on starlight and celestial darkness: human vision and cosmic revision in zoe leonard and katie...

7/30/2019 On Starlight and Celestial Darkness: Human Vision and Cosmic Revision in Zoe Leonard and Katie Paterson

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Contents

Glenn Harcourt WorkSiteWorld: Rethinking Michael Heizer throughEnds of the EarthReview: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesMichael Heizer: Levitated Mass, Actual Size, and Actual Size: Munich Rotary Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

Neha ChoksiOn Starlight and Celestial Darkness: Human Vision andCosmic RevisionReview: Zoe Leonard: Observation Point Camden Arts Centre, LondonKatie Paterson: 100 Billion Suns Haunch of Venison, London

Ben LordExpanding Fields, Narrowing PathsReview: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesMichael Heizer: Actual Size and Actual Size: Munich Rotary Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

Lincoln Tobier Artists project: DOLOREM IPSUM: Pain Itself

Kris PaulsenIn the Beginning, There Was the Electron

Leslie DickPersistence of Vision: Some Thoughts on dOCUMENTA (13)Review: dOCUMENTA (13)Kassel, Germany

Melissa RagainIts hard for me to be in the present sometimes: dOCUMENTA (13)Review: dOCUMENTA (13)Kassel, Germany

Nhora Luca SerranoLACMAs Gambit: In Wonderland s Surrealist WomenReview: In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women

Artis ts in Mexi co an d the United State s Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

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Executive EditorElizabeth Pulsinelli

Managing EditorShana Lutker

Editorial BoardStephen BerensEllen BirrellLeslie DickKaren Dunbar

Shana LutkerElizabeth PulsinelliNizan ShakedDamon Willick

Contributing EditorsKen Allan, Seattle Neha Choksi, Mumbai and

Los Angeles Allan deSouza, San FranciscoJae Emerling, Charlotte Michelle Grabner, ChicagoMicol Hebron, Los Angeles Aram Moshayedi, Los

Angeles Kristina Newhouse,

Los Angeles Jan Tumlir, Los Angeles Anne Walsh, Berkele y

DesignBrian Roettinger

Assistant Managing EditorBrica Wilcox

Interns

Evan BurrowsKellie LanhamKali Zappala

DistributionArmadillo Trading Co.Ingram Periodicals, Inc.Ubiquity Distributors

WebsiteTakumi AkinJon Gacnik

PrinterShapco Printing, MinneapolisPrinted in the U.S.A.

PublishersJeff BeallStephen BerensEllen Birrell

Project X Foundation forArt and Criticism

Jeff BeallStephen BerensEllen BirrellCay Sophie RabinowitzMitchell SyropMichelle Whiting

Errata The editors regret failing tocredit the artists project onthe front and back covers of

X-TRA volume 15, number1, to Kate Costello ( Untitled ,2012; ink on paper).

The caption for thereproduction on page 49 in

X-TRA volume 15, number1, should have read: RobertHeinecken, Are You Rea (title page), 196468. Offsetlithograph, 8.7 6.3 inches.The Center for CreativePhotography, Universityof Arizona.

The title of Nicole Woodss

feature in X-TRA volume15, number 1, was listedincorrectly in the table of contents. The correct titleappeared on page 7: Object/ Poems: Alison Knowless Feminist Archite(x)ture .

CoverKorbinian Aigner, Apples ,19121960s (detail).402 drawings in gouacheand pencil or watercolourand colored pencil oncardboard; 4 6 inches each.Courtesy of HistorischesArchiv der TechnischenUniversitt, Munich.Photo: Roman Mrz.


