Photography seems to have a spilt personality; either a truth teller or a
fabulist, matter of fact or dissembling. But this is just a pose. If
the lies of the latter are plain – a spectrum that begins with
pictorialism and ends with photoshopped thighs – this makes them a bit
more honest. Documentary claims are the method by which the greatest
falsehoods are advanced: the airbrushing of purged apparatchiks from
Stalin-era photographs being just one example. But what about the moon
landings? The litany of doubt could go on and on. I may be paranoid but
this doesn’t mean photography’s not out to deceive me.
What separates a photographer from an artist who uses photography? If
Steichen wanted to temper the otherwise mechanical view from the camera
with a kind of subjective gauze, achieved through expressive blurs on
the level of image and tasteful – organic – printing techniques, this
approach no longer suffices. The greatest fakers of the digital age use
all manner of visual confection to go for the consumer jugular. Today
artifice has all but completely collapsed into the professional
techniques of the advertising and entertainment industries, leaving some
leading proponents of photographic ‘art’ to either concern themselves
with ironic quotation of these methods or to reject them completely. In
the late 1960s the second approach brought us a deadpan turn towards the
scientific roots of photography in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, a
concern taken up in the 1980s by Thomas Ruff and others: a wallowing in
serial surfeit of ‘fact’, monotonous details within a modernist grid –
so many impassive gazes from pimpled portrait sitters. In
contemporaneous contrast with the latter, Jeff Wall began to examine the
implications of the photographic image as a staged tableau. In such
pictures ‘the dismissal of photographic representation’s presumption of
veracity is expanded onto the real. At stake is not the
inappropriateness of photography to depict real objects; it is the real
that is manipulated to increase the unreliability of photographic
representation.’ Such practice is not a final summary or ‘laying bare’
of photography’s true nature. It is, rather, an exploration of its
strange powers. If it freezes living subjects, sucking the life from
them, then – by reverse alchemy – it can also enliven dead matter,
endowing it with organic semblance. In a similar vein, ‘if reproduction
makes copies out of originals, installation makes originals out of
copies.’ In some of Bailes’ photographs the frame effects such
transmogrification, applying a perspective that almost documents an
unreal place through its monocular record of manipulated studio space and nothing else beyond. In the face of such work the viewer perceives the acute tension between these two fields.
The suggestion of reality in an illusion is uncanny – dumb paper surface
seeming landscape; the near vision of a cosmos intentionally hobbled by
poor materials brought to the cusp of the viewer’s belief but no
further. Such is the near-scene of Tent. Unlike Thomas Demand and
Wall, Bailes does not create theatre sets; he creates half-places –
near-somewheres. These environments do not obviously contain everyday
accoutrements and so the nature of characters or types who might inhabit
them is not in question – the trace of social life, psychological
drama, politics and economics cannot be found. But while Bailes’
sceneography is devoid of historical texture the artist’s own activity
is brought into question – standing for the play of creation itself,
always provisional and rudimentary when set against the riotous colours
of life. The grayscale tones hammer this point home, announcing the
counterintuitive truth that artistic creation is less a case of
embellishing or complicating manifold reality than it is the performance
of reduction. Representational images are exercises in simplifying the
world; in diminishing complexity.
With Tent we are on unstable ground – an illusion that, in
material terms, begins with a three-dimensional construction and ends
with a two-dimensional record; a double reduction that de-locates the
moment of art, distributing it throughout multiple times and spaces –
studio, camera, print and viewer experience. The artist puts it thus –
‘the object presence of the image is there, before you, but the
photograph is always somewhere else.’ In pursuing this strategy Bailes
plumbs some of the murkiest waters of our contemporary aesthetics,
namely, the ascendance of art documentation as opposed to artworks.
According to Boris Groys the content of the former is by definition not
art; it ‘merely refers to art’ and ‘makes it clear that art in this case
is no longer present and immediately visible but rather absent and
hidden.’ He continues: ‘art documentation is neither the making present
of a past art event nor the promise of a coming artwork but the only
possible form of reference to an artistic activity that cannot be
represented in other way.’ In this manner, Bailes’ art is hidden in
plain sight.
