White Columns allows itself the luxury –or the, delirium– of putting on shows with zero economic potential that graze in relatively obscure intellectual pastures. Pages from a Magazine: CAMERAWORK is the current wonderful example of this formula. CAMERAWORK was one of a number of left wing journals engaged (very much so) in the critical revaluation of cultural practice –the image world as it was sometimes known– in 1970’s and 1980’s England. Others were BLOCK, Control magazine, Wedge and ZG to name only the most prominent. In this show Mathew Higgs, White Column’s director, has pinned to the wall in an appropriately no-nonsense manner, his own collection of Camerawork magazines. Real artifacts –creased and a touch battered– displaying layouts of black and white photography which, more often than not, frames a special focus issue by issue. Thus we have a magazine on the wars in El Salvador or North of Ireland, an issue on nuclear weapons or one about racist gangs in London’s east end.

Camerawork was the spawn of the Half Moon Photography Workshop, itself the cousin of the politically immoderate Half Moon Theater which produced Bert Brecht and Dario Fo more than Shakespeare. And when they did do Shakespeare, it was Shakespeare very much as a ‘people’s’ theater. Half Moon Photography Workshop began as a cooperative, with all the political implications that word had in 1972. The members of both the theater and the photography workshop were affiliated with everything from left groupuscules to the squatter’s movement. CAMERAWORK ended, if not badly, then less well than one could hope, with the standard internecine splits in the left. Jo Spence, one of the founders, was expelled, sued the expellers, won, and with the settlement went on to publish PHOTOGRAPHY/POLITICS: ONE (and two, and perhaps more. I personally lost track after number two). By the time of the split Spence was already, also working with the Hackney Flashers, a “socialist, feminist photography collective”. (A fact that in many ways gives the feel of how different times were.) After Spence’s departure the magazine continued to be published by the original cooperative, sans Spence, for another 12 issues.

These were heady times when being a socialist artist, and arguing with other socialist artists was not a bizarre anachronism one would have to carefully explain to one’s students. Though Camerawork was not heavy with theory (at least in its early to ‘classic’ period) it was the case that dialogues about, say, the Althusserian reconfiguring of ideology ran alongside articles about the Workers Film and Photo League of the 1930’s, and ‘how-to’ darkroom tips to encourage people to take control of the production of photographs. In fact the magazine seemed, even if only sometimes, to have welded that elusive grail of the left, a concord between theory and practice.

For the first 19 issues the magazine proclaimed as if with the ardor of Charles Foster Kane inaugurating his first newspaper: “CAMERAWORK is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photography and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photography, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our own lives.’”  By issue 20 all of the original members of the collective had departed. A palace coup had excised practice from the concord and the magazine sought to emulate the journal Screen for levels of linguistic density and quantities of syllables.

The pleasure of the White Columns show is that in an era when left politics has been expelled from most art practice (and replaced by a rush to make ever more pricey tchotchkes for  Wall St parasites) a relatively modest curatorial project (this one will not be re hung for Venice or Kassel, guaranteed.) can remind us of the debates that used to shape what artists did as their daily practice.

True, notions like ‘the democratization of image production and circulation’ can be a little difficult to wrap ones head around in the era of flicker and You tube. And tips on darkroom technique seem a little quaint next to my smart-phone.  Yet it was not democratization as a quantity issue –as flicker etc seem to be– rather it is about empowering the unvoiced (no, not voiceless, the un-voiced) to be able to speak. Some old saw like speaking truth to power comes to mind. So when images appeared in Camerawork of, say, the anti-fascist riots in Lewisham, London the images were framed by the question, emblazoned across the front cover of the magazine, “What are you taking pictures for?”

It’s a play, a joke, a pun. It is what the average overpowered London cop of the time would have asked the photographer at the event. And yet it is also addressed to the wider question of why one circulates images. From and for what ideological position are you doing this shutterbug thing?  (A question undreamt –or deeply, deeply, deeply repressed– in the silicone offices of Flicker et al)

And the title? Camerawork. Close the word space. Remove the Vaseline from the politics, fast forward past the anti Steiglitz jab and you run headlong into the semiotics of the day. Barthes to Sontag taking a photograph had been so withered by analysis of the power relation in shooting a photograph that the image sank into the messy context of words.