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Neha Choksi

On Starlight and Celestial Darkness:Human Vision and Cosmic Revision,

as Seen in the Recent Works ofZoe Leonard and Katie Paterson

Review: Zoe Le onard: Observat ion Po intCamden Arts Centre, London, March 31June 24, 2012

Katie Paterson: 100 Billion SunsHaunch o Venison, London, March 9 April 28, 2012

With the Cold War space programsunder way, 1960s and 1970s Land arto ered a reinvestigation and renewedattention to the territorial human onearth and in space. 1 In addition toinstitutional and post-minimal critique,Land art emerged as a discourse olandscapeassociated with natureand dealing with grand scale, remotelocation, and di culty o makingtoreclaim the earth as material.

In contrast to the panoramic aerial viewrom above, the work o Zoe Leonard and

Katie Paterson reverts the kinesthetictoward an act o looking upward to thestarlight and cosmic darkness o the skies.Unlike the land, which is coded heavilywith national and territorial impulses, thesun and its cosmic cycle are overlaid with

romantic, symbolic, religious, spiritual,humanistic, and scienti c values. Byattending to the sun as part o theaerial view, as an a ective dimensiono our lives on earth, and as a singularsource or illuminating representationaldiscourse, these artists have shi ted Landarts emphasis rom the spatial to thetemporal. They show the ways in which weare asking and permitting the sun to do,and the ways in which the sun is alwaysalready per orming. 2 The landscapetradition is one o colonizing distances;

Land arts tradition is one o territorialcritique. Leonard and Paterson want tobring down in miniature orm more than atoken o their ndings, but to bring the sunitsel to Earth, as a new kind o landscape. 3

I imagining the grandeur o earthworkswas a response, in the 1960s and 1970s,to the miniaturization o Earth via NASAimages, then seeking out the unbridgeablespaces and times o cosmic length isa response to todays instantaneouslynetworked world. We have come backto Modernisms utopian universalismand nineteenth-century concerns withromance, poetry, and the picturesque.Indeed, we can go urther back anddeclare that this reversion to gazingupward, seen in Christian paintings wellpast the Renaissance, may reintroduce

through a ormal compositional back door,even i inadvertently, the kinesthetic o thesublime and spiritual.

At the Camden Arts Centre, threeprojects o Zoe Leonards rom 2009 to2012 are spaciously installed in threediscrete galleries. The works are centeredon viewing and how we view what weview, and they reveal a photographerbeholding the sun to ocus her thinkingabout the origins o photography and itsuses. The rst room encountered is an

Zoe Leonard, February 27 2012, frame 30 , 2012. Gelatin silver print, 14 10 inches. Courtesy GalerieGisela Capitain and Galleria Ra aella Cortese.


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Zoe Leonard, June 3 2011, frame 33 , 2011. Gelatin silver print, 13 18 inches. Courtesy Galerie GiselaCapitain and Galleria Ra aella Cortese.

expanse o white, with light rom s evenskylights fooding the white walls, whichin turn are punctuated by ten pale silvergelatin photographs o the sun. Theseprints, rom 2011 and 2012, are rom anongoing series, together called AvailableLight , and are appropriately presentedwith no arti cial light, un ramed andpinned to the walls. Each photographhas its negatives edge printed blackto orm a visual boundary, signi ying

how photography relies on the sun orsubject and process, both the power andsigni cance o the suntaming its lightto the expanse o sky contained within.

The sun pictured materializes as a hazypale gray blob or a hotspot o nearwhite in an even-toned, vaporous sky.The photograph presents pure light asa subtle s umato without modulationso shape and shadow. It is commonlyheld that the rst hazy sky in WesternArt is none other than Leonardo daVincis Mona Lisa .4 For a century be oreLeonardo, with the exception o a ewreligious scenes depicting the reso hell, every Renaissance paintingpictured skies with unlimited visibility. 5 Da Vinci incorporated atmosphericobscuration to create compression o thear distance through aerial perspective.However, in Leonards photographs, thehaze places the sun at a removeveiledand aloo and yet corporealizes it; it isboth a body that can be veiled and anunattainable sun; it is both indexicallypresent and experientially absent. In act,

these are photos not o the sun but othe Sun as sunlight and ob uscation,lens glare and negative grain, and arecolorless, like white light and dry heat.

