Page 39 - Studio International - June 1972

With them, photographs act as information to be grey-textured fields with straight white
about their art which somehow lies outside the lines which bisect them as Horizontal!
physical fact and act of photography: Vertical/Diagonal in the Kaiser Wilhelm
Huebler's photographs, taken and exhibited by Museum in Krefeld ? With all their flat
chance, are presented with other types of formalism, close observation shows the 'lines'
graphic information which so complexly to represent tangible ropes, which—like the
support and contradict each other that the `texture' of grass—diminish in size towards the
rigorous systematizing of chance meanings is photographs' tops' with that distance scale
what awes as art; Long's photographs are also present in 'natural perspective'.
documents of material sculptural acts and facts Of course photography is the sine qua non
which are beautiful but different from their medium of 'realistic' observation, representing
publication and often invisible to it. But with the world with the technological 'dumbness' of
Dibbets, the physical presence and character computerized accounts of sociological 'facts'.
of photographs are primary : he cares about and But as we know that one can make tables of
determines their image, sequence, contextual `figures' say anything, Dibbets is realistic
placement, and number—and the loss of one part enough to know that the physical fact of his
of his tripartite Horizontal/Vertical/Cross or of photographs or ideas for photographic works is
the 1979 series The Shadows in my studio not the whole of his art. He accepts and works
photographed every ten minutes in Alan Power's with the import of their conceptual background,
collection would effectively destroy the whole physical-cultural contexts of exhibition,
work (cf note 6). For it is the viewer's materialist merchandizing, and even critical
phenomenological experience of the minute interpretation. The large panel prints from his
visual differentiations projected by these works Perspective Corrections are sold for less than their
which is at their crux; and recently Dibbets negatives accompanied by the computational
has accentuated this importance of drawings representing their conceptual
phenomenological immediacy (cf note 3) by background. In using specific exhibitions as
focusing the viewer's attention not just on the material for his work (cf note 3), Dibbets not
phenomenon of 'photographs of...', but also only recognizes that his work is perceived as
on the artist's manipulations of the time and within an observer's larger personal `Umwelt',
directional movement of photography. This is he also accepts the risk of misinterpretation
most apparent in his Dutch Mountains series by those exhibitions' organizers and the
and the multi-screened Horizon films. In resulting phenomenologically important
the latter, the camera vertically scans the sea's failures of execution, installation, and
horizon in three loops of different lengths/ presentation such as those in the Pier 18,
times—or two different loops taken with the Bykert Gallery, and Guggenheim International
camera maintained at opposite 45 degree exhibitions of 1971. Dibbets must be realistic
angles; these loops, when projected about the art-world culture within which his
simultaneously and contiguously and work exists, and much of what might be Installation shots of Louverdrape film (1970 as
continuously, give an a-synchronic wave-like construed as art-world hustling (cf note 2) is projected back on louverdrapes of 'Art & Project',
Amsterdam: film collection 'Art & Project',
experience of rising and falling horizons — also very realistic 'critical research' into the Amsterdam
effecting a conceptual awe at the systematized context which affects his work and its ability
simplicity of their interrelational structure to be realized in the manner he wishes : and, as
while simultaneously inducing a virtual with his own productions, he uses discrimination in building a self-contained entity of physically
visual-seasickness. and control over which galleries, artists, clear confines. All this is characteristic of
But a consistent theme in Dibbets's work is collectors, and critics get work or information Dibbets's work, and allies him to a particularly
the paradoxical nature of illusion and reality from him. aged and Western European tradition. An
immediately and directly perceived. Thus, the autonomously extracted physical part from a
reality of a seemingly 'natural' visual observation 6(Classicism) Newman or a Huebler would not itself identify
is counter-posed by a physical or conceptual If such art-historical-overview terms as its original position within the work; it would
reality. Which is more real : the film of a fire `Classicism', 'Romanticism', 'Expressionism' do so in a Dibbets, a Greek sculpture, or a
burning a home-movie screen, or the physical mean anything as specific abstractions and if Renaissance painting up to and even through
fire incinerating the screen on which that is the same is true of what I've said of Dibbets `Cubism'.
projected ? The film of Art & Project's and his work, then Dibbets belongs to Dibbets's work also uses many particular
Louverdrape opening and closing one's `classicism' : a typological category which would aspects of that repeatedly revived 'classical'
perceivable light, or those same louver-drapes include Phidias, Mondrian, Raphael, Reynolds, visual and scientific art and thought rooted in
in physical stasis as 'screen' for the projection Wren, with as questionable ease as it would Graeco-Roman culture. There is that view of
of that film ? Which is more real in Dibbets's exclude Turner, Van Gogh, Griinewald, Nature (cf note 4) as 'the four elements', in
Perspective Corrections: the appearance of a Bernini, or Franz Kline. 'Classicism' in this humanly perceivable and identifiable masses, as
square on the photograph's surface plane; or context usually embraces those stylistic `separate but equal' and the competitive
the physically drawn trapezoid marked on manifestations of impersonal distance, paragon for human artifice. There is that
ground or wall to induce that 'square' from the phenomenological directness of controlled understanding of 'perspective' as a mental
camera's viewpoint; or the precise calculations clarity and simplicity of forms and their construct which could be manipulated as a
in Dibbets's negative use of the traditional relationships, the 'factual' representation of mathematical and technological representation
concept of 'single-point perspective' as a Nature, the structuring of relations between of the 'laws' of natural vision and locational
device for structuring visual observation ? And `illusion' and 'reality', the matching of space. There is that use of straight lines, right
what about the fusion of all these ironies in the separate media and mentality, and the angles, and regular geometry as 'abstract' man-
three photographs which, on first glance, seem importance of 'completeness' of separate parts made figures whose structure was construed as