complete, the subjective over the analytical, and feeling over description. Interestingly, both artists shoot their pictures with Polaroid cameras, rephotographing the Polaroid print to make standard color photographs, and exploiting the shifts of color and tonal quality that come from the generational evolution. Lee adds black vignettes by computer, but the distinct photographic point of view in her images seems contingent upon the focal qualities of the Polaroid camera itself. For Pollack, too, technique is intrinsic to her

Barbara Pollack, 1995 Headshot: Lucy

Headshot: Max, (No. 2) color, 30x30"

method, and her results depend upon the inexpensive Polaroid camera's inadequacies, her experimental modus operandi upon the stance of the amateur.

The images of, DARREN CLARK's Glory Hole series depict furtive sexual encounters between men in public restrooms. Cropped to largely exclude complete bodies or telling details such as faces, these small, grainy blackand-white photographs, like Lee's, recreate the fetishistic experience of keyhole voyeurism both in their format and their content. (And the "glory hole"

is an opening from one space to another that can be penetrated, by vision, among other things.) To a certain degree, these gritty and unabashed portrayals of tearoom sex acts recall the studied candor of cinema verite or Super 8 pornography, but at the same time, their moody abstraction evokes a dissociated romanticism. The coarse grain, limited tonal range, soft focus, and suppression of detail in Clark's photographs bespeak their affinity to hazy pictorialism. This overlapping of conflicting visual codes works to un6

settle fixed subject positions and resist unambiguous interpretation. Images of charged and over-determined activities, Clark's pictures conscientiously defer the closure of signification and frustrate the satisfaction of identification.

Clark has written that his photographs attempt "to recount part of my history,"4 as well as to complicate dominant and reductive discourses of sexuality, whether reprobative or not. 5 His stagings of intensely primal scenes of want and abandon, however, exercise a specular fascination derived not from

highly concentrated in their intensity, short in length yet persistent in their repeated durations: hypnagogic images are affective, evocative, and arousing. "6

DANA HOEY pictures encounters between young women, fraught with implications of imminent physical or psychological aggression. She captures moments just before some unspeakable offense or in the middle of some awful act of violence. Two tough teens silently confront a third in the school bathroom (Born Innocent); one standing girl, arms akimbo, sternly

transgressive representation or from making visible the repressed, but from an uncanny visual economy. These images of immediacy and deferral, of psychic urgency and formal distancing, do not represent desire but seem a condensation of desire itself as representation. They function like hypnagogic images, those half-remembered, half-imagined visualizations that come in the space between sleep and waking, and have been described by John Paul Ricco as "phantasmatic yet seemingly tangible visual flashes that are

watches over another, on her knees, who plucks a daffodil in front of a suburban colonial (Connecticut), bloodred lipstick, applied by the hand of an unseen figure, cropped by the photograph's edge, inscribes the face of an apprehensive blonde tomboy (Foxes) The tawny mane of the woman in dun-colored business attire who crouches, equine, on all fours in Secretariat obscures her face and nearly brushes that of the prone woman in the red sweater who lies under her. Hoey's images owe much to a genre of 1970s

Darren Clark, from The Glory Hole series, 1993, gelatin silver prints, 1OxB"

exploitation flicks commemorated in some of her titles (Foxes, Born Innocent). These B-movies, centered 'around precocious teenage girls, depicted them as both aggressors and victims, street-smart and assertive yet still vulnerable (often to attack from their peers). Although these films' protagonists to a large extent control their own bodies and (nominally hetero-) sexualities, they nonetheless serve as objects of titillation for the (presumably male) audience. But at the same time, these movies appear genuinely to open a space for the projection of young women's own liminal desires for self-image, as the possessors of agency, power, speech, and freedom. 7

Hoey's photographs recall this genre with their drama, mise-en-scene, and vaguely disco-era hairstyles and fashions, but they do not attempt to recreate a specific scene or even film. Instead, by the apparent concentration and recapitulation of taut moments between the action, pregnant pauses in the plotline, they materialize the movies' narrative tension in a single, still, allusive image.

Like the movies she emulates, Hoey constructs a particular sexual identity, visualizing young women as subject to an unreasonable violence that seems endemic to them. As in film in general, she images woman as preexistent, always already familiar, types-woman as representation-who produce anxiety, for herself as much as for man. Hoey employs the tropes of cinematic genre as a "memory code, "8 a key to the language in which they are "written." And genres, as Frederic Jameson has noted, "are essentially social contracts between a writer [artist] and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact. "9 As Mulvey, among others, pointed out, one such "proper use" of mainstream cinema is to reflect and (re)produce patriarchy. Yet Hoey seems to present no argument to dominant paradigms, no critique or deconstruction, but represents the movies' ideology, with its guilty pleasures of exploitation and titillation fully intact. She does, however, induce a subtle rupture in context, letting loose the filmic image from its moorings in cinematic narrative and setting it to float freely in a sea of indeterminacy and ambivalence. The inferred aggression is inexplicable, the tension unresolvable; no one is redeemed or

punished in the end (which can never come).

Both Hoey and Clark stage photographs that masquerade as stills from lost films-arty pornography or all-girl gang stories-their quasi-cinematic conventions implying discfuietingly unrecoverable narratives full of psychosexual unease. Reimagiried from life or the movies, or fully fantasized according to the rules that appertain, their pie-

camera, sometimes on a one-frame-ata-time stop-action setting, using the tiny transparencies that result to print his photographs.

LAWRENCE BECK's black-andwhite depictions of massed flowers appear deadpan staples of straight photography. Gradations of light and shade, tonal value and range, focal length and depth of field, are paid careful heed in the transcription of form and

tures exhibit what Gary Dufour has called the "theatricality of pre-visualized images. "10 Their condensation of the filmic lends their work qualities of the phantasmatic, gasps of the visual that answer to an emotional exertion born of need. Clark's use of the cinematic extends to his means, and he shoots his images with a 16mm movie

surface. But more than a glance discloses odd details of the flowers' makeup, anomalies of texture and facture that upset easy complacencies: the center of a sunflower comprises some kind of coiled jute, the roses show fuzzy and fibrous edges, the daisy's petals seem impossibly crisp and regular. The blooms reveal them-

Dana Hoey, Secretariat, 1995, color, 40x30"

selves as artificial, man made surrogates for the genuine article. In the few images in which the bouquets' surroundings can be discerned, carved marble basins or chiseled inscriptions intimate the flowers' function: memorial arrangements in Italian cemeteries. Flowers have long and naturally symbolized beautiful and transient life, and their cultural appropriateness for funerary purposes is a given. Using techniques at photography's disposal-tightly cropped compositions, a deliberately adjusted scale, and grisaille (everything is more believable in black and white, someone once said)-Beck elides as much as possible the visual differences between the real and the fake, rehearsing the flow-

ers' own artifice, both clouding and crystallizing the relative propriety of sentiments embodied by his subject. The authentic and the counterfeit grow mutually transparent as the earnest expression of lasting loss telescopes onto the tawdry articulation of abject expedience.