Even more interesting is the paradoxicalproli eration o a cold, dying sun in theinterior o an art viewing space. Theportraits and landscapes o the sun arearranged equidistant rom each other,punctuating the white walls with hazygray rectangles, the e ect o samenessintensi ed by the lack o color and the

regulated arrangement. What is themeaning o multiple suns, when welive under one sun? Speci city matterssince each photograph is titled bydate and rame number, and yet, theiterations seem to create an equivalencyo time and vision, each day repeated asanother, changes in weather or seasonremarkably going unrecorded.

Indeed, the use o a series emphasizing

equivalences also orces the artistshand. Compare Leonards series o hazysuns to Al red Stieglitzs Equivalents ,his photographs o clouds, which werealso always shown in groups. 6 TheEquivalents are commonly recognizedas photographs intended by their makerto ree the subject matter rom literalinterpretation, and are historicallysigni cant or being among the rstabstract photographic works o art. 7 In Leonards work, it is as i Stieglitzsclouds are replaced by the sun, or theclouds have thinned into an obscuringveil over the sun. The conceit oabstraction survives the thinning orreplacement. Not including a horizonand centering each sun gives a senseo levitating vertigo. 8

In photographing clouds, Stieglitzdemonstrates how to hold a moment,how to record something so completely,that all who see [the photograph o ]it will relive an equivalent o what hasbeen expressed. 9 Rosalind Krausshas argued that the photographs in

Stieglitzs Equivalents series constitutemasterpieces o Symbolist art, 10 eveni Stieglitzs notion o equivalentstrans ormed a Baudelairean andSymbolist concept into an ostensiblypersonal and American one. 11 Assymbolic works, Leonards sun picturesdirect our attention to the ountainheado photographic exposure. What I haveelsewhere noted in re erence to the worko a ellow artistwho photographedthe sun closely cropped and printedc-prints the size o wallet pictures


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applies to Leonards photographs too.The artist displaces the ostensiblesubjects o other photographs andzooms in directly to the very sourcerom which photographs are made, light,

and the ultimate source, the sun. Forthis photograph cannot be an aid tomemory, but an aid to vision. [T]hephotographs achieve a species o divinesimulacra, by their ailure to reveal animpossible but wonder ul origin, the

sun. 12 Leonards choice o black andwhite points to their existence as Urphotographs. They index the processo capturing light on paper in slowtime, sequentially laid out, un olding intime or the spectator. 13 Viewing black-and-white photography today sets up asituation where a nostalgia or analogin ects and occupies the present. Eerily,the photographs eel as i they are longnighttime exposures o the sun, as i thesun could exist in night. The expulsiono color drives the photograph awayrom light towards nocturnal shades, thepallor o dull grays, as i hinting at thecold alienation and empty subjectivitythat aces these blank pictures. Thesepictures challenge our ability to scr utinize.

The photographs moreover allow us toconsiderin our contemporary digitalmomentthe ontology and genesis othe photographers desire to image light.The history o photography is entwinedwith the sun, conceptually, visually,

procedurally, and substantially.14

The sunand its light are ontological subjects ora camera rather than merely guring theprimary source or the work it does. It isnot the camera that is heliotropic but ZoeLeonard hersel . The suns concrete andmetaphorical luminescence coalesce inher photographic vision. However, i thecamera can render the sun in normalscale within the landscape o gray sky,the camera obscura reveals the sun asall-pervasive. At Camden Arts Centre, Iwas thrust rom the bright white room o

sun photographs into the dark chamberhousing Leonards Arkwright Ro ad ,2012, a room-sized camera obscura. 15 Iwas blinded by darkness, be ore beingengul ed in the time o the street. One isreminded that without darkness there isno light.

