Documentation of tagging after the work’s installation. Matt Haffner, “Serial City,” 2006, Dekalb Avenue and Hill Street. Photo by Joey Orr.

The idea for BURNAWAY originated from a front-porch conversation about the need for more dialogue about local art. Please welcome Joey Orr, today’s guest writer of Our Front Porch.

“In one of the streets I passed along on my endless wanderings I was surprised, many years earlier, by the first stirring of my sexual urge, under the oddest circumstances.”

—Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”

Can publicly situated art sustain real social engagement? This particular inquiry began in 2006 when I was hired as the curator for Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s annual public art project. The project that year, titled Serial City, included a series of temporary installations of large, wheat-pasted images on walls throughout the city by artist Matt Haffner. Some of the property owners on the original list of proposed locations declined because they felt it would incite graffiti. And indeed, some of the work was tagged by the end of the project. This was an anticipated result, however, and an important aspect of the project for me, as I am interested in how public work unfolds in the hands of those who occupy its spaces.

Documentation of tagging after the work’s installation. Matt Haffner, “Serial City,” 2006, the side of Wisteria Restaurant on North Highland Avenue. Photo by Joey Orr.

It struck me when looking at some of the reactive tagging that almost all of it consisted of sexual or gendered images or epithets, including “fag art,” “bitchshit,” and a penis apparently poised for fellatio. But I am strangely hopeful about such tagging, which for me triggers a whole fantasy of discourses launched by publics identified only by acts of disarticulation. The tags derive their meaning because they cut against the grain of their context. It seems to me, in these particular instances, that the taggers wanted to cast some emasculating shade on street art accomplished with permission, and so they marked it accordingly.

The morning after the 2005 Sol LeWitt “pink finger” intervention. Sol LeWitt, “54 Columns,” 1999. Photo by Kevin Hart.

Considering the idea of making meaning by using the work of another artist brought me back to 54 Columns, a permanent Sol LeWitt concrete block sculptural project installed in Atlanta in 1999 at the corner of Glen Iris and North Highland Avenue. While privately commissioned, it was subsequently donated to Fulton County. There have been many interventions with this work, including the well-intended planting of dogwood trees among the columns by a neighborhood group attempting to beautify the corner. In 2005, an undisclosed area artist painted one of the columns. I refer to this intervention as “the pink finger” because it breaks the serial form of the work with a gesture that I read as a “fuck you” that interrupts this otherwise colorless, concrete, conceptual space. Reactions to work in the public realm are the uncontrollable bit of discourse that, while being activated by the institution, are not institutionally authorized.

Dawoud Bey, David Hammons standing in front of Richard Serra’s ‘T.W.U.,” 1981. Photo courtesy Dawoud Bey.

Dawoud Bey, David Hammons peeing on Richard Serra’s “T.W.U.,” 1981. Photo courtesy Dawoud Bey.

Dawoud Bey, David Hammons receiving a citation from a police officer, 1981. Photo courtesy Dawoud Bey.

The aggressive intervention with Atlanta’s Sol LeWitt brings to mind one of my favorite works by artist David Hammons. Richard Serra’s sculpture T.W.U., named for the Transport Workers Union whose strike was coming to a close when he completed the work, was originally installed at West Broadway at Franklin and Leonard in New York City in 1979-1980. The images presented here depict Hammons in front of Serra’s sculpture, urinating on its surface, and being confronted by a New York City police officer. As you can see in the pictures, he was not the only one using Serra’s work as a site for public discourse (notice the tags already littering its surface), just the only one disidentifying himself with the work by giving the action a title as one would a work of art.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” 1953, drawing, traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame, 25 1/4 x 21 3/4 x 1/2 inches.  Collection SFMOMA, purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis, © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Image courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

This is a work by artist Robert Rauschenberg titled Erased de Kooning Drawing from 1953. As the story goes, Rauschenberg approached the famous Abstract Expressionist painter, Willem de Kooning, and asked him for one of his original drawings that he could erase. There are many versions of this story. In interviews, Rauschenberg has said that de Kooning offered a work he knew would be particularly difficult for Rauschenberg to remove from the paper. The gesture is considered a hostile response to Abstract Expressionism, which enjoyed dominance in the art world at the time of the work’s production. It has been referred to as a kind of “killing of the father,” a way for Rauschenberg to enter the discourse of contemporary art.

I refer to Erased de Kooning Drawing not only because one artist is renegotiating or appropriating the work of another, but also because it has something to offer me in my thinking about this strange compilation of images. While a common reading of Rauschenberg’s work may be an Oedipal one, or at least one of defiance and violence toward its preceding movements and authors, I want to suggest that it is a loving gesture. Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing is careful in the full meaning of that word. It is not annihilation, but rather a considered tending to the work, even in its erasure. The pink finger, in contrast, strikes me as victory-driven: its defiant gesture has the energy of a spontaneous rant.

Traces of “the pink finger” on Sol LeWitt’s “54 Columns.” Photo by Joey Orr.

The original anti-graffiti coating on 54 Columns eventually turned the piece an uneven black over the years, and there was ghosting from repairs of many instances of tagging. Recently, the work was re-coated, and the color is now a kind of pale gray to white, a matter of distress for many local curators. When exploring the columns a couple of years ago, I located a trace of the pink finger and documented it. It looked to me like a dangling thread defying its chronological cover, peeking out from the past, reminding me that a little tug at an indiscreet spot can create quite a mess. At this writing, then, 54 Columns retains some subtle documentation of its public treatment—a worthy goal for public art.

