A Place By Any Other Name: “Regarding Place” and “Power and Place”
By Mason Riddle
In a pair of discrete but related exhibitions the idea of place is explored, stretched, even pulled into unconventional territories by eight artists working in film, video and photography. However, here, place is explored less from a Jeffersonian ‘genus loci’ perspective, and more examined under a microscope to identify its physical, psychological, and existential reach, its malleable limits with regard to fact and memory, its shape-shifting abilities, and its uneasy relationship to language. What is it that place can be? In the eight-artist exhibition “Regarding Place” and “Paul Shambroom: Power and Place,” place is rarely a specific construction or a geographical location, but more a conceptual crossroads where landscape, human activity and language, layer-up, slide past each other, and sometimes collide.
Over three decades Shambroom has built a meticulous practice photographing sites of power ranging from small town hall meetings to corporate office towers to nuclear weapon sites. “Power and Place” features pigmented ink-jet prints culled from three series: Shrines: Public Weapons in America, his most recent; U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve; and a nine image-composite from his Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) project.
Characterized by his trademark uninflected style, the Shrines series documents decommissioned military machinery ranging from Civil War cannons and WWII battleships to nimble fighter jets and phallic defense missiles pointing to the sky. All have a new lease on life as public symbols of reverence, victory, and meaning, if not objects of affection, in groomed small town parks, on the lawns of American Legion Posts, and as roadside markers. Prominently displayed in tidy settings, these former death-wreaking objects rest peacefully, their original function and story blurred. In one image, a bride straddles the long steel gun of a Walker Bulldog Tank decommissioned to Cantigny Park, Wheaton, Illinois, while husband and wedding party look on. The gun of a tank is no longer a deterrent, apparently, to anything. Does the bride know what she is doing? Of course she does. But that is the point of Shrines; these objects of war have been re-purposed as decoration or entertainment—a certain breed of public sculpture—part of manicured landscapes where they are the antithesis of war. Yet they contain political and historical meaning. They perch in places of artifice, not combat, silenced as lobotomized hulks, respected and understood by few as former defenders of freedom and democracy.
Shambroom’s inkjet images of U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve sites in languid backwaters and rural areas of Louisiana and Texas are lyrical if not uneventful landscapes defined by low horizons, electrical towers, and shed-like structures. The artist’s scenic big skies with billowy clouds are reminiscent of the genre of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. Ostensibly these are places of ordinariness, yet they are the singular sign of the United States’ massive below ground reserves that store some 700 million gallons of refined oil—some 59 days of backup. Like the Shrines images, these expose a place whose public narrative is built on a set of contradictions that extend far beyond the physical place itself. Similarly, Shambroom’s ICBM images throw into high relief the disconnect between the power of belowground nuclear warhead missiles and the unsensational landscape above, places made even more unremarkable by signage consisting of only a concrete slab and chain-link fence.
A more personal, even idiosyncratic idea of place is on view at “Regarding Place,” first organized for a 2011 exhibition in Turku, Finland, and modestly reconfigured for its Nash Gallery venue. The show features work by photographers Jan Estep and Jim Henkel, University of Minnesota studio arts faculty, graduate students Erin Hernsberger, Sam Hoolihan, Andy Mattern, Stefanie Motta, and Areca Roe, and photographer Justin Newhall.
Hernsberger presents a large-scale color triptych, titled #1,2,3 (all flesh is grass), a macro look at a micro world. What could be an aerial photograph of desolate terrain is, in fact, a close view of decaying fruit. Like a 21st-century Paul Strand, Hernsberger depicts a textured landscape evocative of the body, fluids, and flesh. Far more literal is Hoolihan’s Super 8 Film (transferred to video) titled Building a New Relationship with the Sun, where the many days’ work necessary to build a garden and geodesic-like dome on an empty lawn between two university buildings is condensed into a 7-minute video. While depicting the construction of a literal place, Building also conveys the enthusiastic and psychological place of being a student, of learning and making things. Mattern’s four large color images of bathrooms, ranging from filthy to neat, document a place of personal habits, traces of hygiene routines that collectively create an urban archeology of the human body and its need to groom.
In her three color portraits of women and girls, Motta creates a palpable psychological place. Winter, her photograph of a rosy-cheeked girl standing in a snow-covered field under grey skies, is mysteriously poetic, inviting the viewer to create a narrative about the physical and psychological dimensions of this place, one that is empty and seemingly infinite. By comparison, Roe’s color images depict places of great artifice—zoos in San Francisco and elsewhere. With a deadpan gaze, her work exposes the irony of such places that strive to preserve the natural world in places that are terribly unnatural. Most disturbing, in spite of its strange beauty, is an image taken at the Brownsville Zoo in Texas of a small, lone monkey sitting on a branch in a room covered with wallpaper printed like jungle foliage, as if a bedroom.
