BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES.

Uta Barth: In Between Places

Henry Art Gallery

Seattle, Washington 

November 9, 2000-January 21, 2001

Contemporary Arts Museum

Houston, Texas 

May 12, 2001-July 1, 2001

Uta Barth: In Between Places

essays by Sheryl Conkelton, Russell Ferguson

and Timothy Martin

Seattle: Henry Art Gallery Association

176 pp./$49.95 (hb)

The large collection of photographs featured in Uta Barth's mid-career retrospective titled "In Between Places," directly confronts the long-standing rivalry between the fields of painting and photography. Serving as both a transmitter of information as well as an art form presenting altered representations of the world, the medium of photography has carried a double role. Postmodernism's recent embrace of "the importance of specific environments, life experiences and cultural traditions," has served to recast this medium as a socio-political phenomenon. [1] Simultaneously, the Information Age has created an inflation of imagery, consequently devaluing this postmodernist philosophy. With photography positioned in between these crossroads, Barth ventures to embrace the depth of life in the absence of clear, figurative imagery and presents very basic photographs that reflect painterly characteristics, excluding both frills and frames, in an effort to reassert photography's place within the realm of fine art.

Four mixed-media pieces from the early part of Barth's career, "Untitled 11-14," open the exhibition. Made in 1990, tiny strips of black and white acrylic paint horizontally line the surface of each 48 x 48-inch panel, creating a fierce contrast Within the center of each work, Barth cut out a 3-inch square within which she inserted small focused exterior pictures of homes taken at night. The lights seen within each structure give these images added depth, revealing how dark and light colors can work together to create space as well as static movement Toying with the vision process, these initial pieces collectively create a distancing effect, repelling one's vision. In contrast to the artist's later work, these pieces incorporate paint to a large degree. Barth eventually drops this ironic combination of mediums in favor of something less aggressive--the blur of the photograph--insofar as it captures that which exists outside of our main line of vision.

Placed within the first room of the gallery, nine works from the "Ground" series serve as a smooth transition from the earlier pieces and visually take viewers into a home. Ground #78 (1997) continues to play with depth and blurs out part of a room or hallway on the left side of the picture plane, while a small portion on the right side of the image focuses on a window covered with a drape of white linen. Ground #52 (1995) represents a black leather couch--in focus--that barely fits within the border of the photograph. A sense of anonymity dominates both images. Stripped of commodities and gaudy detail, both appear less jarring and encourage one to question what exactly comprises a feeling of "place." Does it derive from the presence of objects, experience or both? The artist's choice of juxtaposing a partially blurred image with a clear one serves to vindicate her own, paint-like style. Moreover, these images reveal that our minds do not simply fasten onto general objects per se, but rather on the recogniti on of a likeness of something that represents a few characteristics associated with ourselves.

Ground #41 (1994), for example, is an off-center portrayal of two, large mahogany bookshelves filled with books. Similar to the previous piece, neither of the shelf components fit within the border of the picture. This image does undoubtedly reference reading since the dark shelves and direct lighting upon the books indicates the picture was taken within a private library or reading room. Ground #42 (1994) stands out quite strikingly from the rest, due to the presence of an aqua-green wall. Yet two framed, indistinct images of Vermeer paintings (definitely The Lacemaker [c. 1669] and quite possibly The Milkmaid [c. 1658)) appear in the upper left corner. In this instance, Barth not only teases the mind's eye with famous paintings, but the artist uses photography to create a hazy reproduction of these fine works that were executed in absolute clear detail.

Created in the mid- to late-1990s as a complement to the previous collection, the "Field" series deals strictly with urban and rural exteriors. The blurry landscape in Field #13 (1996) is largely nondescript, although a haze of green, black and brown stretches across the middle ground. Field #14 (1995) looks almost identical except the light gray of the road expands further back into the picture adding a little more depth. Both images reveal slight traces of vertically standing entities and pursue the concept of "boundary" more effectively. Field #3 (1995) contains more color, enabling one to decipher an urban area with two tall buildings in the background. The silhouette of a white car rests in the middle ground while a dark car sits in the left foreground. Since Barth eloquently extinguishes the difference between the country and city, these pieces successfully transcend the civic prejudices that exist at the heart of these polarized communities.