One suspects that these artificial and mass-produced blossoms betoken sincere and personal grief, suggesting that such equivocal gestures of mourning (or other ritualized emotions) may be the only ones left possible. The synthetic flora sustain a poignancy unknown to the organic version. Deploying the formal precision and elegance of traditional photo8

These six artists confound traditional denominations by producing failed portraiture, frustrated narrative, and unstill life.

graphic aesthetics to index the flowers' ambivalence, Beck imbues them with bathos while introducing a subtle identification of form with content. Harnessing modernist photography's classic composure to a degraded banality, he materializes its scandalous contigu-

ture, begin their rapid acceleration downward (Annunciations). Monumentality, religiosity, and the implacable knowledge of the trajectory and velocity of sharp or blunt instruments combine to imply a divine visitation coupled with impending violence. Axes and

LA TUA M

ity with high kitsch. The title of Beck's series, The Esthetics of Death, becomes a double-edged irony at what often seems to be the moribund close of a historical period.

PETERGARFIELD's large-scale images of objects flying across expanses of cloudy skies bear the titles Angels and Annunciations. Distance and shutter speed collude in some of these black-and-white photographs to permit the recognition of the blurred items hurtling through space as tools: axes and hammers. Like strange birds, the utilitarian implements travel across the stormy heavens (Angels) or, irresistibly drawn by the gravity of the earth, glimpsed in the lower edges of the pie-

hammers, speeding through the ether in place of any celestial messenger, stand as both sacred and profane, comic and portentous, allegories of contemporary foreboding.

But while the near sublimity of turbulent skies and supernatural intervention, inflected by the displaced mundaneness of the airborne hardware, achieves a black comedy, Garfield images allegories without referent. The angel carries no particular message, the annunciator stays mute; the pictures elicit a generalized apprehension that feels palpable yet remains vague: signs without signifieds taken for wonders without cause. Garfield conjures metaphors of unreasonable

Lawrence Beck, The Esthetics of Death, (Fake Flowers) series, 1994-95, gelatin silver prints, 14x11"

dread, pictorial analogues to conditions of ,_paranoia or delusion, tempered only by their steadfast grip upon the literal. It is impossible not to remember that househo Id tools have been flung into the air and photographed before they fell back down to the ground. This collapsing of the allusional onto the quotidian, of an uncanny proleptic economy onto an awkward rattletrap materialism, effects a discomfiture of its own and enunciates a doubled apprehension: a crisis of a crisis of category, an anxiety of anxiety.

Beck and Garfield each employ inanimate objects as symbols, emb Iem atiz in g personal and social conditions that are conflicted and nervous. Applying paradox and enigma, their photographs set in motion a mechanism of artifice and revelation, uneasiness and deferral, uncertainty and doubt Conceptually discontinuous, the objects depicted become implausible metaphors,

the images anxious poetry. Within the convention of the unadulterated photographic print, these six artists confound traditional denominations by producing failed portraiture, frustrated narrative, and unstill life. Generating uncertainty, deferring closure, multiplying apprehensions, and compounding investments, these photographers fashion realities consonant with the psychic and intellectual disposition of the fin de siecle, the extremity of an age in which even its most fundamental beliefs, "paradigms of modernist physics-uncertainty, entropy, relativity-evoke an inscrutable, alienating world, where absolutes give way to incommen.surable subjectivities, order fizzles into randomness,and progress seems overshadowed by a fallout cloud. "11 At the close of an uneasy century, these artists decline the presupposed and the soothing to create phantasmatic spaces of high anxiety.

- © Joseph Wolin

JOSEPH R. WOLIN is Associate Curator of the Americas Society Art Gallery, New York. He is the curator of Absence Activism & the Body Politic, held at Fischbach Gallery as part of the Cultural Festival of Gay Games IV in 1994, and Laura Anderson Barbata, Linda Mata/on, Ricardo Maza/: Embodied Abstraction held at the Americas Society in 1997. His writing has appeared in Artscribe, Flash Art, and Luna Cornea.

1 Distemper was, in fact, the title of an exhibition that presented very ditterent work, but articulated a very similar weltanschauung to that of High Anxiety See Neil Benezra and Olga M. Viso, Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s (Washington, D.C.: Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1996). The quotation is from p. 8.

2 I have borrowed this term and example from Peter Lunenfeld, who apparently derives them from Christian Metz. See Peter Lunenfeld, review of Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Ar/forum 34, no. 10 (Summer, 1996), p. 103.

3 "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975); reprinted in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 372. For recent reconsiderations of Mulvey's "gendered problematics of the gaze," see Kate Linker, "Engaging Perspectives: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Problem of Vision," in Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), pp. 217-242; and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Problems & Pleasures for Feminists," review of Ingress Erot1cized Bodies. Retracing the Serpentine Line, by Carol Ockman, Art in America 84, no. 7 (July, 1996), pp. 27-31.

4 Letter to the author, undated (January-February, 1996).

5 See the artist's statement by Clark published in the present issue of PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly

6 Wake: Doug lschar, exhibition brochure (Toronto Mercer Union, 1995).

7 And it is here that Hoey's pictures diverge from the Untitled Film Stills of Cindy Sherman, to which they are also greatly indebted. For where Sherman's practice enmeshed woman (as self-portrait) in the cinematic as subject to social, psychological, and architectural victimization, and to the controlling male gaze, Hoey places woman on both sides of the equation, giving her images a certain homoerotic frisson in the process. In addition, it might be noted that Hoey's chosen cinematic models generally date from about a decade or two later than those of Sherman.

8 The term is taken from Gary Dufour, "Against the Reality/Fiction of History," in Jeff Wall. 1990 (Vancouver Art Gallery, 1990), p. 60.

9 The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 106; quoted by Dufour , p. 60.

10 Dufour, p. 59.

11 Bill Boisvert, "Weird Science," review of Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, by Kevin Kelly, and At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kaufmann, Voice Literary Supplement, no. 148 (September, 1996), p. 14.

