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ISAAC LAYMAN

Taking Pictures

…a rock  

false manor

all at once

                evaporated in mists

                    which imposed

                            a bound on the infinite…

—Stéphane Mallarmé

Frequently queried by students as to what art matters to me I feel caught in a bind, for in the offering of an answer, guidance from “someone-in-the-know” do I not enact hidden transactions antithetical to the message I have in mind? A strange anxiety for a teacher to have, though weaned on critical theory questions about the veiled operations of power, multiple solicitations embedded in each utterance—questions, broadly put, concerning representation—are vitally important to me, in my life and in my pedagogy. Indeed, they are at the heart of the answer I offer in the end. “The art that really matters to me,” I say, “unmoors me, reveals to me an invisible given I had relied upon to frame my world, and renders it neither so natural nor inevitable as it once seemed. In such moments I feel simultaneously flooded by the possibility of recognizing the world afresh, and the weight of that challenge.” Isaac Layman’s work matters to me in this way.

A recurrent point of discussion for many who have written about Layman’s work centers around the hyper-real, information saturated photographs of everyday objects for which he’s become best known, and a resultant, counterintuitive feeling of unreality that emerges in the viewing experience (2). So convincingly real and familiar at first glance, we are surprised by our discordant feeling of unease before these uncanny images of his sink, oven or dryer. Such was the nature of my first encounter with Layman’s work, Pool Table (2008), which though vying for attention amidst a salon-style hang of many other artists’ work, transfixed me. A photomontage of sorts, on the left of the work, shot from above, one sees a high-resolution digital photograph of the corner of a pool table, and just off the diagonal axis, between the pocket and cropped upper corner, rests a ball. On the bumper beneath rests the hand of the artist, bridged as if to shoot the ball with an invisible cue. To the right, abutting the vertical crop of the pool table is an image of white piece of paper which, like the image of the pool table, appears to hover over a white ground, gaining its identity only though the shadow cast by its edge. No amount of written description is up to the task, so let me stop here, after one last detail; the clear thumbtack, at roughly eye-level, that apparently pins the images together along their seam, and to their ground. It is unclear to me now when I first registered this detail.  Was it before or after that the staunchly static images that comprise the work shifted perspective, the hand now read as steadying the photo and paper so it could be pinned to the wall? This was just the first (if they can be ordered) in a series or shifts that ensued, for seeking some rational mooring that we expect (though we know better) from “realistic” photography, once the pool table reads as “picture on the wall” it flattens in inverse ratio to the dimensional gains of the hand and paper, and this is just one example on the many plays here. They are plays, I want to add, that solicit our participation; as the orientation of the image shifts our alignment shifts in turn, an effect that is even more pronounced in subsequent works.

Over his last two solo exhibitions at The Lawrimore Project (3), Layman has extended this important facet of his work in part through the use of advanced digital technologies. The relatively low-tech photomontage method of Pool Table has been exchanged for a technique in which extremely high-resolution digital information selected from numerous shots, often taken from different perspectives and depths of field, is meticulously sutured into one seamless image. In a compelling account of the effect of this, Marisa Sánchez has written,

                                Because of the precision and clarity of the information gathered by the visual apparatus,

                                Layman produces images that are unsettling doppelgängers. In many ways, the unreality

                                of the object pictured threatens the  viewer’s vision because the precision defies rationality,

                                destabilizing our experience and perception of the object in real time. His images are an

                                assault on our vision because the naked eye could never perceive the object in its entirety

                                as it is presented by the artist. (4)

