WDWGN! (On the dynamic of being without)

Adam Chodzko, Too, 2013.
Found 35 mm slide, Brighton, 2 Oct. 1987. Dust from Geneva Airport, September 2013.
Printed as C-type 17.8 x 25.4 cm. Edition of 2

All photographs are time-limited pieces. But in some photographs, some people assume they can set a time. They assume what time should be set aside to each of the photographs to properly to decode it. It is to assume knowledge of what photography is really about when people take into their own possession brief moments on an evolutionary process. In the absence of prepositions, we need to stop mention when it does not mention; it being the case that we entrust ourselves to what happens within the frame, describing both the object and the subjects of our desires. This capacity to relate and remember through photographs is something that we want, a form of access to the past, to information, to knowledge. But, essentially, for us to keep up with successful lies. Photographs are captured visual memories pieces to clearly remind us of what we want. It is a present taken from the past remembering us in unison a desired future and a sensation of loss.

One of the most obvious things is that distinguishing photography, and visual images, on that account, from being, for instance, we are positioned on the outside. Like a spectator standing at the physical safe distance provide by optical lens and screens, a viewfinder, by a technological innovation. That acknowledgement distinguishes us also from all other living animals. On an ontological level, we have a need to not forget what we want in order to survive. Because what we want is second nature to our being, how to satisfy it presents not only a problem but, also, provides a critical distance, when the present problem should be to forget properly the past. Photography also allows us to move on from a position of being without to a position of consummated desires.

We need to remember everything, and for that we collect, accumulate trinkets or mnemonic devices taken from diverse sources and scattered places. We, as beings, gather images already in existence to justify our madness in remembering everything. However, remembering does not allow us to move away from the position we occupy at a precise moment in order to invalidate thoughts we are immersed in, but the opposite. It is like being constantly remembered of a death person. Being loss means opening new conditions of conflict; means to move onwards towards a destination. For instance, in Délio Jasse collected images, found in flea-markets, on dislocated people from the ex-colonies, from Africa, moving into those countries that were previously the colonisers; or Larson & Shindelman’s #Hashtag series that deals and inquires into the notions of memory and witnessing. All those photographers collect what can be considered as historical visual documents or records providing information about a place, an institution, or about people, i.e. natural destruction around the world, in Chodzko’s series. The past, which should no longer be in existence, becomes the present that will mark the boundaries and delineate the limits of a future. The conflict in the field of possibilities that opens to questions and due explorations is closed from inside and from inception.

Adam Chodzko, Too, 2013.
Found 35 mm slide, location unknown, Aug. 1981. Dust from Geneva Airport, September 2013.
Printed as C-type 17.8 x 25.4 cm. Edition of 2.

To remember is to give form to desires. It is to want to give form to conditional expected moments existing in our memory while being afraid of losing those. Re-imagining and re-presenting them on every alternative moment that appears in front of us. It is to make the past return. A good memory, triggered by a trinkets or mnemonic devises, gives us what we want and when we wanted it. It does not surprise us. It does not invalidate the thoughts we are immersed in; it reinforces and adds to what is already in existence. A bad memory, as is expressed by Freud, instead, is the one able to surprise, to reveal unseen perspectives. That is when art comes in. That is the role of art. To reveal what is not “in there” initially! It is without a story, a context. It is without being. Art should challenge and offend the opinions of the predominant forces in the campus, the story being told. Take for instance, that is why in court, the lawyer needs a witness with good memory, so he or she can testify and confirm the story being told. Whereas, a bad memory, instead, will be opening the field of possibilities and might be arousing stories that were not meant to be told in public. Or, in his 1980 book, Roland Barthes, for example, inquires into the nature and essence of photography through a eulogy on his death mother.

Dust, in Too (2013), is that fine, dry powder consisting of tiny particles of earth or waste matter lying on the 35 mm slide surface from a transition place, the Geneva Airport, used as a mnemonic devise for the demise of time. Too is composed by a series of found amateur colour slides, dating back from the 1950s to the late 1980s, by Adam Chodzko and drawn from his collection. Those image hold flattened houses or ripped up trees like as being an analogous imagery to a dead person’s remains, the mortal human body. Too expresses the possibility about the nature or essence of a person because we are subject to time. It is our subjection to time that photographers prefer to describe. When, those talk about the extension of a landscape, or indeed the timing of an event, they are caught between the determinism they must abide, staying in the same place or condition within, and the choices they think they can make, in the state of being without while occupying that position in space. They record accurately, in pictures, what they believe to be about time, to express about omniscience; time is of the essence. If Chodzko’s found images documenting the effects of nature act as an embodiment of time, dust, from Geneva airport, alternatively, impacts on the perception of life, death.

Adam Chodzko, Too, 2013.
Found 35 mm slide, Kansas, 2 Sept. 1958. Dust from Geneva Airport, September 2013.
Printed as C-type 17.8 x 25.4 cm. Edition of 2.

