Anodyne
Monday, July 03, 2006
 

Untitled billboard photograph by UK artist Stephen Gill. Link courtesy Roy Arden. Gill's practice intrigues me: pictures, mostly (the audio recordings, etc. punctuating them seem like notably lesser works, a distraction), marked by Gill's encounters with concepualism (definitely Huebler, definitely Ruscha), but always focused on their subjects, and not on the "conceptual methodology" generating them.

This serial spirit -- rampantly curious; egalitarian; largely made by wandering around - is something genuinely new in photography. Lots of recent projects seem animated by a similar impulse: SGB's Every Bus Stop in Surrey, B.C.; Adam Harrison's 365 Sketches; Jamie Tolagson's 100 Views; Robert Linsley's 100 Views of Mount Baker; my ghosts. These pictures are all encyclopedic descriptions of a particular culture or place, and they all cast as wide a net as possible, in the hope of snaring representations of things that haven't made it into more idea-driven picture-making. Gill's series "Invisible," and "Billboards" are my favorites of those profiled on his site, with"Lost" bringing up third place. Also note Gill's generous offers of free limited edition pictures; this too is an impulse derived from conceptualism. Gill might as well have stamped his free bank machine photographs COLLECTION PUBLIC FREEHOLD.

Iain Sinclair, from a review on Gill's site: "Gill is not a polemicist. He is present, as Robert Frank is present in his American wanderings, to let reality imprint itself with the smallest degree of intervention or commentary."
- posted by cjb @ 11:07 AM


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