JAN

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Alan C

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JAN DIBBETS

Land Sea Colour

J

JAN DIBBETS

Land Sea Colour

The Alan Cristea Gallery at31&34 Cork St. London W1S 3NUTelephone +44(0)20 7439 1866Facsimile +44(0)20 7439 1874Email: info@alancristea.comWebsite: www.alancristea.com

JAN DIBBETS

Land Sea Colour

21 March – 20 April 2013

Alan Cristea Gallery

Jan DibbetsA Third Way for Photography

Photography is in crisis today. Since the beginning of the

twenty-first century, many of the medium’s traditional

film-based tools have been terminated or reconfigured,

and its conventional hard-copy production and print-

media distribution points have been displaced. Radical

transformations in the making and interpretation and

circulation of photographic images, driven forward in large

part by new digital technologies, now open onto quite

different networks of reception and pulsing flows of

information. Morphing into a wide range of electronic

technologies and platforms, from iPhones to eBooks, from

Flickr to Facebook, photography is ubiquitous and rapidly

changing, faster and easier, more vast and more accessible,

reaching global users instantly and simultaneously. These

technological changes in photography itself have challenged

the once-certain veracity of the photographic image and, at

the same time, created vast changes in the behaviors and

expectations of makers and audiences. The new, shape-

shifting forms that photography has adopted as the lingua

franca of the digital age have produced widespread anxiety.

But while these recent changes in the nature and social

uses of photography seem sudden and technologically

determined, their intellectual and artistic roots lie in an

earlier rupture in visual culture that resonated throughout the

international art world in the mid-1960s. As a series of recent

exhibitions have shown, around 1965, artists from a disparate

variety of disciplines, nationalities, and points of view

simultaneously began to challenge the conventional ideas

and tools and sites of contemporary art-making, particularly

as expressed in painting and sculpture.1 That broadly

manifested rent in art making and art criticism substantially

redirected the perception of photographic presumptions,

among other things. This challenge to the fundamental nature

of photography came not from fine-art photographers but

from a quite different strain of artists using photography.

This new approach was especially evident in conceptual

art, which employed photography in a variety of innovative

ways unrelated to the aesthetics of the medium and designed

primarily to de-emphasize the material status of the

traditional art object and to concentrate attention on ideas

and processes. For most conceptual artists, photography

itself, as a subject or medium, was largely beside the point.

They were only interested in the “informational possibilities

of black and white photography.”2 At the same time, as

information, photography was central to conceptual art and

its critical investigations. The social status of the photograph

as fact or evidence allowed conceptual artists to interrogate

the status and role of the artist, to challenge the means of

art’s distribution, to overturn the commodity character of the

art object, to expose the political function of art institutions,

and to highlight the crucial participation of the viewer in the

reception and completion of a work of art.

At best, the banal photographs conceptual artists made

or conscripted to illustrate their conceptual ideas were

regarded as undifferentiated or low-energy images, akin to

monochromatic canvases or the blank prose of Alain

Robbe-Grillet’s fiction. Nevertheless, conceptual artists

engaged photography in their works in a surprisingly protean

range of operations: as a record of performances or actions;

as a documentation of a physical artwork not present; as a

communication between artist and viewer; as an analogue or

stand-in for a word or idea; as a typological catalogue of like

forms; as the basis for a visual pun or parody; and

occasionally as a work of art in itself. These novel uses of

photography were largely unrelated to the medium’s

aesthetic value, but had profound and far-reaching effects in

shaping visual culture, ones with deep ramifications even

today. As art historian Matthew Witkovsky has recently

claimed, “In the Conceptual era of the 1960s and 1970s,

photography definitively became the paradigmatic form of

contemporary art.”3 It is crucial, then, to look again at the

work of the artists responsible for these newly relevant shifts

and to understand how their views redirected photography

and shaped how it appears to us today.

