Plato's cave.

SLIDESHOW

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART 

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND 

FEBRUARY 27-MAY 15, 2005

THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER 

CINCINATTI, OHIO 

JULY 2-SEPTEMBER 11, 2005

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its
age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.
--Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)

The history of my family, like many, is partially recorded in photographs. My father held the position of family documenter, but by the time I arrived, he had turned from shooting print film to a more economical and convenient slide film as his preferred means. The times I spent with my family in the darkness of the living room witnessing his narrated slide shows of holiday gatherings and vacations turned out to be as memorable as the images we viewed during them.

In part, it is this legacy that drew artists to explore use of slide technology in the 1960s and '70s, coincident with a general rise in photography's presence in contemporary art. Photography invigorated post-abstract expressionist art precisely because of its multifaceted nature as a tool whose dominant use lay outside the parameters of fine art. Unlike painting with its long history as a medium with a specific set of artistic conventions, photography's generic quality has appealed to artists wishing to create art more engaged with contemporary life. There are, however, particularities to slide technology that make it distinct from printed photography: slide projection exists in the interstices between still photography, film and video. More ephemeral than a printed image yet more static than a moving one, the slide offers the viewer opportunity to both contemplate an image for a period of time as well as to see images in a particular serial order. Slide projection allows for the creation of large-scale works that can easily match the size of paintings, while at the same time offering artists a means to move away from producing a physical object and to defuse potential problems raised by the commodification of objects.

Preceded by years of gradual decline in use due to the rise of digital technologies, the fall of 2004 marked the production of the last Ektagraphic slide projector by Kodak. The exhibition "SlideShow," which opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and is currently at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, commemorated this event by presenting artworks created with slide technology spanning nearly 40 years (1966-2002). The end of the exhibition was dedicated to an archive of the technology itself, displaying a historical lineage of objects from magic lanterns to a variety of early slide projectors. The show's curator Darsie Alexander details this history in her opening catalog essay, placing slides in a historical line with other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optical devices.

The timeliness of the exhibition, marking the replacement of one standardized visual technology with another, is significant. Technologies shape the way we represent and therefore understand the world around us, placing an idiosyncratic stamp on the images viewed and created with them. The carousel projector, first introduced in 1961 and the model used by all the artists in this exhibition, displays a continuous circular series of images in a particular sequence, punctuated by brief interruptions of darkness as one slide is replaced by the next. Later models offered opportunity for dissolves and automation, anticipating the more smooth digital projection with which we are now accustomed.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The installation of the BMA show was beautiful, with subtle touches like shadowy lines projected onto the floor in the passageways between sections, reminiscent of the heat vents on slide projectors. It conjured the feeling that one was wandering around inside a projector as one progressed through the exhibition. The sound of so many projectors running simultaneously created a distinct ambience and added to the sense that the show itself was contained within the belly of an immense slide projector. Indeed, the exhibition design was a "work" unto itself: the experience of "SlideShow" felt akin to an amusement park ride. This space was very unlike a traditional white cube, a space receding into the background to allow one to focus exclusively on the art. Instead, "SlideShow" created a subjective environment that worked aggressively to blur the lines between the "inside" (the artwork on view) and the "outside" (the physical space of the exhibition). This notion of various representations nested within a representation seems to be made possible by the physical characteristics of slide technology itself. Again I found myself back in the tiny theatre created during my father's slide shows and all the elements that went with this ritual: the darkness of the room, the luminance emanating from the image-interrupted by the narrative that accompanied the images, brief periods of blindness as the slide shifted and the monotonous hum of the mechanism itself.

"SlideShow" offered an opportunity to view seminal works that are rarely exhibited such as Jan Dibbet's Land/Sea (1971), Dan Graham's Homes for America (1966-67), Robert Smithson's Hotel Palaneque (1969-72) and the full realization of Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-96). It also contained some pleasant surprises such as "Projects: Helen Levitt in Color" (1971-74) originally created for display at the Museum of Modern Art, and Krzysztof Wodiczko's "The Real Estate Projection" (1987), a wonderfully installed interior projection that mimicked the space of a high-priced apartment in Manhattan with views out a window toward a derelict building awaiting renovation.

