Uta Barth, Untitled (aot 2), from the
series "...and of time", 2000
Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
That means slowly
re-training the public.
By photographing what’s invisible to
me, and repeating it endlessly, hopefully it becomes clear that something
else might be happening other than describing my home. I point the camera
at things I stare at day after day while talking on the phone, sitting
around, or waking up. When editing negatives for a show, I take out
anything with "stuff" in it, because it instantly grabs attention. Shoes
on the floor, clothes, letters and objects on my desk immediately
construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it:
I’m the subject. So, I diligently erase myself from the work.
I’m reminded of
Rauschenberg’s famous drawing
"Erased de Kooning". Despite Rauschenberg’s erasure of
de Kooning’s drawing, its ghost is still there.
(Laughing) Nothing asserts the de Kooning more than the act of erasing
it.
Your work contains a removal before it’s even shot.
The images from Ground are based on conventions of portraiture. I was
interested in how background information provides the context for thinking
about the person in the photograph and I wanted to look just at that. The
background is carefully chosen to tell us something about the sitter. Look
at portraits of authors on dustcover jackets. If they’re men, most likely
they’re sitting in front of a bookshelf. This assures us they’re smart.
I’m not interested in the idea of absence; I’m interested in the container
left behind.
Uta Barth, Ground Nr. 41, 1994,
Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
When did you first form
your concept of looking?
In the late 80s I began making work
that named vision as its primary content. They were compilations of images
about looking and being looked at, surveillance and interrogation images
that rendered vision as invasive. To break up or collapse a potential
narrative, they were paired with painted
Op Art graphics. The patterns made it hard to focus and created visceral
optical effects. I wanted you to become self-conscious of the activity of
looking. The first out-of-focus images I made were part of these
configurations. They were an attempt to create a similar, yet opposite
optical problem.
Your work challenges the
viewer’s rote response to photography as either documentation and evidence
or a moment of beauty.
I try to not give most of the things
expected of a photograph. It leaves people a bit confused when they first
encounter the work, and interesting things happen in the process of
figuring them out.
Uta Barth, Ground Nr. 47, 1994, Courtesy Uta Barth,
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, ACME, Los Angeles
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Uta Barth, Untitled Nr. 1,(detail) 1989
Why has photography been consumed with the subject as opposed to looking?
Greenberg’s modernism asks each medium to embrace its most inherent
characteristics; for painting it’s flatness. I think
MoMA asserted that photography’s essential characteristic should be its
ability to describe the world. They embraced social documentary as
photography’s primary vehicle. Since MoMA was the first American museum to
have a photography department, art-photography here has largely been
defined by their terms. In Europe, the medium’s task is typology. You can
see it in the
Dusseldorf School. But to me both of those positions feel so
claustrophobic.
Uta Barth, Untitled (06.4), 2005,
Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
Your most recent series
contains images of a flower. What is the flower series based on?
A passage in a
John Berger novel that’s stuck with me for twenty years about looking at a
glass of lilacs on a mantel. He’s puzzling out what he’s seeing: the light
and reflection in a mirror, trying to figure out an illusion and sorting
it out step by step. The flower series was a bit scary. It’s the first
body of work in 15 years with a central subject and it’s not just any
subject, but a completely clichéd and culturally trampled one. To me the
images are about light and time. They’re some of the slowest images I’ve
ever made. Hopefully, no one will believe them to be a reverie about
flowers.
Uta Barth, Untitled (02.5), 2002,
Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
How do you choose and
develop the sequences?
The structure of white blind (bright
red) is to move from the objective view of the outside world through
the deterioration of subjective after-images or retinal fatigue and then
to return again to the straight view out the window. It’s what you see
with your eyes open and then closed. Every sequence returns to an image
almost identical to its start, the whole piece wraps around the room as a
continuous loop. Frontal or isolated presentation doesn’t make sense for
someone interested in peripheral vision. The piece I’m currently working
on is an inverse of that. Virtually all of the images in the piece are
what happens with your eyes closed and sequences are only occasionally
interrupted by a “straight” view.
When was the first
time you used peripheral vision?
In the Untitled series
from 1998. These images were made whenever something would catch my
attention and make me turn to look back. The pieces were structured as
double-takes, that’s how the diptychs came about. The decision to
photograph in the house is also about peripheral and ambient vision, which
is another way to think about the
figure/ground relationship; there’s no focal point.
The
color in your photographs is often highly saturated or pumped up, like in
cinemascope film. Especially recently, your colors have become even more
searing.
Those images are pretty much blood red and reenact
optical after-images seen after staring into the light. At first, you’re
still registering the blood through your eyelids and everything is a flash
of red. After a few moments, the after-image becomes the opposite color of
what you’ve looked at. The color receptors in your eyes have been
exhausted by prolonged overexposure to one color. Color in this work is
not really made up, it’s given to me by the view and my interest in
blinding bright light.
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