In trying to negotiate a relationship between art and its public reception, I offer some questions for your consideration: How do we traffic in undisciplined and unauthorized discourse with care? How does work that strives to challenge other projects or operate outside of institutions do its work without always only throwing tantrums or oppositionally reinforcing the lines it aims to challenge? What if instead of pressure washing words like “fag art” out of the visual sphere into an afterlife of repressed pink fingers and eager phalluses, we find ways of incorporating their question marks and incentives to unravel? What if our public art practices could reflect both the making and undoing of discourse?

After I had more or less moved on to thinking about other things, I came across a series of photographs by Emily L. Martin titled Public Exposure. Interested in how people interact with public art, and also how the presence of a camera might alter their engagement, Martin introduced people she knew to various works of pubic art in Atlanta and Cincinnati. She did not give them special instructions, but only documented the ways they chose to perform or pose. Weirdly relevant, one such encounter includes a set of images titled Sol Lewitt/54 Columns/Atlanta, GA.

Emily L. Martin, “Sol Lewitt/54 Columns/Atlanta, GA” from the series “Public Exposure.” Photo courtesy the artist.

Emily L. Martin, “Sol Lewitt/54 Columns/Atlanta, GA” from the series “Public Exposure.” Photo courtesy the artist.

The “art audience” in this instance is exhibiting complete abandon in their interaction with this public installation. I would venture a guess that they are at least unaware that the work was probably not constructed to structurally support such activity. But beyond their sense of entitlement here, they have also chosen to expose themselves, or their underwear, anyway, as a way of performing their relationship to public art. Remember Michael Ryerson’s poster, “expose yourself to art”? Well apparently art doesn’t have to be figurative or representational these days to elicit such reactions.

Offering a similar collection of documented public art interactions is Marc Adelman’s work Stelen (Columns) from 2007-2011, which was recently part of the exhibit Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex at the Jewish Museum in New York, and was even purchased for the museum’s permanent collection. The series consists of appropriated images in which Adelman gathered 150 profile pictures of men posing amidst Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin found on the website GayRomeo.com. The trouble came when one such man realized his profile picture was being used out of context for Adelman’s artwork and was on public display. After the museum received the complaint, the artist immediately agreed to remove the image from the series. The artist now states on his website that any other image will be removed by request. What Adelman was not consulted about was the removal of the entire series from the exhibition this past May.

Marc Adelman, from the series “Stelen (Columns),” 2007-2011.

Marc Adelman, from the series “Stelen (Columns),” 2007-2011.

There are several points of interest here. First, the subjects in Adelman’s series are using Eisenman’s work to capture themselves in desirable ways—or at least in ways that seem applicable for a profile picture on GayRomeo.com. And while the museum curators were apparently interested in the visual re-use of Eisenman’s memorial—interested enough to purchase Adelman’s work—when that re-use threatened the institution, the work was visually negated by removing it from public view. It remains to be seen if any legal action will, or even can, result. Regardless, in such cases, if an institution has made its collecting and exhibition decisions in good public faith, it should stand by these decisions and use negative public reaction as an opportunity to lead discourse on important civic issues. Indeed, Adelman’s case stands to offer an engaging debate on the ethics of appropriation and digital re-use.

For me, the missed opportunity is when we fail to recognize trouble for what it often is—a signal of the fraught and undetermined territory that fertilizes all knowledge and authority. Troubled borders are not inconvenient aggravations, but rather creative epicenters. My question, therefore, is this: Can we learn to read this kind of trouble as an invaluable aspect of serious work, and if so, what kind of artistic and curatorial methods might simultaneously sustain art and its, at times contentious, receptions?

In a personal, childhood story from Walter Benjamin’s “A Berlin Chronicle” (quoted at the beginning of this article), Benjamin’s parents send him to collect a relative who will then accompany him to a religious service. At some point in his walk through the city, he realizes that he cannot find the relative’s home, he does not know where the synagogue is, and it is too late to make it anyway. It is at this point that Benjamin feels a “blasphemous indifference” toward the service, and this same feeling exalts the street in a manner he associates with his sex drive. But why a sexual urge? For that matter, why fags, bitches, and blowjobs on public works of art? Why pink phalluses, urination, and dropped pants? Is this completely random, or can we understand the impulse to encounter the sanctioned in undisciplined ways? People touch art when they shouldn’t; they draw on it, steal it, and even hold it for ransom. If there is a blasphemous indifference toward art, perhaps it provokes the kind of trouble that isn’t so much art’s undoing as an offer for greater combinatorial capacity. The real question is, are we deft enough to meaningfully engage in such undisciplined discourse? If institutions are invested in art existing outside of their walls, they might at least recognize that a blasphemous indifference awaits it. And what if this is not a matter of art’s annihilation, but instead a potential for its transformation, however odd the circumstances?

Please feel free to participate in the open comments underneath this article, or share it elsewhere and discuss informally with your friends. Talking in person counts!

Our Front Porch is a series inviting guest contributors to share thoughts on local art for open discussion with you, our readers.

Click above for a video montage compiled by Alex Robins. Why is philosophy always so serious? Does the same go for the art world? We at BURNAWAY believe humor can be a sign of intelligence.