The exhibition was divided into the categories of narrative, performance art and conceptualism, mingling works created in different time periods and with differing motives for utilizing slide projection. Comparing, for example, Ana Mendieta's series "Untitled (Body Tracks)" (1974) with Marcel Broodthaers' Bateau Tableau (1973), one can see enormous differences in attitudes toward the medium. Photography was Mendieta's primary way to record her ephemeral private performances for display in gallery and museum exhibitions. Although an awareness of the formal qualities of the photographic frame is evident in Mendieta's "Untitled (Body Tracks)" series with its centered view of her back-turned body, her treatment of slides (and photography in general) was primarily as a document. Broodthaers' approach was far more self-reflexive: consisting of 80 projected images of a realistic amateur nineteenth-century maritime painting, Bateau Tableau deconstructs the painting by photographically moving in closer and closer to its surface. Displaying an awareness of the transformative powers of photography, Broodthaers turns a representational work into an abstract one while also cleverly tracing a larger art-historical shift from figurative painting to abstraction. A number of other pieces in the exhibition such as those by Robert Barry, Willie Doherty, Jonathan Monk and Robert Smithson aproach slide technology with a similar wariness toward its purported documentary powers.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Many artists seized upon the opportunity afforded by slide projection to pair images with sound, providing a contextual framework for their images. The crux of James Coleman's Slide Piece (1972) in fact rests in the audio track: a single repeating image of a parking lot in Milan is variously described and interpreted by an authoritative male voice. The expectation that a new image will appear is promised, as the screen briefly goes dark while the projector seems to be advancing to the next slide. Instead, the same image repeats but with a different narration. This has the effect of simultaneously making one think that the image is in fact different while at the same time forcing a closer look at the same image. Slide Piece capitalizes upon the chameleon-like quality of a photograph, how its meaning can be manipulated by altering the context in which it is viewed. The entire set up of Slide Piece mimics a pretentious art history lecture, peeling back the tenuous layers of the process by which works of art are imbued with meaning.

Seeing Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in its original configuration as a 700-plus slide show set to music was one of the highlights of the show. Too often, images from this series are shown alone in printed form where they can appear anemic without their contextual framework. In its original form, no image stays on the screen for too long, always remaining part of the larger "story" pushed forward by the music. In the form of projections Goldin's fleeting images of friends, many of whom have since died of AIDS, find a more fitting representation as ghostly traces vanishing before one's eyes.

In a number of works in the exhibition, time was treated as material to be shaped and manipulated. The circular slide carousel seems to prefigure the video loop, a trope influenced by the nature of digital editing so prevalent in contemporary art today. Projection 4 (1997) by Fischli & Weiss consisted of two projectors displaying an automated series of continuously dissolving images of vividly colorful flowers and mushrooms. Faced with these psychedelic monstrous hybrids, time seemed suspended in slow motion. Likewise, Ceal Floyer's Auto Focus (2002), which features a single empty projector engaged in a futile attempt to focus on a non-existent slide, is trapped in a timeless limbo. The six slides that comprise Dibbet's Land/Sea appear to show a continuous horizon line of land and sea, conflating time and space into an extended vista. However, a closer look reveals that the images are repeated, presenting instead the stretching of a single moment in time across the space of six images.

"SlideShow" makes evident the lineage of slide projection in relation to the immersive environments recently created by artists working in video and other forms of digital projection. The darkness required for projection itself has become a trait common to contemporary exhibitions, making the gallery space into a malleable element as walls fall away in favor of glowing images floating in space. The history of this practice, perhaps predating the eighteenth-century spectacle of magic lantern shows, leading into the space of cinema, and onto more contemporary practices, would be a fascinating trail to follow. "SlideShow" is an important first step in the writing of this history.

LYNN CAZABON is an artist and Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Susan Sontag