In her photographs, the suns lightscatters and xes; yet it is the sun itselthat matters, the shape and look o it. In

the camera obscura, it is the light thatmatters, its arrival on earth re racted andrepeated. In Arkwright Road , Leonardextends and reveals the corporeality oreplication, giving a new dimension toour reception o time and space throughmovement and light. 16 An unsuspectingspectator might understand the darkenedspace as a projection room, the lens tothe outside as a movie projector, and thereal projection as a de erred or delayedrecording. Even though Leonards cameraobscura o ers the highest degree oindexicality, with no intervening recordingmedia, paper, or raming device, thewondrous thought is not o objectivity buto the subjectivity o expectation and thea ective dimension o real light. It is nota matter o the real and the removed, buto allowing that whatever we do see isindeed part o our reality.

I Arkwright Ro ad in act participatesin the drama o landscape, it does sowhile turning the scene on its head. 17

Without the correctives o putting theimage right side up or brightening

the dim visual, the work proclaims itsidentity as a camera obscura piece, noillusions. 18 And so it should dawn onthe viewer that what is on view is not aprojection o a prerecorded landscapeconcept, but is rather, uncannily, animper ect view o li e and scenographyrom the ordinary London high streetright outside the gallerywith no timedelay. What matters here is not theconstruction o an idealized or instructivelandscape, but rather a technologicalorganization o viewing and a speci c

Zoe Leonard, Arkwright Ro ad, 2012. Camera obscura installation: lens, darkened room; dimensionsvariable. Installation view at Camden Arts Centre, 2012. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy Galerie GiselaCapitain and Galleria Ra aella Cortese.


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use o interior walls decorated witharchways to interpose the public on thevaguely domestic, to allow us to be bothensconced and al resco. The work is nota record. It is a dislocated and truncatedexperience, one whittled down romthe all-immersive to a strictly one-wayvisual. It is an act o viewing withouta chance o the gaze being returned,a distillation o Modernist alienation.Inso ar as the work is comprised o a

disembodied and decontextualizedimage, one captured within the artgallery i not actually recorded, it is aninstance o phantasmagoria not unlikeRoland Barthess notion o photographyas presenting reality in a past state, anectoplasm, a reality one can no longertouch. 19 But while Barthes spoke o apast state, that is one with time as thedistancing actor, Leonards cameraobscura renders a current and presentstreet activity as no less a reality one canno longer touch. The gallery is a redoubtrom the real world, a dark room in which

action is visible but unresponsive to us. 20

Unlike the sun photos, where the level oabstraction is so high that there is little tosee, Arkwright Road opens up reality oras long as the sun is willing to share. Thegreatly magni ed cars zooming about theceiling amused me more than seeing thesky at my eet, because it suggested theurban as transported to the heavensbillboards, construction, tra c lights, andall. One acquaintance was amused thatthat the sign on the cinema across the

street read: IN IMAX 3D EXPERIENCEin reverse. Although the stereognostic,and thus the proprioceptive, experienceo walking down an uninspiring Londonhigh street is withdrawn, the gain iscousin to the foating eeling a orded aviewer spending time in Available Light .

Arkwright Road burbles and levitates; it isphotography in and o the present.

In 1859, Alphonse de Lamartine amouslydeclaimed, Photography is more thanan art. It is a solar phenomenon where

the artist collaborates with the sun. 21 IZoe Leonards work relies on the sunslight, Katie Patersons work relies on thepossibility o such a light never arrivingon earth.

The Dying Star Letters , 2011, are a serieso letters handwritten by Paterson andaddressed to her gallerist at Hauncho Venison, Mrs. Annapriya Urquhart,upon learning about the demise o a star

