The Brooklyn Rail

I came to appraise and stayed to pray. Such an opening could mark the confession of a reformed apostate or converted heathen, and what happened to me at Sean Kelly Gallery was such a transformation. One of the perils of being associated (by others) with a movement—in this case the so-called Pictures Generation—is that work itself becomes the illustration of a putative thesis and thus loses its particularity. Individual pieces don’t need to be looked at because their concept precedes and dominates them. Rough edges get lopped off or ignored, weirdness gets normalized, and obsessions subordinated to a larger program. What a cruel fate: art historical mummification while still alive. And yet, let’s be candid, aren’t there many artists repeating themselves? This is especially true in photography, where a strategy can be mistaken for a point of view. Do we really need to see what comes next? I can’t help thinking of Titorelli’s paintings in Kafka’s The Trial, a single image is repeated over and over. If you have seen one you have seen them all.

Casebere’s photographs provide plenty of grist for the interpretative mill, which can make the actual works themselves disappear. His approach has been consistent: to create architectural models that he carefully lights and then photographs. Only the photographs of these no-longer-existent structures and places persist. To this basic format he has often added fabricated water. Such a simple program, but it offers so many opportunities to decode references: which architects (ancient or contemporary)? Which historic buildings and settings (Monticello, Süleymaniye Mosque, the Hudson Valley)? Why water? Out of this has come a body of criticism that sees the work as first and foremost about representation, with the camera as a bland coconspirator, making copies of copies shorn of any anecdotal particularity. The architecture itself is somehow complicit, ostensibly there to be glorified by the camera as eternal and monumental (the machine’s historical role) but in these works reduced, summarized, and implicitly critiqued. Depending on your preferred school of thought, water represents a dreamlike Surrealist element or an environmental impact statement.

So, I already knew what to think. But not what to feel, and enjoy, and lose a little sleep over. That’s what these pictures of nothing (real) awakened for me. Many of them, especially the ones that present modernist “buildings” surrounded by water, are colorful but forbidding, mannered but weirdly austere. Of course they are fabricated setups, but the camera doesn’t know that, and as viewers we come upon them as if we had entered unfamiliar territory, impossible to tell whether the landscapes are utopian or dystopian. In fact, they are homages to architects Balkrishna Doshi and Francis Kéré, champions of low-cost housing and sustainable structures. We can’t help but be uplifted, can we? Likewise, the same question mark after several works in which variations of an architectural form that appears Mesoamerican are displayed in different ways, including as a sort of jungle ruin covered with vegetation and surrounded by water. These reference Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari’s design for an elevated outdoor cookstove and seem to promote an integrative view of nature and the built world. Yet for me, the photographs didn’t promote or advocate anything. They arrested. Again, I found myself in places I didn’t recognize, unmoored and buffeted by many associations I couldn’t dismiss—the uncanny persistence of the archaic in the contemporary, or visions of a world without us, filled by our uninhabited artifacts.

The longer I looked, the more I saw evidence of an impulse that exceeded not only interpretation but also very likely the artist’s own rationalizations. The angles, lighting, and coloration of these photographs seemed not just particular but obsessional, and a subsequent conversation with Casebere confirmed his willingness to do a thing over and over again, through months or even years, until whatever he was after felt right. And what was that? Certainly, a dynamism in images that are so still, a peculiar life-within-death. But the title of the exhibition suggested something else. Photographs can’t help but betray evidence of the particular time and place of their taking. Casebere deliberately removes that evidence from his subjects, to bring it back to an allegorical no-place. The time of each image, its very atmosphere, is intensely specific, even if we can’t put a clock on it. Was it afternoon or morning? Was it winter, with its slanting shadows? Was a storm coming in from somewhere distant? This specificity anchored me in a deeply unsettling place, being fully there at some orchestrated moment, looking from an arranged point of view on a world where it was impossible for me to be. Yet I was.

What is time’s seed? Where is a sense of time born, in a picture and in us? Most important, when will it come to an end? After the waters have risen? I had the sense of looking on a world not as if it was soon to vanish but as if it somehow already had. And being there, I had vanished with it.