Insidious Lassitude

I toyed with the idea - the concept, if you will - of not illustrating this post with a picture of the artwork I’m going to mention. Looking at that picture up there, you may think that’s exactly what I did - that I just popped up a few black holes to assist the conceptual ruminations of you, the audience. But no, that is a picture of the artwork. Well, it’s a photograph of a photograph of the artwork, which is itself made from photographic reproductions of found photographs. By the time it reaches you, Insidious Lassitude inteligentsia, then it’ll already have been passed around several cultural mileu and had it’s context gawped at and peered through, deconstructed and redeemed. That probably doesn’t matter though. I was only considering what the ramifications of not having a pictorial representation of it would be. Plus, I couldn’t be bothered to photograph it, because I’d have to put some palaver into trying to avoid accidently photographing the reflection of myself in the glossy paper I have it printed on.  

After I did photograph it and I had avoided capturing myself, then I thought that I shouldn’t have avoided it at all, but should’ve purposefully attended to including myself. Though when Penelope Umbrico made it she managed to not include herself. And she’s the artist. But at least I was aware, and I made a choice.

Here’s what it is, and how she made it; which in this instance are the same thing really - they’re mutually dependant, and both requisite to the success, or otherwise, of the artwork. Umbrico collected images of TV sets she found for sale on internet classified tack-board Craigslist. Hence the title, which if I hadn’t witheld it might’ve made things clearer: ‘For Sale/TVs from Craigslist’. She then interpolates (presumably, as I doubt they’re photographed or advertised on Craigslist that big) them and has them printed at the size that the TV is in real life - 15″or whatever, though this is America so I’d guess some of them are gable end”. She then arranges them and installs them on a gallery wall. With a further - slightly leaden and superfluous, I think - conceptual flourish, she offers the image for sale at the price the TV was advertised at on Craigslist.

It’s not clear from how many images she chose these ones, but what I think is particularly appealing to me is that everybody chose to photograph their TV from the front - a aspect that all sets looks virtually the same from. And they’re all photographed when they’re off! So the differences between them become virtually lost, as it were, and they’re indistinguishable from one another and the qualities that might be used as criteria to appraise them - aesthetics, picture quality - are removed. Way to sell something, guys! No wonder the American economy is going capish.

One of the things this makes obvious is how little it matters; that everyone has the same needs when it comes to TV - everyone is just another droided reflection, a slump to be framed by a screen. So it is that we have thousands - I don’t know how many she did, but I’d like to think it was lots - of black holes with an unintentional photographic trace of the owner peering into it with a light and finding themselves distorted and unrecognisable. It’s rather fabulous that they’re leering at and trying to capture a dead screen as they contort themselves to try to eliminate their own reflection, and are suceeding in nothing but futility - but (presumably) succeeding in selling their TV and keeping the material/economic lifecycle spinning - and appear as unwilling ghostly role-reversed distortions trying to hide from themselves. I’m reminded of Francis Bacon’s deliberate ploy of using glossy glazes so that his audience couldn’t avoid seeing distortions of themselves in his attrocious paintings. The whole conceit is deliciously loaded, and gloriously darkly comic.

Umbrico does some similar work with mirrors she’s found in catalogues, and reproduced shorn of the context so that a room full of them only shows the reflections of things which are absent, and when the viewer peers into them in the gallery their own image is vanquished and they see only a reflection of things they’re being sold. She scaffolds it all with some notions of the self in a consumerist, image-based, everthing-marketed, society, postmodern where the self is problematised and threatened. I read an interview with her that was quite interesting in casting a light on her ideas. I’d reproduce some bits of it here and add my own reflections on it, but I can’t be bothered to palaver over the cut and paste tool. But I did photograph her photographs. Though, as you can see, the paper wasn’t quite flat, so I have added a distortion of my own to her work, after all. How apposite.