Ms Sontag reminded us in the opening of her text that we “linger unregenerately in Plato’s cave”. Squinting, as one must, to discern the true, truer or truest came to be about deciphering how images had been written over or through by language. And that was indeed the context that Camerawork created. Higgs’ curatorial choice –to pin the actual magazines to the wall– gives us this full context. Today we think of photography as less of a bounded, monolithic practice of visual representation rather we think images flow, circulate through the virtual, viral interspace of the web. In 1972 images circulated through the space of The Press and were battered by words and editorial power from all sides. The unglamorous stubble of racist speeches, unprinted by the mainstream press, (see image below) found newsprint as context for anti racist image making in Camerawork. It is good that White Columns has preserved the shadow of this important magazine.

In one sense, Liz Larner’s new installation is held together oxymoronically, by lacunae. The spaces between are a large part of the power of this impressively laconic exhibition. Moreover, the items on display not only bear their paucity proudly but are each idiosyncratic, different from the next object, except for a shared allegiance to abstraction. So how does it become so happily coherent, this display of diffidence?

To begin with, Larner has the equivalent of perfect pitch when it comes to placement and scale. Next, she does a kind of parsing of possibilities: works on the wall, on the floor; sculpture in two dimensions and three, in relief, fully rounded; a painting in tempera on a square of paper, patterns in vinyl stuck directly on floor, wall and ceiling. Forms are piled up or hung, open or closed. Things are really big, pretty big, easel size. Objects are discrete yet the room is bridged by the vinyl pattern, apparently a “tree,” but so stylized as to be entirely non-representational. The “product” is materially diverse—ceramic, rubber, tissue paper, epoxy, steel—but chromatically narrow.

One could judge this installation simply a triumph of good design, which it certainly is. Along with this, however, is an up-to-the-minute “code-mixing” expertise holding hands with a lofty commitment to old-fashioned formalism. There is even the sly joke or two here, as when the most ambitious work shown—maybe even the centerpiece since the eye is drawn to it first by virtue of its size and placement—turns out to be made of tissue paper. In its reticence, the show seems to take big risks; in its savvy virtuosity it seems like no risk at all.

Ephraim Birnbaum

A sort of antic incrementalism, in which the sheer number of accumulated found objects stuns the viewer into submission, clogging their visual arteries, presently constitutes an academy in itself. How do we know? Art schools and project rooms across the nation are filled to the brim with such compilations. And indeed it is hard to gainsay so much labor, so many hours of tedious assembling.  And indeed some people are very, very good at it. (It’s interesting that so many practitioners of this style are women—as if having been the target of consumer campaigns for so long, women are now throwing it all back in the face of the public.) Tara Donovan’s past sculptures have likewise cherished an OCD mania, featuring a work ethic on amphetamines, combined with a Tom-Friedmanesque ingenuity with everyday objects.  That was at once their allure and their drawback:  a cloud of plastic cups—how clever!  Donovan’s previous works were truly accomplished but perhaps a tad . . . mmmm . . . “gimmicky “ (sorry, swore never to use that word).  Still, you had to admire how she worked and worked that schtick. And it WAS clever.

Well, forget all that now.  With these new pieces Donovan has hit pay dirt.  Transcendent rather than amusing, they at the same time subtly subvert all transcendental convictions.  First of all, she has taken on the picture plane and all its optical splendors.  Walking into the gallery you think you are seeing some beautifully rendered revisions of the classic, abstract white painting.  Drenched in radiance and reverie—could they be Malevich’s “face of God”, blanched? Minimal in their presentation, maximal in the number of changes rung from work to work, they leave the viewer utterly unprepared for the surprise of finding, on close inspection, that all this light and shapely immanence comes from pins.  Millions of them—all right maybe not millions.  But so many, so precisely arranged to create perfect effects by virtue of number, placement and depth that the mind reels.  The algorithmic vertigo makes one fervently hope there was digital assistance for the surely sore digits of the assistants.  Donovan lures us into what should be the reassuring pleasures of the repetitive task but instead of comfort there is the abyss—the complexity of this process is literally dizzying.  The viewer is bedazzled by effects whose formula cannot be readily or at any rate quickly calculated and that failure constitutes a loss of control in keeping with an ecstatic experience.  The light bouncing off those pinheads—countless angels thereon or not—sets up the beatific rapture of seraphim.  And yet . . . they are just pins, straight pins even, nothing tricky, nothing special in themselves.  It’s a wonderful moment after the decades-long attempts to lower the barrier between art and craft.  Wonderful because here we have blatant and proud handicraft merging seamlessly with the “great tradition,” with all things Greenbergian, with Russian suprematism, Ryman syncretism, Op Art, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  Meanwhile the needle is gloriously lost in a needle haystack.

