Spanning Time:
A conversation with Uta Barth
Uta Barth, Untitled (Ground Nr. 9)
1992-93, Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
In terms of
contemporary photography, Uta Barth occupies a unique artistic position.
The photographer’s often blurry images of trees, streets, and empty spaces
are less concerned about documenting her environment or saying something
about herself. On the contrary: Barth eliminates every clear hint that
could relate something about the theme or story of her photographs.
Instead, she poses a far greater challenge to herself in truly attempting
to see. Cheryl Kaplan spoke to the Los Angeles-based photographer
about her work.
Uta Barth, Untitled (02.12), 2002,
Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
In the film
Buffalo 66, the actor
Vincent Gallo has just left prison. We see him hopping a bus, then looking
out a window. Before we know it, he’s sitting behind the wheel of someone
else’s car in a parking lot, not moving. Minutes go by like hours… even
the girl sitting next to him wants to know what he’s doing. At last he
snaps: "I’m spanning time, just spanning time."
Uta Barth, Untitled (00.1), 2000
Deutsche Bank Collection
"Staggered and
discontinuous time" starts and stops in
Uta Barth’s photographs. She splendidly isolates the familiar and
then re-activates what’s been set apart through photographic sequences.
Images add up and diminish, forming trial separations that are at times
diagrammatic, at times scaled to catch a sideways glance.
|
Unlike film and most photography, Barth purposefully
eliminates as many references to the world as possible. Most discussions
of her work have been about her blurry images, but there’s a lot more to
it. Barth’s work is not about photographic style. Her interest in
"unmotivated or undirected looking" is plainly the opposite of the
constructed or staged narratives made famous by
Jeff Wall and
Sam Taylor Wood. Oddly, narrative in photography has often reinforced the
medium’s dependence on realism and the social. A dependence that might be
linked to the public’s experience of photojournalism, the personal
snapshot, and the need to indicate one’s place in the world.
Uta Barth, Untitled(aot 4)
from the
series "....and of time", 2000,
Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
Barth asks: "Do you think
we can only know things by comparing them to other things?" Her question
strikes at one of photography’s long-standing conflicts: its ability to
transcribe reality. Encouraging the viewer’s instinct to slowly and
steadily look, Barth escalates the viewer’s relationship to the external
world often by depriving the viewer of the things they look for first:
objects and identifiable locations and the tell-tale signs of the author.
Her interior shots have the feeling of an exterior world and her shots of
landscapes are viscerally internal. What’s normally felt as public
gradually deteriorates into the private, and what’s normally felt as
private equally re-organizes itself to be felt more publicly.
Barth
allows the viewer to idle. It is in this idling that intimacy unfolds
along with a way of looking that lets you span time.
Uta Barth was
born in Germany and grew up in California. Her works have been shown at
the Guggenheim
Museum in New York, the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the
Tate Modern in London. One of her works from the Deutsche Bank Collection
can also be seen at the bank’s London headquarters. She has been teaching
at the University of California in
Riverside for the past 18 years.
Uta Barth, Untitled (aot 1),from the series "...and of time", 2000,
Courtesy Uta Barth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
ACME, Los Angeles
Cheryl Kaplan:
Why is anonymity important in your photographs?
Uta Barth:
Well, I don’t want the work to be about me, so I carefully edit out
autobiographical information. In 1998 I made a decision to only make
photographs in my house because I wanted to find another way to empty the
subject out of my images, to separate meaning and subject. Seeking
something to photograph made no sense anymore, but I still had to point
the camera somewhere, so I point it at what’s familiar and everyday that
it’s almost invisible. I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so
hard to erase.
[1]
[2]
[3]
|
