David DiMichele.
Markle, Leslie
Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles CA February 10 * March 10, 2007
In David DiMichele's new photographic series,
"Pseudodocumentation," large-scale images of imagined art
installations question the documentary function of photography within
the gallery context. DiMichele's process is to create scale models
of exhibition spaces, "install" work in them(including
appropriately diminutive viewers), and then photograph the lot. Ending
up as huge light-jet prints, these meticulously detailed maquettes
inevitably belie their much smaller originals and relatively scaled
installations. Evoking Daniel Buren's trademark pinstripes or
Robert Smithson's piles of dirt, they nonetheless don't record
actual shows but openly present themselves as cons. This merging of
fakery and fact establishes the slippery ground on which art as
mediation always lies.
Pseudodocumentation: Inside the White Cube (2006) shows a model
museum interior with everything in dazzling white--the walls, ceiling,
mural-scale monochromes, and assortment of monumental white cubes. While
immediately referring to Brian O'Doherty's seminal Artforum
essays published in the mid-1970s, the work also calls to mind Robert
Rauschenberg's white paintings shown at Black Mountain College in
1951, as well as numerous cubes by Tony Smith and Richard Serra, while
the architecture quotes the vernacular of Sol LeWitt. Furthermore, the
whole conceit paraphrases the kinds of installation that Robert Irwin
and Bruce Nauman practiced in the 1970s, where the phenomenology of
space and spectatorship are mutually called into question.
Generally speaking, the muted color of the prints reflects the
appropriate ambiance of the models until one stumbles across the
presence of small brightly colored plastic figurines which, functioning
as digital avatars or miniature surrogates, effectively permit viewers
to project themselves into the work. Over time, subtle gradations of
color and valence become increasingly apparent, further directing
attention to the viewing experience as an artificial byproduct of
carefully nuanced and diffused lighting.
In Pseudodocumention: Desert Disks (2007), we see three monumental
saucers hovering in a modernist setting, flanked by grand picture
windows. The forced perspective of this image mirrors the totalizing
effect of minimalist sculpture, while the juxtaposition between the
richly nuanced interior and stark desert landscape seen through the
windows points to the artificiality of the abstract sublime. While
clearly alluding to Donald Judd's Marfa installations, to the
uninitiated it might as well be a pirated image of a UFO carport.
What DiMichele puts under the microscope is the ritualistic sameness of installation art, which in its most typical expression
foregrounds presence and absence in the unfolding field of
spatiotemporal experience--here portrayed as more a style of art world
dress-up a la Cindy Sherman, albeit without the stockings and garters.
For example, the formal similitude between installation model and
pseudo-documentary photography tends to subvert the authority of both,
foregrounding the experience of art as one of endless mediation. Though
this strategy has the aroma of the simulacrum, its end result seems less
critique than a jolting of the imagination to infinite possibilities--in
miniature.
