Jan Dibbets: Land Sea Colour
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Transcript of Jan Dibbets: Land Sea Colour
The Alan Cristea Gallery at31&34 Cork St. London W1S 3NUTelephone +44(0)20 7439 1866Facsimile +44(0)20 7439 1874Email: [email protected]: www.alancristea.com
Jan DibbetsA Third Way for Photography
Photography is in crisis today. Since the beginning of the
twenty-first century, many of the medium’s traditional
film-based tools have been terminated or reconfigured,
and its conventional hard-copy production and print-
media distribution points have been displaced. Radical
transformations in the making and interpretation and
circulation of photographic images, driven forward in large
part by new digital technologies, now open onto quite
different networks of reception and pulsing flows of
information. Morphing into a wide range of electronic
technologies and platforms, from iPhones to eBooks, from
Flickr to Facebook, photography is ubiquitous and rapidly
changing, faster and easier, more vast and more accessible,
reaching global users instantly and simultaneously. These
technological changes in photography itself have challenged
the once-certain veracity of the photographic image and, at
the same time, created vast changes in the behaviors and
expectations of makers and audiences. The new, shape-
shifting forms that photography has adopted as the lingua
franca of the digital age have produced widespread anxiety.
But while these recent changes in the nature and social
uses of photography seem sudden and technologically
determined, their intellectual and artistic roots lie in an
earlier rupture in visual culture that resonated throughout the
international art world in the mid-1960s. As a series of recent
exhibitions have shown, around 1965, artists from a disparate
variety of disciplines, nationalities, and points of view
simultaneously began to challenge the conventional ideas
and tools and sites of contemporary art-making, particularly
as expressed in painting and sculpture.1 That broadly
manifested rent in art making and art criticism substantially
redirected the perception of photographic presumptions,
among other things. This challenge to the fundamental nature
of photography came not from fine-art photographers but
from a quite different strain of artists using photography.
This new approach was especially evident in conceptual
art, which employed photography in a variety of innovative
ways unrelated to the aesthetics of the medium and designed
primarily to de-emphasize the material status of the
traditional art object and to concentrate attention on ideas
and processes. For most conceptual artists, photography
itself, as a subject or medium, was largely beside the point.
They were only interested in the “informational possibilities
of black and white photography.”2 At the same time, as
information, photography was central to conceptual art and
its critical investigations. The social status of the photograph
as fact or evidence allowed conceptual artists to interrogate
the status and role of the artist, to challenge the means of
art’s distribution, to overturn the commodity character of the
art object, to expose the political function of art institutions,
and to highlight the crucial participation of the viewer in the
reception and completion of a work of art.
At best, the banal photographs conceptual artists made
or conscripted to illustrate their conceptual ideas were
regarded as undifferentiated or low-energy images, akin to
monochromatic canvases or the blank prose of Alain
Robbe-Grillet’s fiction. Nevertheless, conceptual artists
engaged photography in their works in a surprisingly protean
range of operations: as a record of performances or actions;
as a documentation of a physical artwork not present; as a
communication between artist and viewer; as an analogue or
stand-in for a word or idea; as a typological catalogue of like
forms; as the basis for a visual pun or parody; and
occasionally as a work of art in itself. These novel uses of
photography were largely unrelated to the medium’s
aesthetic value, but had profound and far-reaching effects in
shaping visual culture, ones with deep ramifications even
today. As art historian Matthew Witkovsky has recently
claimed, “In the Conceptual era of the 1960s and 1970s,
photography definitively became the paradigmatic form of
contemporary art.”3 It is crucial, then, to look again at the
work of the artists responsible for these newly relevant shifts
and to understand how their views redirected photography
and shaped how it appears to us today.
