Photographs of destroyed properties are inescapable today. Buildings misplaced to fires, floods, and bombs hang-out our feeds, if not our lives. Amidst all this carnage, what does it imply for a photographer to border deserted properties as artwork?
John Divola’s career-spanning exhibition The Ghost within the Machine opened at Yancey Richardson Gallery on January 9, as wildfires tore via Los Angeles. The present presents two our bodies of labor in Divola’s now-iconic oeuvre: Vandalism (1973–75), by which the artist spray-painted after which photographed the interiors of deserted Los Angeles properties, and Blue With Exceptions (2019–24), which rephotographs equally dilapidated areas on the deserted George Air Power Base in Victorville, California. Marked and captured by the artist, these crumbling, peeling buildings turn out to be canvases layered with ghosts. They’re pictures, but additionally installations: Monuments to what comes after the top.
Works from Blue With Exceptions fill the gallery’s fundamental room. In individual, these prints’ material — even their medium — can’t be apprehended at a look. The colourful, three-by-four-foot pictures are printed with such ultra-contemporary, high-resolution element that they border on the surreal, rewarding a deeper look; whereas the prints aren’t fairly massive sufficient to be rooms of their very own, you are feeling such as you may be capable of poke your head into one. On the identical time, the deserted rooms are shot with such a large depth of subject that they’re flattened to the sting of abstraction. Divola typically separates numerous rooms inside {a photograph} with brilliant blue, pink, and orange lighting, heightening this abstracting impact by turning partitions into planes of colour. Holes in plaster lose their depth and seem as a substitute as if collaged onto a flat floor. The precise collaging of paper, spray paint, and AI-generated pictures of idealized birds onto a few of those self same partitions additional obfuscates a way of area. The whole impact of those works is of a visible puzzle: What am I taking a look at? Is it actual? And the place does that distinction now lie, given the insane stage of expertise required to make a pigment print appear to be this?
John Divola, “Vandalism (74V01)” (1974), classic gelatin silver print
The gallery does properly to pair this sequence with Vandalism, Divola’s earliest physique of labor on this vein. Although they share the identical material, the distinction in method is so profound that every gives reduction from the opposite’s depth. The dimensions of those works is smaller, and the lens frames corners of particular person rooms relatively than an incomprehensible patchwork of area. After being pummeled by midtone distinction and cutting-edge printing of Blue With Exceptions, for example, I used to be charmed to note that the classic gelatin silver prints will not be completely sq., in true old-school handmade vogue. In these earlier items, the subject material is extra apparent, and extra clearly arty. They’re punk, uncooked, and deliciously analog in tonality. One feels that on this less complicated world, destruction was extra generative and fewer disorienting.
It’s laborious to resolve what this half-century-old work means in right now’s world. Is it a memento mori? Break porn? A lesson, or a warning? Can we nonetheless play within the burned-out, washed-out shells of outdated lives? On the very least, the relevance of those pictures is simple: The gradual unfolding of an area that’s laborious to see even when proper in entrance of us, which uncannily reveals itself to be disastrously acquainted — properly, that’s value contemplating.
John Divola, “GAFB F7418 (10_27_2023)” (2019–24), from the sequence Blue with Exceptions, archival pigment print
John Divola, “75V13” (1974), classic gelatin silver print
John Divola: The Ghost within the Machine continues at Yancey Richardson Gallery (525 West twenty second Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) via February 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.