Peter Garfield, Angel, 1994, gelatin silver print, 69x42"

negative, desired

JOHN PAUL RICCO

" .. .despairfollowsfrom this cult of beauty,fame,wealth,(and violence)as a feeble last attemptto fight downwardmobilityand anxieties... "

"How could it be otherwise? It's not that I want to hide it, or that I want to boast about it arrogantly. But it's the least I can do to be sincere. How can I speak of photography without speaking of desire? If I mask my desire, if I deprive it of its gender, if I leave it vague, as others have done more or less cleverly, I would feel as if I were weakening my stories, or writing carelessly It's not even a matter of courage (I'm not militant), it has to do with the truth of writing. I don't know how to say it more simply The image is the essence of desire and if you desexualize the image, you reduce it to theory "

-Herve Guibert 1

Photography is a wonderfully solitary act, as is writing. I suppose this is why I enjoy them both so much. Although I was an early bloomer, sprouting hair in all of the scary right places at a moment so much sooner than my classmates, I remember that it was still a matter of years before I gathered up the nerve to take Polaroids of myself naked. It was almost as though the hairy evidence of sexual maturity had to be there before such self-portraits were even possible. Presenting a Polaroid camera to a thirteenyear-old homosexual is a wonderfully generous act It became for me a principal instrument in the sexualization of an identity. It now seems superfluous to discern which triggered which sexuality or photography; they seem jointly instantaneous. The pictures that the camera spat out were literalizations of myself, which no mirror or other media-and most certainly no other boycould allow me to see. I wanted to see myself as a sex obJect because I had no one else to see it for me. My Polaroid camera fulfilled my desires and confirmed my expectations for something that otherwise seemed impossible. With these few photos, which, appropriately enough, were immediately put out of sight so as to develop properly, I had evidence. Evidence of something of which at that time I was rather oblivious, and only now can understand for what it was.

These Polaroids were all hidden away in some super-secret spot, one of those places that every adolescent 10

imagines to be absolutely unknown to everyone else although most likely is not (like those small boxes that are meant to appear as antique books and thereby effectively give themselves away). I would take them out once in a while, in the privacy of my own bedroom (the very mise-en-scene for the photographs), and restage the sessions, assume those poses once again, and with the Polaroids and the large mirror above my dresser, triangulate the growth of a teenage boy's body. My favorite was a standing threequarter shot: knees to neck. Perhaps due to the season (upstate New York winter, more solitary than anything) and also the flash's intensity, my skin is rendered an unblemished white, accentuated by the already-thick black hair above my half-erect penis. It is a late'70s boy body, the kind that will listen to Donna Summer and the Cars, do very well in school, and find solace in long-distance running. A swimmer's bod, although to this day I do not know how. Only now, and in these photographs, could this body-that otherwise remained cloaked in embarrassment and shame (not only a skinny body but one that I was certain could be seen through)-regain its materiality and the confidence that accompanies a sense that there may be something real there.

Those Polaroids were visualizations of a blind spot that exists in many middle-class American households, and in which many young queers reside unseen. Rather than being images that could be seen through (a truly violent crossing of the obvious and the invisible), they were pictures of me that need be seen only by me. Because they were so immediate in their imaging capabilities, so literal in their picturing (yes, that's my body, but also my small desk there in the shadowy background, and much of my unmade bed), they were all of the evidence I needed. They were both traces and agents of traces, as they left behind poses that were captured there and only there, without any residue, and images that could not be easily reproduced. They were clean secrets.

In fact, so efficient were they, that as I spent the last few weeks of a sum-

mer packing for my freshman year of college, I looked at that body of five years earlier, and realizing that I did not need its visualization or the secrets it embodied any longer, I took scissors to those photos and created tiny chips of Polaroid. (Cut a Polaroid and it will bleed for you.) After this, the fake-book box that secretly held these pictures for years no longer served as a reliquary, since traces of traces do not really survive.

" As I progress, they become foreign to my story, which is really becoming a negative of photography It speaks of photography in negative terms, it speaks only of ghost images, images that have not yet issued, or rather, of latent images, images that are so intimate that they become invisible. It is also becoming something of an attempt at biography through photography each individual history is doubled by its photographic history, imaged, imagined But by what right would I accumulate those other images, their images, positive images? They pass through my story, they stumble against it, make themselves at home within it, but will never be mine." 2

So too these words of Herve Guibert, which pass through my story as in an imagined conversation between friends that never happened and never will (pace AIDS) Guibert keenly knew of the intimacy between photography and writing, and wrote more eloquently than almost all others, of (in) the blind spots events that exist yet remain invisible, those places filled with an emptiness that is substantive, and, most especially, images brutally honest and sincere in their literal capture of these things He is my ghost, captivatingly haunting my thoughts; a negative is his writing to mine "For this text is the despair of the image, and worse than a blurred or fogged image-a ghost image " 3

In a recent essay occasioned by Doug lschar's video installation Wake, I appropriated a bit of Steven Shaviro's brilliant logic, since it ascertained the reciprocal relations between idealization and violence (relations which lschar's work visualizes with tremen-

dous complexity). 4 Through the writing of Guibert and the photographic work ·- included in High Anxiety, I now understand this relationship more fully, as despair becomes a third force in this critical equation. For not only does idealization trigger aggressivity, it does so elliptically, by generating despair-its inevitable offshoot-and the undeniable futility of ever achieving anything close to the ideal. In fact, to even try to get there is to perpetuate this exhaustive cycle: idealization-despair-violence.

Yet this cycle need not always yield negative effects, at least when visualized literally-which is to say, as the three-part mechanism that it is, in which each cog is inextricable but cannot produce anything, and therefore the machine continues to spin its wheels. 5 Such literal visualizations do not generate negative effects so much as they provide critical perspectives onto sites that otherwise go unregistered: blind spots and ghost images. These pictures are not examples of failed idealizations, moments of despair, or even scenes of violence, per se. Instead, they are visual traces left in the aftermath of such incidents: events that haunt straightforward attempts at representation and the effects that follow. Half-lives. (As you can see, I have kept to my promise [Herve's?] and continue to speak in the negative of photography.)