Curiously, the only artist among the conceptualists who
committed totally to photography and to investigating the
unique visual properties and paradoxes of the medium was
the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets (born 1941). Though he began as
a painter, and later played a crucial role in the conceptual art
movement, Dibbets has always considered himself first and
foremost a photographer. Uniquely among conceptual artists,
Dibbets examined the photograph itself, plumbing the depths
of the medium and insisting that, for him, the photograph was
the work.4 In fact, his allegiance to this medium over forty
years is impressive; the types of photographs that Dibbets
takes are utterly unique and entirely consistent. His
photographs are straightforward and unmanipulated, the type
of photographs anyone could make. One could say that the
simplicity or dumbness of the photographs provides their
generative power since, for Dibbets, the fundamental goal is
to unmask the seemingly self-evident role of photography as
a legitimate depiction of the world, and to show how even
simple operations can expose photography’s illusion. For an
audience in thrall to the photographic image, thoroughly
accepting of its conventions, it is often hard to make this
point. That is why Dibbets often resorts to eccentric forms and
combinations of photographs, twisting and turning the
images, making mountains and comets out of horizon lines
(cat. 1), using words and drawings to peel back the seeming
inevitability of photography’s representation of reality.
Dibbets takes the notion that cameras do lie and
pushes it further, claiming boldly that reality itself is an
abstraction.5 In other words, our perception of material reality
is mediated not only by physiological impediments, such as
the viewer’s monocular vision and psychophysical processes,
but also by cultural constructions, including all manner of
representations. Of these cultural constructions, photography
is probably the most compelling. The distorted analogue to
the real world that photographs provide has become so
convincing and persuasive, that today photographs are
generally accepted as literal transcriptions of reality. In the
past several decades – that is, since Dibbets made his first
photographs – this view of photographic representation as
original or authentic has been roundly challenged by
postmodern theory. While most artists and photographers
have been concerned with representation (what and how a
photograph depicts) or abstraction (the formal qualities of the
photographic image), Dibbets has been concerned to look at
photography in a third way. His motive has been to
demonstrate in a variety of aesthetically engaging ways the
fundamental fictions of the photograph.
Dibbets has been immersed in an intense and ongoing
examination of what Marcel Duchamp would call “precision
optics”, that is, the foundational components and examples of
photographic vision: perspective, motion, light, color, and
time. For Dibbets, these are not formal or theoretical concerns
but rather phenomenological or perceptual issues, pertaining
to how a viewer encounters the world through photography.
Dibbets’s ultimate goal seems to be to trouble or decenter our
confident acceptance of photography’s stable organization of
experience. “A consistent theme in Dibbets’s work is the
paradoxical nature of illusion and reality immediately and
directly perceived,” critic Barbara Reise noted. “Thus, the
reality of a seemingly ‘natural’ visual observation is
counter-posed by a physical or conceptual reality.”6 His
approach in this regard has been methodical and systematic,
engaging one idea with great intensity for a period of years,
moving on to the next series, and then finally circling back
years later to reexamine earlier explorations with new tools
and points of view.
Among the most sophisticated early demonstrations of
Dibbets’s explorations of photography’s potential for
misrepresentation are his works in the series titled Perspective
Corrections (1967-69). Over an intense two-year period, Dibbets
made approximately forty large black-and-white photographs
using slight variations of the same basic exercise. A trapezoid
was laid out with rope on the ground or in his studio such that
when photographed from the proper angle the trapezoid would
appear to be a two-dimensional square. This reverses the
normal function of perspective: instead of making the square
appear trapezoidal when projected in depth, Dibbets makes
the trapezoid appear square. This inversion of the textbook
illustration of Renaissance perspective has a powerful and
uncanny effect: not only is the three-dimensional rope form
translated into a two-dimensional representation but also the
resulting square, an illusion, seems to float parallel to the
picture plane. And, even more, the square oscillates between
fixed reality and optical illusion.
