Some thoughts after seeing the show "Signals, How Video Changed the World", at MOMA on 6/5/23, short version.

Walking into MOMA, maneuvering through the crowd in the lobby, and continuing on the stairs leading up to the sixth floor, my mind was a jumble of thoughts about the ways imagery enters our lives now, the coming onslaught of AI, and its possible effects on our culture.  As I entered the show, my cluttered mind was mirrored by Gretchen Bender’s twelve monitors streaming current TV content.  I found her attempt to layer static meaning on top of visual overload disturbing, but the piece helped me to slow down, focus and move into the show.

Mostly, “Signals” is a large collection show.  It’s difficult with time dependent media for curators to give all the works the space they need, and nearly impossible for viewers to give all the works the time and attention they deserve.  I had to carefully choose where I spent my time, attention and energy, which is probably a common dilemma for most visitors to this show. 

The curators Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo help move things along by shuffling the deck in the early galleries, installing works from the sixties and seventies in close proximity to ones created within the last couple of years.  The juxtapositions this created served to highlight how the art form has changed over time.  The works point to an evolution in an understanding artists seem to have of where and how their art will be seen.

A lack of funding early on affected the scope and scale of the works, but not the artist’s ambition for the work.  They most frequently used video as a means of examining society and questioning the role of media in our lives, assessing its effects on our understanding of time, distance and truth.  In many of these earlier works, the artists weren’t self consciously making art so much as making work that attempted to counter the overbearing presence of what were the dominant forms of media at the time.  The results were often charmingly direct and personal.  It was notable that many of the works were meant to be seen on a single monitor, or at least as a single moving image.  This was a time before the internet and cell phones, and before artists gained access to major funding and began making their work with large institutional spaces in mind.

As the show moves into the 2000s, there’s a noticeable growth in the scale of the works on view, with an element of self consciousness concerning their presence within the space more forcefully felt in the works themselves. As the show grew closer to our time, there was a corresponding growth in the percentage of works suffering from an overbearing presentation.  Many pieces felt burdensome to view with multiple screens or overly large projections and ancillary components crowding for attention.  Unfortunately, this expansiveness often served to diffuse the impact of the content of the works.  It was as if the artists were intending to overwhelm and dominate in whatever space they might be shown.  The quantity of production, seen and unseen, put me in mind of a quote I read recently attributed to Isabelle Graw, “What was once called the art business transformed itself into an ‘industry engaged in the production of visuality and meaning’”.

Despite what I have just written, in truth, there were a number of works in the show that were very engaging for both myself and the friend I was seeing the show with.

Midway through the show was a smallish room showing “The Excluded.  In a Moment of Danger” from 2014, by the Russian collective Chto Delat.  This is a four channel piece with sound.  The production values are excellent, yet the piece has a no nonsense, no frills quality to it.  In the front of the room there’s a large projection with another smaller projection on each side wall.  A monitor is situated next to the front projection, but low towards the floor.  The “piece” is a recording of the members of the collective performing before a camera(s).  The group members were exploring, through the performance, a range of personal responses to their overall predicament of living in a society with which they were in profound disagreement.  A society where disagreement is dangerous, isolating and illegal.  The performance, consisting of spoken and written text, and simple poses and vocalizations is highly nuanced and mesmerizing.  The three projections and the single screen never develop a presence of their own.  The large projection carries the overall performance, while the smaller ones, along with the screen, serve to create an intimacy between the performers and viewers.  The effect is so unobtrusive and beautiful that my friend and I found it hard to walk away from this piece.

