Lisa Oppenheim: Accidental Networks (MAP #25 Summer 2011) | MAP Magazine

via mapmagazine.co.uk

Excerpt from original article on mapmagazine.co.uk :

Image: Lisa Oppenheim, ‘Refusal, III’, 2011, unique colour photogram.
Courtesy Harris Lieberman, New York

"A Harry Callahan photograph from the late 1940s or early 50s depicts broadsides peeling off the exterior a city building. It’s either a photograph or series of closely cropped photographs. In fact, there is no real way to tell at first they are indeed billboards, although they seem to be mostly movie and concert posters. Only the odd letter or maimed likeness of a long ago starlet peeks through the decay. In short, this photograph (or photographs) look like abstract paintings. His title is something like, ‘For Paul Klee’.

In The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism, Rosalind Krauss explains, via Breton’s writing on ‘convulsive beauty’, photography has a special relationship to mimicry. Mimicry: a thing in nature, in the world, that imitates another; a moth’s wing carrying the markings of an eye; camouflage of all sorts.
Photography is constituted in part by this mimicry, an imitation and imprint of a thing in the world, of peeling posters. What is represented, however, is marked by distance. A photograph of peeling posters is not the thing; it’s a representation of the thing, always viewed in a space and time different from that of its making or taking. It’s a picture of the outside of a building in a town of which you’ve never heard, but which you see on your computer, in a magazine, or billboard. In this way, photographs are abstracted and decontextualised from any semblance of a natural environment, much like Krauss’ description of a moth pinned to the back of a frame. Images are read in this decontextualised frame through the various other economies in which they circulate, for example, journalism and art. It is this such framing, and Callahan’s clever titling, that a documentary photograph of disintegrating broad- sides can engage in direct dialogue with abstract painting.
For Paul Klee...

There is a secondary level of abstraction not specific to photography but to this historical moment. This is an abstraction of information from its source through a haphazard and accidental process that I am just going to call ‘research’. It’s an abstraction of process. Most research is done in front of a computer screen. Sometimes, when looking for something, I will go to a specific website for specific information, like the New York Times, or Petfinder.com, but often the search is meandering. Looking for a Harry Callahan picture I’ve not seen in years, but assuming it must exist somewhere in my Google search, I find another image and email it to a photographer friend who made something that looks similar. This sets off long back and forth chat about mimicry in research. Sources lead to other sources while emails, eating, and life, get in the way. And yet all of this is part of the thought process. Whatever final form the outcome of this research takes, the information required to make or write the thing (this thing that you read now, even) is dislocated and abstracted from any original context; this is the rhizomatic nature of looking around for stuff online...."

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