An immediate reference to the use of dust in art practice points to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s collaborative photograph Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Notes) , from 1920, an accumulation of dust on the surface of Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-1923) documenting (permanently fixing) the passage of time. Or, more recently, to Cornelia Parker’s Exhaled Blanket (1996), a slide projection of dust and fibres taken from Sigmund Freud’s couch, or The Negative of Whispers (1997), a set of earplugs crafted from dust from the Whispering Gallery, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Encapsulating the transformation of something ephemeral, in transition to something lasting, with a physical tangibility. In both conditions, dust has become an essence on the dynamic of memory and being without. At another level, the physical properties of the matter are playing with the private and public nature of meaning and value and, about the subatomic particle, on a religious/science context. However, on a more practical level, we all know that dust particles are most notably a nuisance for photographers. Beyond damaging lens or an almost perfect picture, it is also a remembrance, a witness to the time we are to be without. But, photography has always been about time, and that it is about time matters to us.

More than ever before, there are many things in life that we experience only as spectators. We are increasingly becoming passive witnesses, living memories being continual digitally worldwide broadcasted, archives for computer generated images in a system of government based on representativeness and freedom. The precariousness of life experience nowadays has never been on the news; it has been more on the accident, illness, malevolence, war and disasters, boredom, as well as ageing, i.e. the passing of time inevitability. When Chodzko investigates that that happens to other people due to natural causes, and introduces dust as a variable on that investigation, he is making evident photography’s limitations in terms of narrative capacity. He shows that photography’s inability to adequately communicate complex issues, such as politics of distinction, electorate freakiness, or aesthetic liberations is vicarious. With it, we can only anticipate what might come. No experience derives for us. Life becomes progressively stranger as time passes and we get older. Whereas, we become increasingly anxious to keep it familiar, keep it in order in our memory by the use of visual devises. We are on a continuous state of being without. We need photography and other trinkets and mnemonic devises to be what we are without.

There is no production of the new. There is an abused use of the old – what has been already there. Nowadays, as the artist, author and museum director Michael Petry has not long ago put it, in his book The Art of Not Making (2011), artists are using other people work, both artisans and artists, to generate their own. Take for instance, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, who brings into being new sculptures by appropriating sculptures created by Sri Lanka artists (buying those works through the commercial representatives of those artists in their country), while inserting them in the Western context for contemporary art; or Mishka Henner, a photographer without a camera, who uses images taken by other people to build his body of work. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977 – 1980), in which the photographer produce a series of black and white photographs reminiscent of still from American noir movies form the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s; Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, or, even, the XVIII century painters, such as Turner, Gainsborough, Constable, who were influenced by the Old Master imagery and composition.

Adam Chodzko, Too, 2013.
Found 35 mm slide, location unknown, May 1965. Dust from Geneva Airport, September 2013.
Printed as C-type 17.8 x 25.4 cm. Edition of 2.

On a recent solo exhibition at Marlborough Contemporary, in London, Adam Chodzko introduced and presented the idea of the image moderator, in Room For Laarni (Same, 2013, HD video with sound, 10 minutes, Ed. 3 + 1 AP). In a conversation, between the artist, the art critic Jennifer Higgie and the gallery director Andrew Renton, Chodzko’s came to compare this condition of moderator to the artist role throughout the construction of the history of humankind:

”Artists are another kind of image moderator but perhaps the artist sets the criteria for this process to be impossibly at odds with each other so that art appears through the gaps in these rules? And externally nothing stays still either.”

So, what do artists reveal through their artworks? What and how do the artwork reveals’? The excesses of society! Contemporary society excessive indulgency to consumption, to technology, to appropriation to archives and to ideological value! In this order, it would be the excess, for example, of commodities that characterise present day society: it is to be fashionable in a fast, heavy and electric context, to be without being!

Images in relation to capital (consumption) are more than needed. A technology of images dances around us like a storm or an other form of violent disturbance of the atmosphere, generated by its’ natural dynamics – in opposition to man-made –, such as strong winds, accompanied by rain, thunder, lightning, etc. that move forcefully and decisively to a specified position that stimulates change or progress within that system. This immoderation has as consequence humankind going beyond what is its permitted by its natural limits – natural resources, such as the soul’s temerity, are becoming scarce; or, natural conditions, such as freedom, are taken as a playing field with extended possibilities. Where different variable confront each other on a fast, heavy and regular unrestrained beat! The dynamics of being are difficult to describe; images’ narratives have so many approaches so many possible interpretations that we are without when confronted by what images can/might be!

Bibliography:
Adam Chodzko, 2013, Room for Laarni, Image Moderator, exhibition catalogue, 6th November – 21st December. Marlborough Contemporary, London.
Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Accessed February 26th, 2013.

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Adam Chodzko