Bridey Schufli

Auden went to the Arctic. Iceland, 1936. He was much taken with the Northern desolation of nature. He was young still. Searching, as they say, for ideals. For the right politics, the right sexuality, the right turn of poetry. (It was of course the last that came easiest to him). While there Auden penned a Letter to Lord Byron. A verse letter, a poem to a God of English poetry. A God who, as it happens, also went searching for ideals that were very much kin to those of Auden’s search. Of Iceland Auden wrote to Byron:

The North, though, never was your cup of tea;

“Moral” you thought it so you kept away.

Moral indeed. Stay away from morality. Byron sort of did. Far away. In Greece at the end. Struggling for a political and sexual morality of his own. Auden? Him too, far away from the far north in some dive on 52^rd st and on, and on, and on in New York, mapping his mid-century morality of poetics, Freud and sexuality.

And Janet Biggs? She went too to the Arctic. Svalbad, A Norwegian archipelago seemingly, on maps at least, adrift from the rest of Europe and paddling further up the page toward the “Moral” North. She too has sent back a poem –a film-essay– on the search for morality, sexuality and narrative order. It is showing a little south of the long gone dives of 52^rd st. 27^th st.  Winkelman gallery to be precise.

Biggs is showing three videos comprised of material shot on her journeys to Svalbad. Long slow takes travel through the Arctic terrain.  Ice, glacial horizons, frigid water and barren land populated by an occasional polar bear, a canoeist come actor and a miner working in what has been Svalbad’s sustaining (if that is the word) economy for many decades of territorial dispute between, and ravaging by, various European industrial conglomerates and governments. This material is intercut with footage shot in New York interior settings of individual performers. In one case, in the video Fade to White, Biggs films countertenor John Kelley wanly intoning a lament for unnamed and unknown loss. In a second video, Brightness All Around, Biggs films Bill Coleman singing/performing a high octane, club come lounge act. These two videos are presented face to face at separate ends of the gallery and run alternately as if in some back and forth dialogue.

The North is moral? Oft times it seems terminal. It is less the case that it is post civilization, more that the possibility of civilization is foreclosed.  Some of the best footage in Biggs’s films speaks to this. Below ground the mineshafts and the toil performed both in making those shafts and in the work of mining them bespeak a vastness of effort for a terrifyingly meager sense of reward.  The machinery pummels the arctic, the latter corrodes, the former rusts and then we start all over again. Above ground too the landscape brooks few civilizing scars.  Brrr!  And thus I honestly liked the films in Biggs’ show. I am drawn to the north. To the spare landscape, the fear, the unrequited naturalness of it all.

But the terms of the work, as determined by its formal choices of editing and its implied relationship to narrative, are that we watch loosely anchored images drift by, happily unexplained and unmotivated in their connection to one another. And this is all for the good. Because it is the case that the makers of video art, and the viewers of video art have together –in many cases but not all– foresworn the very real delights of Hollywood’s long established and ongoing system of continuity editing and narrative seduction. So much the better I say! That too is a moral decision. Those very real Hollywood delights applied their seductive fig leaf to so many questions of meaning and visual pleasure which various counter-cinemas have sought to rearticulate in less palliative films than Hollywood could nightmare of. But what then are we all to do, compact between video-art maker and video-art viewer having been made, with the often lugubrious the often beguiling enactments of said video art? Well, we can sit back and be wafted over by enthralling visual innovations and pleasures as with anything from, say, Brakhage to Rist.  Or, another tack, we could connect the dots laid out for us from Hollis Frampton to Christian Marclay. Toying as they do with Hollywood’s very system of montage and meaning.