In the first edition of Theory in Studio, I wrote about the aesthetics of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (click here to read last year’s article). While discussing the column with my fellow writers, we realized to great amusement that everyone tends to pronounce his name differently. Some prefer the familiar “Ben-ja-mihn” (like Benjamin Franklin, but without the Franklin). Others opted for the more exotic “Ben-ya-meen.” There was even less consensus as to whether he was a Walter or a Valter.

We soon realized this problem extended to much of the philosophic cannon. How to say the names of Augustine, Nietzche, or Barthes varied from person to person. This month we meditate on this phenomenon of variable pronunciation. Does it mean anything? Is there a right way to do it? Do you risk total embarrassment at cocktail parties or gallery openings when using the wrong phonetic system?

Perhaps the most notorious example is the name of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre (1905-1980) was a French philosopher who became an international intellectual celebrity after WWII. He championed the philosophy of existentialism which he formulated in plays, novels, and more traditional philosophic treatises. Existentialism opposed itself to many of the dominant philosophic trends of its day including psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Sartre advocated for a philosophy with a more radical idea of individuality and greater ethical responsibility.

During his lifetime, Sartre was a member of the French Resistance, he worked actively with Parisian Maoists, and was one of a few people to ever turn down the Nobel Prize. All this is to signal that Sartre spent his life as a staunch individualist and a proud trouble-maker. It is only fitting, then, that people around the world should have such a hard time pronouncing his name, as if he did this consciously as a prank.

As René Magritte might say, this is not a pipe-smoking Sartre. Illustration by Alex Robins.

What makes Sartre’s name so devilish is how easy it should be to say. It looks kind of like an English word. It should act like other British terms such as metre. But no convention has been struck and there are no intellectual or cultural guides to help us choose. Each person is alone to choose their own way to say Sartre. Sartre’s name is an existential crisis par excellence.

Whenever someone attempts to say his name, they are confronted with a choice. Setting aside regional accents, there are two main options for an English speaker trying to say Sartre. The first is the one-syllable option: “Sart.” This version rhymes with tart, cart, or dart. Alternatively, one may opt for the two-syllable version “Sar-truh,” or the variation “Sar-tree.” Here the speaker hints at the original French name but makes no attempt to aspirate the final syllable. To better illustrate these variations, I’ve put together a short montage of people saying “Sartre” (see the video at the top of this article).

Each time we say Sartre’s name, we must make these sorts of choices, and once we’ve spoken, we can’t take it back. No option is truly satisfactory, but regardless we must take full responsibility for whichever imperfect solution. There is “Sart” or “Sar-truh” or yet another imprecise variation. In this way, each utterance is its own existential problem.

Whatever pronunciation a person settles upon determines their own way of being in the world. As Sartre famously proclaims, “l’existence précède l’essence,” which in English translates as “existence proceeds essence.” Less poetically stated, this means you can make who you are in the world. One’s essence is the product of choices and not a predetermined fact of existence.

So when someone says “Sart” with confidence, do they make themselves a stronger candidate for the Republican Party by habitually anglicizing foreign words? Or if you say “Sar-truh” with equivocation, does it reveal that you made a C grade in high school French class?

There are dozens of websites that purport to give the correct pronunciation of Sartre’s name (here are examples from howjsay.com and inogolo.com), but that is an impossibility. As we have seen, there is no consensus on how to speak Sartre. Furthermore, the lesson of existential philosophy is that there should be no consensus. These websites are oblivious to the individualized crisis that Sartre’s name inspires and instead replace that crisis with an anonymous computer voice.

We should not succumb to this impersonal pronunciation but instead revel in the cacophony of different ways of saying Sartre. Each speaker must confront this linguistic ambiguity, evaluate their situation, and take the spoken plunge.

The next time you hear someone saying “Sart” or “Sar-truh,” don’t correct them. Instead, graciously tip your hat to them as one self acknowledging another self in their radical individuality. I for one intend to pronounce Sartre  as “Benjamin.”

Alex Robins is a PhD student in philosophy at Emory University. His research examines the history of aesthetics with a focus on American theories of art.

Theory in Studio is a series dedicated to highlighting philosophic terms, trends, and figures and showing their relevance to contemporary art. By providing context, the series seeks to demystify theory and introduce ideas that might help inspire future studio practice.

FLUX 2011. Photo by John Ramspott.

Early Modernism saw two visions of the relationship between art and life emerge. One held that art was autonomous, whereas the other sought to integrate art and life. The former, traceable to such artists as Velazquez and Manet, and subsequently brought to the fore by the Abstract Expressionists and Clement Greenberg, is supposedly self-referential and self-reliant. The latter can be shown to move in two directions; one, via Russian Constructivism as influenced by Marxist historical materialism and the Bolshevik Revolution, sought to dissolve art into life; the other, sometimes associated with rationalist utopianisms of the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and other movements in western Europe, sought to make all of life an aesthetic experience. Two lines, faint and meandering as they may be, can be drawn from the two aforementioned primary modes to the two major ways of making art today. Autonomous, self-referential art could be associated more with objects of the gallery or museum (and permanent outdoor sculpture), while work descendant of “art-merging-with-life” relates more to performance and outside-the-gallery happenings. Throughout the Modern period, myriad art movements have leaned one way or the other in attempts at creating an art that would most accurately reflect and critique the Modern experience. Often, this critique was focused on the project of capitalism; paradoxically, artists of both camps remain reliant on capitalists in order to subsist.