In the final gallery was a projection by New Red Order titled “Culture Capture: Crimes against Reality” from 2020.  This is a very large single channel projection with sound.  New Red Order is a collaboration between three artists of indigenous heritage.  The piece was concerned with a few public monuments that embody generalized negative connotations about indigenous peoples.  The group took photos of the monuments and through sharp editing and computer animation, stripped them of their skin of hurtful meaning before transforming them into an entirely new energy.  Most of the imagery in the video is processed and manipulated, with even the sound track having an abstract quality to it.  The production values are quite crisp.  My friend has a basic understanding of some of the technology behind the images, and believed this work was a fairly straight forward affair.  He helped me to understand that the technology available today on cell phones and laptops makes it possible for three independent artists to make works such as this without needing to contract the services of a large production facility.  New Red Order’s piece didn’t feel quite as up close and personal as Chto Delat’s, but I did connect with it enough that it was hard to move away from it as well.

These two pieces weren’t the only standouts.  There were others, but the overall arc of the works in this show traveled from a beginning marked by earnestness and enthusiastic directness towards a contemporary form of techno baroque.

The accumulation of ever larger amounts of capital in the upper regions of society’s pyramid has changed many things, including in the art world. The spaces we have been building for art to be seen in and the needs of the capital that are behind them are putting a great amount of pressure on artists.

A number of the artworks in this show seem, in response to the demands and pressures of this new order, to have swollen out of proportion.  It generates a feeling of spectacle or of distancing brought about by an over produced and overbearing physical presence.  The physical manifestation of the work becomes a barrier between the viewer, the artist, and any organic intent on the part of the artist.  The relatively recent bending towards social media in video art, does lend a sense of intimacy, but due to the intermediation of the media itself it’s really an inversion of intimacy.

The world, the way we record imagery, and the way that imagery comes into our lives, have all come a long way in the last few decades.  I would never claim to have a comprehensive understanding of all these changes, and I’m something of a crank who has a very limited involvement with social media, and perhaps it was for these reasons, but it was reassuring to see the work of artists like Chto Delat and New Red Order in this show.  It helped to see that even with all the pressures and the technological advances, these artists retain an ability to connect with a viewer on a personal level, and that through them, our collective sense of self hasn’t yet gotten totally lost in the shuffle.

Some thoughts after seeing the show "Signals, How Video Changed the World", at MOMA on 6/5/23, long version.

When I was a  kid there were only three ways to see moving imagery.  Television was predominant, with movies seen in a theater coming in a distant second.  Additionally, for adventurous families, there were super 8 home movies.  There wasn’t anything casual or unobtrusive about super 8 movies.  Filming indoors required the use of blindingly bright, dangerously hot, lights.  Viewing the movies was equally cumbersome, requiring a dark room, a roll up screen and a noisy projector, which had a habit of regularly malfunctioning and melting the film.  Additionally, the cameras didn’t record sound, so the films were mostly a novel and expensive way of expanding on the idea of family snapshots.

TV came to us from distant broadcast entities such as ABC, NBC or CBS.  Movies came from large studios in Los Angeles such as Warner Brothers and RKO Pictures.  Together their content saturated our lives and had a considerable impact on public and private opinions.  I was six years old when a friend’s mother appeared on New York’s channel 13, all of the neighborhood’s children watched that broadcast in one family’s living room.  We were awed, it was as if she had entered another distant world.

Video opened a door into that distant world.  When hand held video cameras became readily available, even people with little to no funding could produce content that could be viewed through a closed circuit on a TV screen.  Artists were quick to take advantage of this opening.  Advances were slow at first, but the technology progressed steadily.

One day in the mid 1980s, while I was a student at Purchase College, I was in the Neuberger Museum standing in front of a multi channel video piece by Mary Lucier.  It wasn’t like anything I had seen before.  Physically, the piece consisted of a bank of monitors stacked in a grid with a few short duration images playing on each monitor.  Scenes from once grand estates on the north shore of Long Island, now in a state of decay and ruin, were interspaced with images of large construction vehicles moving about. The intended meaning of this poetic juxtaposition of scenes of kinetic activity and entropy was clear to me.  Additionally, there was an accompanying sound track that amplified the images in a powerful way.  The experience was totally absorbing.  The production standards were very high and polished, but it didn’t have that feeling of distance I was used to from the products of TV broadcast firms and movie studios.  This felt very close and personal, yet it had the glow or sense of authority one gets from a work of art.