rom her scienti c contacts around theworld. The work refects a very humandesire to record and communicatethe moment when a scientist noticesthe transmission o light rom a starhas stopped arriving on earth, thusintimating its death. The unvarnishedtruth is announced thus, Im sorry toin orm you o the death o the star GRB120305A. Yours sincerely, K.P. The blandannouncement, the serial nature o thecommunications, the contemporaryormality o analog mailpostcards,letters, envelopes laid in a row on a shelin a galleryall contribute to a genericmatter-o - act eeling o resignation.Claude Lanzmanns comment on imaginghuman death is use ul here: I used tosay that i there had beenby sheerobscenity or miraclea lm actuallyshot in the past o three thousand peopledying together in a gas chamber, rsto all, I think that no one human beingwould have been able to look at this.Anyhow, I would have never includedthis in the lm. I would have pre erredto destroy it. It is not visible. You cannot

look at this.22

And so we do not look;we writecalmly, mechanically, andacceptingly. And yet, one would hopethat one couldnt help but look uponthe death o a star without experiencinga twinge o insecurity. Our own star mayollow this ate, a ter all. The Dying Star

Letters communicate, rom one earthlingto another, an awareness o the deatho stars beyond our sun, and so byextension, an awareness o the ate oour own solar system. The unreachablyremote is made even more remote with

Katie Paterson, The Dying Star Letters , 2011. Ink on paper; dimensions variable. Installation view atHaunch o Venison, London, 2012. Photo Peter Mallet. Courtesy o Haunch o Venison, London.


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ultimate negation and the evacuation omeaning, and on the other being richlysymbolic o inner and external worlds. 29

Katie Paterson exercises control over theanxieties we have about our extensivelarger environment, communicatingthe invisible, the unseeable, and themysterious. Patersons Ancient DarknessTV allows us to ask questions such asJane Blocker raised in writing about

Bruce Naumans corridor pieces: Whatis the place o vision in works in whichthere is nothing in par ticular to see,or in which seeing is rustrated, orin which one is blinded? And whatis the unction o representation inworks in which nothing much seemsto be represented? 30 Ancient DarknessTV absorbs our gaze and renews ourcapacity to receive light. I seeing triggersa cascade o reactions in our brain, whatdoes not seeing do? The blinded viewerunderstands timelessness and in nity allthe better when darkness is explored notas mainly ironic or dualistic or enigmatic,but as part o the primordial beginningand ultimate end common to li e andart. On the other hand, a puzzled viewermay use that single minute to wonderabout the blankness, may question ishe is indeed viewing an emptied screen,and thus unexpectedly visualize andproject her own subjectivities outward.One may quote again, When I shut myeyes and look at darkness, even nothingbecomes something: a star eld, a ractalsimulation, an indistinct halo. The act

o the real is another world rom thegment o our imaginations. Analogysatis es our desire to place ourselveswithin the worldwe link the knownwith the unknown to create an orderthat is dynamic and sel -refec ting. 31 As Annushka Shani writes in describingother works examining darkness, itis a void that is sometimes conceivedas dread ul and nameless, a kind omute otherness, beyond language andcommunication; or it might suggest acharged void replete with potential, a

pause, an interval, a site or wonder andrefection. 32

To Otto Pienes questions and concernsrom 1973, Why is there no art in space,why do we have no exhibitions in the sky?

Up to now we have le t it up to war tolight up the sky, artists have answeredwith works in recrackers, coloredsmoke, and light shows. 33 However,Paterson goes the extra distance to set

alight a Black Firework or Dark Skies at an unspeci ed location in 2010, andto display merely the ashen burntrework in a box in the gallery. The eventhappened somewhere, remotely, like thedeath o the star. The smoke ailed tocommunicate anything; the ashes indexthe event as past. It is as i the tatteredrework remains are her miniaturizedstand-ins or the explosions that heraldedthe star deaths. Indeed, the ultimateminiaturization occurs when the real isrepresented rather than gured. Patersondid just that or her 2011 Venice BiennaleProject, 100 Billion Suns (2011), whichinvolved a con etti cannon discharging3216 pieces o paper with each explosion.Each colored circle apparently representsthe colors o the various Gamma RayBursts, which are the brightest explosionsin the universe, up to 100 billion timesbrighter than our suns. Patersons worksare neither hope ul nor morbid, buttranscend both states into an engaginglyheady awareness o cosmic fux.