Bailes’ art documentation requires activation through an act of recognition. To interpret the representational content of Tent
as a half-place, circumscribed by the logic of architecture, is –
strictly speaking – unnecessary; a reduction of possible meaning. The
artist has furnished little more than a series of visual suggestions.
The piece is, in Bailes’ words, ‘about decision making, it’s about
deciding to understand or to not understand’ the image according to
typologies of the built environment. The distributed moment of illusion –
he implies – encompasses the interrogation of the image by the audience
and, by extension, the viewer’s complicity in the production of its
lie. This compact is encapsulated in the title of another of his works, The Informants
– with its implied tension between disclosure and dissimulation. ‘I was
asking myself, who informs who?’, states Bailes. ‘Does the picture tell
us something, do we tell the picture something, or do we tell ourselves
something?’
The visual content of The Informants also speaks to an unresolved
conflict between surface and depth in photography. The work is a
large-scale black and white print of four colour gels normally used in
photo-studio lighting, hanging in pairs against an otherwise plain
background – their semi-translucent folds overlapping to produce varied
tones. Particular points on the curved skein of these forms have come to
gleaming crescendo while reflecting the glare of Bailes’ actual studio
lamp, and in the areas surrounding these white-outs the materiality of
the gels has been revealed through minor surface scratches and other
imperfections. With this image, that which might cast something in a certain light
has been cast down from the position of gods-eye into the world it
would otherwise reveal. No more effortless mediation for this technical
object, it has become – in Heideggerian terms – present-at-hand.
Further works by Bailes also feature similarly useless objects. Ruin
Value is a monolithic cube of weathered concrete set atop the organic
contrast provided by grass and varied foliage. Like other images in this
vein, such as The Empiricist – a picture of a short wooden log
propped up against another pile of logs – the message is inscrutable,
the visual information clear but everything else obscure. Rather than
opening up a narrative vista – a where, when or why – the latter work’s
title frames the content as pure data. Empiricism is the foundation of
scientific practice, and the view that all rationally acceptable
propositions are justifiable only through recourse to experience. For an
empiricist, quantifiable perception precedes meaning; a case of ‘look
first then interpret’. The key question for an empiricist is ‘how
much information is enough to justify a belief?’ Visually speaking, the
artist’s oeuvre re-iterates this query again and again.
Some of the Bailes formal concerns invoke the visual clarity and
geometric sensibility associated with Russian Suprematism – in
particular, the work of Kasimir Malevich. The latter artist’s abstract
compositions of suprematons were rooted in his study of aerial
photography. The great reduction of the pictorial world to a Black Square,
and in later paintings to a collection of geometric forms, was a
function of distance – so many fields (of colour/farmland) inscribed on
seemingly endless space. Bailes’ Maps is imbued with this
topographic mood. Its vision from above – and not among – the scene,
looking upon the actual from a place of remove, produces ambiguity and
dis-identification as much as a transparent overview of the content. As
with other works by Bailes, this perspective does not facilitate the
viewer’s immediate recognition of the things photographed; at the moment
of encounter detail is subordinated to a schematic. The viewer can only
regain the natural texture of the objects through a sustained act of
looking – a visual journey that rewards patience with an inkling of
contextual legibility. In his subtle orchestration of this process of
recognition, by modulating the print so that just enough detail but no
more is available – so that the picture unfolds slowly in the mind’s eye
after it has already been taken in at a glance – Bailes;
representational discipline approaches an ethic: Recall the postmodern
impasse outlined by Baudrillard in Simulations – visualized as a
Borgesian map of such detail that it comes to cover the whole globe,
obscuring more than it reveals. The incessant current of new
photographic images and archives – encapsulated by the omnipresent
combination of Google Earth and Google Street View – constitutes a
slippery surface; total visual control that lapses into a lack of
(human) perspective, perhaps best exemplified by a well known wikileaked
video(game-style) murder of journalists and civilians in Iraq – an
aerial scene on a black and white screen. The challenge, in our times,
is to wrench heimlich back from such hyperreality –
paradoxically, to put detail back into our photographic culture. If
Bailes’ images teach us anything, it is that topographic documentation
obscures countless truths.
Stuart Bailes: True Lies