Walking into MOMA, maneuvering through the crowd in the lobby, and continuing on the stairs leading up to the sixth floor, my mind was a jumble of thoughts about the ways imagery enters our lives now, the coming onslaught of AI, and its possible effects on our culture.  As I entered the show, my cluttered mind was mirrored by Gretchen Bender’s twelve monitors streaming current TV content.  I found her attempt to layer static meaning on top of visual overload disturbing, but the piece helped me to slow down, focus and move into the show.

Mostly, “Signals” is a large collection show.  It’s difficult with time dependent media for curators to give all the works the space they need, and nearly impossible for viewers to give all the works the time and attention they deserve.  I had to carefully choose where I spent my time, attention and energy, which is probably a common dilemma for most visitors to this show. 

The curators Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo help move things along by shuffling the deck in the early galleries, installing works from the sixties and seventies in close proximity to ones created within the last couple of years.  The juxtapositions this created served to highlight how the art form has changed over time.  The works point to an evolution in an understanding artists seem to have of where and how their art will be seen.

A lack of funding early on affected the scope and scale of the works, but not the artist’s ambition for the work.  They most frequently used video as a means of examining society and questioning the role of media in our lives, assessing its effects on our understanding of time, distance and truth.  In many of these earlier works, the artists weren’t self consciously making art so much as making work that attempted to counter the overbearing presence of what were the dominant forms of media at the time.  The results were often charmingly direct and personal.  It was notable that many of the works were meant to be seen on a single monitor, or at least as a single moving image.  This was a time before the internet and cell phones, and before artists gained access to major funding and began making their work with large institutional spaces in mind.

As the show moves into the 2000s, there’s a noticeable growth in the scale of the works on view, with an element of self consciousness concerning their presence within the space more forcefully felt in the works themselves. As the show grew closer to our time, there was a corresponding growth in the percentage of works suffering from an overbearing presentation.  Many pieces felt burdensome to view with multiple screens or overly large projections and ancillary components crowding for attention.  Unfortunately, this expansiveness often served to diffuse the impact of the content of the works.  It was as if the artists were intending to overwhelm and dominate in whatever space they might be shown.  The quantity of production, seen and unseen, put me in mind of a quote I read recently attributed to Isabelle Graw, “What was once called the art business transformed itself into an ‘industry engaged in the production of visuality and meaning’”.

Despite what I have just written, in truth, there were a number of works in the show that were very engaging for both myself and the friend I was seeing the show with.

Midway through the show was a smallish room showing “The Excluded.  In a Moment of Danger” from 2014, by the Russian collective Chto Delat.  This is a four channel piece with sound.  The production values are excellent, yet the piece has a no nonsense, no frills quality to it.  In the front of the room there’s a large projection with another smaller projection on each side wall.  A monitor is situated next to the front projection, but low towards the floor.  The “piece” is a recording of the members of the collective performing before a camera(s).  The group members were exploring, through the performance, a range of personal responses to their overall predicament of living in a society with which they were in profound disagreement.  A society where disagreement is dangerous, isolating and illegal.  The performance, consisting of spoken and written text, and simple poses and vocalizations is highly nuanced and mesmerizing.  The three projections and the single screen never develop a presence of their own.  The large projection carries the overall performance, while the smaller ones, along with the screen, serve to create an intimacy between the performers and viewers.  The effect is so unobtrusive and beautiful that my friend and I found it hard to walk away from this piece.

