Thirteen Paragraphs and A Footnote On Adam Harrison's 365 Sketches
(extended remix version)
by Christopher Brayshaw

1. "In the presence of extraordinary reality, consciousness takes the place of imagination." (Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous)

2. In January 2005 Adam Harrison was still my editor at Terminal City, and we were in touch by phone or email several times a week. An artist embarking an ambitious, year-long project could reasonably be expected to tip a sympathetic friend off, but I had to find out about the 365 Sketches on the web, of all places, and from a fellow critic. Peter Culley spilled the beans in his blog mid-month, and I, along with many other curious readers, patiently waited for http://aharrison.com to load up. Then what? On the day I arrived, an image of a young man in navy blue swim trunks perched on the edge of a hot tub, water boiling around his knees. Puzzled by the picture's informality and intimate air – who did Adam think he was, Wolfgang Tillmans? -- I clicked back and forth, bringing up (in no particular order): a faucet leaking into a heavily rimed sink, a broken light bulb, an electrical cord tangled across a terracotta patio, a heaped-up pile of dirty snow, and a few others. Forward and back again. Foam patterns in the still water along a fountain's edge. Dead, drooping flowers, their orange petals almost indistinguishable on my poorly color-calibrated browser from the cardboard box containing them. Forward and back a third time. The snow again. The light bulb with its fine patina of grey dust and its snapped black wire, encased in a clear glass bubble. The faucet, a drop suspended from its tip like the tear on a seagull's nose, ready to fall.

3. The word "sketch" implies that any artwork so designated comes before, and is thus less fully finished than, the work it serves as a plan or model for. "Sketch" applies equally well to drawn or painted works, although, with regard to Harrison's project, the historical precedent that seems most relevant is the painted oil sketches of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists working out of doors. Quickly painted in order to represent atmospheric effects or the complex play of quickly changing light, these plein-air sketches were not treated by their creators as independent works of art, but were considered technical exercises meant to test and sharpen their skills, and often preserved for later consultation and analysis in the studio.

4. In his groundbreaking study, Before Photography, Peter Galassi argues that the plein-air sketch formed "a loophole in the traditional artistic practice, which allowed a generally unacknowledged but formidable shift in artistic values to develop. Thus, although lacking the status of high art and rarely receiving full artistic attention, the landscape sketch - particularly the landscape sketch in oil - became around 1800 the primary vehicle of a tentative but profoundly original sense of pictorial order, based on a heretical concern for the visual aspect of the most humble things." According to Galassi, such sketches present "a new and fundamentally modern pictorial syntax of immediate, synoptic perceptions and discontinuous, unexpected forms. It is the syntax of an art devoted to the singular and contingent rather than the universal and stable. It is also the syntax of photography." In other words, a new way of seeing and depicting nature, already present in the plein-air sketch, made photography thinkable.

5. Photography's inherent technical inability to deploy what Galassi calls the synthetic option of perspective (seen, for example, in the work of painters like Uccello or Piero, in whose images the "visual pyramid" – comprising the point of view and a delimiting frame – is first established, creating a "static neutral container" in which to organize the remaining elements of a picture) led photography inexorably toward the "analytical option" of perspective, in which "the world is accepted first as an uninterrupted field of potential pictures. From his chosen point of view, the artist scans this field with the pyramid of vision, framing his picture by choosing where and when to stop." The important difference between the synthetic option's deployment in photography and painting is, of course, that the sketch paintings of artists like Manet, Corot, or Degas were conceived of, quoting Galassi, "through long experiment and only gradually acquired a dominant role. In photography, the camera's inability to compose rendered the old standards nearly obsolete from the outset." Galassi does not investigate the kinds of depiction that are photography's proper business, perhaps believing that this task is better left to photographers. Harrison's sketch photographs take up this project, systematically using photography to interrogate the medium's own representational legitimacy, a task I conceive of, based on my reading of writers like Clement Greenberg, Thierry de Duve, and Jeff Wall, as fundamental to artistic modernism.

6. By making and displaying photographs at the rate of one per day, every day, for a year, Harrison seeks answers to questions almost Zen-like in their simplicity. What kind of depiction is a photograph? What are its representational limitations, if any? And to what extent can these limiting conditions be pushed back, altered, or disposed of? Each new photograph is a partial answer to these questions, partial by necessity of being a sketch and therefore, by definition, "giving the essential features without the details" (Random House Unabridged Dictionary). Harrison's project is a matrix of possible answers, with each daily image representing one or more data points. Do three months' worth of data points cluster, providing anything more substantial than provisional conclusions? For me, they provide three kinds of answers, structural ones, thematic ones, and ethical ones, which I will now discuss in turn.