Half-lives are registered by substantial (radioactive) remnants and are then used to calculate complete archaeological histories; they are partialities through which totalities-gone and lost forever-are extrapolated. In the end, you are half of what you were and of what you could have been: a calculus all too applicable to the many early deaths over

the past fifteen years, that granted young gay men half of the life that they would have had otherwise (pace AIDS, again). A half-life might also be used to mark other lives, as Jill Ciment does in her recent Southern California-based bio-narrative of idealization, despair, and violence, Half a Life-idealization as it is projected across c~eck-out line glamour magazines af'ld onto the notso-big screens of subu,rban multiplex cinemas, despair that follows from this cult of beauty, fame, and wealth, and violence as a feeble last attempt to fight downward mobility and the anxieties

that accompany dreams which turn into nightmares. This cycle is finally broken (at least for Ciment) with the death of her "deranged" father and the writing of this life story, an adolescent history that escapes with half a life and survives as a book. JoAnn Wypijewski, in a recent review, references the seemingly incommensurable relation

between the teenage Ciment portrayed in the text and the author photo on the book's jacket. Substitute any number of DANA HOEY's color prints (e.g., Foxes) and continue with Wypijewski's review:

"This girl? This girl ripped the flowery wallpaper off another girl's bedroom wall? Tore up her souvenir pillows? Ruined a family's furniture and scratched Fuck Youinto the stove? This girl had such hate for people she didn't even know?" 6

The photographs that Dana Hoey produces, like the stories that Ciment writes, are histories that are still latent and already doubled: pictures that wait to be seen, stories that remain to be written or read, imagined as they are captured within the very mechanisms that image them. This imperceptible doubling-a critical crossing suggested by Guibert-yields halflives biographies imaged and imagined in their negativity and through their partiality. They are ghost stories of a different sort, all the more affective since they have actually been lived through. They were the fantasies and daydreams of childhood and adolescence, and for those of us uncertain as to whether we would make it to school tomorrow (or ever again), they were visions of survival. This is the predicament of the queer kid. As Simon Watney asks and answers, "How do you explain about yourself to yourself, let alone to others, when you have absolutely no legitimate or legitimating model for your own most intensely personal feelings about other people and the world? Youturn to those elements within what is culturally on offer and make them speak your queer feelings, as best you can. "7 Doubling 11

Dana Hoey, Born Innocent, 1995, color, 40x30"

our present-day lives, these pictures and stories encouraged us to be ever more patient, for through them we would see a way out. In the meantime, we kept them to ourselves, since if they were shared, no one would believe us anyway.

Carl Phillips captures one of these moments of literal visualization, of seeing what no one else believes-moments typically isolated to childhood, yet for some of us extended into later lives-in his poem Visitation:

"Whenit was over, they told me that the creak of wings folding was only the bed, that shutters do not clap of themselves.Morning was what it had always been, any woman maroonedin the air, the nicked blooms of suggestion,in the lamp, in the lemonwoodstool, every seam or pocket slowly retrieved, were the usual ones, what everyoneknows. Fatherspat into the unsweptyard below, as if it too were an unseemlydesire, and passed through the door. I am no mystic. I know nothing rises that doesn't know how to already In my ears, only the clubbed foot of routine,no voices, no clatter of dreams.but I saw what I saw."a

Through this voice, seemingly juvenile yet doubly mature, myths are shattered as they are literalized. Visions are taken to be just what they are seen to be, rather than being filtered through

the mandates of symbolic representation, and are therefore seen in all of their mundanity, anchored to the everyday and "rising only if they know how to already." Resistance to this literalization insists upon looking (into the) beyond, to something else, to some higher or deeper meaning, and ironically rendering the site that much less visible. Might this not also be the way in which to see PETERGARFIELD's black-and-white photographs of axes and hammers flying through dark and cloudy skies, and carrying the names Angels and Annunciations? For these photographs show us the raw elements that constitute myth, and still allow us to call them angels and annunciations even though they convince us that they are literally hammers and axes. To philosophize or photograph with a hammer ... literally, deadly literal.

And so I sense that somehow we have returned to the queer childhood bedroom: space of fantasy and imagination, built out of the very real things that fill that everyday world and offer escape routes from it. For if anything is to come of it, it may be less a matter of photography than of a different kind of visual theory, one that articulates things that are visualized yet remain

unseen. As Guibert notes, blurred or fogged images do not sufficiently render these blind spots visible, since in their semblance they reaffirm the very strategies of representation. What I desire is to theorize the negative of photography, just as the six photographers in Anxiety visualize it.

-© John Paul Ricco

JOHN PAUL RICCO is a theorist, educator, and curator, who is currently an instructor in art history, theory, and criticism at the School Matalon of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also completing a dissertation at the University of Chicago, entitled fag-a-sites. minor architecture and geopolitics of queer everyday life. His work has been published in many journals, zines, and anthologies including, STEAM, Architecture/Research/ Criticism, and Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History He curated disappeared, a project that articulates loss and survival in the midst of the AIDS crisis, at the Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago.

1 Ghost Image, Herve Guibert, trans. Robert Bonanno (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996), p. 83.

2 Guibert, p. 114.

3 Guibert, p. 16.

4 See John Paul Ricco, Wake.·Doug lschar, exhibition brochure (Toronto: Mercer Union, 1995); trans. Sylvie Fortin (Quebec: VU Centre de Oiffusion et de Production de la Photographie, 1995).

5 This is meant to assure those who continue to believe that there is an uncomplicated cause-and-effect relationship between image and act, fantasy and something called reality, and other false pairings (CF. Macl<innon-provoked pornography debates of the 1980s). Images are too savvy to be reduced to such theorizing, as they cleverly confuse these distinctions and still have something left over for the next round.

6 "Only the Strong Survive," review of Half a Life, by Jill Ciment (New York: Crown, 1996), The Nation (26 August/2 September 1996), p. 27.

7 "Queer Andy," in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and Jose Esteban Mulloz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 24.

8 "Visitation," in In the Blood. (Boslon: Norlheastern University Press, 1992), p. 50.

Lawrence Beck

.- Woodstock is already a place very familiar to my life. My grandmother who passed away several months ago, lived in Woodstock for the past forty years. I dedicate these photographs to her. As a New Yorker and as the son of an Italian woman, I haye concentrated on photographing Italian subject matter and more recently, a series in the New York Botanical Gardens. My university experience combined studies in romance languages and ·photography. Duality has always been a main subtext in my work, which is appropriate and consistent with my personal history.

Surrogate Flowers, or The Esthetics of Death (Fake Flowers), emerged as a direct result of a previous series of photographs also taken in dozens of Italian cemeteries over the past five years Details from decorative funerary sculpture grew into the photographing of fake flowers rampant in Italian cemeteries. Our present-day existence has forced us to facilitate our already hectic lives by using replacement artificial flowers and to alter the tradition of visiting our loved ones with fresh flowers The fine line between real and fake is blurred further by the selection of a smaller print size for this group, which makes it more difficult to notice that these flowers are not the real thing.

Darren Clark

Darren Clark is the winner of the Phoenix New Times Annual Photo Contest for 1995 and 1996. He has been involved in curating exhibitions in Arizona and Mexico and is currently working on a collaboration with the performance artist John R. Killacky.