The problem comes when the dots don’t quite link up. For example on one of the occasions while I was at Winkelman to see Biggs’ work one viewer whispered (loudly) to their partner, “why does he have a gun” (referring to the canoeist/hiker in Fade to White). Poor viewing etiquette aside, well yes we are going to ponder questions like that when you hand your actor a gun.  Biggs’ films trade in truncated narrative gestures, allusions toward a fledgling continuity between shots and thus to a sense of motivation: as such they lead us, the viewers, toward the expectation that things will be explained. Indeed why does he have a gun?

In one sense this is all a smart gambit. The classical cinema of Hollywood tortured itself to provide yet hide the motivation for everything from editing transitions to close-ups and eyeline matches, to why the actor has a gun. And, thus, travestying the prerogatives of classical narration has credentials. The surrealists did it. Markopoulos did it. Yet in large part the cinematic avant-gardes elided the problem by eschewing narrative altogether. Even the poetics of, say, Deren and Hammid, courting narrative as it did, offered such a rapid paced shift of images that it capitalized upon the trope of shocking juxtapositions.

But I must admit to being lost, cast adrift by Bigg’s compilation of images. I am sure footed throughout the treacherous north. I can even take the gun-toting. It is when we collide with pleather clad “New York music guru” Bill Coleman or countertenor John Kelley that I stumble. Caught in the glare of the cut I am disoriented by the slamming shut of one iconographic door and the loud opening of an other.

I am asking to have it both ways. I know. I want the artist to not explain the narrative and let us all rely upon poetic drift. Yet I want to not be slammed by gratuitous collisions. The latter is, I believe, only because I feel gypped. I have been led to believe there is a proto-narrative. For sure the press release is partly the culprit. It will explain that “androgyny, and  (a) mournful operatic voice parallel the Arctic landscape, and signal the waning of male dominance” (Kelly) or a “ (we are) witness to the struggle to maintain a sense of self” (Coleman). Brrr again. Stay warm, burn the press release. If not it is put to work to doctor a tale not really being told in the films. It, the press release, maps a moral territory for Bigg’s adventure in the north that simply rings no bell.

So are the hopes of a counter cinema to expire on clever gimmicks (c.f. Marclay) and fear of non-narrative, non-meaning? That the press release completes the inconclusive narratives proposed by Biggs’ images and sounds is a big part of the problem.  In its grandiose claims, by filling in the blanks, making the connections and supplying the motivation for shots and scenes, it seems to apologize for the narrative tardiness of those images. In truth I feel that Coleman and Kelley, the gun and the schooner end up as profane pericopic orphans grasping at the viewer to make sense of them. For myself the take-away  –my cup of tea– in Bigg’s films is the arctic freeze wagging a moral icicle at us. Should the tundra and mine shafts have been enough? Maybe. Is it that the fear of its emptiness –its power to mean nothing, or to obliterate meaning– leads one to dress the set with guns and pleather? Maybe. As Jean-Luc might have said, there is always an impulse to let the images flow faster than the glacier does. Well perhaps you don’t have to. The glacier is on its way. Its gonna get here –even if its melted. Capitalism fucked up. Big chill comin soon!

No sooner uncoiled from the sock in the gut delivered by Susan Unterberg’s powerful new portrait photos—with their contorted features, hair literally standing on end, they are horrific, hilarious, inscrutable—no sooner recovered than the viewer is almost immediately besieged by a teeming mass of unswerving allusions, as difficult to shake as a mob of pursuing zombies. Therefore: madness incarnate or madness encultured? In effect, Unterberg has created a hybrid creature (heightening the frisson of monstrousness, all hybrids seeming at first unnatural), grafting the rhetorical onto the tangible. Mysteriously manipulated, the photos are like silverpoint drawings executed with a stylus scalpel sharp, every line of skin, virtually every cell and certainly every hair so distinct as to be reptilian. On the other hand, the theatricality of the facial expressions is clearly constructed. Mask-like in the sense of being exaggerated, frozen grimaces, the photographs recall a host of documentary moments in the history of the psychiatry/art nexus. Because it is the same face run through a sequence of emotional permutations, the set has the feel of a typology along the lines of Franz Xavier Messerschmidt ‘s bronze busts of afflictions, character traits and passing states or Gericault’s portraits of mental patients, commissioned by the psychopathologist Etienne Jean Georget so that his students could use facial traits to classify patients into various categories of monomania.