Curiously, the only artist among the conceptualists who

committed totally to photography and to investigating the

unique visual properties and paradoxes of the medium was

the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets (born 1941). Though he began as

a painter, and later played a crucial role in the conceptual art

movement, Dibbets has always considered himself first and

foremost a photographer. Uniquely among conceptual artists,

Dibbets examined the photograph itself, plumbing the depths

of the medium and insisting that, for him, the photograph was

the work.4 In fact, his allegiance to this medium over forty

years is impressive; the types of photographs that Dibbets

takes are utterly unique and entirely consistent. His

photographs are straightforward and unmanipulated, the type

of photographs anyone could make. One could say that the

simplicity or dumbness of the photographs provides their

generative power since, for Dibbets, the fundamental goal is

to unmask the seemingly self-evident role of photography as

a legitimate depiction of the world, and to show how even

simple operations can expose photography’s illusion. For an

audience in thrall to the photographic image, thoroughly

accepting of its conventions, it is often hard to make this

point. That is why Dibbets often resorts to eccentric forms and

combinations of photographs, twisting and turning the

images, making mountains and comets out of horizon lines

(cat. 1), using words and drawings to peel back the seeming

inevitability of photography’s representation of reality.

Dibbets takes the notion that cameras do lie and

pushes it further, claiming boldly that reality itself is an

abstraction.5 In other words, our perception of material reality

is mediated not only by physiological impediments, such as

the viewer’s monocular vision and psychophysical processes,

but also by cultural constructions, including all manner of

representations. Of these cultural constructions, photography

is probably the most compelling. The distorted analogue to

the real world that photographs provide has become so

convincing and persuasive, that today photographs are

generally accepted as literal transcriptions of reality. In the

past several decades – that is, since Dibbets made his first

photographs – this view of photographic representation as

original or authentic has been roundly challenged by

postmodern theory. While most artists and photographers

have been concerned with representation (what and how a

photograph depicts) or abstraction (the formal qualities of the

photographic image), Dibbets has been concerned to look at

photography in a third way. His motive has been to

demonstrate in a variety of aesthetically engaging ways the

fundamental fictions of the photograph.

Dibbets has been immersed in an intense and ongoing

examination of what Marcel Duchamp would call “precision

optics”, that is, the foundational components and examples of

photographic vision: perspective, motion, light, color, and

time. For Dibbets, these are not formal or theoretical concerns

but rather phenomenological or perceptual issues, pertaining

to how a viewer encounters the world through photography.

Dibbets’s ultimate goal seems to be to trouble or decenter our

confident acceptance of photography’s stable organization of

experience. “A consistent theme in Dibbets’s work is the

paradoxical nature of illusion and reality immediately and

directly perceived,” critic Barbara Reise noted. “Thus, the

reality of a seemingly ‘natural’ visual observation is

counter-posed by a physical or conceptual reality.”6 His

approach in this regard has been methodical and systematic,

engaging one idea with great intensity for a period of years,

moving on to the next series, and then finally circling back

years later to reexamine earlier explorations with new tools

and points of view.

Among the most sophisticated early demonstrations of

Dibbets’s explorations of photography’s potential for

misrepresentation are his works in the series titled Perspective

Corrections (1967-69). Over an intense two-year period, Dibbets

made approximately forty large black-and-white photographs

using slight variations of the same basic exercise. A trapezoid

was laid out with rope on the ground or in his studio such that

when photographed from the proper angle the trapezoid would

appear to be a two-dimensional square. This reverses the

normal function of perspective: instead of making the square

appear trapezoidal when projected in depth, Dibbets makes

the trapezoid appear square. This inversion of the textbook

illustration of Renaissance perspective has a powerful and

uncanny effect: not only is the three-dimensional rope form

translated into a two-dimensional representation but also the

resulting square, an illusion, seems to float parallel to the

picture plane. And, even more, the square oscillates between

fixed reality and optical illusion.

Central to the concept of Dibbets’s Perspective Corrections is

the fact that they appear only in the photograph, or really

only in the negative. These are not documentations of some

absent artwork; you could not reach out and touch the square;

the photograph is the work. As critic Bruce Boice noted,

“Without the mediation of the camera, one cannot, in the

physical situation, see a Perspective Correction or a trapezoid of

rope magically pop up to form a vertical square regardless of

where one stands in relation to the rope configuration.”7 Like

many of Dibbets’s early experiments, the Perspective Corrections

sought to reveal generally accepted optical effects that are

unique to photography. In these subtle demonstrations of

how photography relies on the model linear perspective to

organize its simulation of human vision, Dibbets destabilizes

a model that deliberately suggests that our environment is

organized, stable, and coherent.

