Unframing the Subject: On “Connected”

Michiel Dolk

Between the painterly resolution of problems posed by photography and the photographic resolution of problems posed by painting, a host of artistic practices have emerged which, through digital technology, at present favour the dominance of photography. Merilyn Fairskye’s practice is one that has been formed in the ensuing tussle, exploring a range of genres, media and techniques.

Over the past decade, light has become thematised in her work, with images formed as reflections from mirror surfaces, or as shadow images cast by transparent supports. The latter preceded her adoption of photographic printing processes developed for advertising; Duratrans and Duraclear, as well as work with digital video projection.

The current conjunction of these media results in two apparently unrelated projects in this exhibition, “Connected”. Both allegorise the contemporary world of digital communications. As usual, the resonant or arbitrary relation between multiple narratives characterises the working method and motivation of Fairskye’s work, achieving particular resonance in Duraclear.

I will therefore confine my comments to the stills. It is striking how the installation of transparencies, formatted in rows of life-size vertical “portraits”, transforms the gallery into an ambient space, staging a contiguous relationship between life-size images of city pedestrians and viewers (a device retained from mural painting).

Gallery lights activate a doubling of the image (on acetate and the wall behind), while silhouetting the viewer within its subdued radiance. Its warmth becomes strangely suffused in the cool blue tonality of Ektachrome dusk. Above all, the evocation of a crepuscular mood predominates, registering dusk at the moment when daylight fails and twilight is replaced by the artifice of neon. With the aid of slow speed film, the work is literally occasioned by reciprocity failure: digitally amplified and enlarged into a grainy film of pure spectral colour, the long exposure also produces the dissolution of the moving subject, who slips out of focus and is cropped within an indeterminate depth of field. Somewhat like multiple exposure, this effect is amplified by the doubling of the printed image and its projection. In addition, the free-hanging film suspended 10 cm in front of the wall sways in the circulation of gallery air.

The appearance and disappearance of the subject is thus caught in the light, space and duration of representation as a technologically saturated zone (of movement). This is reinforced by the choice of motif: anonymous figures caught from behind during rush hour, all engaged in mobile telephone conversation. Isolated from the crowd, the figures thereby provisionally share the same vanishing point as the viewer, as they (and we) disperse towards destinations on the horizon line, too preoccupied in conversation to see what lies ahead. Let us assume that the choice of subject is not incidental.

As in street photography, the anonymous back view, rather than the prospect from above, emphasises the anonymity of public space with a melancholic poignancy. While sharing the same medium, Fairskye here reverses the privileged vantage point of advertising photography, the frontal view in which face or figure is projected towards the viewer. The image, like the mobile phone, has dispensed with face to face.

In the theatre of mobile telephones the gesticulating autism of the monologue is indistinguishable from compulsive dialogue, as the spectre of anonymous, solitary existence is dramatised (exacerbated) by permanent connectivity. Apart from restoring faces (and places) to disembodied voices, we may wonder what the digital proliferation of communication in the 3G era portends?  Yet, far from concerned with the prospects of the 3G spectrum or its potential translation to Duratrans, Fairskye’s work involves the incidental observation of social banality, of being “connected” to those distinguished by “their not being where they are.”

It is as if the interpenetration of private and public space is a liminal zone of passage in which the relation between subjects and places always prompts us to call and recall others in other spaces.

The dissolution of the contours of the subject, its indeterminacy in the placeless ambience of metropolitan space is an allegory well worn within the history of modernity, yet never less persistent than today.

Whatever its contemporary resonances and ramifications, the continuity of the work with visual and literary images of modernity which emerged in the mid-C19th on the boulevards of Paris is unavoidable. Not least it reminds us of the origins of photography in dialogue with painting. Ironically, given his attitudes to photography, we might start with Baudelaire’s reflections on the relation of the artist to modern life (which he compared to a distracted flâneur. In retracing the figures in crowds painted by the Impressionists, we might recall the ghostly vestiges of similar figures occasioned by the long exposures of early cameras, or with the photographically inspired street perspectives of Caillebotte. Then, the correspondence with Seurat’s work: the dissolution of contours in his black conte crayon drawings, as well as his divisionist colour methodology related to contemporary experiments in photochemistry. (Interestingly, like celluloid film, the grain in Duraclear answers the dream of a medium which maximises luminosity with additive rather than subtractive mixtures of colour). In addition we might recall the late 19th century fascination with equivocating dusk and gaslight (for example, in Degas’ work); the impact of Whistler’s oil “sketches” on pictorialist photography and snapshot-like “states of mind”, with Boccioni’s painterly evocation of “Those who stay behind”, (inspired in part by Bergson’s reflections on the sensation rather than the measurement of time). We could acknowledge a long tradition of street photography, or even Vito Acconci following random subjects on the streets of New York. 

A more conscious departure point for Fairskye has been the painting of Bob Boynes who has incorporated a photographic silk-screen process into his elaborately crafted paintings. His work recalls the dreamlike colour space of Redon from the ‘ruins’ of historical photographs of figures on the street, whereas Fairskye’s work depends on pushing the digital saturation of colour between Photoshop and the printing lab. Her work is a contemporary technological resolution of problems posed by painting. The subjectivity invested in the technical disparity between painting and printmaking is displaced by a new technical division of labour. Yet, as in Gerhardt Richter’s work, the dialogue between painterly touch, trace or drag and the photographic blur is unmistakable.

While such art-historical genealogies are not necessary for a reading of the work (in contrast to those informing the staged Duratrans tableaux by Jeff Wall for instance), those iconographic codes and formal protocols are already naturalised within Fairskye’s work. This no doubt explains her artless concealment of artfulness (or is it vice versa?), the almost casual effortlessness with which these images suspend us before the recognition of the everyday, the melancholy yet seductive spectre of ordinariness.

This text first appeared in Eyeline 53, 2003-2004. Reprinted with permission.