This leads us naturally to Charcot’s hysterics and the classic photos at Salpetriere clinic, a notorious topic for feminist work. As Hilary Robinson, among others, has reminded us, Charcot’s documentations were “staged,” and compiled images of different women with only fragments of hysteria symptoms so as to create a more comprehensible cycle for the clinical picture. And that brings us to the crux of Unterberg’s project. Although gender ambiguous, these are in fact self portraits, and, by the artist’s own admission, portraits about a woman aging and turning . . . demonic, unrecognizable, ungendered. (Mary Kelly’s “Interim” also connected Charcot and aging women, appropriating his words for the captions of her photographs of “hysterical” fashion items, but Kelly’s lingo is Lacanian and Unterberg’s lingua is franca.) Whereas Gericault seized on irrationality as a Romantic’s riposte to Enlightenment rationality, Unterberg’s investigation heads in the opposite direction, seeking to unravel the myths of the post-menopausal woman’s dangerous instability, although both artists share an anti-idealist stance. This is especially interesting in Unterberg’s case since her work has often submerged the grotesque in a species of classical poise. Her early probing of the unholy family romance of mothers and daughters and fathers and sons did this superbly. Since then, an interest in gothic subjects—insects, animal eyes—has often been balanced by cool palettes and compositions. Or by juxtaposing two antipodean bodies of work, as she did in the group of thumbs aping erogenous body parts paired up with a collection of pale moons in orbital eclipse. Here the cooling effect is provided, paradoxically, by normally revolting imagery—a set of photographs of jellyfish, signifying the unequivocally beautiful, pulling their retinue of silken cords and lacy, undulating ribbons. They float and evanesce like angels trailing beatific exhaust fumes.

Meanwhile, their luscious translucence contrasts significantly with the companion petrified images. Surely it is no accident that the vernacular for jellyfish is “medusa.” With their writhing locks and distorted expressions, Unterbergs’s head shots could not be more gorgon-like. Grisaille, the latter look to be carved out of stone. Masonry, dry point, etching, solarization—using the latest digital techniques, the works reference some rather outdated technologies, thus allowing the gender and age consternation to rap on the temple door of western art. Most pointed is the evocation of Man Ray’s experiments with solarization. It is less than ironic that so many of his portraits, often criticized as surrealist woman bashing, reinforced a highly constrained “feminine” and sexual ideal. Nary a middle-aged woman in sight. Catapulting herself into the similarly antiquated but still powerful role of the crone or the hag provides Unterberg some residue of oracular, vatic power, albeit as a sibyl who is also rather a cut-up. The overwrought Delphic cackling, “know thyself,” is tinged with a wry self-mockery.

Famously, the medusa’s head, with its nest of hair, is said to stand in for the female genitalia (no surprise that Medusa herself is seen as variously ugly and beautiful). Conversely, but in perfect keeping with Unterberg’s ungendering, she embodies both male and female qualities. Some women have adopted the image of the medusa as an emblem of their rage—and it is impossible not to think of Cixous’s famous 1975 tome, “The Laugh of the Medusa”—but Unterberg’s images may be more comically apotropaic than venting. There is the posing—as much like a child making faces as anything else–which adds a comedic touch. The restraining factor in the goofiness of this play is the fact of the subject’s age. She is no child nor is the role child’s play. The “vile bodies” of the funeral liturgy may not be actually visible, but mortality, senescence, and dementia are nevertheless the ticklish particulars, and their reality may be expressed in the hyper-vigilant inventorying of each individual strand and follicle. Ultimately, however, the artist purposely blunts any expression of fear or inner turmoil in these riveting works; she is deliberately taking on the archetype of the older woman. If Charcot believed that hysterics were defined by their susceptibility to hypnosis, Unterberg replies with a parody of the sort of contortions demanded by the stage hypnotist. She performs a valuable de-hypnotizing. She is wide awake.

Hans Georg Schneider