Central to the concept of Dibbets’s Perspective Corrections is
the fact that they appear only in the photograph, or really
only in the negative. These are not documentations of some
absent artwork; you could not reach out and touch the square;
the photograph is the work. As critic Bruce Boice noted,
“Without the mediation of the camera, one cannot, in the
physical situation, see a Perspective Correction or a trapezoid of
rope magically pop up to form a vertical square regardless of
where one stands in relation to the rope configuration.”7 Like
many of Dibbets’s early experiments, the Perspective Corrections
sought to reveal generally accepted optical effects that are
unique to photography. In these subtle demonstrations of
how photography relies on the model linear perspective to
organize its simulation of human vision, Dibbets destabilizes
a model that deliberately suggests that our environment is
organized, stable, and coherent.
A second major series by Dibbets, begun around 1970
and continuing to the present, has focused on what has
become the most consistent and confounding theme in his
work: the horizon. Of all the ways that humans rationalize
sight, the most compelling – yet least conscious – is our
conception of the horizon. Strictly speaking, the horizon is an
illusion, a manmade fiction; it is the point at which the sky
appears to meet the earth. But this is a mirage created by the
curvature of the earth. This is especially dramatic at the
seashore, where the blank blue sky meets the expanse of
ocean. It may be true that in Dibbets’s native Holland, a
particularly flat country, the horizon is more prominent than
elsewhere. Whatever the case, the horizon defines the level or
lateral view, balanced by gravity against the vertical human
experience. Dibbets summarized these subconscious cultural
connotations when he said, “In the whole world what is more
beautiful than a straight line? And the horizon is a straight line
in three dimensions: it’s an almost incredible phenomenon.”8
Dibbets’s fascination with the horizon has instigated
a surprising range of conceptual and artistic inventiveness.
Exploiting the sequential and temporal aspects of the
panorama, Dibbets has made linear and curved horizons
compiled of dozens of slices of images elegantly montaged
together, in color and in black and white. He has tilted and
bent the horizon to unsettle, in whatever ways possible, the
impossibility of the horizon as a concept. Many of these works
are the culmination of logical but elaborate processes, such
as a composite of photographs taken by rotating the camera
on a tripod and taking a photograph every 30 degrees or
swinging the camera around in various arcs. Yet, in some
ways, the most effective of these horizon works are the
simplest, the two recent series New Horizons (2007) (cat. 2) and
Land-Sea Horizon (2011) (cats 6 – 12). These works stem from
the seminal Sectio Aurea of 1972, which was the first to
juxtapose, side by side, a single color photograph of a
land-based horizon with a single color photograph of a sea
horizon. The effective union of the single horizon line, though
thoroughly artificial, creates a harmony reflected in the golden
rectangle of the title. This device also opened the way to
slanted and asymmetrical horizons and diamond-shaped
composites in the recent series. Though decidedly pictorial,
these horizon works use photomontage and the abrupt
reconciliation of land and sea horizons to trouble their easy
reception and to continue Dibbets’s insistent protest against
the conventions of human perception.
Perhaps Dibbets’s most challenging photographs are the
Color Studies (cats 13 – 18), begun in late 1975, and now
reconceived digitally at a larger scale. These works consist of
enlarged details of automobile hoods and fenders made in
such extreme close-ups that almost all evidence of their
source is omitted. The shallow focal length of the pictures
means that the frame is virtually filled with the extravagant
automotive paint colors, though close examinations will show
slight details that break the monochromatic illusion. These
details are not enough, though, to evoke any anecdotal or
cultural associations with cars or car culture; the make or
model of the individual automobiles is impossible to discern
and, in any event, irrelevant. In Dibbets’s hands, the
photographs of car parts have become, in effect, large and
luscious color swatches. What seems to be a formalistic
reduction of these representations is emphasized by the
presentation of the Color Studies in groups, so that one must
always encounter not only the individual colors but also the
relations between colors, and by the scale, which in the recent
versions is extended to the maximum size possible within the
largest paper made. When first exhibited in 1976, the Color
Studies were dismissed by critics who considered them too
painterly or too much of a departure from Dibbets’s previous
work. But decades later the works seem refreshingly whimsical
and aesthetically audacious, immersing the viewer in almost
pure color, like photographic Barnett Newmans.
