Page 84 - Studio International - July August 1975

significant permutation in an object's however, the main emphasis is firmly In other words, the camera's instrumental
three-dimensional identity into account directed at two alternative methods of capacities were no longer the key factors
when photographic records are made. recording motion. And the fact that controlling and justifying the form
Watching the head proceed through the Hilliard here unites in one dense piece Hilliard's pieces assumed. They had by
sharply differentiated stages of full the strategies he had earlier examined now been exhaustively investigated, and
face, three-quarter view, profile and singly, in the first two parts of the the proliferation of photography in the
back is tantamount to receiving a lesson Ten Runs series", only accentuates its art gallery context to substantiate projects
in comprehensive observation, the overriding concern with the workings of a transmittable through no other means
implication being that this ideal totality camera. The ten successive double became his primary objective. The
should always be borne in mind when images articulate a cross-referential innate functioning of a machine was
dealing with visual information. Not that exchange between a running and a therefore superseded by the artist's own
Hilliard disapproves of photography : on stationary photographer, each shooting manipulation of its images for exhibition
another level, his carefully defined pictures of each other and thus purposes, and Hilliard rightly decided
sequence of heads celebrates the exemplifying the camera's dual methods that these manipulative devices rested
camera's unique ability to freeze an of dealing with speed. The internal mesh in the main on editing and captioning.
object and thereby submit it to a more of photographic techniques is so His response was lucidly thought-out.
detached examination than would absorbing, in fact, that sculptural As a substitute for the 'sculptural'
appear possible in a first-hand associations assume only a marginal object he had used in the past, the
encounter subject to the vagaries of importance; while the signal absence of a refined image which artists presented
real space and time. Thirty-Six Views dominant and frontally positioned object became the new constant in his work.
can therefore be seen as supplying a like a clock or a head makes the flurry of And the variables this time were either
static form of sculptural experience, with dematerializing white marks in the final the words or the editorial improvements
the additional advantage of discarding stages of the piece more akin to agitated employed in the preparation of
the material excess which Hilliard had brushstrokes than three-dimensional photographic exhibits by artists unallied
earlier found so impractical and solids. to the painting and sculpture traditions. "
overbearing. On a third and more self- Since landscape has become the
referential level Thirty-Six Views does, of VII. The presence in the third version ubiquitous arena for much of this work,
course, depart from a sculptural context of Ten Runs not only of active figures the choice of a pastoral setting in
altogether, and bears out Anne but of Hilliard himself" marked a move Across the Park was especially fitting.
Seymour's perceptive comment that away from static, relatively mute It encourages us to see the solitary
each of Hilliard's early photographic subject-matter towards the kind of walking man in the identical upper
works 'serves as a kind of illustration, or events and specific locations deployed by pictures as a personification of the
proof in the mathematical sense, of how many artists who use photography to artist, either enacting the work himself
the camera sees the same image as it is record their activities. It is typical of or involved in its planning." When this
pushed through the hoops of the scale of Hilliard's broadly logical development controlling image is extended in a
its various abilities'." But on a final that this shift ushered in a new phase of cruciform sequence downwards, to the
level, it also asserts the four-square work in 1972 : one centring more on the right, upwards and finally to the left, the
strength of minimal units in their own photograph as a first-order certificate of inference is thereby made plain. How
right, not as comments on either art endeavour in general than on the can anyone be sure about the reliability
documenting an object or displaying a documentation of exhibitable artefacts. of an artist's document which can so
camera's abilities.
This purely sculptural bias is made
even more clear in Camera Recording Its
Own Condition, which although basically
conceived as a thorough-going
declaration of internal photographic
mechanisms like speed and aperture, does
simultaneously contain a considerable
number of 'blank' rectangular forms.
White in one corner and black in the
other, they are at direct variance with
the central section where a maximum
amount of technical data is relayed
through the double mirror device. And
Hilliard ensures that they are plentiful
enough within the overall structure of the
work to register their existence as
segments which, while representational
in theory, are 'abstract' in practice.
It would be unwise, all the same, to
overstress the sculptural aspect of these
works. Hilliard does concede that they
could partially be seen as an extension of
the formal and spatial considerations
pertinent when he made sculpture." But
in Ten Runs Past a Fixed Point (3) —
1/500to 1 Second, which marks the
climax of his first phase as an artist
exploring the camera's mechanical
potential, any sculptural implications are
clearly subservient to a comprehensive
demonstration of the way photographs
can register the phenomenon of speed.
There is, admittedly, a link with
sculpture both in the outsize proportions
of each section and in the considerable
amount of space they take up when
exhibited together. On the whole,

Thirty-Six Views, 1980-81
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