TOM MCGLYNN

Tom McGlynn is an artist based in the NYC area. He is known principally for his abstract painting, writing and curatorial activities. For some years now he has also been making photographs that he distributes through social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He is an editor at large at The Brooklyn Rail where he has contributed articles and criticism since 2012. He is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art in NYC. His most recent show there was in the spring of 2020. He currently maintains a studio at  Sharpe-Walentas in Brooklyn where he was awarded a 2019-2020 residency.

QUESTION

In many of the photographs you post to Facebook or Instagram it is as if you want photography to be an abstract mode of representation but simultaneously you –or you let it– insist upon its foundational quality of resemblance. You hold this paradox taut by fraying the relationship between machine-made resemblance and the artist’s plastic manipulation of material. Curiously you seem to do remarkably little to manipulate the material beyond selecting and framing. There is no evidence of meddling with chemistry or other technologies. Nor do you tack toward, for example, the abstract photography of Twentieth Century modernism. Instead you often seem to lean into some proto ‘Eggleston moment’ that you have found, but then you torque resemblance through positioning, framing, juxtaposition and the like.

Thus the work does not actually betray or overturn photography’s fact of resemblance, but through choices of subject and framing it often more or less abandons it, leaves it to hitch a ride on some other event of meaning making. You seem to agree that one cannot remove the fact of verisimilitude from photography, but that you can suck the effect of it out of the final image. It is as if you want to overturn Benjamin’s dictum about photography, to wit, that the photographed object is, “still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in ” art. “” It seems that you want to wholly absorb it in art.

Can you say a few words about the above observations and how you see the relation between the object photographed and the photograph itself? And is there something about the forums, Instagram and Facebook, which shapes this practice of photography?

ANSWER

What initially comes to mind is the idea of the glance , or non- decisional noticing that we all tend to do in our daily lives but that the lack of any definitive “event” in those interstitial moments typically causes one to “overlook” them. So I’d say that my photographs are a result of “under looking”. The mediation of Instagram acts as an overdetermined foil to the under looking, so that the choice of framing the uneventful takes on a certain salience as an event but hopefully then recedes from such in its underwhelming affect. Unlike Barthes , who sees an interplay between studium and punctum in photography, I tend to see everything as studium. In other words I’m not looking for significance in any individual photograph: in its standalone quality. So besides the technologically overdetermined foil that platforms like Instagram offers my subject of under looking, it also tracks nicely a documentation of my quotidien time. The whole project of all these platforms seems to be to sew a map of the world that then fits exactly around the world ( a la a Borges analogy). Photography does kind of “skin the world” as Oliver Wendell Holmes said. Perhaps my own photography represents a dropped stitch in that increasingly seamless image map of the world.

I like to think that my photographs give the photographed situation a little more time to their passing from instance to image.