Mark Luthringer: Texts, etc.

"Collecting, Assembling, Creating"
Blog Post from Chroma by Dino Demopolous 6.07.07

ExerciseMachines507

The collection of treadmill photos above is from Mark Luthringer's amazing Ridgemont Typologies art project. There are fifteen "typologies" in the project. It's really worth a look.

Luthringer simply took digital camera snapshots of various subjects (the front grill of trucks, roofs of homes) as a way of building typologies, which he believes can illuminate the "excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption".

As interesting as that concept is, I'm also fascinated by what he has to say about assembly-the combination of images in this case, as a way of deriving emergent meaning (really, as a DJ of twenty years I had never quite thought of the act of collecting and assembly of music and records quite like that, but that's what it is, in a nutshell, an act of creation from assembling other bits together based on connections that you hope crystallize). Initially, Luthringer was insulted when critics pointed to those aspects of his work (he thought that the focus should be on the subject itself), but he eventually came around to appreciate the unique contribution that he could make:

...the resulting assembly of pictures was itself a distinct entity ,that the initial idea was my principal contribution, and that the subsequent making of pictures was an act of searching and collecting rather than seeing or creating. And about this process of collecting,I thought: instead of not acknowledging it or being uncomfortable with it, why not embrace it? Why not use groups of images, rather than individual ones, as the currency of my work? Why not see what results from sacrificing form for efficiency?

I know very little about cognitive psychology, but I'm really interested in the process by which we contruct meaning by imposing or discovering order in the things around us, and Luthringer's project is a remarkably simple and vivid way of bringing that to life.

weblink

From the San Francisco Chronicle 4/22/04 weblink
re: 40 Monuments to Progress at 3A Garage: Architecture, San Francisco

Eye-Opening Look at What We Ignore
by John King

Forget skyscrapers and shopping malls. A terrific new photography exhibition in San Francisco shows that the most pervasive marks of our modern world are considerably more mundane: the things we usually don't notice.

They're power boxes, bollards, lamp poles and the like. Most are homely, and many are worse; they're designed without a thought for attractiveness an dinstalled without a thought for how they fit the terrain. Call it the architecture of expedience -- and once we open our eyes, we see it all around us.

These metal and concrete imprints are on display in "40 Monuments to Progress," an exhibition by Mark Luthringer at the 3A Gallery at 101 South Park,San Francisco, through May 14. He set out to document the sources of radiation that blanket society, such as cell phone towers. But as Luthringer pointed his lens at local neighborhoods and the Nevada outback, a different theme emerged.

"I started with cell phone towers because they struck me as an iconic form almost, somewhat menacing but mainly overlooked," Luthringer says. "After that, I just started
to notice the prevalence and variety of these types of things everywhere."

Beyond the high quality of the photographs --I adore the huge transmission tower that stands in the desolate wild, poised and delicate as a dancer -- what I love about the exhibition is that it shows how our eyes tend to edit out parts of the world we don't want
to see.

"Access (#3)" presents an impassive
utilitybox perhaps 5 feet high crowded access3
by equally high clumps of sagebrush
on the bottom of a ridge. If you or I drove
by, we'd take in the natural sweep,
the undisturbed "open" space -- not the
regulation- styled silver box that some
engineer stuck there to serve an
electrical god.

Or consider the incongruity of "Underground
Access (#2)": a pipe that sticks up out of the
ground and is topped by a cap and a lock,
and three other open pipes that form a
triangle around it. Presumably the trio is
there to make sure that nothing collides with
the pipe in the middle; but with no road in
view, just fennel and a distant warehouse,
the installation is as cryptic as any sculptor's
grant-funded provocation.

undacc2 What all this adds up to is a cloaked world that serves the one we take for granted. The closer you look, the farther this second world stretches; we don't ask questions, we just assume it will be there when we need it.

The two worlds meet in Luthringer's "Draining," where a creek becomes a perfectly round corrugated pipe, with a perfectly flat asphalt road on top. On a road like that, we can drive straight through oblivion, taking no notice of what stretches out beyond or courses underneath.

While Luthringer tends to scrutinize the outer (physical) fringes of society, you can find the same blunt impositions on every block of our urban terrain.

"Notes on Ridgemont Typologies" (Foreword to Ridgemont Typologies Book)
By Alan Rapp

This place has been nearby for a considerable time now. This terra cotta-topped edge node whose name reflects the latest leapfrogging lifestyle theme. Whose citizens stalk prettified drosscapes in compact SUVs (exceptional passenger space, aggressive styling), sporting compassionate-conservative casual. Some of us are from there, or want to flee—but one way or another we all seem to live there now.

Near as it is, why does it seem Mark Luthringer is just touring us there for the first time?

Maybe it is the sense of cultural displacement that these geographies provoke, even (or especially) for those of us who look on with detached bemusement, for whom this zone is
an armchair tourist destination. Or that these places never seem quite finished. That an entire thought industry has set up around them, turning neighborhoods into theory-driven, concepted landscapes. These are the perfect settings for an endless dramedy series: an axis of spatial sprawl that intersects another of temporal deferral.

In some senses it is familiar artistic terrain—abstraction of the consumer landscape, a
poetic glimpse of the exurban opera. But Ridgemont Typologies isn’t telling this story, precisely. At least, not in story form. The effect of this typological format is to sever the contextual associations of these subjects. Away from the grip of circumstance, condition, intention, motivation, the texture of the lives of normal, “perfectly nice” people—away from
all that, these subjects are no longer things. They become semantic units in a language
we have been speaking since at least the mid-twentieth century.

