Robert Smithson – Hotel Palenque
The most important – to me at least – exhibit I saw in Baltimore last week was one I wasn’t able to get enough time to explore fully, entering as I did without much expectation just an hour before the museum was about to close. The Slide Show is something of a history of slide projection installations as they have existed in art & museum spaces over the past half century. With Kodak discontinuing the production of its last slide projector last year, the definition & future of this medium has become problematic.
That is, if one’s definition of the slide show is predicated upon physical slides placed into a carousel, which may or may not rotate, which may or may not be combined with an accompanying audio track, & whose projected image may or may not be overlaid with another, ranging from a silhouette on the wall to multiple slide projections upon the same white space.
The show itself could only be characterized as a warren of such displays – one enters & is soon wandering almost completely disoriented betwixt Robert Smithson’s coy narrative accompanying slides of the crumbling Hotel Palenque, Ana Mendieta dragging her blood covered hands down a white sheet, photographs from Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, or the hysterically dry wit of James Coleman “analyzing” (or, perhaps, “analysing”) frame after identical frame of the same photograph of a busy intersection, a photograph noteworthy for its lack of a clearly defined focal object. I don’t even recall Ceal Floyer’s projection of “pure” light through a projector whose carousel was empty, but it’s in the catalog, so it must have struck me as “between” images, which is indeed how several of these works felt as I wandered rather too quickly (with two teenage boys) through 20 or so interconnecting darkened rooms that proceed in not always obvious directions. There were works that merely presented the medium of the photograph, others that documented actions¹, still others that were works in themselves & finally those that, like Coleman’s dissertation on the process of seeing, commented on the process of the slide show itself – it didn’t have to click through the carousel to the same exact image, over & over, but that’s what it did. During the evening rush hour, Louise Lawler’s External Stimulation is projected – billboard sized – on the exterior of the museum. This, however, I did not get to see, even though we departed precisely into the evening commute. What is visible on the sidewalk in front of the wall is an encased box, podium high, outside of the building, housing the projector itself.² One might recognize this as sculpture, minimalist & brutal.
In a sense, The Slide Show really is an elegy to the slide projector – the catalog even has a special section on the machine, with eight pictured examples ranging from the “lantern slide” projectors of the 1870s to the recently discontinued Kodak Ektagraphic, which standardized the 80-slide carousel. But just as writing did not come to a halt when IBM discontinued manufacturing typewriters – the division was spun off & exists now as the printer company, Lexmark – there is functionally nothing inherent in the Ektagraphic that cannot be accomplished with today’s computer projectors. The only function that implicitly disappears is the irritating auditory click between slides – an element that only James Coleman actually did anything with in the examples I’ve cited here. In spite of the tone, one suspects that the projected installation is really still in its infancy as a form.
So it’s not really clear what is being celebrated. Unlike a show of, say, nudes or even paintings in monochromatic tones, there is very little that these artists have in common save their employment of this device, which can range in its contribution to the overall work from marginal & almost accidental to being the focal point of it all. The painful earnestness of Mendieta’s work contrasts sharply with Coleman’s deadpan irony which has more in common with the comedy of Andy Kaufman.
Which in turn points up an inherent issue within the conceptually oriented community that is drawn to the idea of installations in the first place – there is surprisingly little in the way of a common aesthetic palette or shared discourse. The feeling one gets is that this must be a community that is terrific at talking, but which is full of terrible listeners. Very little actually builds. One could argue of course that there are ways in which some of these artists do connect – that one could draw a line between the off-centered photojournalism of Nan Goldin & her influences (Weegee, Robert Frank or Diane Arbus), as well as her contemporaries, Larry Clark & Araki Nobuyoshi. But that’s not the tale told here – the closest we’re allowed to get is Helen Levitt’s warm pictures of urban scenes & Jack Smith’s overlit drag queens.
Even if individual works of art attempt to thwart narrative, exhibitions never can – The Slide Show makes a vain attempt in setting up its world in a confusing this-way/that-way kind of path. It’s a bit like a maze, but not a terribly serious one: the curators want you to see all the work. What they don’t seem to want to do is make a strong argument for the form. The closest they get is something along the lines of Well, the first people to use slides just did, employing them instrumentally, while later on people started to notice the tool itself, which led to metacommentary & a more painterly formalism. Yet the most striking instance of the latter is Jan Dibbets’ Land/Sea, a series linked images forming a broad panorama, half being a beach scene, half a meadow – and this is one of the earlier works in the show, dating back to the early 1970s.
Yet it’s exactly the show’s confusions that made me think of this exhibition as important. The curators haven’t got their content sorted out because they’re still intellectually & emotionally in the middle of it & from their perspective it’s all still new & rapidly evolving. I’ll agree with them on this last point, if not necessarily the others.
This show will continue at the Baltimore Museum of Art until May 15. It then travels to the
¹ Raising the inevitable question of how else does a performance or installation artist create anything that could be exchanged for value, i.e. sold? It’s all about the documentation.
² Elsewhere in the museum but not a part of this show, Kara Walker has a particularly strong piece that entails a slide projected against a wall containing a silhouette.