We live in a culture where sexuality and sexual variance are addressed frequently but with ridiculous and humiliating simplicity Consequently, the little bits of information that are communicated become enshrouded in folklore and linked through innuendo, effectively rendering variance in human sexual behavior as deviant, pathetic, and grotesque. By addressing the comfortably unacknowledged arenas of homosexual practice, I am attempting to desensationalize the unfamiliar, enabling us to focus on what is truly important." Does the man in the stall next to me love himself? Can he love me?

Peter Garfield

Peter Garfield is a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Connecticut. He studied at Dartmouth College and did his graduate studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1985 to 1987. He has shown in New York at gaJleries including White Columns, Barbara Mathes, Bonni Benrubi, Michael Klein, and Pierogi 2000. His work has been introduced in Germany and Italy. In 1993 Garfield was awarded an NEA Fellowship grant in painting. He has also been awarded residencies at the Edward Albee foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Millay Colony. His photographs will be featured in upcoming shows at the University Art Museum in Santa Barbara, the Feigen Gallery in Chicago, and in an inter-nationally traveling exhibition sponsored by Independent Curators International.

Common to all my projects is an interest in human perception of the realm between real experience and imagined experience or fantasy, and in the artist's role as a manipulator of this realm. In my current photographs I use images of flying hammers and axes, or flying houses, as a metaphor for arbitrariness and psychic trauma. I intend them to imply incidents of random violence or disaster - acts that defy our reason and our moral sense of right - while seeking the potential for these acts to convey a sense of beauty and humor as well. The images of falling hammers and axes are always printed in black-and-white, and in a large format, to heighten their unsettling and confrontational nature and to enhance a sense of drama and unreality They are meant to operate as visual artifacts, manifestations of some precognitive psychic state.

Dana Hoey

Dana Hoey was born in 1966. In 1997 she graduated from the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at White Columns and the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York.

Jin Lee

Jin Lee's photographs have been exhibited at the Art Instituteof Chicago, San Francisco Camerawork, and the Madison Art Center. She is an AssistantProfessorin the Art Department at IllinoisState Universityin Normal, Illinois.

Vignettes is a series of color photographs of a body presented in a classical oval portrait format. With exaggerated foreground, various parts are seen in a restricted field of vision belonging to the subjective eye of the "narrator" The body parts are fragmented and isolated, existing apart from the whole to which they belong. The series plays with the notions of localized fixation, hyperfocalization on a part of the body, erotic symbolism, displacement, and splitting of anatomical totalities. The final images are generated with the assistance of Photoshop digital imaging.

Barbara Pollack

Barbara Pollack is a multimedia artist in New York City. Her photographic work was included in Voyeur's Delight at Franklin Furnace and in Delirium at Ricco-Maresca Gallery, New York. Her website projects•include: Lines, the inaugural artist project for TalkBack! (http:\\lehman.cuny.edu/ talkback), and Oracle for Blast 5, which opened at the Sandra Gering Gallery in 1996. Pollack's video, GameBoy, was shown at Artists Space and her artist's book with CD-ROM, More Than One Way, was exhibited at Horodner-Romley Gallery.

The photographic portrait is presumed to be a document - either of the subject's state of mind or of identity In my portraits the photograph functions to represent my state of mind in the presence of someone staring at me holding a camera. I use inexpensive Polaroid cameras, exploiting their technical deficiencies to convey my discomfort in the photographer-subject situation. The original Polaroids are then enlarged to Cibachromes, which further remove the photographs from their origin as snapshots and transpose them into an artist's conception. Since I did not come to photography by professional training, I am intrigued by amateur genres in the medium· Polaroid cameras and snapshots, but also wedding albums and homegrown pornography I am particularly drawn to those images amateurs would discard as "bad" - out of focus, overexposed, poorly cropped. In my work, rather than editing out these images, I highlight these defects as a metaphor for neuroses and dysfunction. The subjects in the series Headshots are people I know - friends and family In many instances, they come out looking deformed, monstrous, even frightening. These images represent the moment when intimacy becomes too close for comfort, when familiarity breeds contempt. It is myself, the photographer, rather than the model, who is asking. "What do you want from me?"

..integer

Grazia Toderi

. C'era in lei qualcosa della fata. (. ..There was something of the fairy in her )

1994, 5 minute excerpt of 30 minute video

Luther Price I Want You 1987, video, 4 minutes

Sheila Pepe Untitled (blue dress) 1994, video, sound, 3: 15 minutes

StaceyLancaster

Western 1996, video, 4:52 minutes

Neil Goldberg

She's a Talker 1993, video, 2 minutes

PeggyAhwesh

Fragments Project

1984-94, Super 8 transfer to video 2611 minute excerpt of 58 minute original

Laura Nix Possession 1994, Super 8 transfer to video, 6 minutes

Leah Gilliam

Sapphire and the Slave Girl 1995, video, 17:30 minutes

Monica Carocci Dark Surfer 1996, video, 5 minutes

Mark Morrisroe

Hello from Bertha 1983, Super 8 transfer to video, 17: 11 minutes

CatherineHollander

Leaving Boston 1995, video, 8 56 minutes

Ryan Murphy

Suburban Bus Stop

1995, Super 8 transfer to video, 7 minutes

Integer features film and video that suggest the impossibility or frail promise of completion. I've .selected twelve artists prompted by an interest in parts: narrative in pieces; fragmented (or multiple) subjects, (with their penchants for uncanny spaces); and vision that is partial, obscure, or relocated to regions other than the eye. While diverse, these works rely on a desire, on the part of the viewer, to see more and to get more from the branchy possibilities provided. The quality of wholeness, literal indi-

visibility, implied by the use of the word "integer," is ironic. Often, despite anxiety over disunited parts and incomplete stories, a seamy plot can be revealed in pieces. However, a certain ambivalence toward plotting at all (replacing the model of fulfillment) is discernable as the limits, the unclear boundaries of the integer/whole, are expanded.

Loosely structured around several distinct yet overlapping ways in which artists confound the mandates of precision, linear narrative, and closure, the program is an extended reflection on the relations that such uncertainties produce: between artist and viewer, and viewer and art work. Integer en-

courages a kind of intimate relation; the viewer is required to add, finish, and move. There is trust involved-and if you stick with it-you still may not get what you're looking for. The works are organized using the following artistic devices: refusing to finish the story, or telling it in pieces; things come apart (fragmented or multiple subjects); things add up (the accumulation of parts); and wandering (seeing in parts).

