Last Tuesday at the Modern in Fort Worth, Uta Barth spoke with the conviction and nonchalance of a real artist. It’s not a stage presence that too many artists can pull off when they’re delivering a lecture on their work, but it’s a pleasure and a relief to see it when it happens. She seemed comfortable with us, the audience, encouraged us to ask questions at any time as they occurred to us, and talked with the precision and care of one who has spent more time than most of us thinking about what one does.
Her work is about looking, as opposed to seeing (which is why I choose not to caller her a “seer”), and the difference between the two is significant. To see is to perceive, interpret, understand, while to look is simply to engage the world with your eyes. Looking is the visceral, physical act of taking in visual information prior to making sense of, that is, seeing, it. Looking precedes seeing. It is undeciphered visual experience. So, the act of the body looking–visual perception–is her subject.
Here are some of the highlights from her talk, things that struck me as an artist in the audience:
In the 80s when she was a student, Conceptualism was in, so the art world conversation was about meaning rather than visual experience. Beauty, of course, was a dirty word, something that distracted from reading an artwork as a text.
During her soul-searching as a young artist, she found that she was not interested in narrative, metaphor, or subject; she was interested only in visual perception itself.
She prefers the peripheral to the subject.
She’s interested in what happens when there is no subject, or when the subject is time, silence, air, or vacuum.
Her inspirations include John Cage’s bracketing of silence with sound, Brian Eno’s focus on ambience, Robert Irwin’s (and to a lesser degree’s, James Turrell’s) sense of space and light.
She uses a matte surface in her printed photos because matte obscures where the surface actually is and creates an ambiguous sense of depth.
Barth’s approach to art-making has the organic logic of a practice that was built from the inside out, as if she knew exactly what she wanted her work to be about and then proceeded carefully to include only those elements which served that specific vision. She uses a camera, but we don’t easily call her a photographer, because she doesn’t point her camera at something neat and then take a picture of it, which is what we generally understand the work of a photographer to be. When she photographs the air between herself and a potential subject, rendering the image blurry, out of focus, she’s quick to clarify that it’s not a blurry photo of a flower but a photo in which the flower is the blurry background of the invisible subject that she’s interested in.
At this point, she starts to sound like an artist up to trickery for its own sake, the kind of artist who endures much eye-rolling from the public (“No, it’s not a picture of the flower; it’s a picture of the air in front of the flower!”). But, she’s legit. Her work is an effort to show us an image of what gets elided at the moment that our brain has made sense of what we were just looking at, and now see. She is interested in the ever-elapsing present that is always slipping away from Proust, that present moment when all possible connections and interpretations of something are possible just before the brain gets to its highly efficient business of nailing down the interpretation that will stick with us. The ever pregnant present.
On a different note, as she was discussing her commitment to art and vision as experience, she brought up the notion of a person being a political artist and of its inefficacy. I am among the many former art students who once wrestled with the question of where politics and injustice figure in the artist’s world, and I wish I had heard her brief treatment of this question when I was younger. She says that art’s arena is visual experience, so that’s where she focuses her energy as an artist. Social engagement and public action are the arenas for political ideas, so when she is moved by her political convictions to want to do something, she leaves her studio, goes into the public, and does something. Making political art is seldom good art and never good politics.
