Specters of the ordinary - ExtraOrdinary: American Place in Recent Photography, Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin - Brief Article

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Michelle Grabner

Guy Debord's theory of the spectacle is an appropriate lens through which "ExtraOrdinary: American Place in Recent Photography" can be examined--the "spectacle" and the "extraordinary" share, after all, a penchant for detachment from the normal course of events. This exhibition, comprised of seven photographers, each represented with a series of pictures, contributes generously to our collective stream of "American" images while bestowing little understanding on the phenomena that constitute "America." The exhibition does not offer objective clarity in the same way the genre of documentary photography professes; instead it contributes more accurately to a kind of social concealment. As Peter Wollen cites, "The world of the spectacle is an imaginary world, offering transient and illusionary satisfaction, while thereby denying access through the signifier to cure or truth." It is here, within the parameters of spectacle, that we locate the work on display.

The photographers in "ExtraOrdinary" make no attempt to enlarge the viewer's visual understanding of the familiar, but instead elect to enhance the "quality of the exceptional." The artists included in "ExtraOrdinary," David Heberlein, Todd Hido, Miranda Lichtenstein, Catherine Opie, Greta Pratt, Paul Shambroom and Bridget Smith, slip between documentary photography and the filmic, between pictures of cultural curiosities and Hollywood, representation and true illusionism. They each engage in the format of a series, unfolding stories of the uncommon and the stupendous within the predictability of the subsequent. The subjects of their photos are complicated and keenly edited: Las Vegas, Disney World, National Parks, freeway overpasses, the suburbs, elected government representatives--these are all highly choreographed social constructions that regulate behavior and control movement, attesting to the synthetic frame of reference in which these photographers work.

Bridget Smith photographs the architecture of fantasy and entertainment. She lays bare its physical structure. Her Untitled (1999) series of large-scale C-prints contextualizes Las Vegas within the raw landscape of the west. By doing so she challenges the illusion that is created and contained within the hotels and casinos that comprise this escapist Mecca. Designed to keep reality out and usher fantasy in, while maintaining full control of its occupancy, these theme structures are the epitome of entertainment hospitality. Smith's exterior perspective, however, reveals something else; oddly displaced facades from different times and places. Stratosphere II (1999) looks down upon the "strip" in the early morning light. The desert mountains and clear infinite sky compress sin-city into a thin, feeble concept of lush fantasy incapable of competing with the harsh reality of the surrounding environment. "No matter how hard they try there is always a bit of the desert creeping in," Smith says.

The 40 small horizontal platinum prints documenting Los Angeles's highway overpasses, the "Freeway" (1994) series by Catherine Opie, are void of human activity. Like Richard Serra's sculptures, these concrete linear planes intersect space with a beauty of form that is the provenance of art, not infrastructure. Their diminutive scale, warm tone and panoramic format contribute to their antiquated, archival-like quality. Not unlike nineteenth-century tourist photographs of classical ruins, these pictures tell us much more about photography's relationship to history, abstraction and documentation than it tells us about the psychology or the urban landscape of southern California. Only through the most ironic framework can we link Opie's abandoned freeway series to America's obsession with cars.

Todd Hido and Miranda Lichtenstein, both working on Untitled series, perpetuate the threat of the uncanny and the aberrant in the conformity of the suburb. Like hosts of young contemporary photographers following Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall's interest in Hollywood-propelled psychodramas, Hido and Lichtenstein seek to contribute to this sensational genre of film-inspired photography. Its fictional qualities rely on the viewer's imagination to give context and titillation to the narrative. For example, the discarded stuff in the weedy overgrown fringes of cities and towns is nothing more than litter in the daylight. But Lichtenstein photographs at night when the same debris caught in a car's headlights becomes haunting and suspicious. The night also obscures the context in Hido's eerily glowing suburban homes. Constructing narratives where the deviant lurks under the most normal of conditions, these two photographers excavate a place that is neither particularly real nor particularly American. Instead it is delusory--its place is located in the imagination.

Paul Shambroom's exploration into systems of power has led him to agrestic town council meetings where local officials don jeans and consume Diet Coke. Setting up an affinity with aristocratic and ruling class portraiture, Shambroom's photographs are frontal depictions of local leaders gathered around impromptu-looking meeting tables. By digitally printing the images on canvas he underscores his relationship to history painting. The austere rooms, bearing the prefabricated imprints of concrete blocks and faux wood paneling, where these meetings are held are typically outfitted with American flags, old portraits of previous council members, coffee creamer and a local-business wall calendar. Of the seven artists included in "ExtraOrdinary," Shambroom's series "The Meeting Projects" (1999) best captures an "American" sensibility of place. The work continues the early twentieth-century chronicling of unseen America while contributing to the genre of contemporary photographic portraiture, ironically recording undi gnified yet prevalent locations of civic power.