Page 79 - Studio International - July August 1975

In the work at the Rowan Gallery, a ladder, a transparency, is made by the fall of light through the And yet there remains a danger in Reconstruction:
bucket and a brush — tools of the decorator's single window of a dark box held in a light-filled one that typifies all the work. The images in the
trade — were used. Standing on the floor, or room. A projection is made by causing the sequence can become so complex that the process
leaning against a wall, they appear as 'devices', transparency to cast a shadow outwards from a which went to their making cannot be deciphered by
in the ordinary, mechanical and heraldic senses. light-filled box into a darkened room: on to an opaque everyone from their final appearance. The work has
On the other hand, they may just have been left wall. to tread a narrow path of half-light between the
lying around. As objects, they are bland and dumb In the photographic process itself, one watches, in opaque black of the illusionist's trick and the
yet they suggest a range of references to recent a dark room, an image emerge from a blank sheet of all-revealing white light of the self-referential
art. They are familiar, but their familiarity has paper. Minimal object.
two faces.
Now they are unfamiliar as each assumes a 'On the other hand,' we are not at all mystified 'The other side of the coin, reversed, inside out
specific role, outside its associations, within by photographs, or by photographic equipment. upside down—negative balance —total eclipse.
the interior arrangement. They have become familiar to us, and 'familiarity, The weight of one's own shadow — gravity.'
takes the edge off illusion.' They are just the
An image of a chair is magically suspended tipped tools we use in doing a job. Photography by Chris Davies
up — hovering above a real chair. An image of a
bucket of water tilts perilously above a real bucket of A photographic set-piece like Disappearance of 1973
water: one water level is horizontal, the other is might appear 'tricksy' or like a spot-the-difference
angled. puzzle in a newspaper.
In Wittgenstein's Tractatus one reads:
It was clearly thought about in those terms, but
'Pictorial form is the possibility that things are as a reversal. In a puzzle, you have to find a
related to one another in the same way as the solution. Here, you quickly see the solution and
elements of the picture. have to work backwards. It's the mechanics not
That is how a picture is attached to reality : it the trick that interest you. It's the same with
reaches right out to it. It is laid against reality Ambidextrous. The move is towards it being read,
like a measure.' to avoid it being a trick or an illusion. It's about
showing your hand.
An image of a twelve-foot tape measure, seen in
receding perspective, lying along the floor, appears In Reconstruction, the action of the two mirrors in the
flat against the wall. Whilst an actual tape measure photographs related directly to the handling of a book,
lies alongside the image. It now measures a mere the opening out of each page being echoed by the
four feet. An extendible ladder is moved to the right various positions of the mirrors, through the mirrors
of its image and leant against the wall. But it has to and pages are never congruent until the final two-
be collapsed in order for it to touch the top and page spread when both lie flat, their respective edges
bottom of its own foreshortened projection. aligned. Glimpses of the mechanics of the operation
— the camera, tripod, lights etc. — appear, are
Vertical and horizontal become confused. Once fragmented and disappear, before finally reappearing
real space is projected as an illusion on a flat whole on the last page.
surface.
Barthes on Robbe-Grillet: 'Time dislocates
The whole process of making a slide is one of space, arranging the object like a series of slices
reversals and contradictions. A slide, or that almost completely cover one another ...'

59