terrain: material

Here's Ed Moses in a recent L. A. Weekly:

"I'd like to make it very clear that I'm not creative and I'm not trying to express myself. I'm an explorer, I'm trying to discover things, discover the phenomenal world by examining it, by looking at it, by playing with the materiality, pushing it around, shoving it, throwing it in the air."

The idea that making art is a process of interacting with materials is hardly new, but it provides us with yet another way in which painting and photography are operating in the same space these days. As writers on photography have begun to point out, and as I've already discussed in earlier posts, photographers are conceiving of their works as physical objects just as painters have been doing for decades; and they are reacting to this physicality in ways that loosely parallel what painters have done before them. Mariah Robertson, for example, cuts her pictures into oblong trapezoids and lets them fall loosely within the confines of a box frame. It would probably be going too far to describe them as oddly shaped pieces of paper that just happen to have an image on one side--though one certainly feels the temptation to do so. In another example, Soo Kim handcuts her representational C-Prints and allows the trimmed pieces, still attached to the image surface like tabs, to curl delicately forward into the space of the viewer. As these artists demonstrate, the traditional view of the photographic image as a window onto the world, and of the photographic surface as the transparent vehicle for this image, is being contested in all sorts of ways; at the furthest end, it is being abandoned.

Marco Breuer is another of these photographers who directly engage the work as an object. But not just another: In fact he is a pioneer in the methodology of intervention, and has employed its logic more radically and single-mindedly than the artists I've already mentioned. Yet when one comes face to face with his work, it is often hard to see what he has done; in reproduction, it is next to impossible. This paradox is an effect of the radicality of his procedures. Whereas Kim or Robertson begin by making an image, and then come at the paper support as an object to be manipulated after the fact, Breuer uses physical intervention to create an image in the first place. He attacks photographic paper in various ways--by scratching it, abrading it, even dropping lit matches or sparklers onto it--before there is anything pictured on the surface. These physical acts themselves, in addition to light and chemistry, originate what we see. More than any other artist working today, Breuer engages the physical surface of his photographs, and by doing so forces his audience to confront the reality of what we are experiencing: a piece of paper that just happens to have an image on one side.

marco breuer

untitled (tip), 2000, gelatin silver print