On Ghosts

Adam Harrison and I were discussing the tendency among younger artists to "specialize," to identify themselves with a signature subject matter, form, or series. This tendency is great for developing and reinforcing a brand identity -- witness the commercial success of "shark guy," "dot guy," and "double-self portrait gal," among numerous other offenders -- but inimical to the thematic range one typically associates with great art. Brueghel, Hokusai, Manet, Richter, Wall, Velasquez, Graham, Sturtevant etc. range freely across subjects and themes. Their lack of thematic or subject-driven consistancy compels our attention.

I have always been drawn to the irrational and the fantastic, and their use (in Henry James; in Philip Dick; in Stanislaw Lem; in Brueghel; in M. John Harrison, Margaret Oliphant, H.P. Lovecraft, Dickens and Terry Gilliam) as a kind of allegorical realism, a way of dissecting and analyzing social conditions and relationships. I love Yoshitoshi's supernatural series -- eg., New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts (1889-92), whose surreal or spectacularly violent images exist alongside, and in tension with, his equally detailed studies of modern life. Such a methodology is much less common today, and where it does exist, as in the appalling work of Gregory Crewdson, it typically takes the form of a kind of symbolist kitsch, drained of any real critical use-value.

I think the fantastic's exhaustion in contemporary art is somehow connected to modernity's relentless disenchantment of the world. Photography has played a more than conspicuous role in this process. It's ironic that a medium once used to prop up the supernatural (Victorian fairy pictures; "ghost photography," ectoplasm studies) was soon employed in its liquidation (eg., the photo-based analysis and debunking of UFOs, Bigfoot, Ogopogo, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.).

I like how the photographs of my friend Evan Lee invert the hyper-rational conventions of "straight" photography, finding shy cartoon presences in landscape; in ginseng roots; in cardboard boxes and draftsmen's curves. I'm similarly moved by Yoshitoshi's prints and drawings. My Ghosts are attempts to make images which, while not as dramatic as Yoshitoshi's explosive lines or Evan's complexly arranged compositions, still suggest phantom presences lurking in and around modernity's edges.
- posted by cjb @ 7:18 PM