Integer hints at strategies or models that answer the ever-present compulsion to replicate order, and to complete systems. Artists (and curators) necessarily find ways to subvert dominant narratives and modes of production to suggest other outcomes and unlikely categories for delineating problems of comprehension. These works insist on a different kind of logic, one that does not require completion for the understanding of relatedness. An unwillingness to fix meaning, gaze, and subject (to act as an interpreter) is characteristic. 1

Ranging from nonperformance to overdramatization, situations these artists choose to depict are "unfantastic," everyday breakdowns in video and 19

Catherine Hollander

Super 8 film (reflecting the less distinct boundaries being drawn between film •-and video). Visual characteristics that correspond t_oor comprise the fragmentary as described here include "low-fi," discontinuous, overlapping, and seemingly unmanipulated images. In reference to the work of Grazia Toderi one critic sketches an oppositional stance for this type of work in video: "It also distinguishes her project from the appetite for technological power that we see in the many video artists today who are involved with technical effects and with spectacle, understood as the troublingly narcissistic expression of underlying reactionary values. "2 He may be referring here to the current tendency of art-makers to aspire toward other media such as music (rock stardom), film (celebrity), and fashion, 3 or to the tendency of technology to signify itself, to reproduce mainstream desires of fulfillment. 4

I. Not Finishing the Story

This idea of refusing to finish the story always seems big. Fear of finality, not wanting to get to the ending, of course could remind one of death-that constituent ending to every story, really.

MARK MORRISROE

HellofromBertha

Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, Hello from Bertha is an early Super 8 film by Mark Morrisroe-a revealing, alcohol-induced melodrama. Featuring Morrisroe as Bertha, an unlikely heroine who can't make up her mind, this story of lost love is revealed through inertia. This roughly edited, lovely film is hard to watch. Maybe it's because of its foreboding quality in retrospect of Morrisroe's early death, or because it evokes childhood productions staged near mom's closet or in the neighbor's garage. In the "play," Bertha's consuming yet ambivalent urge for connection yields the following letter, which she recites: "Hello from Bertha to Charlie with all my love," a fragment of the summary of her life. Morrisroe invokes Bertha, an alter ego of sorts, through displays of female indignation and confusion, aptly portrayed by a damaged drag queen. Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian) and Jonathan Pierson also star in this piece.

CATHERINE HOLLANDER

Leaving Boston

"... to keep or to leave?" Framed by impersonal views of tourist attractions and downtown architecture, this intimate video is about parting. Fragments of promises, goodbyes, yard-sale giveaways, and required "viqeo distance" stories are strung together, despite, or because of, the intrusive participation of the camera. "You· have to look through there to tell ''.i.fth·e shirt looks okay. By piecing together autobiographical details, Hollander uses video to document transition, constantly reflecting on the problems inherent in this process. "The pieces can lead you closer or move you further away" 5 is an acknowledgment of the simultaneous embracing and questioning of narcissistic impulses which comprise video autobiography, and its tendency to reflect the split between the self and the reflected persona. "Only in the multiple, dispersed yet interconnected practices that constitute television as a whole can an adequately extensive, flexible, and nuanced metaphor for the self now be found. And television as a whole is the site of the self's own discovery and transformation, but also its imperilment. " 6

RYAN MURPHY SuburbanBusStop

I am reminded of that scene in Woman Under the Influence where Gena Rowlands is waiting for her kids to come home from school. Passersby think she's a little "over-anxious." She asks a woman for the time-she can't wait to see them back. The woman won't talk to her. I remember her sandals. This kind of externalization of would-be bus-stop thoughts is evoked by Murphy's apprehensive camerawork (shaky then static), with its attending narrative that borders on nothing happening. In this tentative silent black-and-white film lies a subtle "critique of depth," evidenced by its ruminating yet mundane story. Is it a grand statement about suburban ennui or just someone waiting for the #77?

II. Things Come Apart

The desire to portray the predicament of space, its tendency to confine and delineate the boundaries of its inhabitants, is characteristically thwarted by unreadibility. Going with impossible space, space that is layered and "incoherent," makes room for characters who do not fit in, who arrive in different guises, and who display a multitude of selves.

LAURA NIX

Possession

"Featuring the tortured yet passionate relationship between [the artist] and a Victorian armchair, this film addresses the psychological underpinnings of domestic space and objects, alternative sexualities and the fragmentation of identity "7 In this sexy Super 8 romance Nix indulges in the pleasures and terrors of uncanny places. Noirish interiors reveal their sexual charges as the protagonist practices evocative rope tricks on her objects of desire. The multiple self lurks, levitates, and revels in this filmic exploration of interior spaces.

LEAH GILLIAM SapphireandtheSlaveGirl

"Just tell me the name of the game so I know the rules "The game leads you astray, takes you from the place where you know for sure. It's tricky when "the monitor supplies both a mirror in which the subject may perceive an objectified form of herself, partially reified but still in flux, and also a stage upon which she may set herself to play in assumed personae. "8 By the time the credits roll, eight Sapphires have appeared. Clues have been provided, the story layed bare, and territories mapped out. But the answer remains undiscovered, the search continues. "... The notion of a centered self fluctuates as split identities, incognito characters; altered and doubled selves emerge through a plethora of alternating elliptical and overlapping sound, text, music, and imagery" 9

MONICA CAROCCI DarkSurfer

This video is about darkness. Relying on the specific allure of "low-fi'' imagery, Caracci transforms nighttime into a lunar landscape, including time-capsule visions of surfers on their waves. Why this guy is bringing a surfboard to a still river is unclear, but in this uncertain futility, the dark surfer becomes our vague hero. The bittersweet sound of surf guitar adds further moodiness to this brooding vision of dreaming turned disorienting nightmare. Along with the refusal of Carocci's images to clearly signify, they also reveal a certain "urge to 'become anyway "' 10 Much like her photographs, her videos seem marked by deliberate flaws, gaps in legibility that purport mystery, and gravitate

toward distortion. "This seeming carelessness makes for an atmosphere of .- rejection in her work. " 11

III. Things Add Up

The accumulation of parts can feign completion or reveal disunity. Either way, compilation as a practice exposes habits, generalizations, and tendencies, that are calibrated to differences that vary slightly or change slowly; linear progression just speeds by.

NEIL GOLDBERG

She's a Talker

By staging and accumulating a collection of images-all picturing a common experience between men and their cats-Goldberg lightly teases the idea of a unified self through repetition. Popularized by identity politics, essential queer characteristics have developed as excellent signifiers of collective identity. Gay men like to talk sweetly to their cats, to whom they attribute female characteristics. It begs the question, why do we know so much from so little information? These intimate peeks into domestic spaces add up. We are everywhere. Goldberg challenges "The problem of identity debated through the conventionally circulating signs of 'otherness' creates a visibility that is measurable, thereby foreclosing on that enigmatic space in which the coherence of my selfhood could be challenged, or different and common realities imagined. " 12

PEGGY AHWESH

FragmentsProject

This compilation of various footagemonologues, outtakes, performances, landscapes-functions like a travelogue of sorts. The route: uncertain. Fragments Project is intended to be reedited each time it is screened, emphasizing its deliberately arbitrary sequencing of "events." "Compiled in a meta-way, " 13 this discontinuous series of pieces is strung together like memory-out of order, stream of consciousness-unevenly connected by chance turns in direction or the weather.