It is the nature of this threat that I want to focus on for a moment, and the manner in which, in the passage above, rationality and the naked eye appear aligned. For while I have felt the same destabilizing of experience and perception Sánchez identifies, for me this is less a matter that Layman’s images defy rationality than that they exceed it, and in so doing, reveal that the eye was always already clothed, and in front of Layman’s work has not yet found the right outfit. (5)  For certainly our vision has been figured in countless ways, is prejudiced that is, and the camera in its various forms has contributed greatly to this. I cannot see like a camera, while my mind’s eye can’t seem to stop seeing like one. The rub is that the camera in my head is only the 8 megapixel hand held that’s framed so many of my recent experiences, and thus provides little preparation for the massive assault of visual information Layman’s images offer. In front of these images I feel destabilized, in part, because they simultaneously solicit so many perceptual alignments. Familiar and believable at the start, they refuse to coalesce around the unified perspective or focal length I anticipate, and instead disperse my perception across an amorphous visual field. As my vision strives to perform acrobatics needed to keep pace, oscillating between belief and skepticism, I fall short, learning in the experience something vital about the power that “realistic” images still hold for me. It is one thing to know their fictions, and quite another to simultaneously experience in a self-reflexive mode their manifold effects. (6)

At first glance Taking Pictures may appear to mark a radical shift in Layman’s work. Where, one might wonder, are the pictures?  Absent here too is the built-in believability of photography, amplified by Layman, which provided his work such a fertile point of departure. Can we conceive these objects, resolutely singular, as pictures? Or even as representation? If so, how, and to what end? Though the signature photographs may be gone, many of the questions Layman’s work has raised persist, perhaps focused more tightly and broached from new perspectives that point both forward to new avenues of inquiry, and backward, inflecting our understanding of his past practices. In an important though generalized sense, one might consider how the pictures in this exhibition perform a series of inversions relative to his earlier works: object/image, literal/virtual, conceptualization/experience, singular/serial, wall/floor, belief/doubt and so forth.

Arguably, the fulcrum for the show is Favorites, Picture Taken August 10th, 8pm (2010). Unlike the other subjects of his photographs, for which Layman has consistently expressed detachment, the objects that comprise Favorites are just that. As he has in the past, Layman set himself a task to help generate work. In this case the task involved roaming his home and selecting his favorite things, not knowing in advance what they might be. When his attention to the task waned, the objects were placed side by side on his floor, a picture taken, but in what sense? When we look through a photograph to the object it images we may overlook how fundamental selection is to photography. Imagine Layman literalizing the photographer’s process, hunting for objects, guided by some desire and finding it, taking it, framing it, sharing it. The construction of” the picture” is evident here, as is in some sense its uneasy status as representation. For now these formerly disparate objects are in some sense equalized, taken from their contexts and deprived of their utility, no longer Layman’s favorite things but rather reframed as his art, comprised of components that can only gesture towards their former life. (7)  Gone, other favorites may emerge.

With attentive looking one encounters again components of Favorites, or rather their Polaroid generated doubles in Correction (2010). (8)  Polaroids, once quite magical as instant photographs, are now resolutely outdated. (9) Anachronistic, they point towards a past moment of the objects they represent, a memorial that acknowledges the objects’ new status. (Does the work thus correct a deficiency of Favorites?) Chosen for the accidental uniformity of an age-induced defect, the objects they image appear as if seen through the green lens of 3d glasses. Though our conditioned eye targets the images, they soon seem secondary, barely legible, flawed. Much more assertive is a fundamental aspect of photography that is usually unseen, but one that has consistently figured in Layman’s work; the frame of the pictures, here a uniform white border. Set in relation to the red-tinged reflective surface of the frame-as-object, a picture without an image of its own that forms the other component of the work, we may see the green tonality of the Polaroids “corrected” in their red-inflected reflection, but only some, depending upon the physical position we take vis-à-vis the work. But on what basis would we judge this as a correction?

With Picture Framing Glass (2010) Layman returns to questions related to those raised in Framing Glass (2008), although this time without the photograph. (10)  Insistently now, the “material support” of photography, traditionally taken as extrinsic, returns to be considered rather than looked through. The work seems to perform a kind of zero-degree photography, registering the play of light on and with the glass surfaces, bounded by a disciplined square frame. Or perhaps not quite, since this fugitive play is only conceivably captured beneath the pane. Perhaps this is corrected in Glass Plate Negative (2010) where Gatorboard, often the hidden support of the photographic print is given pride of place. Dark grey against its black frame, the board is faced by two panes of glass. The top half is inexpensive framing glass, while the bottom is conservation grade. While this configuration will index the bleaching touch of light, the top one presumes fading faster, it will not do so with the instantaneity we now expect from photography, nor may it ever reach a final stop, achieve its identity fully, except in our minds.

