Dawid: Beautiful Frames

Graphis, Nov/Dec 2001 by Crager, Jack

In one of the enigmatic short stories that serve as breaks in this book of Dawid's imagery, the photographer ruminates on matters ranging from the points in a stellar constellation to the tiny dots-per-inch in a newspaper photograph. For the Swedish artist Dawid (Bjorn Dawidsson), these metaphors resonate. Much of Dawid's work is about dots: the dots of dimensional shape, as in the spatial progression of a connect-the-dots game; the dots of symbolism, as in numbered spheres distinguished only by label and placement; the dots of language, as in ellipses, with their implication of elapsed time-begging the question (in the words of a Seinfeld episode), "What happened during the yada-yada-yada?" This artwork is as much about the unseen as the seen.

Although most of his imagery is photographic, Dawid has worked in a variety of media, from large-scale prints to small drawings to "ready-made" pieces created from found fragments. This elegant, primarily black-and-white volume from Steidl Publishers includes works made during the past three decades, using an image-- per-spread format that deceptively lends uniformity to the pieces and arranges them in a cryptic progression. Dawid's wryly candid street photos from the 1970s, say, follow his abstract Chemigraph prints from the early 1990s. Yet for all its variety, Dawid's art consistently shares the hallmarks of mystery, graphic economy, deliberate perspective, and dry wit. He takes "pleasure in discovering the extraordinary out of the humdrum," writes London-based curator Michael Mack in the book's insightful essay about the artist's work, which Mack calls "determinedly impenetrable."

That inscrutability has opened Dawid up to bewildered and sometimes harsh reactions from reviewers over the years, as the artist has carved a rather precarious niche at the intersection of fine art and photography. Though his work is widely exhibited and influential throughout Scandinavia and northern Europe, Dawid has enjoyed neither global fame nor great support from the art world. But he began to develop an appreciative cult following after the underground dissemination of a 1983 catalog for a series called Rost (Rust), which played on the humor and symbolism of patterns created by ephemera such as nails, springs and wires photographed against a light box. Beautiful Frames incorporates much of this as well as other series, which are printed in their entirety in thumbnail form in the back of the book. These sequences, plus the juxtapositions found throughout the book, show the artist's continual return to visual motifs-negative space, angular patterns, textural contrasts. the aforementioned dots...

Many of these images are like Rorshach tests for viewers; within enigmatic shapes one may find sexuality, splendor, isolation, or a taunting sense of the bizarre. Above all, there seems to be playfulness. Even the book's title stems from a serious joke. It's from a piece made out of a classified ad that Dawid spotted in a Stockholm newspaper: "Framed painting with crying child and a mean goose, beautiful frame." The amusing absurdity of this item is obvious. But only Dawid would make it into a work of art.

Dawid: Beautiful Frames, edited and with texts by Michael Mack. Published by Steidl Publishers, 2001; Distributed in the US by D.A.P. 6-7/8"x 9", 416 pages, more than 200 B&W illustrations. $45, (hardcover)

Jack Crager served as the editor of Graphis from 1993 until 1997, when he moved to his current position as managing editor of American Photo in New York. While running the day-to-day logistics of the photography magazine, he also writes profiles about photographers and reviews books, equipment and websites. For Graphic, Crager has written features on subjects ranging from art director D.J. Stout to nature photographer Jim Brandenburg to Nike shoes. For this issue, he reviews the book Dawid, page 103.