Elevate: Art Above Underground, 2011. Photo by John Ramspott.

Some critical thinkers move beyond the paradoxical relationship with capitalism into the precipitous problem of experience. Walter Benjamin, in an essay titled “Experience” (1913), concludes that an adult (probably an analogy for modernity) loses the ability to have real life experiences in favor of knowledge and cynicism. Giorgio Agamben furthers Benjamin’s thesis in Infancy and History (1978), wherein he applies a linguistic-semiological interpretation to the problem, suggesting that the only thing we experience is language, and our most valued experiences relate to words with no clear referent. For neither writer is experience merely raw stimulus reception, but that which changes us on a deeper level. As Agamben notes, “For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam…Modern man makes his way home in the evening, wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.”

The Object Group performs Eyewitness at Off the Edge, 2012. Photo by Sara Keith.

I would think that for many people, this analysis rings particularly true in today’s smart-phone-web-2.0-html5-world. Everywhere you look, people are face down, attentive to a glowing screen, “doing” something other than experiencing the physical world immediately around them. Even when a spectacle worthy of drawing one’s attention away from the screen presents itself, many are still obliged to mediate that experience through the screen via obsessive picture taking or video making. As one can tell by the date of Benjamin’s essay, although our technologies are new, the phenomena that follow are not.

Similar ideas can be found in the writings on Situationism from the 1950s and 1960s, and on Relational Aesthetics from the turn of the 21st century. The argument for a more real and imminent relationship to the world is often used to build a case against museums, galleries, and static art in general, in favor of public and interactive art. I believe that the argument has become so common that it is often accepted on its face value, and its flaws never emerge. I also believe that an examination of the questions I present below can help Atlanta’s art scene, inside and outside the gallery, to strengthen and continue to grow.

KAWS opening at the High Museum of Art, February 18, 2012. Photo by Dylan York.

The first problem is that certain experiences are given preference; the “real” kind are seen as deep and valuable, and the “virtual” kind as passive and meaningless. This bias boils down to a kind of Kantian relativism, in which subjective taste is mistaken for universal law. Although I think most people do find real life more meaningful than a virtual one, the distinction becomes blurred when choosing between mediated experiences. Why do so many of us find information from a book, even if it’s fiction, more important than televised drama? Why can some people sit before a computer all day, then brag about how they “don’t even own a TV”? A mediated experience is a mediated experience—just because a person is dressed up, dancing on the corner of the street, does not make the event more real than someone doing the same thing on a proscenium stage. Personal and social boundaries define the line between “real” space and make-believe, thus the definition of mediated is dependent on each viewer’s psychology.

gloATL performs at FLUX 2011. Photo by John Ramspott.

The second problem is more directly related to the idea of experience, specifically with regard to the popular argument that public interactive works create a sense of physical community, as opposed to virtual, online interaction. In today’s hyper-mediated world, a carnival-style art event is equally likely, if not more likely, to be experienced through the lens of a camera phone than is a gallery show. Also, for many, to “experience” such events as Flux Projects’ one-night art extravaganza, Elevate: Art Above Underground, or similar happenings is to follow a map and a schedule analogous to some bourgie version of TV Guide.

Ben "Bean" Worley's SYNTHESIZ at Get This! Gallery. Photo by John Ramspott.

Finally, the pace required to “see” all of the art at any of these events often mimics the pace required to get a plasma television on Black Friday, leaving little time to socialize with the company in one’s midst. By comparison, the conversation-filled, wine-sipping, partylike atmosphere of any gallery opening may have more to offer in terms of creating community than the best open-air festival. At the same time, the ratio of numbers of works to amount of time a given festival occurs can be unkind to a viewer trying to interact with all the work to be seen. While this evanescence is representative of the drive-by nature of contemporary real-life interaction, it is also counter to being able to engage with the work on a deeper level. By contrast, in the days or weeks following the opening of a gallery show (the opening being a time when work probably gets the least amount of attention), one can stand in front of a work at one’s own pace, take time to communicate, and make a real, deep connection with the work, in a way described by James Elkins in his series of essays How Long Does It Take to Look at a Painting.

Obviously, I am not calling for an end to public art events. They are great fun and offer opportunities for artists to make, and viewers to experience, works that are disproportionate to the gallery. I have participated in them, and will continue to do so, both as an artist and a viewer. I do wonder though: Why is there such a push to move art outside the gallery? If all of our experience is mediated by technology, what difference does it make where art exists? What does art outside the gallery promote that art inside a gallery does not? Does the apparent need to evangelize the visual arts mark a failure in its ability to compete with the kitsch found on television, in movie theatres, and the on the Internet; are we, as “fine” artists jealous of the popularity of these “lower” art forms? Most importantly, I question why we go to such lengths to produce and receive art: to be able to say that we have experienced its existence, or to actually improve our own existence and experience?

Lance Turner, Channel with Blue and Pink, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 8 inches. Image courtesy Beep Beep Gallery.

Beep Beep Gallery’s wryly titled Pangea: World-Breaking Artwork for the End of Days 2012 is the latest in their annual series of January exhibitions, offering what they describe as “promising artists who are showing with us for the first time.” Pangea (also the title of a work in the exhibition by Lance Turner) is geology’s name for the primal, unified landmass, which has since broken into today’s separate continents by the subterranean drift of the earth’s tectonic plates; as this apocalyptic year of 2012 progresses, the work brought together in this combined seven-artist show will undergo its own continental drift, and the meaning of each individual artistic practice will become more apparent.

