THE JOYS OF RE-ASSIGNMENT
All Roads Lead To, 2025
By MICHAEL PERKINS
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S UBIQUITOUS AND EXHAUSTING USE OF THE TERM “ABSTRACT”, especially in artistic circles, took a word which should have been as precise as a scalpel and hammered it flatter than a cow chip. Anything in a painting, a photograph, a piece of music or a work of literature that didn’t adhere readily to easy definition or analysis was bumper- stickered with the word, as if that alone settled the argument. Lazy beings that we are, we can’t relegate an unknown thing to a handy drawer or convenient category fast enough, and so, Picasso was “abstract”, Joyce’s Ulysses was “abstract”. If I had boysenberries on my corn flakes instead of bananas, I was now eating an “abstract” breakfast.
I myself don’t use the word often, at least as an adjective, but I do appreciate its use, in photography and the other arts, as a verb. To abstract something means, then, to take something out…out of its original context or use. All objects that we see in life are more or less assigned to be seen/used in context with something else. A wheelbarrow looks “correct” when it’s standing next to a hoe or a shovel or a barn. A piece of fruit looks “right” when arranged with other fruit in a bowl. Taking those objects and abstracting them, then, frees them from how we’re accustomed to seeing them, and forces us to assign all-new values to them, something that truly frees the interpretive artist. Now the thing is exclusively what we say it is. Exciting.
The fruit bowl in our previous paragraph is worth further examination. 20th-century art movements took explosive aim at the classic still life, deliberately tearing it loose from the several centuries of examples of its place in visual art. The results could be disorienting, but these revisualizations in both painting and photography led us to revere design and composition as absolutes, and to recognize in objects only the values we personally gave them, blasting away our habitual conceptions of them. A seashell became a dissertation of geometric design. A nude became, in some artists’ hands, another kind of seashell. And so on. There are many questions that rattle around inside a photographer’s brain both before and after the shutter click. What am I looking at? What am I supposed to see? What do I want to say about it? Do I leave it undisturbed or try some mischief with it? What do I want others to see? As in everything else in visual art, you get the best answers when you pose the best questions. Cameras are already abstracting the world, extracting a part or an aspect of it to create an impression. It’s really just about how far you push that process.
NEW ANGELS
Current, a rope and cord art installation in Columbus, Ohio, created by “fiber artist” Janet Echelman
By MICHAEL PERKINS
FOR ME, ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING TRENDS IN URBAN DESIGN, in the twenty-first century, is not the latest generation of skyscrapers or town plazas, but a bold new redefinition of the concept of public art. Where once it was sufficient to plop down a statute of some wartime general near the county courthouse, commissioned works now make mere sculpture look as primitive as cave paintings. We have evolved past the commemorative earthbound seraphim that once graced our parks, to flights of fancy that connect and shimmer from the air. It is an age of New Angels, and Janet Echelman is one of its patron saints.
Echelman, a Guggenheim fellow and Harvard graduate, who refers to herself as a “fiber artist”, is, in fact, an altogether new kind of sculptor. Instead of being grounded on pedestals, her arrangements of shimmering color, created by mixtures of fiber, netting and rope, hang in suspension over cityscapes like vast spider webs, refracting the rainbow and generating waves of shifting hues depending on changes in sunlight, wind or the angle of view. Some of her creations are billowing circles and cones that resemble a whirlwind of cyclone; others look like sky-bound rivers, curling and twisting into tributaries of red and blue. Each is uniquely tailored to its specific location in cities like San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, and a half-dozen other cities around the world. They are, simply, magnificent, and the best challenge for any photographer, since they appear vastly different under varying conditions.
I first saw one of her works while working at Arizona State University, where Her Secret Is Patience floats like a phantom hot air balloon near the school’s Cronkite School of Journalism. And just this spring, I was thrilled to see her first work to be floated over an entire intersection, 2023’s Current, which spreads across the meeting of High and Gay Streets in Columbus, Ohio, anchored to the tops of buildings at the crossing’s four corners. Commissioned by a local real estate developer as a kind of front porch for his refurbished bank building (now housing deluxe condos), Current can be seen from any approach within a four-block distance of the area, an irresistible advertisement for the regentrification of the neighborhood. Janet Echelman is but one voice in a rising chorus that demands that public art re-define itself for a new age. That age will not only withstand controversy but actively court it, just as any art, including photography, needs to do.
CHECK THOSE ABS
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT SEEMS ODD to hear someone refer to part of their photographic output as “abstract”…..as if the rest of their work somehow isn’t. I guess it depends on what you believe the word ” abstract” means, as well as what is meant by other words like, say, “reality”. For me , the whole discussion seems overthought. To my mind, all photography, all art is “abstract”.
To abstract something is to extract it from its original context, to re-frame it, take it from one form and paste it into another. And there is no way not to do that with a photograph. We don’t show reality. We show shards, fragments, selectively sliced slivers of time. Even if we take great care to take a no-frills, documentary approach to the recording of an image, once we click the shutter, we have abstracted that moment from reality, making an editorial choice to pluck away this instant versus all others.
One way to illustrate this process is to consider the image at the top of the page, which represents a virtually endless chain of abstraction. Thinking backwards from this photo of a museum exhibit:
In the beginning, God creates man, an abstraction of himself. Then Michelangelo creates an abstraction of God (and a lot of other Biblical superstars) by depicting Him in the act of creation, even as he (the painter) is also abstracting representations of the Creator’s creatures. Centuries later, art historians take selective pictures of Michelangelo’s massive abstractions on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, abstracting them further by using selected excerpts as book illustrations. Inspired by those books, curators in Manhattan create an exhibit honoring Michelangelo’s ceiling by reproducing it as a miniature, assembling a replica composed of dozens of backlit transparencies suspended over guests at the Metropolitan museum in an artificial abstraction of the original Sistine frescoes. Finally, using a selective-focus art lens in 2017, I abstract those same guests to blobby smears of color and make editorial choices about which single panel in the faux-ceiling exhibit to shoot in sharp focus, thus hinting that it’s somehow more important than all the others.
Photographs snatch away parts of the real. To use a camera is to abstract that reality. Every snap of the shutter is a calculation of choice. Therefore choose wisely.
thenormaleye 