Newhall’s boxed set of ten images interprets a place from an uncommon perspective. Newhall found a box of nearly 100 pornographic images, wrapped in plastic, yet nonetheless degraded from exposure in the foundation of one abandoned structure in a housing project in Churchill, Manitoba, where the indigenous Saysi Dene were relocated in 1967 by the Canadian government and where more than a third of the population had died by the early 1980s. He rephotographed the images on site with a large format camera and then returned them to their resting place. The barely discernible, ghost-like images are unsettling and establish a psychological, even dangerous place that no longer exists. Newhall’s notion of place is uneasy, shifting as we try to frame it and ask what it means. As the government owned Churchill, and thus the Saysi Dene, were the women in these images owned by others as well?
In three black and white photographs, Jim Henkel explores Gettysburg Battlefield memorials and gravestones, one of a Minnesota infantryman. Shot from a short distance, the images reveal only cut-off rows of text that function in their incompleteness as code for a Civil War soldier’s identity, which battles he fought and lost. These small slabs of textured stone or metal marked by truncated sentences recall modern-day steles of the ancient world, with their rows of indecipherable hieroglyphics. Through the sparest of means, Henkel has constructed a cryptic place with few openings to enter, one where the viewer imagines-in details the best he/she can. In a second series, Henkel photographed salvaged Mylar rolls scribbled with text and signs that were once used in overhead projectors to illustrate college class lectures. Like Duchampian found objects, these rolls convey an abstract conceptual space, one formed by knowledge and ideas that would travel through space above students’ heads to find a visceral presence on the wall beyond. Almost more absent than present, these images yet convey a tangible beauty in their linguistic presence.
In the video Beneath the surface (of language), Jan Estep explores the relationship of language to place and image-making. The mesmerizing work layers a voiceover narrative over footage filmed on location in the high-desert salt flats of Wendover, Utah, near the far western border with Nevada. During the 20-minute piece, which unemotionally depicts a barren landscape hosting only a military airfield, maintenance vehicles, and barking dogs, Estep narrates a complex set of ideas regarding language’s ability to define, convey, and elucidate a sense of place. We also hear the noise of the heavy vehicles and barking dogs. In the process, Estep channels examples of the land art of Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, John Baldessari, and Francis Alÿs to clarify her ideas to lyrical and compelling results. With the eye of a minimalist, Estep has created a haunting piece, a visual landscape contained by a philosophical dilemma. There is no protagonist, no winner or loser, simply what exists and what we are to make of it. The video is a companion piece to an illustrated map Beneath the surface (of language), Silver Island Mountain Byway, Wendover, Utah, USA, which doubles as an ordinary roadmap bearing the voiceover narrative as written text.
By projecting two short, time-lapsed videos, On Certainty, 2010, and On Certainty, Take Two, 2011, on opposite walls, Estep created a narrow, confined place for the viewer. On Certainty records a casually dressed Estep writing a philosophical joke in large letters on a blank white wall. Sounds of birdcalls and the forest are played on overhead audio. She writes, “I am sitting with a philosopher in a garden …” As Estep explains, the words continue to describe someone transfixed by a tree, wondering if it is real. This skepticism establishes a mental and emotional space that is strange to the passerby. The viewer also feels disconnected by the delay, anticipating the flow of words written out by hand. The text is excerpted from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book, On Certainty. The related video On Certainty, Take Two records Estep writing another narrative about a meeting with a Buddhist monk, who offers a very different perspective of the problem of naming and certainty. The text written out by Estep was adapted from Pema Chadron’s book, Start Where You Are. As a pair, the two are subtle investigations of language’s ability to describe activity and place and relate meaning.
Estep’s are curious, provocative, even beautiful videos that through their economy of means create a small universe, a safe place in which to contemplate the relationship of language to the world, how language may or may not create or signify place. Estep suggests that, possibly, language can be perceived as a material object. Language is abstract yet, as Estep fleshes out, we continually tie it to the physical landscape. As an heir to the land artists before her, Estep buried in the earth a handwritten version of her narrative for Beneath the surface (of language), along the Silver Island Mountain byway. Just as it should be.
To simplify is dangerous, but the artists in “Regarding Place” and “Power and Place” pose a series of related questions. Does the idea or the memory of a place change which words are chosen to describe it? Can language ever accurately describe a place or, to understand a place, does one need visual information or actual experience? Is place intuitive? And, perhaps most importantly with regard to these shows, can two-dimensional images fully describe an abstract or three-dimensional place, or is language necessary?
Image List
1) Andy Mattern, Tub With Dawn. 2010. Pigment inkjet print.
2) Jim Henkel, Micro Serum. 2011. Pigment inkjet print.
3) Jim Henkel, Enrollment. 2010. Pigment inkjet print.
4) Stefanie Motta. Winter. 2009. Inkjet Print.
5) Areca Roe, Gladys Porter Zoo, Brownsville, Texas #3. 2010. Archival inkjet print.
6) Areca Roe, Budapest Zoo, Hungary #2. 2010. Archival inkjet print.
7) Paul Shambroom. 240.5 Million Barrels, Bryan Mound, Texas, 2008. Pigmented inkjet on paper.
8) Jan Estep, Beneath the surface (of language), 2011. Single-channel video with audio. Duration: 20 minutes.
9) Jan Estep. On Certainty, Take Two, 2011. Single-channel video. Duration: 4:33 minutes.
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