Many of the issues Layman puts into play within and between the works in this exhibition come together in Double Down (2010), a work that recalls for me my first experience of his photography. On one side (by what criteria, now, do we render this front or back?) a white lacquered frame, its inside edge still lined with what was once wide, blue masking tape, now almost completely covered with white lacquer, evidence of process, construction. By looking into this frame, which requires physically bending or kneeling, we see the front edge of its maple double in which two panes of glass abut, creating a thin horizontal line. Blue matte board is pressed against this glass, which has the effect of making the glass reflective. Within this mirrored space, the white frame and tape are reflected, though their reflection seemingly recedes into a depth equal to that of the maple frame and advances into our space simultaneously. Only one thing, so apparent when looked at directly, fails to register a reflection. A divide, a fundamental condition for difference from which representation unfolds on its binary field. An inversion of the effect of that thumbtack, the unreflected edge of the abutted glass grounds the illusion.

Of course this is only one unsettled perspective on this work (there is a back, or is it a front?), and particular aspects of Layman’s work that matter to me.

-Kolya Rice

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I want to express my deep appreciation to Isaac Layman for the many hours we spent talking about his work and the subjects that inform this essay. Vive Les Mardistes.

1.  A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, Basil Cleveland trans., UbuWeb (2005): 9

2.  For an excellent discussion of the exhibition Photographs from Inside a Whale (2008) see Ken Allan’s catalogue essay, “Isaac Layman and Photography,” which grapples with many aspects of Layman’s work I have chosen not to take up here.

3.  Differences abound between Photographs from Inside a Whale and 110%, but they are beyond my scope to trace here. In passing, let me note that in the later show, in my experience the unease persists, though it is often accompanied by what I can only think to name a simulacral or staged sublime. This view formed before Layman related to me that the task he set for himself to generate works for this show involved finding objects in his home for which he could construct an affection.

4.  Marisa Sánchez, “2008: Isaac Layman,” Betty Bowen Award: 30 Years (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2009): 70.

5.  Martin Jay has had the most to say on this subject, tracing how various theorizations of the camera in the 19th century both contributed to and then unhinged “the dominant scopic regime of the modern era, which combined Albertian perspectivalism with a Cartesian faith in the molecular gaze in the mind’s eye….” From “Photo-unrealism: The Contribution of the Camera to the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,” in Vision and Textuality, Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press 1995): 344.

6.  Expressing a similar stance, Jen Graves recently wrote, “Even after all these years, people continue to look through photographs at what’s in them rather than at photographs, and work like Layman’s helps correct this mass distortion, which can lead viewers to believe much bigger and more dangerous lies.” Graves, “Flying off the Walls: Isaac Layman’s Best Images Are Impossible to Apprehend,” The Stranger (July 13, 2010).

7.  Favorites is further complicated by the fact that two of its components were once (still?) independent works of art.

8.  Doubling is often understood (along with difference) as structural necessities for representation per se.

9.  On Layman’s invocation of past technologies of vision in earlier works such as Stereo (2008), see Allan (2008): 2.

10.  For an excellent summary of many questions this work raises, see Allan (2008): 4.

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Taking Pictures is the first installment of a twelve-part series of exhibitions entitled Has Art? Each month, for the next year, artists will be paired with a writer and a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés.  The writer will provide a critical response to the work as it relates to the poem as well as offer scholarship about the artist’s practice as a whole.  As the exhibitions progress, a publication will grow and an idea of a group exhibition will be the result.

You can follow the progress of the publication and the exhibition HERE.

A printable PDF copy of Has Art? is also available upon request

Simply email: scott@lawrimoreproject.com