Field #20 and Field #21 were made for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1997. At 132 x 165 inches, these images attempt to realistically place viewers within Barth's blurry world. The sheer size of both works easily reveals each grain of color within the picture plane so that they appear as contemporary reflections of the pointillist style of Georges Seurat. By expanding the size of the photograph, Barth clearly breaks down the picture into very minimal terms and establishes a distinct similarity between the human act of looking and the mechanical characteristic of the camera, thus emphasizing both the photographic and visual processes.

Placed in a small room off to the side of the main gallery, a small collection of 10 lithographs titled . . . in passing (1997) reflect a number of magazine cut-outs that each include a small fraction of a focused subject in order to isolate the hazy space within the background. Barth's use of other, everyday imagery to represent her thoughts regarding the looking process reaches into the next body of lush, untitled works from 1998 that utilize an exterior setting and a small focused object in order to create a large visible contrast.

Untitled (98.5) (1998), for example, consists of three photographs of a countryside embodying a visual regression. A gray window pane in the image on the far left defines the boundary between interior and exterior space. Small raindrops rest upon the window as thick white clouds descend upon a green hill full of grass and trees. Due to the slight blur of the line, these images are slightly unfocused and appear more impressionistic since colors and details flow evenly together. However, this romantic view of landscape moves gradually out of focus in the last two images. In this instance the artist works more directly with natural elements such as clouds and light in order to show that a slight haze is also something created by nature and is not simply a mere photographic effect.

... nowhere near (1999) consists of 13 pieces and brings the viewer back within the setting of a house. Rather than travelling from room to room as in the "Ground" series, Barth keeps the camera focused upon a backyard in order to capture the movement of the sun from dawn to dusk. Each image reveals how different amounts of natural light can also work to aggressively distort one's line of vision.

The nine photographs that comprise...and of time (2000) reflect different indoor camera shots of a carpeted floor and couch set against a wall. A few images study the transformation of illusionistic space as light moves across white walls and furniture while others test the traditional idea of the center with a focus upon the floor. Some of these photographs reflect drastic angles that exude a sense of vertigo. Similar to the "Ground" series, these reflections of another stripped-down interior work to exonerate the mundane.

While most of Barth's work reflects a dim, blurry line, her art should not be seen as painting but rather as a step forward for photography. Barth's work gives credence and adds to some of the ideas expressed by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1845 in his six-volume treatise The Pencil of Nature. [2] At that time, Talbot sought to turn the medium of photography into a dignified art form like painting had been. However photography's role in assisting the success of various market economies has frequently shadowed efforts by other artists who have sought to raise photography up to such a dignified level.

As a whole, this collection of Barth's work serves to highlight where photography is going. In his essay titled, " Poetic Transference of Situation," Jean Baudrillard claims that, "Contemporary photography ... knows only how to capture banality, the absence of destiny, insignificance, humanity's confusion with its environment ... and that flaunted happiness which differs not one jot from unhappiness." [3] Most likely in response to the technological revolution, Barth shows that photography can--like painting--turn to abstraction as a means to transcend reality while ironically embracing the mundane in order to do so. Photography now seems to inhabit the space that painting occupied at the turn of the last century; in the midst of another wave of heightened awareness, the figure and details within the photographic image fall away and break down into obscurity. As a result the viewing experience slowly shifts into something very subjective and more sublime.

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in Seattle.

NOTES

(1.) Keith F. Davis, An American century of Photography. From Dry-Plate to Digital, 2nd ed. (Kansas city: Hallmark cards, inc., 1999), p. 449.

(2.) Gail Buckland, Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), pp. 78-96.

(3.) Jean Baudrillard and Luc Delahaye, L'Autre (London: Phaidon Press, 1999).