Sophie Calle, Anna and Bernhard Blume, Mat Collishaw, and Candida Höfer
The Summer Show
Calle’s work is also haunted by the idea of absence. The images she gives us are substitutions for what cannot be shown. The wedding chapel photo, the text tells us, was used to cover a hole in the wall made by the objects her husband threw at her, and in a sense all her images function similarly: they “cover” holes in her life, failures of the spirit, even the inability to truly see another. The text in Autobiographical Stories: The Amnesia tells us, “No matter how hard I try, I never remember the color of a man’s eyes or the shape and size of his sex. But I decided a wife should know these things.” The photo, however, shows a nude man from the chin down with his penis apparently tucked between his legs, invisible. It seems her full autobiography lies in an undepicted, undepictable realm. Yet her apparent sense of herself as a victim who can never really look life in the face could also be a reflection on her medium: documentary images can give us only the surface of a situation, not its essence. And there’s a bit of self-aware humor in the failures and tragedies her photographs at once stand for and conceal: though they have real emotional weight, her display of them makes her self-centeredness seem a trifle absurd.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Mat Collishaw’s Shrunken Heads approaches the issue of power from a different perspective. He combines a realistic three-dimensional dioramalike old-fashioned village square with a video in which figures can be seen inside “a pub” through a window and then in the street just outside; two are fighting, and one fires a gun. The video monitor is placed at one edge of the town square, and the figures match the scale of the diorama, as if the action were meant to blend seamlessly with the static town–but of course it can’t. Both forms of representation are shown to be artificial, but the video figures have a real power; when they exit the first-floor room, it’s almost as if they were bursting out of the monitor and into the town.
In his three paintings and 21 untitled drawings, Christopher Patch often both recapitulates and defuses mass culture’s aspirations to grandeur. Two drawings of L-shaped sofas emphasize the depth of these elongated forms but also diminish them, partly because of their very small scale and the empty paper around them. Images of an outdoor barbeque or of several shirts drawn on lined paper are delineated with a precision that suggests a love of the smallest features–the colors of the barbeque’s fake stones, the shapes of the shirts. Roske and Patch reclaim line and color from their function of glorifying the aristocracy or the personalities of individual artists, using them instead to rediscover the pleasure of looking at ordinary things.
