GEOFF KLEEM

FOUR WORKS + VACANT ROOMS

1 0 A u g u s t – 3 S e p t e m b e r 2 0 11WILLIAM WRIGHT // ARTISTS

We are focusing on a new way to control light…In the future of technology, light is going to have more and more importance.1

To control light is to control time and space, silently and invisibly. That’s the implication of Nicolas Stenger’s imperative above. He is part of a team of scientists working on the development of an invisibility cloak. Crossing the line from sci-fi myth into plausibility, the cloak they have already created has a structural and material composition capable of changing the speed at which light is absorbed and refracted. Subsequently, when placed over small objects under infrared light, the cloak and what it covers appear to vanish. The goal now is to adapt it for usage within our visible light spectrum.

Stenger’s thoughts on light and perception run parallel to Geoff Kleem’s considerations of light’s materiality and artifice within his practice encompassing photography, sculpture and architecture. In the early 1980s, Kleem began exploring these themes in his photographic series Vacant Rooms. The site of the work’s initial production was an empty warehouse, an old gravity fed factory with internal mechanics designed for regulated reproduction. For Kleem, its framework offered the perfect production line legacy in which to undertake and reflect on the economy of art making.

Using an industrial spray-gun, he physically coated the building’s interior in layers of white paint (extended to a palette of primary colours in later works), translating form into content. Thousands of watts of light were then flooded into the space. The immense surface area of white paint generated a reflective intensity whereby the interior appeared to oscillate between the material and immaterial, an endless cycling of structural depth into painterly surface. The site appeared and disappeared in a play of light.

The perceptual confusion created in the endless corridors of light meant that Kleem’s act of painting would always be contingent on photography to finally locate the space pictorially. The white-on-white tactics test the codependence between painting and photography as well as the hum of our own perception. And while there’s a nod to the history of Abstraction in these blank interiors, they seem more about an “indifference” to narrative rather than its transcendence, more West Coast conceptualist deadpan than European transcendentalism.2 The hanging wires,

abandoned cars, empty paint barrels and other signs of production bleed through the high-key monochromes like faint x-rays of the scaffolding beneath the images. This makes the works appear as detailed fragments or stills of what could almost be thought of ‘behind-the-scenes’ shots. They become photographs primed as canvases—as blank as a readymade.

A later work developed from the Vacant Room series, Untitled, 1992, uses photography to prefigure rather than consolidate the world’s architecture. By overtly staging the photograph as both object and image, Kleem manifests the problems of spatial perception with a physical immediacy, and as a problem to be solved by the viewer rather than representation alone. Reminiscent of Minimalist sculptures by artists like McCracken and Judd, with its industrial appearance, fabrication and phenomenological investment, the work’s highly reflective surface and playful morphology operates as both measure and mirror of the body. It confirms and conflates the physicality of our presence when we encounter it face-to-face.

The human scale and preemptive referentiality of much of Kleem’s work has allowed him to examine how we make sense of our own reflections in a photogenic world. It is from this perspective that we can understand his later works, which swap the machine of the factory for the picturesque industry of the landscape.

For example, in Untitled (voids), 2011, two large discs of complimentary colours, synthetic magenta and radioactive green, stare out at opposite sides of a generic, panoramic forest. When standing centred in front of the image, it seems possible to imagine the two colours merging, like a stereoscopic intersection of light. The fluorescent voids hover like dots on an Ishihara plate. It could be a test. They make you wonder at the precision of your own looking.

In another landscape image, The Good Forest (corrected), 2010, the need for optical calibration is more up front. The work is an anaglyph, which can only be seen “correctly” through the red and blue lenses of a pair of stereo glasses. Apparitions in the form of a table and lamp’s white silhouette float in the forest’s foreground. The anthropomorphic traits of the furniture and the forest’s “goodness”, perhaps provides some clue as to what we’re really looking at or maybe what’s looking at us. Like his earlier work,

RENDER

Untitled, 1992, there’s the suggestion of a two-way exchange that proliferates through the image, a double gesture between the image/object’s abstraction and reality.