In the final gallery was a projection by New Red Order titled “Culture Capture: Crimes against Reality” from 2020.  This is a very large single channel projection with sound.  New Red Order is a collaboration between three artists of indigenous heritage.  The piece was concerned with a few public monuments that embody generalized negative connotations about indigenous peoples.  The group took photos of the monuments and through sharp editing and computer animation, stripped them of their skin of hurtful meaning before transforming them into an entirely new energy.  Most of the imagery in the video is processed and manipulated, with even the sound track having an abstract quality to it.  The production values are quite crisp.  My friend has a basic understanding of some of the technology behind the images, and believed this work was a fairly straight forward affair.  He helped me to understand that the technology available today on cell phones and laptops makes it possible for three independent artists to make works such as this without needing to contract the services of a large production facility.  New Red Order’s piece didn’t feel quite as up close and personal as Chto Delat’s, but I did connect with it enough that it was hard to move away from it as well.

These two pieces weren’t the only standouts.  There were others, but the overall arc of the works in this show traveled from a beginning marked by earnestness and enthusiastic directness towards a contemporary form of techno baroque.

The accumulation of ever larger amounts of capital in the upper regions of society’s pyramid has changed many things, including in the art world. The spaces we have been building for art to be seen in and the needs of the capital that are behind them are putting a great amount of pressure on artists.

A number of the artworks in this show seem, in response to the demands and pressures of this new order, to have swollen out of proportion.  It generates a feeling of spectacle or of distancing brought about by an over produced and overbearing physical presence.  The physical manifestation of the work becomes a barrier between the viewer, the artist, and any organic intent on the part of the artist.  The relatively recent bending towards social media in video art, does lend a sense of intimacy, but due to the intermediation of the media itself it’s really an inversion of intimacy.

The world, the way we record imagery, and the way that imagery comes into our lives, have all come a long way in the last few decades.  I would never claim to have a comprehensive understanding of all these changes, and I’m something of a crank who has a very limited involvement with social media, and perhaps it was for these reasons, but it was reassuring to see the work of artists like Chto Delat and New Red Order in this show.  It helped to see that even with all the pressures and the technological advances, these artists retain an ability to connect with a viewer on a personal level, and that through them, our collective sense of self hasn’t yet gotten totally lost in the shuffle.

An Epiphany in Florence

A few years ago my wife and I visited the church of Orsanmichele in Florence.  We spent a long time there.  We did what we typically do in places like this.  We roamed around looking and taking things in until we lost all awareness of ourselves and the passing of time.  Eventually, I found myself sitting alone in front of the massive tabernacle designed by Andrea di Cione.  The tabernacle is an amazing structure, but it was the painting within it that held me transfixed.  The painting is of the Madonna and Christ child along with a host of angels.  It was painted by Bernardo Daddi in the mid 1300’s.  Normally, figures painted during this era have moved past gothic stylization, but for me, they often still retain enough gothic sensibility to keep me at a distance.  So, when I began looking at this painting, I felt appreciative but I kept my distance.  Soon though, feelings were aroused in me that were deeply uncomfortable.

The Madonna is holding the Christ child and looking out at you.  I mean that literally; it’s one of those paintings that gives the impression of the eyes being on you constantly no matter where you go.  The Madonna’s face is bathed in a warm glow from the reds and golds that surround her giving her a beatific mien.  Because of this, it's very easy while sitting in front of this work to feel that the mother of God cares for you personally.  That she cares for you as a spiritual mother would.  I began experiencing myself moving towards a sense of religious or spiritual community.  I sensed with great clarity that I was seeing this painting as someone who was alive in the fourteenth or fifteenth century would have seen it.  This feeling was strong, almost hallucinatory.

I saw that if I had been born in Florence during the late Medieval period or during the Renaissance and had worshiped in Orsanmichele, this painting of the Madonna, radiating motherly love, would have become a part of me.   For a few brief moments, I knew what it would be like to live within a shared, strong communal identity.  I was feeling with piercing clarity that I was a member of the Republic of Firenze, a Christian too, and inside the church of Orsanmichele was a symbol of the boundless, warm love I could always count on to be with me no matter where I might be.  This painting of the Madonna would literally be the center of my world. Wherever I went, my sense of place would on some level be realized as relational to that painting.  I realized too that I would not have been alone in this feeling of centeredness.  Other citizens of Florence, which was a political community set amongst a network of principalities, would have shared in this same type of communal reality for hundreds of years.  I was seeing how an image rooted in religious iconography could, through its embodiment of spiritual power, also become, for a majority of a populous, an anchor in the temporal world. I was awed.