Both Leonards and Patersons works old

the wonder o the skies into Land art, byre-linking the body to the cosmic material.The massive is miniaturized to the scaleo our body. We eel our bodies gazingand imbricated in Leonards sunlight.We eel the aging o our bodies in ronto Patersons dying stars. Carl Sagan isproved right: We are all starstu . 34

Neha Choksi is an artist who lives and works inLos Angeles and Mumbai.

Katie Paterson, Ancient Darknes s TV , 2009. TV broadcast, VHS trans er to DVD, 6 min. 9 sec. Installationview Haunch o Venison, London, 2012. Photo Peter Mallet. Courtesy Haunch o Venison, London.


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Notes

1 See Joanna Eggebeen or a reviewo Land arts relation to sculpturalMinimalism and Modernisms utopianuniversalism as variously outlined byRosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, andMiwon Kwon, in Between Two Worlds:Robert Smithson and Aerial Art, Public

Art Dialogue 1.1 (March 2011), 105.2 To revise Jill Casid, otherwise writing

about landscape (and not the sun)in Epilogue: Landscape in, around,and under the per ormative, Women

& Per ormance: A Journal o FeministTheory 21.1 (2001): 98.

3 See James S. Ackerman, ThePhotographic Picturesque, Artibus etHistoriae 24.48 (2003): 7394.

4 Roy McMullen, Mona Lisa: The Pictureand the Myth (Boston: HoughtonMi fin, 1975), 91, 109, et passim . TheFrench physicists Louis Fizeau andLeon Foucault rst success ullyphotographed the sun with anysharpness on April 2, 1845.

5 Stanley David Gedzelman, The Sky inArt, in Weatherwise 44.6 (December1991/January 1992): 8.

6 Zoe Leonard has shown selectedphotographs rom Available Light invarious art spaces, always in r eworkedcombinations. As Kristina Wilsonmakes clear about the Equivalentsphotographs, [Stieglitzs] tendencyto group them into seriesexplicitlysituated the individual work o artwithin a larger conceptual and ormalstatement, weaving a sentence outo autonomous words. KristinaWilson, The Intimate Gallery and theEquivalents : Spirituality in the 1920sWork o Stieglitz, The Art Bulletin 85.4(December 2003): 762.

7 Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: AHistory o Photography (New York:McGraw-Hill, 2000), 239.

8 Although not shown here at the Camden,Leonard has at times revealed a bit othe oreground landscape in the ormo the tops o buildings, not unlike theappearance o treetops in StieglitzsEquivalents . For a discussion o thesensory disorientation and cognitivecon usion, see Rosalind Krauss,

Stieglitz/ Equivalents, October 11(Winter 1979): 12940; Daniel Cornell, Al red Stieglitz and the Equivalent:Reinventing the Nature o Photography(New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery,1999); and Wilson, 757.

9 Dorothy Norman, Al red Stieglitz: An American Seer (Millerton, N.Y.:Aperture, 1973), 910.

10 Rosalind Krauss, Al red StieglitzsEquivalents, Arts Magazine 54(February 1980), 3437.

11 Norman, 144.12 Neha Choksi, The Droll Suns o Carl

Nishizawa in Class Register (1996),a photocopied publication created byand or the students in a p hotographyclass taught by Sharon Lockhart at theUniversity o Cali ornia, Los Angeles,1996.