IV. Seeing in Parts

The big picture is not so vital when its constituent parts are brimming. Much like looking through a peephole, the satisfaction of seeing a locked view or a shifted perspective can convince you

that you've seen it all.

GRAZIA TODERI

...C'erainleiqualcosadella fata ... ( ... There was something ofthefairyinher...J

The anticipation of change is levelled by cyclical patterns. Grazia Toderi deploys duration to examine the motion of tiny leaves as they remain trapped in a glass, water pouring on them from a faucet. "With disarmingly simple means-a camera framing a single scene-her videos document small, cyclically recurrent events at the limits of significance. "14 It is at these limits, thresholds of meaning, that her work hovers, questioning the necessity of progression, offering instead "a range of emotional temperatures" 15 enacted through reiteration.

LUTHER PRICE

IWantYou

"A nonperformance in video: a fourminute static shot, close-cropped and framed to the crotch of a denim hardon. . .. Olivia Newtron Bomb, the chosen soundtrack for this piece adds a certain queer flavor-a kind of disco SIM thing. No one gets hurt, just a lot of cigarettes and a bad flesh burn "16

SHEILA PEPE Untitled(BlueDress}

Unlike the camera poised and staring at the artist's crotch, Pepe's camera navigates, looking outward from a location between the artist's legs. Informed by ideas related to body construction, Pepe wears the camera as a strap-on and wanders around her apartment. This combination of intentional placement of the camera, manip u Iate d movements, and the resulting unexpected images were efficiently edited from one afternoon of fooling around in the house. The fact that the artist couldn't see the images she was producing gives precedence to experimental choices, governed by subsequent formal decisions in editing (keep the vacuum cleaner, that brown towel). The invitation to make up a story is baited by familiar jumpy gestures and the wonderment of awkward visuals.

STACEY LANCASTER Western

"The desire for narrative and this fear of its absence would seem to estab-

fish the structure of longing inherent to Western.,.,.. The posse never arrives. " 17 A roving view of a rural landscape is accompanied by the theme song from The Magnificent Seven (written by Elmer Bernstein), as appropriated from Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, Roundup. The impending drama loses shape as "the far away implied by the image" 18 becomes an impossibility.-© Lia Gangitano

LIA GANGITANO is the assistant curator and registrar at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where she has been the co-curator of several exhibitions, including Boston School (1995), Familiar Places (1995), and Dress Codes (1993). She has also organized Mark Morrisroe. Super 8 Films at the ICA in 1995, and video programs for Day Without Art at the ICA in 1992 and 1993. She is a contributor to the volume Arts Communities/AIDS Communities: Realizing the Archive Project, and the Boston Book Review I would like to thank Joe Wolin, Sheila Pepe, Catherine Hollander, Suara We/itoff, Elisabeth Subrin, Luther Price, and Jim Buni for their generosity of ideas.

1 Many of the ideas presented in this program derived from conversations with Sheila Pepe, August, 1996.

2 Giorgio Verzotti, "Grazia Toderi," ARTFORUM, April, 1996, p. 95.

3 Conversation with Jason Dodge, March, 1996.

4 Conversation with Catherine Hollander, August, 1996.

5 Ibid.

6 David E. James, "Lynn Hershman: The Subject of Autobiography" in Resolutions. Contemporary Video Practices. Eds. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg. (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press,1996), p 124.

7 Laura Nix, artist's statement.

8 David E. James, pp. 125-6.

9 Tina Wasserman, "Leah Gilliam, Elisabeth Subriani, Randolph Street Gallery," The New Art Examiner, January, 1996.

10 Gianni Romano, "Monica Caracci,'' Temporale, July, 1993.

11 Jonathan Turner, "Monica Caracci SAL.E.S.," ARTnews, January, 1995, p. 175.

12 Jean Fisher, "The Syncretic Turn Cross-Cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism,"in New Histories, Eds. Lia Gangitano and Steven Nelson (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996), p. 35.

13 Conversation with Peggy Ahwesh, August, 1996.

14 Giorgio Verzotti, "Grazia Toderi," ARTFORUM, April, 1996, p. 94.

15 Ibid.

16 Luther Price, artist's statement.

17 Stacey Lancaster, artist's statement.

18 Philip Monk, flyer for Stacey Lancaster, The Power Plant, Toronto, 27 June - 8 September, 1996.

The Integer video is part of the Center's archive and may be screened by appointment: Call 914-679-9957.

OPPORTUNITYKNOCKS / PROFESSIONALSERVICESFOROURREADERS

The Banff Centre for the Arts

Media and visual arts centre offers employment-related WORK STUDY PROGRAMS in television production, visual art support, computer applications, and curatorial practice.The duration can be one week to two years, dependent on project requirements. Deadlines are ongoing. For brochures and information contact:The Banff Centre for the Arts, Jed DeCory, Box I 020, Station 28, I 07 Tunnel Mountain Drive, Banff,Alberta, Canada TOL 0C0. Tel 403 762 6641/fax 403 762 6665.

The Center for Photography at Woodstock

The Center offers individuals of special talent training INTERNSHIPS IN ART'SADMINISTRATION that includes producing one of the longest running and most respected educational creative Photography Workshop series, publishing the Quarterly magazine, and implementing year round visual arts exhibitions. Interns also learn valuable business practices and fund raising strategies associated witft aQartists space dedicated to serving contemporary photographers. College credit may be arranged. Personal interview required and may be scHeduled at any time throughout the year. CALL FOR PHOTOGRAPHS This year the Center is welcoming photographs for possible inclusion in a special exhibition of work by participants in the Woodstock Photography Workshop series. One person will be selected for a free Workshop in 1998. Submission is ongoing throughout the wor shop season, JuneOctober.When you register for a Wo_rkshop please re~est guidelines or send 20 sl1aes,a current resume, and statement (include a $15 processinglfee). W are also accepting DONATIONS of c ntemporary an histo)'ical photographs for our annual BenefitAuction. Work accepted will be illustrated in the PHOTOGRAPHYQuarterly Fall Aucti n issue.All contributions are tax deductible. Please"support the arts and d9nate artwork. Contact: CPW, 59 Tinker Street, w' odstock, NY 12498T 914 679 9957 IF 914 679 6337.