However, it was not this sense of awe , but the realization that followed it which brought me to the very edge of tears.

What moved me to the verge of crying in public was how this experience highlighted a lack of this sort of centeredness in my own life.  This was not new to me.  I have felt this lack of centeredness in myself and my culture since my teenage years.  The existential shiver came from being brought to a place where I could experience the opposite condition through a painting of the Madonna.  An image rooted in a religious iconography to which I had not had a relationship or an attachment since I was a child.  Normally, in fact, I am repulsed by it. 

For the first ten years of my life my family lived in Queens Village, an area within the borough of Queens in New York City.  I went to a Catholic school, but my home and my sense of belonging was in the neighborhood my family lived in. It was a diverse neighborhood with a mix of white collar and working class people.  It wasn’t a perfect world.  Many families had their share of the social problems current in that era.  Yet, most of the neighbors knew each other intimately.  They shared cookouts in each other’s yards, helped each other with home repairs and child care.  All adults were potentially your parents or at least a pair of eyes that would tattle to your parents.  We children spent a majority of our time together engaged in games and imaginative play.  The physical space of the neighborhood was a shared reality for all of the adults and us children.  When we thought of home we thought of that space and understood it as being indivisible from the other people who we shared it with.

When I was ten years old, my family moved to a housing development out on Long Island.  Since it was a development, this was a space with very real physical dimensions, but there was no communal experience within that space.  For the adults, it was the place where you housed your family.  Even though most of our neighbors were living quite comfortably, the space that seemed to matter for them was a place where they exercised their energies in striving to “get ahead”.  Their involvement with the physical space of the neighborhood, the space their homes existed in, was very narrow and attenuated.  The children spent their time playing sports or being absorbed into consumerist culture.  Imaginative play was reduced to reliving and reviewing things everyone had seen on TV the evening before.

Needless to say, I hated Long Island and started traveling back into Queens as soon as I could.  By the age of fourteen I quit the Catholic church and started questioning and examining the alienating society I was stuck living beside.

Sometimes questioning and close examination can be an expression of subsumed yearning, but I have never yearned to join our consumerist culture.  I find it delusional and am glad to keep a distance from it.  Where though, am I, in relation to it?  Artists rarely, if ever, exist in their own self perpetuating world and in this sense I am not an exception.  Because my creative life is immersed in my physical existence my continually unresolved relationship with my own culture was always nibbling at the back of my consciousness.  It kept driving me to examine and reexamine the culture around me and caused me to experience my sense of otherness as a painful dislocation. 

The experience I had sitting in front of the painting of the Madonna made me see the lack of centeredness in myself and my culture anew.  It started the process of my moving from the worried awareness I’d carried with me for most of my life into one of acceptance of myself and the reality of the cultural existence that I lived in opposition to. I soon became able to embrace my otherness without the painful tinge of dislocation.

I’ve never believed that we are who we are as a society because we no longer embrace religion as the basis of our shared identity or because we don’t have a strong foundational myth.  I know that it simply isn’t possible for us to have this kind of shared iconic reality because our culture has been immersed in a tumbling state of change since the Renaissance.  Wit the acceleration this state of flux has been undergoing for the last one hundred and fifty years any sense of centeredness will, on a personal level, remain elusive and transitory and it will simply be impossible for a broad, general population to manifest or maintain it culturally.  Somehow, my experience in Orsanmichele freed me to finally accept this and embrace my life as an outsider living in relation to the dominant cultural narrative of my time.