As it is, it’s hard to believe that the only limits placed on the participants was that they present “brand new work that pursues new directions for them as artists.” The theme of original unity and subsequent dispersion is dealt with directly by at least four of the artists in ways that almost imply a collaborative effort, though each pursues the topic in a dramatically different style.

Nathan Sharratt, True Story: I Was An Orphan. For Ten Minutes., 2011, stainless steel, 7 x 3 inches. Image courtesy Beep Beep Gallery.

Nathan Sharratt’s twenty-first-century update of 1980s text-based postmodern irony seemingly makes him the odd man out in this exhibition, except insofar as his quotations reproduced in stainless-steel plaques reveal the underlying patterns of contemporary media and the kinds of condensed confessions we have come to expect as the headlines on tabloids or the crawl on daytime TV shows. The titles generally (but not always) replicate the text, under the prefatory category of “True Story”: True Story: I Did Not Get Signed To A Major Label. Twice.; True Story: I Lost It At 13.; True Story: Jack Bauer Gave Me A Lap Dance For My 30th Birthday.

Sun Hong’s botanical abstractions are ink-on-paper drawings that link to one another in more than one direction, so that their various arrangements indeed have No End and No Beginning, as her title puts it. Their rhizomatic proliferation could be extended indefinitely as well as reassembled to reveal new patterns.

Sun Hong, No End and No Beginning, 2011, 16 interchangeable works ink on watercolor paper on wood panel, 10 x 10 inch individual panels, full size variable. Image courtesy Beep Beep Gallery.

Lance Turner, following a line of logic we associate with a variety of artists over the past two decades, puts it all together while keeping it all apart by juxtaposing a wildly varying number of styles of abstraction and representation in painting, from loosely rendered decorative patterns to a single image (of a young woman aiming a gun) that might ultimately derive from the panels of comic-book illustration or from the venerable example of preliminary sketches for larger paintings.

Kelly Cloninger allows her earlier Day-Glo pattern-and-decoration flowerets to morph into sensuous images of exuberant females immersed in masses of Day-Glo confetti. The painted images of confetti in turn become literalized in piles of the actual stuff scattered on the floor beneath the artwork.

Kelly Cloninger, Confetti Bath, 2011, acryla gouache and graphite on panel, 6 x 8 inches. Image courtesy Beep Beep Gallery.

Chris Parry’s black-and-white works on paper are a sort of goth-cum-tattoo-art mélange of skulls, snakes, Mardi Gras beads, and multi-armed allegorical figures robed like the mourning women on nineteenth-century tomb sculpture. Some of the imagery comes straight from the Symbolist Era of the Czech Decadence, although it has passed through some intermediary forms of art along the way from 1890.

Chris Parry, Savior, 2011, pen, ink, and wood stain on watercolor paper, 10 x 30 inches. Image courtesy Beep Beep Gallery.

Sean Abrahams presents a set of drawings that mostly turn the horror vacui of Tibetan art into the secular carnival of present-day popular media: smiley-face icons blend into friendly smiling skulls and floral-wallpaper patterns, and although the landscapes are filled with houses seen from the perspective of the Buddha palaces of mandalas, these are anything but dwelling places for sacred figures.

Chelsea Raflo returns us to contemporary media studies with her brilliantly rendered Untitled Stills from a Future Film. Though the title recalls Cindy Sherman, the photo-cutout dioramas are more like updates of Joseph Cornell (or of the cigar-box dioramas children across America once assembled in Vacation Bible School), combined with the storyboards used to map out scenes in moviemaking. The noir narrative runs in reverse if the four boxes are viewed left to right, leaving us to wonder whether this is a series of successive flashbacks or just a test of our ability to put narrative together from visually loaded fragments seen out of sequence.

The exhibition comes without supporting materials—no artist statements here, or even biographical sketches of the contributors—and I was left with the realization of why we need an under-30 Atlanta version of Walter Benjamin.

“Huh?” you may ask. So I will tell you.

Benjamin was an incessantly curious experimenter who alarmed his Frankfurt School superiors by combining whatever seemingly contradictory forms of analysis might shed light on the origins and meaning of both high art and popular culture, forms that few had previously considered in the same body of thought. He pondered the meaning of Charles Baudelaire as a poet of the era of High Capitalism; he also pondered the meaning of the emergence of Mickey Mouse as a fictional figure, and looked critically at how and why store windows in the arcades of Paris were arranged. He wrote about German tragic drama, and about children’s toys.

Chelsea Raflo, Untitled Stills from a Future Film, 2011, mixed media, 9 x 9 inches. Image courtesy Beep Beep Gallery.

Today we have academic departments that at least think they do all this, but we don’t have the kind of insider analysis that would allow me as a working critic to make sense of the seven artists whose work I have just summarized. I presume that these works of art stem from entire forms of popular culture that these artists and their contemporaries have known intimately from childhood onwards, just as Walter Benjamin and his readers knew the sources of the topics he recombined in his innovative forms of analysis.