A second major series by Dibbets, begun around 1970

and continuing to the present, has focused on what has

become the most consistent and confounding theme in his

work: the horizon. Of all the ways that humans rationalize

sight, the most compelling – yet least conscious – is our

conception of the horizon. Strictly speaking, the horizon is an

illusion, a manmade fiction; it is the point at which the sky

appears to meet the earth. But this is a mirage created by the

curvature of the earth. This is especially dramatic at the

seashore, where the blank blue sky meets the expanse of

ocean. It may be true that in Dibbets’s native Holland, a

particularly flat country, the horizon is more prominent than

elsewhere. Whatever the case, the horizon defines the level or

lateral view, balanced by gravity against the vertical human

experience. Dibbets summarized these subconscious cultural

connotations when he said, “In the whole world what is more

beautiful than a straight line? And the horizon is a straight line

in three dimensions: it’s an almost incredible phenomenon.”8

Dibbets’s fascination with the horizon has instigated

a surprising range of conceptual and artistic inventiveness.

Exploiting the sequential and temporal aspects of the

panorama, Dibbets has made linear and curved horizons

compiled of dozens of slices of images elegantly montaged

together, in color and in black and white. He has tilted and

bent the horizon to unsettle, in whatever ways possible, the

impossibility of the horizon as a concept. Many of these works

are the culmination of logical but elaborate processes, such

as a composite of photographs taken by rotating the camera

on a tripod and taking a photograph every 30 degrees or

swinging the camera around in various arcs. Yet, in some

ways, the most effective of these horizon works are the

simplest, the two recent series New Horizons (2007) (cat. 2) and

Land-Sea Horizon (2011) (cats 6 – 12). These works stem from

the seminal Sectio Aurea of 1972, which was the first to

juxtapose, side by side, a single color photograph of a

land-based horizon with a single color photograph of a sea

horizon. The effective union of the single horizon line, though

thoroughly artificial, creates a harmony reflected in the golden

rectangle of the title. This device also opened the way to

slanted and asymmetrical horizons and diamond-shaped

composites in the recent series. Though decidedly pictorial,

these horizon works use photomontage and the abrupt

reconciliation of land and sea horizons to trouble their easy

reception and to continue Dibbets’s insistent protest against

the conventions of human perception.

Perhaps Dibbets’s most challenging photographs are the

Color Studies (cats 13 – 18), begun in late 1975, and now

reconceived digitally at a larger scale. These works consist of

enlarged details of automobile hoods and fenders made in

such extreme close-ups that almost all evidence of their

source is omitted. The shallow focal length of the pictures

means that the frame is virtually filled with the extravagant

automotive paint colors, though close examinations will show

slight details that break the monochromatic illusion. These

details are not enough, though, to evoke any anecdotal or

cultural associations with cars or car culture; the make or

model of the individual automobiles is impossible to discern

and, in any event, irrelevant. In Dibbets’s hands, the

photographs of car parts have become, in effect, large and

luscious color swatches. What seems to be a formalistic

reduction of these representations is emphasized by the

presentation of the Color Studies in groups, so that one must

always encounter not only the individual colors but also the

relations between colors, and by the scale, which in the recent

versions is extended to the maximum size possible within the

largest paper made. When first exhibited in 1976, the Color

Studies were dismissed by critics who considered them too

painterly or too much of a departure from Dibbets’s previous

work. But decades later the works seem refreshingly whimsical

and aesthetically audacious, immersing the viewer in almost

pure color, like photographic Barnett Newmans.

Yet, as with all of Dibbets photographs, they are

taken from real objects and situations in the world, but

made to appear abstract or ambiguous. They demonstrate

the subtle and fluctuating balance that Dibbets has always

sought between photography’s representational and abstract

properties. Speaking of the Color Studies, Dibbets has said,

“[They are] the consequence of speculation about the

structure of the photographic image….That set me to

thinking: what would happen if I stripped the image of its

structure? Then I had the idea of photographing something

as flat and shiny as photographic paper. That’s where the

photographs of car hoods came from. They’re as real and

concrete as the other studies; they’re representations of

reality.”9 Though conceived almost forty years ago, Dibbets’s

Color Studies have direct relevance to fundamental

photographic issues that younger artists are grappling with

today.