The experience I had in front of the painting of the Madonna was, to me, an epiphany.  I was given the gift of becoming free from yearning.  Epiphany is a loaded word that probably makes a lot of people think of Catholicism, but for me, it has nothing to do with Catholicism or any other organized religion.  For me it connotes what was an unfiltered humanistically spiritual experience.

Painted Space

In art school my senior thesis was a series of paintings that I thought of as contemporary portraits of objects such as a chair, a potted plant, or a bunch of freshly picked spring flowers.  My idea for this project grew out of my job at an advertising agency where I was frequently sent out to photographers’ studios to pick up proofs and final prints for the ads we were working on.

The agency I worked at developed advertisements for print media.  Mostly these ads were for commercial telephone systems and early home computers.  Our work appeared in major metropolitan newspapers around the northeastern United States.  The photos we used in these ads always looked to me to be twentieth century versions of the premodern still-life and portrait paintings we had so often studied in art history class.  In the photography studio “subjects” were always posed on a seamless backdrop or in a light tent.  This resulted, in the finished photo, of the subject appearing to exist in a white void.  Much as in the paintings, there was always a ground plain indicated by cast shadows, sometimes along with another broad, faint, horizontal shadow indicative of a horizon line. This led me to see the silky white void in the photos as a corollary to the fields of scumbled browns and grays in the paintings.

In the paintings I made for my thesis show, the white void became a field of color.  I took most of the colors I used from paintings by Fairfield Porter.  I was also mimicking Fairfield’s manner throughout these works, so the paint was stroked on and runny; there was no scumbling.

This series of paintings ended with the completion of my thesis.  Afterwards, I was unable to reenter or build out from this work because there was a gap in it that I could feel but not articulate.  The fault was not in my idea or in the manner I was trying to manifest it.  It was that I did not have an understanding of, or sensitivity to, the kinds of space I was working with.  I was mashing together the look of a contemporary advertisement with the look of a painted portrait from another era, while remaining ignorant of the spatial tension inherent in the collision of these two modes of representation.

As with most everyone in my generation, I grew up inundated with advertisements.  Often they had a subtle aggressiveness and they exerted a pressure on the development of my visual intelligence and sensitivity.  For me, the structure and mechanics of advertisements somehow became part of my natural environment.  I didn’t think about or question them any more than I would question why trees were green or why when you look out over a landscape the blue of the sky comes all the way down to the horizon.  The physical world is, for us, much like our bodies, always and forever existing.  Whenever we open our eyes or tune in to one of our other senses, we are simultaneously aware of our physical being and the space around us.  Advertisements and the mechanics of mediation are not like this; their reality is imprinted on us and reinforced through constant repetition. 

Having grown up this way I could not see the difference between the space in a painting and the space in a photo made for an advertisement.  In reality the space in the photos, the white void, was so lacking in context that your scope of possible involvement was reduced to a minimum.  You could get a sense of the physical presence of the subject, you could admire it, fantasize about it, and eventually lust for and desire it.  These kinds of interactions can be intense, but they are almost always short in duration.  The space that has been constructed around the subject has the shallow physicality of illustration, but it is not a humane space.  You can’t linger in such a space because there is no room in it for you to inhabit.  There is no center to this space; it’s existence pulls on your psyche, willing you to project something onto it.  This situation is exacerbated by the mechanics of photography and print media which together can abstract all sense of human involvement to near invisibility.

The space in a portrait or still-life painted before the modern era exists in a way that is the polar opposite of this.  I’m thinking, for the most direct comparison, of paintings with umber and grey paint scumbled across all the parts of a canvas not taken up by the subject.  There is usually a cast shadow, and sometimes a hint of an architectural detail like a base board, a doorway or the edge of a table top.  Even with these intimations of a physical, domestic environment, the space in these paintings almost always remains amorphous.

