Page 78 - Studio International - July August 1975

'Much futile thought has been devoted to the he ore a painting : the hare room before the and reductions. The camera introduces us to
question whether photography is an art. The artist, to be painted; the bare canvas, as it is unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to
primary question — whether the very intervention before it is painted. unconscious impulses'.
of photography has not transformed the entire
nature of art—was not raised.' (Walter Benjamin) The room is motionless, calm. The mood is contempla- In the same essay, Benjamin comments that, for
tive, controlled. Like still life. contemporary man, the representation of reality by
With the exception of an experiment at Gallery film is incomparably more significant than that of the
House, all projections up till the time of the Photographs, like mirrors, are the means we painter: 'Every day the urge grows stronger to get
Garage installation had been on the flat of the have—the one new, the other ancient—to verify hold of an object at very close range by way of its
wall. At Garage, the peculiarities of the new our own existence. One shows we existed, the likeness, its reproduction.'
space again generated a new formal departure. other that we exist. Yet the urge to use photo-
The projections were cast partly on the pillars graphs and mirrors in this way is here frustrated. Here, instead of getting closer to objects, close
and partly on the wall areas behind, which No figures appear in the photographs or slides, enough to seize hold of them, we are set further
might be twenty or thirty feet away. A three- and in the mirrors the spectator rarely sees away. We are forced into a purely contemplative
dimensional cut-out image was thus created himself reflected. Instead, there are further relation with things. The development predicted
which could be reconstituted only when the parts of the room from which the viewer seems by Benjamin is reversed.
viewer took up the position that the camera had absent.
occupied. Art becomes a museum for a certain kind of thinking.
The room is sealed off. It is made alone, to be seen
It is as much like entering a debate as entering a alone. But Lukacs claimed the centrality of this contem-
quiet room. It is both. It is static but never resolved. plative attitude was rooted in a particular stage
The slides, the room and our judgement are always in The use of technology is always low key. The of economic development and the rise of
contention. space is not impregnated with gadgetry. The bourgeois philosophy. Of itself, this contempla-
equipment is quite common and could be out of tive attitude produced those divisions between
It is important that the installations should only date soon. The work is not bedazzled by the the individual and the world, between things and
be temporary and that there should seem to be a latest thing in the way that most 'technological their appearances, which have no part in that
possibility of rearranging their contents. But this art' seems to be. It is not futuristic. It doesn't knowledge which comes through action, through
possibility should never be realized. The uphold the same optimistic attitude. work.
arrangements under no circumstances invite
physical participation. The technology, such as it is, does not open up the
world to our view, but neither does it stand between
They are carefully composed. us and the world so completely as to obscure it.
The spectator is not physically engaged. He Walter Benjamin has said that 'a different nature
doesn't do anything. Nor does he feel he is in a opens itself to the camera than opens to the
public place. naked eye — if only because an unconsciously
penetrated space is substituted for a space
It is very much gallery art. It needs that dis-location. consciously explored by man ... the camera
intervenes with the resources of its lowerings
Entering the gallery is not like entering a and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its
funfair or a circus. It is more like 'the space extensions and accelerations, its enlargements