Jan Dibbets at Barbara Gladstone - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2001 by Jonathan Gilmore

While many of Jan Dibbets's post-Minimalist and Conceptualist contemporaries created visually undistinguished photographs as documents of installations, performances and earthworks, his own photography has always had a seductive formalist allure. This exhibition of 13 early works (1967 to the mid-1970s) shows the ways the Dutch artist consistently created art that joins (like flesh to spirit) the sensuously expressive qualities of photography to an animating conceptual core.

Shortest Day at My House in Amsterdam (1970) is a grid formed by 80 photographs that register--at eight-minute intervals from dawn to dusk--the progress of daylight that filters through an empty room's translucent blinds. Although the conceptual charge here concerns the structure of time, what emerges is a glowing vision of De Stijl-like geometric subtlety. In work such as this, where figurative representations constitute an abstract tableau, Dibbets claims an affinity with the 17th-century Dutch painter Pieter Jansz Saenredam, whose church interiors often resolve into formal designs.

Land 0 [degrees] - 135 [degrees] (1972), an almost 30-foot-wide work of 10 aluminum-mounted color photographs abutting one another, begins with an anonymous landscape bisected by a horizon line into green grass below and clear blue sky above. Each subsequent photograph incrementally rotates that landscape by 15 degrees, ultimately inverting the view. This seriality and rotation transform a fundamental structuring device of Dutch landscape painting--the split between sea or land and sky--into an abstract motif. Venetian Blinds 0 [degrees] - 135 [degrees] (1972) displays the same incremental rotation on the much more intimate scale of 10 small square black-and-white photographs mounted in two rows on cardboard. Here, the Venetian blinds (which, stretched from edge to edge of each photograph, simulate parallel lines drawn in pencil) assume a purely formal identity, as if participating in a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt. As he does elsewhere, Dibbets adds his conceptual bona fides in a marginal notation concerning the photographs' angles of rotation.

Other works suggest a more minimalist orientation, such as a group of four large color photographs, each showing the hood or side panel of a different automobile. The flat, painted metal surfaces, dappled in water and indistinctly reflecting a cloudy sky, fill the images so as to suggest a ready-made study in color.

Perspective Correction, My Studio I, 1: Square on Wall (1969), a photograph printed on canvas, shows perhaps Dibbets's most original form of composition from this period. He has photographed an empty studio with a trapezoidal form outlined in tape on the wood floor. Whereas the orthogonal lines of the floor, walls and ceiling recede diagonally in perspective, the taped sides of the form converge to produce a perfect square. The square floats as if parallel to the picture plane, compressing the image and reconstituting its virtual three-dimensional space as a flat design. Neither straightforward figurative photography, nor antiphotography meant to debunk the medium's mimetic promise, Dibbets's work engages in an almost Platonic negotiation between the temporal and spatial systems with which we structure the world and the forms of things themselves.