Sometimes this technique is nothing more than an acceptable way for an artist to fill up all the canvas left over once they had finished depicting their chosen subject.  However, with an artist like Manet, this seemingly simple technique comes to life.  The grey and umber paint grow in depth and come to embody a space that is more sensed or felt by a viewer than it is delineated by the artist.  Manet created, with this technique, a space that wasn’t simply dimensional, seductive or declarative; it was expansive and effervescent, it anticipated you the viewer; it left room for you to enter it imaginatively and it encouraged empathy.  I think this is one of the reasons why today, we can still identify personally with so many of the subjects in Manet’s paintings.  The young woman posed with a parrot, a loaf of bread, a bunch of asparagus all live in a space that is painted, that exists in the paint of the painting, not in any particular period of time.  This kind of space is experiential and emotional.  It can not be explained technically or deduced.  In this way it’s similar to the sense of scale a work projects.  There is no formula for achieving it; there isn’t any technique that guarantees access to this kind of space, it simply has to come from the artist’s center.

It took a long time and a lot of looking for me to get past my own visual upbringing and become sensitive to the kind of space I’ve been trying to describe.  I’m a painter, painting is the medium that I see and think in so, naturally, it took even longer for me to learn to see into other mediums.  I know there are artists who are perpetually at odds with contemporary art. They are repulsed by its engagement with our mediated environment.  Through them, the question arises of whether or not contemporary art is capable of fostering the kind of space I have been championing here.  

Social media and the mediation of so many aspects of our public and private environment have already changed the nature of both our public and private discourses; it is bound to also change our relationship with art.  I think of myself as a contemporary artist and believe that so far contemporary art can still have this kind of space in it.  I also feel It’s possible that at some time in the future this kind of space will morph into something that can not be reached or encountered, in the plastic arts, through the human touch.

Seeing this space as it exists now, within the jumble of media we live in, is something I will have to turn to in another essay or essays.

Vija Celmins at the Met Breuer

Even though her work is admirable in sustaining such a high level of focus and skill through such a long career, I’ve never been a fan of Vija Celmins.  Walking into a room full of paintings depicting the ripply surface of water over and over would make me want to run for the door.

This show has started the process of changing that.  Her early paintings of simple objects suspended in a painted space, possibly derived from Manet or Velasquez, pulled me in.  These pieces were the work of an artist who felt the need to find a way to make paintings outside of the options available to her at the time.  Instead, she searched in a frank manner for a place of beginning and from there she moved forward, working diligently and earnestly, letting her intellect and her natural inclinations guide her.

Ultimately, Ms. Celmins focused on making images that are derived from photographs.  All of the resulting works are deeply involved in the specifics of what was depicted in the original photograph.  Simultaneously, she is intensely involved, in each piece, with the specific demands of her medium of choice for the piece and the qualities of that piece’s finished surface.  The existence of the original photograph seems more of an artifact of the process than a notable element in the finished work.

This might be how she has always managed to keep a comfortable distance between her work and hyper or photorealism.  It would also seem that her involvement in the physical processes involved in the making of each individual piece leaves little room in her oeuvre for examining the nature of photography or the roll photography plays in our social discourse.

Rather, she seems to have cultivated a deep meditative involvement with both her working process and the material she is sourcing through photographs.  When first looking at one of her works one is sure to be taken with its verisimilitude.  You might even feel that you’re looking at a particularly good piece of hyper realist work.  But, draw close to a hyper or photorealist work, and the illusion quickly falls apart.  Most usually you’re left looking at the mechanics of painting, like a wonderful meal broken down into piles of various ingredients on a plate.  With Ms. Celmins’ works, a closer look dissolves the illusion so you can look through to a wonderfully drawn or painted surface where the flow of the medium is not interrupted by the needs of the illusion.  I think this is a result of her meditative manner.  These paintings are not making a point or about  simple visual thrills; they are a means of being.  They are whole and complete within themselves, no matter what distance you stand from them.