Artifacts of artifice

Art in America, July, 1998 by Kate Linker

The Photograph as Object: "Stills" and "In-Photography"

In 1980, Charlesworth produced an extraordinary series of large-scale black-and-white prints of men and women plunging from windows, either trying to save themselves from burning buildings or committing suicide. These works, again using pictures appropriated from news sources and again resulting from extensive picture research, employ a title purposely taken from film vernacular, "Stills." The individual titles are at once cryptic and descriptive -- Unidentified Woman, Hotel de Aragon, Madrid or Unidentified Man, Otani Hotel, Los Angeles, for example. The deadpan mood offers a flashback to Warhol's "Death in America" and "Disasters" series, indicating the importance of the Pop heritage for the generation of the 1980s. Each work depicts a singular, undefined, ephemeral event that is ripped from the narrative continuum that would "explain" the image. No caption informs us of the outcome of these events, We know nothing about the private histories or intentions of the protagonists, and even our tendency to see them as what they are -- death scenes -- is subverted by the equivocal beauty of these tonal studies of falling forms, eerily suspended in space. The "Stills" set up a contrast between the incompleteness of the depicted moment and the integrity of the photographic object, between its inadequacy as a substitute for its subject and its hallucinatory affective power.

Indeed, Charlesworth's art of 1980-82 displays a kind of love-hate relationship with the photographic referent. In these works, which dispense with photographic illusionism through increasingly abstract means, reality is presented as the ultimate "vanishing point" of the image. Charlesworth is less concerned here with the photograph's documentation of its subject than with the photograph as a subject in itself. A series from 1981-82, called "In-Photography" in a counter to Susan Sontag's somewhat pompous book On Photography, uses the photographic surface as a seductive veil masking its referent -- not a transparency, but a screen. In some works (Samurai, 1981) the surfaces are slashed and scarred; in others (Rietveld Chair, 1981) they are imprinted with negative images of their subjects; in yet others, the print surface is rendered like a skin that peels back to reveal the distant image that is the work's ostensible subject. Charlesworth has described "In-Photography" as evoking the "meeting of an object and its apprehension." The series displays the main characteristics of the artist's mature work -- radically truncated or excised images, elaborately worked surfaces and frames -- all devices which call attention to the photograph's status as a construction. The surface serves to entice the viewer, beckoning him or her as if through a mirror, towards an impossible point of origin.

Charlesworth's work of the early 1980s has affinities with that of contemporaries who were examining the artistic production of meaning, observing how institutions and conventions, along with the material practices of art, structure the "speech" of art. It was a time of heady debates, when many of the signal themes of post-modern theory -- originality, authorship, seriality, repetition -- were transported into esthetic discussions. For Charlesworth, an important influence was the writings of Roland Barthes, which were first translated from French and disseminated to an American audience during the 1970s. Barthes's heralding of the transformation "from work to text" and his trumpeting of the suspension or "disappointment" of meaning were not lost on a generation dismissive of the model of fixed, "meaningful" art that they had inherited.