13 In relation to Leonards choice tophotograph her suns in black andwhite, note Briony Fers descriptionin opening her essay Night (about

Je Walls eponymous black-and-white photograph) o how the younganthropologist Claude Lvi-Straussset himsel an exercise on his longpassage rom Marseilles to Brazilto take up his rst teaching post in1934: With time on his hands, andboth ascinated by and keen to learnthe cra t o writing, he set himselthe task o describing, second bysecond, minute by minute, the tinycolour changes that occurred inthe sky as day turned into night. Itis the opposite o a snapshot. Ina striking metaphor, he writes othe photographic plate o nightslowly revealing a seascape in whatseems like impenetrable darkness.Leaving aside the obvious di erenceo subject matter, there is a hint inboth [Levi-Strauss and Wall] that theprocesses o perceptual recognitionare somehow clearest when they areailing, when twilight dims and nightallsAs a consequence, we are

prompted to ask not only what kind ostructure there is to see, but what kindo structure, or structuring ramework,do we have to see with? The lessonhe [Lvi-Strauss] learnt, it seems, atthat early point in his youth ul careerwas that to harness perceptionwas also to recogniseor at leastglimpsesomething revelatory in thecollapse o a perceptual structure.Briony Fer, Night, in Ox ord Art

Journal 30.1, Je Wall Special Issue(2007): 7172.

14 Jules Janin, one o the earliest criticso photography, wrote about thedaguerreotype in year one o itshistory: Imagine then that its thesun itsel introduced now as the all-power ul agent o an entirely new artthat produces these unbelievableworksNo longer is there a need tospend 3 days at the same spot only tobarely achieve a li eless shadethiswondrous operation does its workin a moment, as swi t as thought, asast as the ray o the sun (in James

S. Ackerman, 75). Indeed writerssynthesized new coinages to describe

the rst daguerreotypes in 1840, suchas heliography (Samuel Morse) and

pencil o nature (Fox Talbot).15 The camera obscura is a room-

sized pinhole camera in whichthe pinhole may be replaced bya simple lens; although it is nowassociated with cameras and theinvention o photography, the cameraobscura was originally used to allowartists to improve their accuracyin representing the world in ront

o them, i.e. to see accurately, i inreverse and upside down.

16 According to art historian JonathanCrary, one o the decisive unctions othe camera obscura is to sunder theact o seeing rom the physical bodyo the observer, to decorporealizevision. In Jenni er King, ObjectiveFictions: Trying to make sense oVera Lutters studio photographs, OnPaper , 10. 3 (Jan/Feb 2006), 61.

17 The word drama is used advisedly.An anonymous blogger writesabout Arkwright Road : [Leonard]tells me she played with the idea ointroducing a per ormance elementto her work. But this, precisely, wouldhave been playingtamperingwiththe experience. It would becometheatre. She also tells me a story. Ata stately home at the close o the 15 th

century, a man decided to have atheatre troupe per orm in the gardenoutside, and cast the play into theballroom through a camera obscura,to delight his guests. His idea wasmet with horror as the guests fed,believing in some sort o witchcra tor trickery. In this tableau, we are theper ormers. Another observer likensit to group voyeurism. It crossed mymind, assures Leonard, but then Irealised that we could also see thisi we just turned around and l ookedout o the window. What elevates thestreet scene rom simple looking toimmersive observation is preciselythe manipulation o the image througha lens, its painstakingly thought-outposition on the sur ace o the wall,and our position in that space. Notthe space in the room, but that spacesomewhere between looking andseeing. (Zoe Leonard: ObservationPoint, http://mini-plex.blogspot.in/2012/04/zoe-leonard-observation-point.html, accessed August 18, 2012.)Although Michael Fried amouslydenounces theatricality, Leonard doesnot, like him, disavow art works thatdepend upon a spatial relationship tothe body o the beholder. This physicalmovement rather than objective stasis

is precisely what is desired andactivated by the doubling o thesunlit street. In this way, the workis inescapably theatrical. James S.Ackerman draws out a comparisonbetween the rectangle ormat o earlyphotographs and the prosceniumtheatrical stage (Ackerman , 82).

