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THE
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Lynne
Cohen
The following are exerpts from
an Interview with Lynne Cohen conducted by William A Ewing, Vincent
Lavoie, Lori Pauli and Ann Thomas, February 2001: ...I'm intrigued by architectural details and hardware. It's strange, but I've never seen an electrical outlet that is level. There are people travelling around in spaceships but no one can properly install an outlet. Some people might find this consoling but I find it disturbing. Also I'm acutely aware of things like surveillance cameras, ‘No Exit' signs, fire alarms and grimy stains around light switches. Sometimes objects look pathological, sometimes not. It often seems as if someone could be shouting at me from the other side of the air vent. And why do heating units so often seem to be keeping an eye on things? They have peculiar human attributes — they seem to want to join in rather than just sit there. Things like that amuse me: outlets, exhaust grates and office paraphernalia that look like minimalist sculpture. Sometimes the hardware speaks for itself; but sometimes it functions as a metaphor for something else. Every room is a conceptual piece, an installation in real time. The following are exerpts from an Interview with Lynne Cohen by Mona Hakim prepared for a conference (January 2004) organized by Vox, Image Contemporaine/Contemporary Image, Montréal: ...What I’m looking for is something political, conceptual, incompatible, pathetic. It’s difficult to articulate precisely what I am drawn to, except a certain sense of strangeness, incoherence, sadness or asphyxiating order. I am drawn to things being not quite right and to how various sorts of flaws poke holes in dreams and ideologies. I am interested in things the wrong size, the wrong color, in symbols of suspect sentiments and in hardware – air ducts, electric outlets, light fixtures, heating devices and the like that take on exaggerated importance, sometimes even a symbolic importance. I intervene very little, although I don’t have an ethic about shifting something or removing this or that because it is distracting. I am perfectly willing to clean up a little formally to make things clearer. But I don’t bring objects with me (I have enough to carry with the equipment and film holders) and prefer not to interfere with what I think is the inherent meaning or characteristic of the places I find. Interestingly, in the eighties a critic for the Village Voice reviewed a show I did at PPOW Gallery and suggested that the sites I photographed and the objects in them were somehow constructed by me in a studio. While I almost always feel as if the places I photograph could not be true, in fact I photograph them more or less as I find them. ...It’s an odd thing but I’d like my interventions to seem neutral. I want the viewer to be deceived into thinking that all is normal, that this is how things happen to be when obviously it isn’t. From my first photographs I felt that if I could seem to remove myself from the making of the pictures, it might permit the subject matter to speak for itself. Trying to conceal one’s presence is often easier said than done but I have made a big effort to make my photographs seem as if they mysteriously appeared. This is one reason I use a view camera with a moderately wide angle lens, un-dramatic lighting and deep depth of field. It is also why I aim for unremarkable compositions and finished prints which look unusually, even uncomfortably, balanced. I want to set up a situation where the viewer might concentrate on the puzzling nature of the reality depicted rather than on how the picture is made. These devices conspire to make the interiors I photograph look real, yet impossible, stable and unstable, assured and vulnerable all at the same time. Ideally the viewer should feel like he or she is seeing something for the first time. Visual clues seem more wrong than right, things appear to be the wrong size and the objects and spaces in between them seem too big or too small and to have been designed with something other than usefulness or comfort in mind. Let me try to explain things
another way. I think
that a Thomas Demand photograph of an office interior or a laboratory
which he meticulously constructed in his studio out of foam core
looks more convincing than one of my pictures of a similar office
interior or laboratory. In one way this seems crazy. A
photograph of a hand-made interior is more realistic than a photograph
of a real place? Perhaps it is because when constructing
something by hand, allowances and corrections are made which
are more convincing than unaltered reality, and finally we believe
the construction is true because what we are looking at is a
photograph. My interiors, filled with contradictions, strange
and unaltered (except for having been photographed, appear to
have been constructed. We think they couldn’t be true,
that they must be tampered with, which of course is mostly not
the case.
...Early on, before I began to photograph, I considered transporting sections of rooms I came across to museum settings. The idea was to take a corner of an interior I found – a table, a naughahyde chair, a goose-neck lamp and the linoleum floor- and to transport them to a museum, much like the pieces I saw in the 1980s of the work Guillaume Bijl did with entire rooms. The installations would have been like photographs in three dimensions. In the end I opted for photography because it seemed a more appropriate and modest means to condense the sort of information I was drawn to. ... I felt photography was the appropriate medium given the conditions in which I found myself and the ideas I wanted to address. It struck me and other artists working in the early seventies that it was a medium without pretence. It didn’t come with the heavy art historical baggage of painting and sculpture. I thought that its modesty and directness would make my presence or interference as an artist less visible. And similarly regarding my decision to use a view camera was connected to my wanting to record a piece of the world with immaculate detail and let the subjects being photographed speak for themselves. For the full text of these interviews
and other examples of Lynne Cohen's work visit: |
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Larry Newhouse |
Tom Venner |
Jay Yager |