7. By structural I mean basic questions of form. To date, all of Harrison's sketch photographs are "straight" pictures, made with available light and a lens. This seems self-evident, but isn't necessarily so. This is one way to make photographs, but it is by no means the only way; it excludes, for example, lensless photography (Moholy-Nagy's photograms, or Corot's cliché-verres), photomontage (John Heartfield; Hannah Hoch), or appropriation and rephotography (Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince). Harrison's methodology even excludes, for the time being, images which are not in color. Even though some of Harrison's images appear to be borderline cases (I am thinking of Grey Picture (Cloud Study) and Hole From a Camera Obscura), they still obey the rules of the representation-of-things game. Grey Picture really depicts mist, and Hole From a Camera Obscura depicts the tiny hole Harrison presumably used to make the following day's Image From a Camera Obscura. In this way, Harrison challenges the way in which we approach objects, showing us that, sometimes, a faithful visual representation of a thing will not at first appear to be that thing (So, looking back at Boy in Hot Tub, which initially puzzled me, I now see how the slats of sunlight falling across the boy's shoulder are made visible by the hot tub's otherwise invisible steam).

8. The rules that appear to govern Harrison's sketch photographs to date in no way preclude lensless photography, photomontage, appropriative or rephotography, or black and white photography from appearing in his project in the future. It is, after all, photography's nature to depict things. A Moholy-Nagy photogram is a depiction of gears and cogs; a Corot cliché-verre is a depiction of a network of lines drawn with a sharp instrument on an emulsion-coated plate; and a Richard Prince cowboy is a depiction of a magazine ad detail. All three of these examples partially conceal the representations that comprise them; though they pretend to dispense with representation all together, that dispensation actually signifies representation's complex reinscription. Harrison has so far eschewed such conceptual slights-of-hand, perhaps because for him it is simpler to believe that depiction is so intrinsic to photography that it is not necessary to move beyond it, just as the flatness of a support was, for Greenberg, a basic limiting condition of easel painting.

9. Certain sketch photographs are related to each other – Fountain and Drained Fountain, for example, or Man Stirring Latte and Printing 'Man Stirring Latte,' January 13. These pictures play off of each other; they indicate that no image is ever meant to be seen in isolation. Things change over time, and photography is capable of capturing physical changes (a full fountain; the same fountain, drained) as well as ontological ones (a representation of an event; a representation of that representation). Photography is a neutral container, a Dairyland crate of a medium that can hold 2 percent milk, or buttermilk, or records, or used paperback books. For Harrison, this is not a "problem," just information.

10. Each sketch photograph represents of a thing or a situation. Some images refer to specific photographic genres, or to artists informing Harrison's choice of subjects and compositional decisions (late Manet, for example, in Flowers on Coffee Table or Tulip Stems' deliberate, knowing quotation of the Bunch of Asparagus, even down to the tie binding the stems; or Stephen Waddell's studies of urban strangers (Man Sketching On The Sidewalk; On A Sidewalk; In An Alley)). Finally, some sketches depict photographers taking pictures (Self Portrait in a Booth Designed by Matthius Bouw; A Photographer on the Ground) or people sketching by hand (Man Sketching again!), a process which, following Galassi, laid the conceptual groundwork for the medium Harrison employs to reflect upon that process from outside.

10a. Harrison's reflections on the historical roots of the sketch form enable us to see that previous theorists of the sketch, unable to conceive of its incorporation into and transformation as photography, were wrong to conceive of it as singular. A pencil or oil sketch is a unique work, but a cliché-verre sketch or a sketch photograph is not, particularly in the case of photographs like Harrison's, which first exist as digital files, simultaneously accessible to anyone with a browser and an Internet connection, and only then as editioned prints, objects which, though presented in a gallery and destined for private display, are still subordinate to the larger project and point back at it like extended fingers.

12. The medium of photography is a gift handed down to Harrison by history the first time he ever picked up a camera. So I come to my final point, ethics. There are no preconditions on Harrison's use of photography other than those his project will turn up or uncover, and no judgments harsher than the ones Harrison will make privately, in the company of what critic Robert Hughes calls the "unwearying tribunal of the dead": those artists whose works shape and guide Harrison's production even as his works, in turn, re-read and re-interpret theirs. So: modernism again, a historical condition I do not believe it is always necessary or worthwhile to transcend.

13. Under these circumstances, the Wallace Stevens injunction I began with acquires a special meaning. If the basic conventions of Western art production and receivership are, in a sense, fixed in place, then the only thing that can save a project like Harrison's from falling into conceptual repetition and, eventually, into mannerism, is the consciousness of the individual photographer, his perception of and uninflected presentation of the "extraordinary reality" of the everyday, a reality that Adam Harrison's extraordinary sketch photographs limn and make visible.