Toys. Beer. Flags.

ROBERT RACZKA: AMERICAN BRAIN

PITTSBURGH CENTER FOR THE ARTS 

PITTSBURGH

FEBRUARY 2-MARCH 18, 2007

In the 1950s and 1960s the grandeur and power of mass media and marketing was palpable: the frenzied optimism over the production and reproduction of advertisements, objects, and signs is reflected in the exuberance of the era's images themselves. In today's visual culture, after a half-century of continuous media production, the novelty is long gone. New representations coat surfaces thick with the history of the images that came before them. Signs and signifiers build upon each other in stacks of abstractions. The density of commercial spaces conflates contexts and remaps identities. Human environments stagger under the literal and symbolic weight of decades of aesthetic produce and refuse.

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Robert Raczka's "American Brain," a suite of forty-two large-scale color photographs, is not a survey of this proliferation of images, signs, and icons but a representation and repurposing all its own. It is an exploration of the territory where our coolly fabricated products meet the subjectivity of space and the inevitable decay of time. With a standard 35 mm camera, Raczka documents the seams of popular culture in his journeys into and out of urban centers, across highways, and through small towns.

At the core of "American Brain" is the interface between fabrication and existence--the space between product and placement. Some images exploit the potent confusion of image planes stacked in three-dimensional space. Others subdue the drama of the depicted picture plane by exploring its boundaries or exposing its underbelly. Still others do less work, comfortably sitting back and letting the absurdity of the landscape speak on its own.

The photographs remain spatially anonymous, titled simply by index number, offering the suggestion that the works are not illustrative of a certain place and the implication that these views can be had anywhere. Like the ambiguous non-place of advertising space, Raczka renders the landscape as a nonlinear and undifferentiated host to the intrusions of graphic space.

Many of the exhibition's images smartly exploit the material properties of advertisements: their flatness, scale, framing, and surface quality. They employ windows, display cases, and translucent vinyl signs to reflect and composite spaces. These variables become tools that aid in Raczka's fractured and collage-like compositions, which thread these representations of space into the photographic space of his actual physical location.

No photograph is digitally manipulated or post-processed; the images thus function like travel photographs in bookmarking location and experience. This understanding is crucial in order to comprehend what is at play in "American Brain." In one image, a Frankenstein-like assemblage of plastic infant parts (toy genitals included) is suspended in a storefront display, walking through the air and offered up with a sticker: "New Born Baby 4.99." In another image, a "Support Our Troops" ribbon hangs above the forlorn face of an American Indian doll, which is posed with a toy cheetah. Overlaying this surreal scene as a shadow is a giant "S," presumably the first letter in the name of whatever storefront is offering these products. These photographs suggest that our spaces are anything but rational, and Raczka's work functions as a monument to this amusing and mildly unnerving truth.

Juxtaposition is a prominent fascination as images and their attendant ideas become enmeshed in bizarre hybrid constructions. One photograph focuses on an architectural detail of an anonymous tavern/restaurant: two cartoon-like kegs stand at the base of a vast light-emitting diode (LED) billboard screen, which features a cropped portrait of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1506), sipping on a beer. Raczka's composition couches this mediated conversation in the larger context of the environment: the less exclamatory details of the roof and adjacent structures lend credence to the show's suggestion that this meta-meaning is quietly acting on us more often than we are likely to recognize. These are not necessarily the highlights of our visual environment; some of the most absurd or fantastic conglomerations may be in the spaces least considered or attended to.

In its focus on fragmentation and dissolution of these public symbols, "American Brain" certainly has its ideological and political leanings. Raczka did not pose any of these motifs, but he did find them amid the drunken fervor of American capitalist production. It was not he who carefully abandoned the clunky gas station signs against the fence that protects a children's playground from a winding asphalt road. He did not mass produce Christian icons and sell them alongside Home Depot plant pots, or allow posters of American flags to press against a security-glass window for so long that the red and white stripes faded into cruddy marbleized continents; this is simply America, being its zealous, productive self.

What Raczka's work lacks is cynicism, but his photographic endeavor embodies a liberating spirit. Beyond remapping the depicted representations with new narratives, Raczka's images suggest the individual capacity to create meaning in the face of dominant cultural production. Raczka's process is an active effort to participate in this world of representations by becoming a producer himself. Despite the ambiguous authority of the title, "American Brain" is really an invitation to read and write one's own idiosyncratic way through our cluttered, potent cultural space.

ADAM GROSSI is an interdisciplinary artist and critic based in Pittsburgh and Chicago. He can be reached at [e-mail].