When I was in my 20s, I read a lot of Roland Barthes. His work was a little more approachable than that of many of his heavier French theory peers. It was the 1980s and postmodernism was in the air. It was refreshing to think of “texts” the way Barthes did. I haven’t had much reason to think about Barthes in recent years, and one could be forgiven for wondering if anyone still read him.
That question is answered decisively in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, a new exhibit by London Ham at Basket Books. Ham’s exhibit is loosely based on “La mort de l'auteur”, a 1967 essay by Barthes. This title translates as "The Death of the Author", and it is the main theory that Barthes proposed. In essence, Barthes identified that the ultimate creator of a text’s meaning was not the author, but the reader. Barthes was thinking of literary texts mainly, but the text could be anything created by an artist or other person. Ham doesn’t write a literary text; he provides us, the viewers, with a series of photographs. He contends they have a meaning for him—after all, he took the photos and selected them—but for the purpose of this show, the meaning will be whatever we viewers derive from them.
I have to say that this now seems like a trivial insight into the production of meaning. Surely anyone who has ever looked at, say, a painting by Mark Rothko realizes that the painting itself doesn’t tell us what Mark Rothko thought—it’s up to us viewers to assign it some kind of meaning. And once you realize this about abstract art, it’s hard not to feel the same about any work of art, in any medium. We all get something personal out of pieces of art (or any other communication).
There are two parts to this exhibit. (In a sense there are three—I’ll return to that later.) Basket Books has a gallery on the second floor, split into two rooms. The front room is more-or-less a standard white cube gallery and the back room is a bit more undefined. It has a kitchen sink, but for Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, it was used as a room to project an interactive video.
In the front room are several identical wooden boxes, displayed on tiny metal shelves. They have hinged lids that face out towards the viewer. Of course, I had a desire to lift the box off the shelf and open it, but I am well-trained in the rules—“do not touch the art!” I was curious what they contained, but instead went in the back where the interactive projection was.
The set-up required that anyone entering the room would walk right in front of the projector, casting a shadow on the projected work, but I think that was just how the room was laid out. On the wall there appeared to be an enigmatic video playing on a white wall with molding and baseboard, but as I looked more closely, I quickly realized that the molding and baseboard were part of the projection. And then we viewers were swung around within the space, as if walking through a series of rooms. It soon became apparent that this walkthrough was being controlled by someone in the room with us, holding a video game controller.
It was not a video, then, but a game-like environment that the viewer could control, at least as far as moving through this series of rooms. The environment one moved through looked like an old, mostly empty apartment—some of the walls had molding and baseboards, and some had shiny black bricks. In some of the rooms there were videos playing on the walls. They were enigmatic collections of images, including the cover of Semina Two, a beat zine published by Wallace Berman in 1957. At first I was mystified by its inclusion (but no less mystified than by every other aspect of this enigmatic video within an interactive environment), but when I went back to the wooden boxes, a connection became clear.
Ham was in the viewing room and showed me how to use the controller—I was very clumsy, not being an experienced gamer. He told me that it was OK to handle the wooden boxes and to open them. Given his permission, I went out and broke the “do not touch the art” taboo that has long been part of my art viewing politesse.
Inside each box was a paperback of Roland Barthes’ book S/Z. This is an exhaustive analysis of a short story, "Sarrasine" by Honoré de Balzac. But within the physical books are a series of loose snapshots (printed on photo paper) of various things. Some of the images seem to be more-or-less ordinary snapshots, inherently personal, but some are recognizable. For instance, a black-and-white photo of Joseph Beuys mid-performance. I couldn’t tell if they were meant to be in a particular order or not.
This is where the connection to Semina lies. Semina was basically a zine filled with arts and poetry by a variety of artists and writers. The image quoted in Ham’s video was a photo by Charles Brittan of someone named Suzi Hicks. That issue also contained work by Jean Cocteau, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, Lewis Carroll, Rabindranath Tagore, but also work by friends and contemporaries of Wallace Berman like John Altoon, Walter Hopps, and Charles Bukowski. But unlike a bound magazine, each piece was published on a separate piece of paper. There was no correct order in which to read the contents of Semina. And the same could be said of the loose photos in each volume of S/Z. If Barthes spoke of the death of the author, Berman and Ham were working with a death of the editor.
In describing this, I am kind of obviating Ham’s idea—that the meaning would be generated by the viewer, not the author (and certainly not the critic). I mentioned this to Ham after he explained all this to me—wasn’t he subverting his Barthian intent by explaining it to me? He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. In a way, it showed how slippery meaning is—it becomes a collaboration between the author, the reader, and other commentators.
I mentioned that there were three parts to the exhibit. The third part is a bibliography. This is a very bookish exhibit, after all. The bibliography included several volumes by Roland Barthes, of course, and some other classics of French theory like A Thousand Plateaus by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, as well as a bunch of books that I would classify as smarty-pants classics for people in their 20s. Reading Ham’s bibliography made me feel old—as did this whole exhibit.
This kind of airless intellectualism and abstraction appealed to me when I was in my 20s, but I feel one has to outgrow it. (At least, I did.) This may sound like a harsh judgment, a “get off my lawn” kind of criticism. But I was happy to see someone trodding this ground, to see an artist producing art about ideas he has been reading.
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