ADAM FUSS
Cheim and Read
October 16 - November 15, 2003
By DEBORAH
GARWOOD
Adam Fuss, details
to follow
Adam Fuss is best known for
his contemporary photograms of moving light, live creatures, and organic
things. British born and based in New York, where he began exhibiting
in 1985 to immediate acclaim, he has created photograms in color as
well as the black and white, silver gelatin print medium. His series
featuring newborns lolling on their backs in shallow baths is particularly
well known. Seen as if from below, the infants look safe yet precarious,
levitating in rings of water, haloed by saturated color born from the
chemical properties of cibachrome paper. Fuss's work is usually compared
to early 19th century "sun print" photograms rather than cameraless
darkroom techniques that evolved under the influence of Bauhaus innovators
in the early 20th century. It's easy to see how his affinity for the
natural world puts him close in spirit to 19th century practitioners
who exposed sensitized paper holding plants and laces to the sun, but
technically, his darkroom photograms have more in common with Moholy-Nagy
and Man Ray than William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins. Fuss, trained
as a commercial photographer prior to his art career, is heir to the
visual culture and industrial-commercial photographic apparatus of the
20th century. The hot and cool logic of his work reflects this. His
synthesis of a knowing, willful innocence and the visual syntax of industrial
perfection has given his work its contemporary edge.
Fuss's exhibition now on view at Cheim and Read (his second with the
gallery) takes his work in an ambitious new direction full of autobiographical
imagery and personal metaphor. The show as a whole is really an installation
in three parts, which culminate in a 3D work that changed during the
exhibition.
The gallery's front room is ringed with 105 portraits of Fuss as a young
boy, ages 1-11, printed on oval-shaped, enamel plaques about the size
and shape of a cupped palm. This type of object from a bygone era was
designed to adorn a gravestone with the image of the deceased. Conceived
as one work entitled "Adam Fuss, 1961-1973," the plaques allude
to the ephemerality of childhood and (perhaps unwittingly) the customization
of retail manufacturing processes. They are a sweet, tender, and very
melancholy portrait of the artist as well as a tribute to the person(s)
who photographed him.
Fuss lines the main gallery's
long walls with mirror-surface daguerreotypes of human skulls. At opposite
ends of this large room, two silver gelatin photograms face off: shadows
of a child's arms reach up into the picture plane in one of them, while
a mature male profile sporting a robust erection is featured on the
other. Both have been treated by a special process to make the white
surface area of the image turn silver. The drama let loose in this room
is heartfelt without being subtle, and the prices are commensurately
high.
In a separate small gallery, Fuss presents a sculpture entitled "Adam
Fuss, circa 1965" (2003). Rendered in silicone , a life-like nude
replica of the artist as a boy of 11 stands on a refrigerated pedestal
with a generator humming nearby. He seems a bleak ambassador from the
outer limits of wishful photographic verisimilitude or a rented lab
specimen. With visitors clustered around him at the opening, the pudgy,
chilly little blond boy commanded curiosity and attention. The walls
around him were hung with beautiful large format color prints of butterfly
chrysalides depicted in isolation on black backgrounds. The silky opalescent
membranes of the pods invited thoughts to linger over the caterpillar
within this casing, transforming from humdrum crawler to a luscious
flying creature who will spend its brief life among fragrant blooming
flowers dusted with brightly colored pollen and sun warmed nectar. A
week or so into the exhibition, Fuss's past self had accumulated a hefty
three inch frost around his birthday suit thanks to the slow work of
the external generator. It's an eccentric riposte to the frozen moment
of time that photography once represented.
Caught perhaps between a
desire to express his experience of life on one hand and rekindle the
19th century sensibility of magic and wonder surrounding photography
on the other, Fuss's new work also expresses an unshakable awareness
of the harshness of life these days. He takes true stories from life
through varied interpretations of "realism" including mirrors,
photographs, metaphors, sculpture, medical-purposed refrigeration, and
along the way invokes 19th century Romantic tropes in contemporary terms.
If the idea of "spirit" in photography still has currency,
this visual autobiography, as public in scale as it is intimate in feeling,
reflects the quicksilver shadow of one 21st century soul.
NOTE ON PHOTOGRAM: The photogram
dispenses with cameras and negatives by using only light sensitive paper
and a light source casting shadows or reflections on the support surface.
This has been done outside in sunlight and indoors in the darkroom with
artificial light. Images created this way are sometimes called "cameraless"
and "unique" photographs.
