Second Thoughts

There was a great exhibition on at the Modern Art Oxford museum, a woman named Angela Bulloch who works with sculpture that incorporates light, avant-garde music, and a rigorous conceptual element. The major installation involved about 30 of her “pixel boxes,” which are industrially constructed cubes with opaque sides and a translucent front, and a soundtrack of unstructured music infused with syncopated voice clips, reminiscent of The Books, an avant-garde group who make music which is pre-consciously accesible despite the lack of reference points. Inside the pixel boxes are three fluorescent tubes of the primary light colors, Red, Green and Blue, allowing the translucent face of the cube to glow whichever color is formed by the combinations. Stacking the cubes into a grid, she has them glow in groups of tones, working as a whole, illuminating the idea of calling them “pixel boxes”: they are the physical representation of the digital pixel, the building block of the digital image. Using obscure films as a source, she abstracts the material into a simplified form on the pixilated wall.



Strangely, one enters a space which is normally abstract, computerized, unhuman, digital--if you let yourself become absorbed and entranced by the play of color, you feel as if you are in some theoretical, pixelated world; there is a loss of the sense of the body. It’s a sort of virtual-reality space, but, importantly, it’s a low-tech one: the pixels are couple feet square, improbably large, as if the image is of bad resolution, antiquated.

I immediately associated this low-fi experience with grainy, blown-up photography, which has a negative connotation, one of dimly-lit, forbidden revelations: the photographs of prisoner tortures at Abu Ghraib, of underground porn, old mug shots, celebrities topless on a beach caught by the paparazzi. Strangely, I associated immorality with poor quality images; on the converse, then, fidelity is morality.

Bullock plays with this idea in another work, my favorite in the show, in which she projects a grainy, black and white off-putting photograph of a crowd of people who are either singing or screaming--both seem plausible--onto the gallery wall. It is clearly an old image, and it feels like something out of Schindler’s List. In a deft move, she places the projector around waist-level, so that one sees the grainy photograph and moves closer, but can’t help eclipsing the image’s projection, casting a shadow of ones body over the contorted faces. Importantly, ones images is sharp and defined, while at this close distance, the photograph is so pixelated as to border on abstraction. On a nearby wall is a printed version of the same photograph with someone’s shadow over it in the same way. That person is clearly a conductor with passionate, outraised hands--a classic image of a choir with the shadowed outline of a conductor in the foreground. I turned back to the projection, and hoped that the people in the grainy photograph were indeed singing. The way the viewer’s outline is so sharp and the photograph so grainy that the moral and immoral associations of each are compelling: as conductor, am I to feel pathos, fear, joy? Am I the cause of what seem like such abnormally emotional faces? Am I a dictator, or an inspiration? Are those blurred images, which have been abstracted and lack clean lines, still representations of humanity?

On a simpler and less interpretive scale, the art Bulloch makes is highly successful in altering and disrupting the viewer’s perception, with a focus on emphasizing or dissolving the body. She seems to confront the membrane which separates actual physical space and conceptual or digital reality, making the viewer aware of how each carries its set of principles, and the interactions between those worlds is inevitably moral. She says in the catalog interview that the work depends on the viewer, not to explicitly interact, but to be “inter-passive” (versus inter-active). There are no buttons to push or levers to pull, but the viewer’s engagement with the work “is discovered the moment the work is completed by the presence of the viewer.” What I like about this distinction is the way it gives high regard to this inhuman, otherworldly space: the way we often interact with the digital realm is to push buttons and pull levers; in her art, we need only confront it morally. Is it something that we created, but now exists on its own terms?