In an essay on Duchamp’s optics and his debt to the stereoscopic image, Jean Clair explores the point at which photography and abstraction intersect in the late 19th century. In particular, he focuses on the impact of the anaglyph’s invention, arguing that the spectator’s experience of perspectival space at this time underwent a “subtle dialectical reversal” in terms of causality.3 Clair explains,

The ideality of Alberti’s perspective diagrams, like those of Abraham Bosse and Niceron, drawn from the data of the sensory world, now crossed over into the sensory world itself. Intelligibility was no longer inscribed in the signifier (the perspectivist apparatus which produced a reduction of sensory data to regular diagrams); it was transferred to the signified: the sensory image obtained by the synthesis of abstract, regular figures.4

For Clair, the anaglyphic “synthesis” of space turns Renaissance perspective inside out, so that instead of the eye as the imaginary vanishing point from which space is read as geometric projection (as with Bosse’s illustrations of single-point perspective), vision becomes understood as an embodied affect. The translation of the world into a two-dimensional picture plane operates as an inverted model of perception—an hallucination, where the vision is foregrounded as a process of interiority.

Unlike its 19th century counterpart, the scale and design of Kleem’s anaglyph is made to fluctuate between two modes of vision, one of interiority the other of self-referentiality, as we make and un-make ourselves, and the world. The situation is further complicated by the almost farcical chock of wood that tilts the entire image off its axis as it straightens the scene’s perspective. This strange levelling device, like a little piece of industry that’s fallen free of the picture, both realigns and distorts the axis of the world-as-image-as-world in one deft and elaborately pragmatic move.

The Californian desert of Death Valley is the most recent backdrop Kleem has utilised in his work. As another readymade space of industry, this “real” picture-making factory was also the perfect

location for several scenes in Antonioni’s 1970 cult classic, Zabriskie Point. It’s somewhere to trip out on in the endless transitions of rocky plains, salt flats, canyons, and mountains, which abound with a baroque monotony. It’s a place to count to infinity.

In Death Valley #5, 2011, Kleem has photographed the desert with the precision of a surveyor, turning it into a hi-res mosaic of terrestrial data. Each scene is built onto the next, exposing the architecture of the camera’s abbreviated vision as it pans and collapses against the vastness of the view. Like a NASA image returned from space and rebuilt, the detailed cross-section of the sparse ground gives us another fabrication of the world designed on the dreams of science. It recalls Rebecca Solnit’s suggestion that the “skeletal elegance” of the desert “is made first and foremost of light…[which] belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like an emotion on a face”.5 It’s the light’s intensity that we initially encounter. The emotions come later, shadows of history we cast across the terrain to give it depth.

All these archetypal geographies, from the studio, to the forest, to the desert, have long been made of light. It’s just that we forget this sometimes. Frequency has rendered it invisible. But occasionally we’ll catch a flickering of light as it momentarily glitches across our line of sight before vanishing, lost again within the forever luminous view.

1. Nicolas Stenger, quoted in Ian Sample “Cloaking device makes objects invisible – to infrared light anyway”, The Guardian (guardian.uk.co), 18 March, 2010. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/18/cloaking-device-objects-invisible-infrared]2. For an overview of Modernist photography in relation to Photo-Conceptualism see: Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” in Goldstein, A. and Rorimer, A. (eds.). Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975. Los Angeles, Cambridge (Mass.) and London, 1995, pp. 246-267.3. Jean Clair, “Opticeries”, October, Vol. 5, Special Issue: “Photography”, Summer 1978 p. 107.4. Ibid.5. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, London: Penguin, 2005, p. 129.

Tanya Peterson

LIST OF WORKS

Four Works

Untitled (voids), 2011, archival Inkjet print, 2500 x 980mm.

Death Valley #5, 2011, archival Inkjet print, 2335 x 1365mm.

The Good Forest (corrected), 2010, archival inkjet print, 1600 x 2000mm.

Untitled, 1992 (remade 2011), archival Inkjet print, 1650 x 400mm.

Vacant Rooms

Untitled #1, 1992, lightjet print, 1235 x 1135mm.

Untitled #2, 1992, lightjet print, 1235 x 1135mm.

Untitled #3, 1992, lightjet print, 1235 x 1135mm.

Untitled #4, 1992, archival Inkjet print, 1325 x 1135mm.

Untitled #5, 1992, archival Inkjet print, 2045 x 1135mm.

Untitled #6, 1992, archival Inkjet print, 1235 x 1325mm.

WILLIAM WRIGHT // ARTISTS91 STANLEY STREET, EAST SYDNEY 2010ww.artistprojects@mac.com mob. 0404 904609

Artworks © Geoff Kleem 2011 info@geoffkleem.com Text © Tanya Peterson 2011

This project has been in part assisted by the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body