Better Things

Afterimage, July-August, 2005 by Sarah E. Webb

BETTER THINGS

by Douglas Holleley. Clarellen Press/120 pp./$19.95 (sb).

In his most recent exhibition and accompanying book, Better Things, Holleley reconsiders the art collection of the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY. The premise for the project stems from Holleley's interest in the duality, if not the duplicitous nature, of categorization within a collection, arguing that "it can make the work more accessible to the public but the process can sometimes limit our reading of the artworks." As a working strategy, Holleley photographs the objects as fragments, and then arranges the images as diptychs, thus removing the preconceived context construed by label, genre, authorship, etc. Of course, in the process he also imposes himself as author, or curator, of the collection creating his own framework in which the work is to be interpreted. Is one approach better than the other, or merely different?

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As Holleley culls his images from a single collection, he brings disparate objects into dialogue. Some of the most tantalizing pairs unite objects from different periods, different nationalities, that might otherwise be destined to remain anonymous to each other (and to museum visitors) due to pre-imposed categorized restrictions. For Holleley, the real issue is that "any and all of these perspectives emphasize the very need to have a perspective," just as so many critical disciplines continue to question the traditional trajectory of Art History, and to pose the question: how is (art)work recorded, valued, made visible and qualified.

SARAH E. WEBB is an artist, independent curator and co-editor of Singular Women: Writing the Artist (University of California Press, 2003).