Experiment with Your Materials

Specifically, I asked them to work with their initial rolls of film. Since most of the students had not previously worked with film, most had exposures that were not entirely successful. Rather than wasting them, I suggested that they cut them up, tape them back together with other negatives, scratch them, burn the emulsion, and so on. Basically everything one is not supposed to do to film.

This led to an entirely new sense of ownership among the students in relation to their delicate negatives. This was also an introduction to integrating writing and images, as well as photographic abstraction and collage. Counterintuitive as this may seem, it also helped them understand film on a rudimentary technical basis as this assignment tangibly reinforced the effects of adding or removing density from the negative.

What Are We Looking at?

The non-archival masking tape stuck on this photograph functions in several ways.

The photograph itself becomes an original, unlikely to be reproducible with the same exactitude as a second exposure of the negative. The piece can now also be considered as being interdisciplinary. Photography is no longer the sole process responsible for its creation.

The archival quality and anticipated permanence of the piece has been altered as well. The masking tape’s half-life is different from that of the photograph.

Reeves-Henning’s use of masking tape to obliterate and recreate an element on his print rather than on the negative had a powerful impact. Many students felt it compelled them to “touch the art.”

Work Collaboratively to Define Meaning

I asked all the students to approach the piece in turn and, with their eyes closed utter the first word that came to mind when touching the art. I wrote down the words in the order they were spoken:

Struggle

Hockey

Incoherent

Wax

Mummy

Tennis racket

Piano keys

Bandages

Clothes pins

Gymnastics beam

Boardwalk

Dead skin

By adding some verbs and prepositions, I jotted down part of a potential artist’s statement:

The waxy mummy was struggling with its tennis racket handle-like bandages that were held together with clothes pins, while it was playing the piano with a hockey stick on a gymnastics beam straddling the boardwalk feeling the heat on some of its exposed dead skin.

What Does This Do?

This had multiple implications for the student and the class. It was an example of how directing an image to speak through others can create an idea for an entirely new body of work and how the reciprocal nature of engaging the artistic process and cooperative approaches function. Taking pictures of the nouns the class associated with the tape could create an entire series of work. This reinforced the value and tradition of collaboration among artists. It also showed the students the value of attending an art school; how the collective combustion of ideas can lead to new avenues of exploration and reveal the potential of each student’s work.

How Can the Image Be Interpreted?

As for the subtext, it is implicit: bandaging something is an attempt at healing, at making something better. The mass consumerism evidenced by the industrial-sized trashcans in the US certainly speaks to this need. There is also the idea of redaction collectively and individually; of eliminating evidence and compartmentalizing what we don’t want to see.

How this might impact other “bandaged” images is not clear, but a few immediate thoughts seem relevant. The increasing controversy brewing over many past acquisitions of regional artifacts, such as sarcophagi and their mummies, or the Elgin Marbles come to mind, as do sports injuries of very young gymnasts who don’t yet have fully formed skeletons. Another thought is of piano lessons and the tyranny of endless practice for those who weren’t born virtuosos.

Conclusion

The interdisciplinary potential for photography opens, by violating a perfect surface, another door for future experimentation. The class was directed to research Patrick Nagatani’s Tapist’s series.

AS IT WAS, Reeves-Henning took off in another direction. The engagement of others with his own work led to an examination of how others, in different contexts, interact with work in museums. This became a satisfying and imaginary process that led to many great images and a portfolio in the subsequent color seminar. Reeves-Henning composed moments of others, when they didn’t touch the art. In some cases, it appeared, they didn’t even look at the art (Figure 12.2).

FIGURE 12.2 Untitled. © Jackson Reeves-Henning

What Are We Looking at?

If someone wanted their likeness preserved before photography came along, the drawn or painted portrait was the likely option apart from the sculpted likeness. Inevitably, this leaves us for the most part with images of people of some importance and of some means. Seated, more often than not, such individuals are posed to exude the gravitas of their existence. What distinguishes this painting from many of its peers is the complexity in the subject’s expression. Is it judgmental, humble, self-satisfied, or full of regret?

WE CAN ASSUME THAT the painting graces a museum—because of the institutional plaque next to it although we can’t read it. The professional hanging system is also mostly found in museums rather than homes. The wallpaper feels more domestic than institutional, though in the context of this piece in a comfortable way. They seem to belong together. Is that why the patron is looking at the wallpaper instead of the art? Is the patron looking at anything at all? We can’t see the patron’s expression, arguably the subject of the photograph. So it is the man in the painting who was old when his portrait was painted and therefore unlikely to be with us anymore. Yet, in his inscrutable awareness he makes eye contact with us. A knowing look about the other man who has turned his back on both him, the man in the painting, and us, the viewers. From the tomb of his painting the portrayed man is looking towards another man with a camera, most likely on a tripod. The easel stand he would recognize, as he would the painter’s pallet—these tools of the trade have now been replaced by the digital camera, filled with logic boards and light sensors that are inventions that are now superseding film after its 150-year reign. The digital/mechanical pallet is replicating in an instant that for which he must have posed for hours back in his day when he was painted. Even though the camera is trained on him, it really is meant to capture the other man; the one seemingly just staring at the wall paper if he is even taking it in.

How Can the Image Be Interpreted?

As an audience from the future, we will only see this photograph after it has been made. Now, though, we are joined by an interloper, the man in the painting, from the past. He will not ever see this photograph but is deeply connected to it.

We couldn’t touch the art in this instance, not in a museum and in any case, we are not there; not even the photograph, as it is merely replicated in this book. And still, we are being touched, in this multiply mediated exchange that has been forged by a painter a lifetime ago. Later a photographer created this new encounter; and just now you are looking at a reproduction of a reproduction in this book. This secret exchange about the man who is staring into space is hardly a secret, yet the staring man may not know of it. Is the old man pleading with us to keep it to ourselves? Is the younger man his great, great-grandson? Has he turned away to say goodbye to someone he never knew and whose legacy is with him or is he a stranger like us who merely turned away?

Conclusion

Maybe the man is a wallpaper designer. Maybe the younger man never came for the paintings in the museum at all. Maybe what we see as mere background to the spectacle unfolding in front of us represents in reality the spectacle the younger man has come to see. The damask-like wall treatment, possibly similar to the damask sheets the man in the painting used to sleep in. Maybe the art was touched after all, just not in the way we expected it to be.