Despite anthologies and even museum shows paying homage to the styles of art enshrined in Tokion and Juxtapoz, we still have no analytical categories that sort out adequately what are clearly several independent aesthetic currents lumped together under the art-movement category “lowbrow.” More generally, artworks deriving from comic books, tattooing, graffiti, video games, et cetera suffer from a lack of art-historical categorization made worse by the critics’ lack of familiarity with the popular media themselves.

So we need somebody who will take whatever analytical tools might be needed from the academic disciplines of history, psychology, and anthropology, and combine them with personal knowledge of what growing up with specific forms of popular culture does to the heads of the artists and audiences who consumed those forms and continue to consume them.

Such a critic could produce an intelligent analysis of the works of these artists and what they have to do with the question of where all of us are going in this (metaphorically and literally apocalyptic) year of 2012.

Sean Abrahams, Untitled 2, 2011, markers on paper, 18 x 24 inches. Image courtesy Beep Beep Gallery.

I have deliberately made reference to things that almost certainly did not influence the artists I’ve discussed—though they may have influenced the shape of their influences—in order to make clear how much we need a critic attuned to the myriad pop-cultural artifacts, phenomena, and experiences that have worked their way into the imaginations of contemporary artists. Though they are by no means the most complex example, tattoos are deserving of independent exploration—worthy of a critic who grew up in the quarter-century since the world at large realized that tattoos had turned into a hip but serious art form, a critic who also knows the history of how tattoo artists turned the genre into something more art-historically informed than it was in the 1940s. This critic should also know not only what visual sources inspired the new tattoo artists, but a bit about the uses of latter-day tattooing as an ironic riposte to the Modernist sneer, circa 1900, that frou-frou decoration in high-end design was as disreputable as the tattoos worn only by the lower and criminal classes (hence, too, the 1970s et sequentia revival of outright floridity in art and design as an act of aesthetic resistance that parallels the freshly reinvented art of tattooing). But most importantly, this historically-informed critic should be of an age to know these genres from decades of direct experience, experience that then can be adapted to theoretical purposes.

Then this as-yet-imaginary critic might be able to write a genuinely informed review of Pangea. For the aforementioned reasons, I am not that critic.

Pangea: World-Breaking Artwork for the End of Days 2012 will remain up at Beep Beep Gallery through Saturday, January 28, 2012. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 6PM.

Christoph Engel, from the Airports series, Untitled (AMS 06-07-11), 2011, archival pigment print, 59 x 82 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

Hagedorn Gallery’s current exhibition, The New Photograph, promises to show the viewer forward-thinking images that lead us into the future of photography, and it definitely delivers on this promise. This group exhibition of international photographers demands a reconception of the photograph as it incorporates digital technology and an abundance of available imagery to push photography into the twenty-first century. Drawing from techniques and explorations undertaken by artists such as Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hannah Hoch, and Rauol Hausmann, these artists bring full circle a series of disputes from the past. And as they employ new photographic technologies, they subvert photography’s indexical relationship to reality, calling into question what it means for something to be a “photograph.”

Installation view of The New Photograph. Photo courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

To absorb the full impact of this show, it’s helpful to understand the theoretical crisis photography has been undergoing since Roland Barthes published his seminal book, Camera Lucida. While at the time of publication, there were loose theories on the conception of photography presented by Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and John Berger; they focused mainly on what the photograph captured, rather than the ontology of the medium. This was an important distinction to Barthes, and in Camera Lucida, he set out to “learn at all costs what photography was ‘in itself’, by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images.” Using language from Charles Peirce’s rules of semiotics, Barthes argued that the photograph is an index of the real world and carries with it two distinct features: the studium (factual information contained in the photograph) and the punctum (emotional content that elicits a response in the viewer).

Index is a semiotic term that when used in conjunction with photography describes the photograph’s relationship to and with the real world. In order to produce a photograph, light has to interact with a light-sensitive material (typically a collection of chemicals); in this way, the photograph comes in direct contact with a natural, real-world phenomenon: light. This separates it from other mediums in that there must be some type of chemical (or today digital) reaction with external light to produce imagery. Most often, this light is the reflection emanating from an object (the referent) in the real world; therefore, something from the real world touches the photograph, similar to how a grave rubbing (to use the standard example) offers proof of the grave itself. Even if the substance that touches the photograph is not tangible, one can still safely assume that the object in the photograph existed at some point. This is different from painting in that while a painting can depict objects in the world, it is not necessarily contained to what exists, or the exact likeness of that object. A painter can change hue and saturation, perspective and proportion, not to mention manifest images from the imagination. In this way, paintings are thought to be more like signs or symbols of the referent, not an index. Furthermore, in other mediums such as painting, the artist’s hand intervenes in the transfer from object to image; whereas with photography, the photographer and the photograph are limited to objects that exist.

Installation view of The New Photograph. Image courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

Of course, Barthes’s theory surfaced in the late 1970s when the digital revolution had yet to take place and film was still the dominant form of photography. Now, new photo-editing technologies make it easier to manipulate, alter, construct, and fake the photograph, threatening the traditional model of photography. And as these digital images enter the digital realm, shedding its physical form (as well as the physical imprint of light on the object), theorists, photographers, and historians alike fret over the loss of photography’s indexical relationship with the outside world. This lack of a physical, chemical interaction with light, for some critics, nullifies the photograph’s claims to objective documentation, compromising its position as the purveyor of truth.

