JAN GROOVER: DEGREES OF TRANSPARENCY
JAN GROOVER MADE HER REPUTATION with a group of small, photographic triptychs focusing on the relation between eye and finger control—time on a split-second scale, the time of the photographed (decisive) moment. The images showed trucks or cars passing by single, stationary camera setups. The “frame” of the image sometimes consisted of dark, architectural elements. The point was that what changed in the photograph was color, differently colored vehicles. Successive shots would be set side by side to form series of trucks—for instance, one red, one yellow, one blue. Color was systematized according to the chance of the correctly colored object appearing, and the photographs implicitly generated anticipation for the viewer, a sense of waiting for the exact moment and exact color which would complete Groover’s plan.
Another series concentrated on the relationship between these short intervals and distance and speed—how vehicles passing closer to the camera were transformed into blurs, whereas ones farther away looked falsely still. These works began the study of what cameras are capable of capturing on their own (while eloquently expressing what a photographer does).
Groover’s next works were odd, serial images of somewhat banal formations made strange and mysterious—trees and lawns, houses, columns, porches,stairs, and architectural ornament. The predicament was discerning the relationship between contiguous images, for Groover was no longer looking for orderly, predetermined sets of color, shape or distance. Color was either washed out, with delicate detail, described by extremely oblique natural light casting shadow, or almost completely drained out, eliminated, because light was replaced by dark objects in deep shadow created by unseen but looming sources. The perversity of these latter photographs lay in their darkness verging on absence, on blackness, precisely the opposite of traditional photographic work, capturing light. The idea that photographs do not necessarily unveil—bring to light—objective facts was raised. The tension between the real and the photographed worlds did not have to do with photographic time at all, but space, and what the camera lens did to extensively contemplated objects in space.
Groover has now dropped narrative, discontinuous sequence, moving to-from; in the new photographs the eye moves tentatively “in between” things. The new point of view is not removed from objects, but extremely close. We explore these still lifes for minute differences in surface, location and weight. The objects must have just been there, ready to be seen, on the kitchen counter; they are all everyday, household items.
At first, the description “extremely close” has a rightness and authority to it which renders the problem of scale negligible. But Groover undermines the luxury of this confidence and safety. The photographs are actually large, and the objects in them seem to be larger than they are in “real life.” Because one does not usually bring, say, a spatula, to an art gallery, it is clear that the camera-closeness to the object and the image’s approximation of actual size creates an undecidable play between photographic images and their subjects. Don’t we usually just adjust to the fact that photographs take everything ridiculously small? In Groover’s photographs, there is no way to get around an object’s possible matching to real size (from a certain distance) so that there seem to be many times a one-to-one correspondence between actual and virtual. Without a doubt, some of the things are enlarged, and some seem smaller, but the effect is always to dislocate certain conventional photographic givens with subtle nuances between degrees of “almost-equal.”
The sensitivity to scale reverses the priorities of traditional photographic seeing and disrupts the relation between what cameras normally do to objects and what the eye compensates for. To search these images in all their nonhomogeneous, nonlinear array, means to lose, to suspend, to give up the primacy of the “looking at” we associate with modern art. I don’t think you can “get” any of these images right away; they don’t fall in simple gestalts, they refuse simplification. Groover takes the eye for a walk, so to speak, over and through a terrain locally controllable but federally chaotic. The viewer’s own sense of body scale is tampered with, so that one feels slightly miniaturized by these too-big objects. The question How big is that leaf?” becomes an inquiry of startling abstractness. Have there been any photographers other. than Duane Michals or Diane Arbus who so consistently demand that our illusions be so rigorously scrutinized and that our photographic habits be held accountable?
One of the first images you meet is a real shocker: the color kicks you right over, and it’s nothing more than the dissonance of a coleus plant with pink-red and yellow-green leaves with an intersection of muddy brown. The intensity and saturation of color that painters create through choice, sensibility and invention Groover has at her disposal in a leaf. But it takes an eye to see it, to zero in on it, with utter, wide-eyed consciousness. Before anything else, the photographs are about color as the surface of objects, about objects as reflected, colored light, about the content of color photography. The photographs are not about the discrepancies between the real and the photographed; those discrepancies are the base for an examination of various levels of difference. When the natural wood studio floor snaps up flat and appears irritatingly orange and then changes into an amorphous, shiny blur in another instant, it shows Groover pushing photography into a realm of Cézannesque speculation about seeing never before seen in photography. They are perhaps about seeing through photography.
What they are not about is clear: they are not reveries hermetically sealed off from the world; they are not sections of the world chopped to create compositions of design-y balance. Groover insists here that the world is the origin, not to be transcended, the world as an inventory of objects which interfere with continuous space. Knives, forks, spoons, cleavers, potato mashers, egg whips, tongs, glassbowls, aluminum foil, exotic plants, wooden frames, green peppers—all jumble together, seemingly uncomposed, and seen so close up, so intently, that it is often impossible to reduce situations logically, to comprehend the locations, to chart absolute direction, to make out what object is in the foreground, or what the relative distances within the spaces are.
Groover does much more than capture the formal beauty of her objects in various stages of nonchalant interpenetration. The silver of the cutlery and the ambiguity of foil create reversals, mirrors, spaces reflecting vacant distances, distortions verging on the surreal, and sometimes reveal indistinct color and shape outside the range of the actual photograph. These particularly multi-functional objects have both shapes of their own, a density and surface color, and also repeat—really transform—the image of other objects on their surfaces, reproducing them as nonmaterial reflections. They are volumes with changing, double surfaces, real and imaginary. Spiked plant leaves may bend around the curve of a knife (a double pun—visually, knives and leaves have similar formal features; semantically, we speak of a knife “blade” or a leaf “blade”).
An object may be made disjunct by the fingers of tongs or the tines of a fork; or it may dissemble itself completely in the shimmer of foil. A fork which dips into a clear bowl of clear water (a double layer of transparency), can be seen triply transformed: one, as a “real” fork handle; two, dematerialized into waves of light passing the surface of water; three, less definitely focused and seen through a fluid solution “holding” it in place. When you look at the “real,” unimpeded fork handle again, it is impossible to see it the way you saw it before: it is as if the object now stands locked into a positive, very real, materially evident but unseen void of space. The distinction between contained and container is severely threatened. And the truth of this materialized void makes the very opposite assertion just as true: the photograph is after all a film of chemicals on paper, as nonmaterial as art can get.
Groover discovers complex spaces and images in the way objects can be formed and represented, in the ways objects are seen in a variety of situations—and this without subjecting them to willful or forced manipulation. To implicate the photographed subject as a reflected patch of light rebounding off another patch of light, both captured by a machine as an image, is a precise and surprising involution of the ways we see the kind of things we see, and what we learn from and really do see in photographs. Groover does not so much attempt to show different levels of reality as she shows us different spaces within which we can understand images.
On the purely iconic level, Groover elicits an extraordinarily large expressive range from her chosen objects. A knife is a leaflike blade, a culinary tool, a stabbing weapon (complete with bloody meat juices), an ambiguous mirror, a plank jutting out into a sea of pink space, a slippery surface, a solid metal thing, flat and round, or a mercurial, glimmering substance. From the same configuration of objects, Groover can do a mock photo-realist painting, an Irving Penn Vogue send-up, a midnight blue Surrealist landscape, a pastel kitchen interior. If there is a theme in all the work, it cannot only be tied to choice of subject matter, but also, more generally, to the necessity of deepened observation. But then, as Leo Steinberg has written, don’t the discoveries of radically new subjects almost always coincide with really new ways of seeing?
—Jeff Perrone