Metroeolitan Transit Authority I Arts for Transit

A a gift to the city, Columbia University School of the Arts is offering $30,00q IN AWARDS TO PHOTOGRAPHERS as part of this year's MTA Arts for Transit Lightbox project. Six photographers will receive awards of $5,000 and a ONE PERSON EXHIBITION. Deadline:Jufy 15, 997. For questions and guidelines write or fax: Arts for Tran11t, (ligh box project), 347 Madison Avenue, NY, NY I 0017. 212 878 7 92.

Nonst~ck

This STOCK ageAcy is interested in innovative and creative • terpretations of tr- ditionally, commercial themes.Those interested may submit slides, prints, CD, or contact: John Scne moes, Di ector of Photography, Nonstock, Inc., 91 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2 I, Y, NY I 0003. 212 633 2388.

Synchronicity Space Photography

SSP is currently reviewing portfolios for SOLO AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS for the 1997-98 season.Send materials to Synchronicity Space Photography, 55 Mercer Street, NY, NY I 0013. 212 925 9168.

VisualArtist Information Hotline

A toll free INFORMATION AND REFERRAL SERVICE FOR VISUAL ARTISTS nationwide, includes funding, artist communities, health insurance, tax assistance, resources, housing, legal assistance, health and safety issues, and more. call: 2 -5 pm EST,Monday - Friday, I 800 232 2789.

Yaddo

Yaddo offers ARTIST RESEDENCIES which include room, board, and studios from periods of two weeks to two months. No stipend available. Deadline: August I. For application forms send SASE to: Yaddo, Admissions Committee, Box 395, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866-0395.

NOTED BOOKS

TheCenterfor Photography at Woodstock'slibraryprovidesan invaluableresource,offeringthe abilityto studyworksfromthe birthof photography to the present.All individualsare invitedto takeadvantageofthisopportunity,freeof charge,WednesdaySundayfromnoonto 5 p.m. lilJlthankeveryonewhohasgenerouslydonatedqualitybooksto thisholdingandwelcomenew additions.Recentdonationsinclude:

HangingLoose69, artworkandcreativefiction, HangingLoosePress, Brooklyn,NewYork,1996.

TheInnerMind,photographsby Shig Ikeda,SaginawArt Museum, 1996.

Kienholz:Retrospective,Edwardand NancyReddinKienholz,editor WalterHopps,WhitneyMuseumof AmericanArt, NewYork,NY,1996.

LightOverAncientAngkor,platinumprints by Kenrolzu, Friends WithoutA Border,NewYork,NY,1996.Donatedby ColleenKenyon. PureAbstractPhotography;TheCreativeMoment,by Thomas Reaume,self published,Winnipeg,Manitoba,Canada,1995. SiciliaSingo/areFemminile,photographsby DonatellaPolizziPiazza, testi di GiovannaBongiorno,BonannoEdiotore,Italy,1996.

PHOTOGRAPHYQuarter{),

CurrentIssues

#68. PHOTOGRAPHYNOW!

WhatsNew?by DianaStollwith picturesby MarcyChoen,EljatFeurer, ChristinaHope,PamelaHawkes,NinaKuo,JonathanMarshall,Marcia Marsted,ElizabethMessina,andTimothyPershing;FromNegative Stereotypeto PositiveImageby ElizabethEdwardswith photographyby VanleyBurke,ErnestDuche,ClaudetteHolmes,and Sir BenjaminStone; SilviaMalagrino'sTestimonyby SiobhanSomerville;OpportunityKnocks and NotedBooksby HeidiAherns;POIndex1995issues.

#67.

BUILDING A COLLECTION

Includesthe Center'sbenefitauctioncatalogfeaturingover250 lots: Article: Wonderby W.M.Huntwith photographsby AdamFuss.Duane Michals,PhilipPorcella,SandySkoglundandAlbertWatson.

#66. BLOODLINES

Members'issue,contemporaryimagery.FamiliarRelationsby Larry Finkwith picturesby overforty artists;Albumby DavidKarp; OpportunityKnocks;NotedBooksby DavidVelez;In Light:Melissa Zexterby KateMenconeri.

Was raisedinYeadon, Pennsylvaniaandhascarried hiscameraas a sketchbook to recordstrikingpeople,places, andthingsbothhomeandaway.Assistant PwfessorofComparativeLiteratureat QueensCollege - CityUniversityof New York,MartinreceivedhisPH.DfromYale. Hisphotographshavebeenexhibitedand publishedinternationally;fromNewYorkto Brazil,ParistoTexas,andmanysitesin between.Martinhastraveledand 1 photographedextensively in Braziland teachescoursessuchas Photographyand Literature,NotionsofUtopia,andTheCity Website:www.brazilnet.net/martinphotos/.

Reflections - Insomeculturesthereflection isthoughttobeaflashofthespirit,the passagewaysofmysticalandgreatforces: ancestorsandghostsgiveawaytheir presencethroughtheirreflectedtraces.In otherculturesthereflectionissimplyaplace ofmysteryandcontemplation.

Narcissusisdescribedinsomemythasin lovewithhimselfsomuchthathelovedto lookonlyathisreflection.Butothers,for example,GerardGenette,havethoughtof Narcissusasinterestednotinhimselfbutin theverynatureofreflections.Staringatthe undulatingreflectionsthatdanceacrossthe surfaceofawavypond,hemayhave wonderedwhatmadetheimagemoveand, investigatingdivedinonlytobeswallowed bythesmotheringwater.Others,more modern,havewonderedaboutthefarside ofthelookingglassandwished,inthestyle ofStarTrek,tocallouttosomeonelike Scottyandthenbebeamedforavisitfrom onesideoftheimagetoanother....Itisan invitationtovoyagefromaprotectedpointof vantagethroughvisualwhorlsnomore treacherousthanakaleidoscope.

TheSlideRegistryat theCenteris a selectedslidearchiveof contemporaryimagesemployingthephotographicmedium.It providesa bridge betweentheartistandthecurator/collector/andtheCenter,makingcontemporaryworkeasyto accessfor exhibitions,collecting,or study.Fromthe RegistrytheCenterselectsSoloexhibitionsandnow,wealsofeatureexceptionalimagesin our QuarterlyThisuniqueresourceis availableto artists,educators,collectors,curators,dealersandstudents - by appointment - WednesdaythroughSunday,noonto 5 pm.Artistswhowishto haveworkincludedin the RegistryshouldcontacttheCenterfor detailsonthisspecialMembershipopportunity.

© Charles Martin, Wheels of Time