The artists in The New Photograph address these critical concerns in exciting and inventive ways. They challenge photography by creating images that play with the medium’s indexical relationship. By appropriating imagery or constructing imagined realities from the glut of images available online, these artists problematize the division between photography as a mechanized art form and other traditional “handmade” media.

Christoph Engel from the Superficies series, Untitled (Aircraft 091130), 2009, archival pigment print, 43 x 51 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

Walking into the gallery, the viewer confronts one of Christoph Engel’s constructed aerial photographs. Engel’s Untitled (AMS 06-07-11) (2011) from his Airports series appears as an aerial shot of a modestly sized, indistinguishable, or perhaps unknown, airport. At a distance, this large scale photograph evokes an uneasy sense of nostalgia; the airport’s familiar forms recall views of any airport, anywhere, defying its placement and location. This play with the viewer’s knowledge becomes clear in the artist’s process: Engel constructs the images from hundreds of Google Earth(TM) and Google Weather(TM) satellite captures from different locations and varying times. His constructions result in photographic images that are everywhere, and nowhere simultaneously. The artist continues this theme in other works in the show, such as Untitled (Town 090511)(2009) from his Superficies series, in which he constructs a spiraling suburban neighborhood complete with artificial lakes and a golf course.

Christoph Engel, from the Superficies series, Untitled (Town 090511), 2009, archival pigment print, 43 x 51 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

Engel’s photographs confront the crisis of the index head on by breaking up the satellite images into composite pieces and reconstructing the pieces into a model he sees fit. This cut and paste approach to the referent creates an archetype of the form airport or suburb: It is not a known suburb, but rather one that Engel “sees.” In reorganizing the referent to suit the artist’s needs, Engel’s process is more akin to painting: He takes one of the most sacred vestiges of photography and renders it impotent by crafting photographs of pure imagination. This strips photography of its special relationship to the referent—making a mockery of the entire process.

Additionally, Engel employs sourced satellite images (which, arguably, were never photographs to begin with). Engel’s building-block images exist as solely digital data that has been captured in space, beamed down to Earth, compiled in a computer, and uploaded to the Internet. Even though the main component of photography, light, was used to capture the image, no physical form of the photograph existed until Engel printed his constructions. By transforming the once digital data into the physical reality of the print, Engel falsely fulfills the indexical promise of photography by providing the viewer with a false document of the world. The result is a series of uneasy questions regarding the truth of satellite images.

Penelope Umbrico, Suns (from Sunsets from Flickr), 2006-ongoing, archival pigment prints, collage of 4 x 6-inch photographs. Image courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

Another artist addressing the indexical problem, Penelope Umbrico uses sourced imagery from websites like Flickr to create her work. One particular installation of Umbrico’s consists of many small photographs of the most photographed subject in the world: the sunset. In this ongoing series, Suns from Flickr, Umbrico appropriates hundreds of sunset images and creates massive wall installations of small 4 x 6 prints. Lyle Rexer has described Umbrico’s use of the sunset in The Edge of Vision as “an enticement to experience another, more desirable world, controlled not by the regimented mechanisms of social and economic life but by the natural rhythms of day and night, sunrise and sunset.” What Rexer doesn’t comment on, however, are the indexical issues that Umbrico’s work manifests.

Just like Engel’s work, Umbrico uses appropriated imagery; but instead of applying a cut and paste technique, she chooses to produce massive installations of photographs she’s found—photographs taken by other people. Without crediting the photographer, Umbrico reproduces their work as her own, much like Sherrie Levine’s rephotographs of Walker Evans’s work. Unlike Levine, however, Umbrico alters the appearance of the images, choosing to print some of them in low resolution. The resulting imperfections only emphasize that the images were appropriated from the Internet.

Penelope Umbrico, 87 Suns from Flickr—29 Visible, 2009, archival pigment print, 11 x 14 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

Again, appropriation is a major tool in the works of both of these artists; but the ways in which they harness their appropriations diverge. With Engel’s work, his process is more akin to painting, cutting off photography’s relationship to the index. Umbrico, on the other hand, challenges the lack of faith in photography’s index by showing the viewer a series of indexes of the same, mundane, over-photographed sunset. The adage, “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” rings false when confronting Umbrico’s installation. Each sunset becomes a unique look at the sun, in a particular place, at a particular time. Whereas Engel strips away the specificity of the scene, Umbrico’s obliterates authorship by allowing each subtle change in the sunset to stand on its own in comparison to the others. Tonal variations, composition choices, and other technical considerations are arranged side by side, showing that no one photograph or even photographer is the same.

By overwhelming the viewer with similar visual data, Umbrico instills a new visual literacy, which forces the viewer to seek out differences within similarity. By using the sun, the life force of photography, Umbrico directly recalls traditional ways of thinking about photography and how these differ in the digital age. Even with the knowledge that these images come from digital data, the range of each individual sunset begins to restore faith in the index. Instead of worrying whether or not the photograph is “real,” Umbrico’s installation teaches the viewer, that in the digital age, photography’s indexical promise is no longer solely about the physical contact between light and the object, but is apparent in the sheer number of people practicing the craft worldwide. This new way of seeing restores a small amount of faith in photography by revealing that even though photography as a practice may be different than it was fifty years ago, the indexical promise can still be fulfilled through digital data. Photography’s claim to truth resides in the amount of data available, not necessarily the process of photography itself. This differential knowledge helps the viewer digest the glut of imagery that they confront on a daily basis and make decisions about what to believe or what to discredit.