Photography survives today but in profoundly revised

forms, making ever more urgent our understanding of how

meanings are invented through photographic practices of

communication. This is a key moment, then, to ask critical

questions not only about aesthetics of the medium but also

about the constructions of history and memory, the politics of

image capture and ownership, the uses of pictures to define

social identity, the shifting belief in photographic truth, and

the transformations in human perception. As the photographic

work of Jan Dibbets demonstrates, these are no longer just

abstract theoretical ideas but practical problems directly

relevant to everyday life.

Brian Wallis

Chief Curator, International Center of Photography, New York

Notes

1. Among the recent examinations of the transformative art of the 1960s,see Matthew S. Witkovsky, ed. Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph,1964-1977 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Philip Kaiser andMiwon Kwon, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (New York: Prestel, 2012);and Christophe Cherix, In and Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art,1960-1976 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). For earlier key textson conceptual art and photography, see especially Benjamin H. D.Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administrationto the Critique of Institutions,” October, no. 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 105-43;and Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: Photography In, or As, ConceptualArt,” in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Art:1965-1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), pp. 247-67.

2. Lucy R. Lippard, “Groups,” Studio International 179, no. 920 (March 1970),p. 93.

3. Matthew S. Witkovsky, “The Unfixed Photograph,” in Witkovsky, LightYears, p. 16.

4. In 1970, Dibbets stated to critic Lucy Lippard that it was thephotograph, or more particularly the negative, that constituted his work.(“LL: Did the works themselves have any importance to you or just thephotographs? JD: Only the photographs. In fact, only the negatives.”) Atone point, Dibbets even experimented with selling his negatives. See LucyR. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972(New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 159. For more on Dibbets and photography,see the monograph Erik Verhagen, Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work,1967-2007 (Paris: Editions du Panama, 2007); and Bruce Boice, “JanDibbets: Photograph and the Photographed,” Artforum 11, no. 8 (April1973), pp. 45-49.

5. Dibbets has stated, “There’s a higher solution than those of Cezanneand Mondrian: to demonstrate that reality is an abstraction.” Jan Dibbets,interview with Georg Jappe, quoted in Verhagen, Jan Dibbets: The PhotographicWork, p. 9.

6. Barbara Reise, “Notes on Jan Dibbets Contemporary Nature of RealisticClassicism in the Dutch Tradition,” Studio International 183, no. 945 (June1972), p. 253.

7. Bruce Boice, “Jan Dibbets: Photograph and the Photographed,”Artforum, April 1973, p. 45.

8. Jan Dibbets, unpublished interview with Irmeline Lebeer; quoted inVerhagen, Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work, p. 81.

9. Jan Dibbets, unpublished interview with Dominic van den Boogerd, Mar.20, 1997; quoted in Verhagen, Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work, p. 113.

Little Comet – Sea 9˚ - 81˚ and Big Comet 3˚ - 60˚, 1973Photograph of installation at MoMA, New York in 1973

Land-Sea Horizons

1Little Comet 9° - 81°, Sky•Sea•Sky1973

2Land-Sea KB32007

3Sectio Aurea AA32007

4Sea 0° - 135°2009

5Land 0° - 135°2009

6Land-Sea Horizon 12011

7Land-Sea Horizon 22011

8Land-Sea Horizon 32011

9Land-Sea Horizon 42011

10Land-Sea Horizon (a)2011

11Land-Sea Horizon (b)2011

12Land-Sea Horizon (c)2011

Colour Studies

13Color Study B 1, 21976

14Colour Studies2007

15S-Color A51976/2010

16S-Color A91976/2010

17Dark Blue1976/2012

18Red1976/2012

Documentation

Cover: Red, 1976/2012

Introduction © Brian Wallis, 2013Catalogue and images © Alan Cristea Gallery,London and Jan Dibbets, Amsterdam 2013

Published by Alan Cristea Gallery on theoccasion of the exhibitionJAN DIBBETS : Land Sea Colour21 March – 20 April 2013 at 31 & 34 Cork Street, London W1S 3NU

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ISBN 978-0-9569203-9-3

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