Yet, as with all of Dibbets photographs, they are
taken from real objects and situations in the world, but
made to appear abstract or ambiguous. They demonstrate
the subtle and fluctuating balance that Dibbets has always
sought between photography’s representational and abstract
properties. Speaking of the Color Studies, Dibbets has said,
“[They are] the consequence of speculation about the
structure of the photographic image….That set me to
thinking: what would happen if I stripped the image of its
structure? Then I had the idea of photographing something
as flat and shiny as photographic paper. That’s where the
photographs of car hoods came from. They’re as real and
concrete as the other studies; they’re representations of
reality.”9 Though conceived almost forty years ago, Dibbets’s
Color Studies have direct relevance to fundamental
photographic issues that younger artists are grappling with
today.
Photography survives today but in profoundly revised
forms, making ever more urgent our understanding of how
meanings are invented through photographic practices of
communication. This is a key moment, then, to ask critical
questions not only about aesthetics of the medium but also
about the constructions of history and memory, the politics of
image capture and ownership, the uses of pictures to define
social identity, the shifting belief in photographic truth, and
the transformations in human perception. As the photographic
work of Jan Dibbets demonstrates, these are no longer just
abstract theoretical ideas but practical problems directly
relevant to everyday life.
Brian Wallis
Chief Curator, International Center of Photography, New York
Notes
1. Among the recent examinations of the transformative art of the 1960s,see Matthew S. Witkovsky, ed. Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph,1964-1977 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Philip Kaiser andMiwon Kwon, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (New York: Prestel, 2012);and Christophe Cherix, In and Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art,1960-1976 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). For earlier key textson conceptual art and photography, see especially Benjamin H. D.Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administrationto the Critique of Institutions,” October, no. 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 105-43;and Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: Photography In, or As, ConceptualArt,” in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Art:1965-1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), pp. 247-67.
2. Lucy R. Lippard, “Groups,” Studio International 179, no. 920 (March 1970),p. 93.
3. Matthew S. Witkovsky, “The Unfixed Photograph,” in Witkovsky, LightYears, p. 16.
4. In 1970, Dibbets stated to critic Lucy Lippard that it was thephotograph, or more particularly the negative, that constituted his work.(“LL: Did the works themselves have any importance to you or just thephotographs? JD: Only the photographs. In fact, only the negatives.”) Atone point, Dibbets even experimented with selling his negatives. See LucyR. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972(New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 159. For more on Dibbets and photography,see the monograph Erik Verhagen, Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work,1967-2007 (Paris: Editions du Panama, 2007); and Bruce Boice, “JanDibbets: Photograph and the Photographed,” Artforum 11, no. 8 (April1973), pp. 45-49.
5. Dibbets has stated, “There’s a higher solution than those of Cezanneand Mondrian: to demonstrate that reality is an abstraction.” Jan Dibbets,interview with Georg Jappe, quoted in Verhagen, Jan Dibbets: The PhotographicWork, p. 9.
6. Barbara Reise, “Notes on Jan Dibbets Contemporary Nature of RealisticClassicism in the Dutch Tradition,” Studio International 183, no. 945 (June1972), p. 253.
7. Bruce Boice, “Jan Dibbets: Photograph and the Photographed,”Artforum, April 1973, p. 45.
8. Jan Dibbets, unpublished interview with Irmeline Lebeer; quoted inVerhagen, Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work, p. 81.
9. Jan Dibbets, unpublished interview with Dominic van den Boogerd, Mar.20, 1997; quoted in Verhagen, Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work, p. 113.
Little Comet – Sea 9˚ - 81˚ and Big Comet 3˚ - 60˚, 1973Photograph of installation at MoMA, New York in 1973
Cover: Red, 1976/2012
Introduction © Brian Wallis, 2013Catalogue and images © Alan Cristea Gallery,London and Jan Dibbets, Amsterdam 2013
Published by Alan Cristea Gallery on theoccasion of the exhibitionJAN DIBBETS : Land Sea Colour21 March – 20 April 2013 at 31 & 34 Cork Street, London W1S 3NU
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