Penelope Umbrico, 79 Moons from Flickr—51 Visible, 2009, archival pigment print, 11 x 14 inches. Image courtesy Hagedorn Gallery.

While all of the artists in The New Photograph can be mined for theoretical arguments, each artist applies a different technique to solve the same problem: how to create photographs after the loss of the indexical relationship. Some, like Engel, eschew the notion all together, becoming a painter of pixels, while others, like Umbrico, use the same techniques to reinstill a certain amount of faith in photography. All of the artists in this exhibition push the direction of photography as a practice and the art form into the twenty-first century. They deliver what the “new” photograph can achieve and can be. By doing so, these artists open the way for further experimentation with the medium’s materials and the types of images that it can create—images that can distance photography from the index or find new ways of satisfying the indexical promise.

Hagedorn Gallery will be hosting an artist talk with Jason Salavon and Penelope Umbrico at 6:30PM on October 21, 2011. The New Photograph will remain up through October 22, 2011. Hagedorn Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10AM to 5PM and Saturdays from 11AM to 4PM.

Dale Inglett, Jack, Kelly, 2010, acrylic, gouache, ink, graphite, and polypropylene paper, 40 x 53 inches. Photo courtesy Twin Kittens.

PATRIARCHS|MATRIARCHS, the latest offering at Twin Kittens, marks the Atlanta solo debut of Georgia-born, New York-based artist Dale Inglett. While Inglett’s choice of materials ranges from oil, gouache, and oxides to polypropylene paper and video, each of his spectral images are gleaned from a unified source: vintage family photographs, taken as the 19th century was optimistically bounding its way into the arms of the 20th. The tension is not merely temporal: An engaging pendulum oscillates between the polarities of surface and subject. Inglett’s pedestrian figures are transformed, abstracted, and ultimately elevated into a sublime narrative of materiality in this series of work.

Dale Inglett, Patriarch, Matriarch (monoprint diptych), 2009, acrylic on polypropylene paper, 26 x 23 inches each. Photo courtesy Twin Kittens.

Detail: Dale Inglett, Patriarch, Matriarch, 2009. Photo courtesy Twin Kittens.

Inglett’s intention, according to the gallery’s website, is “to challenge the fixed quality that photos seem to attach to identity and to get at something more ineffable than likenesses ….” He continues, “I’m replacing the ‘proof’ presented in photos with a reimagining, a fiction, the unknown.” Indeed, photographic truths are here irreconcilable, and identity is claimed in name only. Oil, acrylic, and oxides congeal in Wyle Edward and Savannah Ross Cawley as the eponymous busts are hemmed in by identical ovals, suggesting a panel-painted locket. In Jack, Kelly, thoughtfully edited details punctuate swaths of muted hues which expand and isolate themselves into pure form before reconvening into the frame as landscape, fabric, and sky. Sumptuous burgundies illustrate early photography’s tyranny of stillness in Untitled (family). The careful viewer will notice Inglett engaging his materials to reference the processing anomalies which mark the technological fits and starts of the history of photography.

Using the humble family photograph as a starting point, Inglett upends the premise that the mechanically-reproduced image is devoid of aura. (Click here for a full, free English translation of Walter Benjamin‘s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”) Contemporary critics and academics alike have challenged misguided notions that photography and aura must abide in opposition to one another. Inglett’s work is as good an argument as any to dispel poorer interpretations of the Benjaminian canon. In the process of mining banal source material, the artist has opened up a series of meditative, poetic moments. Such moments are ushered in by a sticky, viscous materiality.

Viewers are well-advised to give these works ample time to unfold before their eyes. Inglett’s experiments with family portraiture result in often-unsettling depictions of the human form. These unsettling transformations risk misreading; one could quickly dismiss the works as a sophomoric critique of sentimentality, written in the shorthand of monstrous abjection. During the three-and-a-half-minute video Patriarch, Matriarch, Inglett chronicles the process in which the images of his monoprint diptychs of the same name were created. As Inglett’s human forms mutate, it is tempting to reach into a limited visual library for a reference point, only to stumble over territory where Dorian Gray shares close quarters with Disney World’s Haunted Mansion apparitions and Vincent Price burlesques of Poe. But to stop at these camp-riddled references would be a mistake.

Detail: Dale Inglett, Untitled (family), 2010, oil, gouache, and graphite on polypropylene paper, 30 x 23 inches. Photo courtesy Twin Kittens.

In time, the video, like Inglett’s still images, reveals itself not as nostalgia dressed in gothic spectacle, but as an insistently contemporary homage to process and materiality — properties uncommonly associated with reproducible mediums. The colors spill, flow, and transfigure, evincing an unmistakable fascination with the control factors inherent in the artmaking process. Carried along by the narrative of the material, the music of Lily Wolfe (composed and recorded for the exhibition) invites the viewer to surrender to the promenade of paint as it seeps into and shifts over a landscape of polypropylene, obscuring the primary figures into a series of eddies that puddle, then retract, into rivulets of blue, gray, green, and white. Less disfiguration than meditation, the viewer is, quite literally, watching paint dry. Inglett is rare in that he is able to make such a banal prospect appealing.

The exhibition PATRIARCHS|MATRIARCHS by Dale Inglett continues at Twin Kittens through March 12, 2011, with an artist talk on Saturday, March 12, at 2PM.