18 Our eyes also take in the world likea camera obscura, upside down andreversed. Early experimenters aroundthe time o photographys teenage

years were experimenting with givinghumans goggles that fipped theworld. The brain adjusted. Thus whenwe see the world reversed, it is asi we are seeing without the brai n,without the perceptual adaptation ito ers. See George M. Stratton, SomePreliminary Experiments on Visionwithout Inversion o the RetinalImage, Psychological Review 3.6(November 1896), 61117; David Lindenet alia, The Myth o Upright Vision:A Psychophysical and FunctionalImaging Study o Adaptation toInverting Spectacles, Perception 28(1999): 46981.

19 A ghost o re erentiality is exactlywhat Barthes invoked in his CameraLucida , where he stressed the greaterimportance or photography ochemistry rather than the cameraobscura: it is light-sensitive paper thatgives the photograph its essentialnature as a that-has-been. Barthesemphasized the photographs intimateconnection with the object, attestingto the reality o the thingbut areality in a past state, an ectoplasm,a reality one can no longer touch.Margaret Iverson, Readymade,Found Object, Photograph, Art

Journal 63.2 (summer 2004), 50. Seealso Roland Barthes, trans. RichardHoward, Camera Lucida: Refectionson Photography (New York: Hill andWang, 1981), 87.

20 Thanks to Allan Kram or hisconversation and words about therelation o the camera obscura toModernist alienation and its e ect,August 18, 2012.

21 Gisele Freund, Photography and Society(Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), 79.

22 Lanzmann has variously criticized AlainResnaiss 1955 documentary Nightand Fog or its use o concentrationcamp images. Claude Lanzmann,

Seminar on Shoah, Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 8299.

23 Jane D. Marsching, Orbs, Blobs,and Glows: Astronauts, UFOs, andPhotography, Art Journal 62.3(autumn 2003): 62.

24 Survey and Observation Point/ Observation Point (2011) continue toaddress issues at work in Leonards2008 Dia Beacon installation You SeeI Am Here A ter All , which is titleda ter a phrase on one o the postcardso Niagara Falls. Observation Point/ Observation Point presents twosmall postcards side by side on awall showing the same observationpoint urnished with stone structuresand an eponymous sign. The

postcard rames the process andgoal o observation, highlighting themediated nature o looking.

25 Phrase rom Joanna Eggebeen, 103.26 Annushka Shani, Dark Matter (London:

Jay Jopling/White Cube, 2006),exhibition catalog, 33. Quotation romE. E. Cummings, I carry your heartwith me, in George J. Firmage, ed.,Complete Poems 19131962 (New

York: HBJ, 1972).27 The artist as creator and ramer o

exemplary phenomena and messagesgoes into space there to beamsignals back to earth / The artist asexplorer o the inner sel continuesthe dialogue with the universe inspace, rom the Statement sectionsigned November 3, 1986, in Paris, byOtto Piene, Elizabeth Goldring andLowry Burgess. In Elizabeth Goldring,

Desert Sun/Desert Moon and theSKY ART Mani esto, in Leonardo 20.4, 20th Anniversary Special Issue:Art o the Future: The Future o Art(1987): 346.

28 Andre and Barry quoted in Lucy R.Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerializ-ation o the Art Object rom 1966 to1972 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University o Cali ornia Press, 1997),40. Robert Smithson, A Thing Is aHole in a Thing It Is Not, Landscape

Architect 58.3 (April 1968): 205.29 Shani, 33.30 Jane Blocker, Blink: The Viewer as

Blind Man in Installation Art, Art Journal 66.4 (winter 2007): 16.

31 Marsching, 62.32 Shani, 36.33 Otto Piene, Ways to Paradise, in

Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, eds., ZERO (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1973); original publication: ZERO3 (Dusseldor , 1961). Quoted inElizabeth Goldring, 339. As a sampler,see the relevant works o Cai Guo-Qiang, Ra ael Lozano-Hemmer, andJudy Chicago.

34 Carl Sagan in Cosmos: A PersonalVoyage episode 8, Journeys inSpace and Time, a TV series rstaired in the 1980s.


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on starlight and celestial darkness: human vision and cosmic revision in zoe leonard and katie...

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