Ridgemont Typologies is big-box conceptualism, taxonomizing and redeploying products and environments into the kinds of grids that a value shopper can appreciate. Pictures tell stories, but these typologies arrest narrative much as their grouped subjects exist in a floating zone. We’re absolved of the march of history and the myth of progress, where we always advance toward a beneficent humanist future. In the grid, this long trudge is over. We’ve arrived at a heavenly stasis, where the past is annihilated, the future suspended.

40 Monuments to Progress Artist Statement

This work began as an examination of that unintended sculptural expression of our need for bandwidth everywhere, the cell phone tower. While many cell phone users are surely comforted by the sight of a new cell phone tower by the side of the road, to me they are, aesthetically at least, quite menacing in their visual attitude.

My attention focussed on the visual noise of infrastructure, I soon found many other subjects possessing a sculptural presence that could be captured in photographs. I began seeing poles, boxes, pedestals, mysterious little monoliths and manholes, etc. everywhere: along streets and highways, in parks and playgrounds, in parking lots, etc., usually just outside the margins of the visual field intended for us as passersby on foot or in a car.

In them I found rich formal variety and subtlety, and distinct character- sometimes humorous, sometimes foreboding- revealed in their photographs. Many are characterized by a sort of
conflicted awkwardness resulting from the contradictory ways they must inhabit the land-
scape and serve their purposes: they must blend into the landscape discreetly while still being accessible and provide access while still being secure against vandals, the elements, and unauthorized use. Many of these subjects do bear a strong resemblance to actual monument
like roadside historical markers or gravestones, and as a group, they establish a formal vocabulary (repetition of forms and materials, heirarchies of scale and complexity, etc.) as varied and specific as that of actual monuments. And while those actual monuments are typically the sculptural expression of some tribute, remembrance, or commemoration, my monuments, as the physical evidence of their functions, are, intended or not, sculptural expressions of those functions, and what I choose to see as monuments to them.

While these monuments might symbolize to me a progress I am at best stoic about, for many these objects and their proliferation might themselves personify progress, be, in a sense, a
kind of currency of progress. ‘Progress’ is for me a relevant and effective common conceptual denominator for this work, and a concept open-ended enough to both transmit and receive irony.

transmitting

Statement on Photography (a work in progress)

>> I used to be one of those photographers who, having found something I deemed worthy of photographing, set out to find and bring back various examples of it, each resulting image a distinct entity that, together with the others, formed a series. As I worked this way (with some success), I frequently had the feeling of being unsure exactly what my contribution to the work was, aside from legwork and lots of time in the darkroom. It sometimes felt as if I was just tracking down the subjects and putting myself in position to throw a net over them.

Several years ago, at a well known photographer’s review event, I was showing a series of carefully crafted black-and-white images of decaying mid-century architecture, and a comment by one reviewer had an unintended effect. The comment was about how the forms of curb and powerline were echoed in the architecture, how lovely this was, and how the work displayed a gift of being able to harness these things. My reaction (long familiar with the work) was inner frustration with the fact that he was reading the photograph, not the subject. And while I appreciated his generosity, this time I saw also that I was being given credit for things I didn’t do, or didn’t intend to do. The more I thought about our interaction, the more I came to see that not only could I not take credit for previously existing form, I had no desire to. Furthermore, I was no longer willing to give such credit anymore either.

At some point I caught on and realized that the resulting assembly of pictures was itself a distinct entity, that the initial idea was my principal contribution, and that the subsequent making of pictures was an act of searching and collecting rather than seeing or creating. And about this process of collecting, I thought:instead of not acknowledging it or being uncomfortable with it, why not embrace it? Why not use groups of images, rather than individual ones, as the currency of my work? Why not see what results from sacrificing form for efficiency?

>> With this work (Ridgemont Typologies) I have completely embraced digital photography. I’ve benefitted from its efficiency, but have also come to appreciate its conceptual implications. It is of course a further democratization of the medium,but I see it also as a technological expression of how photography has always truly functioned- as an object-less conveyor of information. As for the digital image itself, what’s surprising (important) isn’t how different it is from that of chemical photography, but rather how similar it is. It’s obvious now that what’s been done away with- the negative- has always been superfluous anyway. What we are witnessing is the consummation of photography’s manifest destiny: to become a truly object-less
conveyor of information.

>> Working with the typological form has provided me some convincing insight into
the question of whether photography has a ‘privileged’ relationship with subject or with ‘reality’. I’ve always felt that it does, and that its ability to approximate reality for us is based more on inherent elements of its process [its inescapable necesity of depiction] than those of the photographic image itself. The typological form is a demonstration of how this works.

When we look at one of these pieces, we are immediately dealing with relationships between the images that assume the existence of the subjects, if not the intimate details of them as objects. To be convinced of this reality, we apparently do not require persuasion by the images themselves, only the knowledge that they are photographs. We accept the images as records of interactions between camera and subject, and it is this knowledge, this ability to place camera and subject at the same place at the same time (the pieces of depiction), that gives photographs their ‘privilege’. So the images transmit not any sort of reliable likeness of a given subject, but rather the notion of it, the idea of it, or, as the pointing finger pictures of John Baldessari try to show us, the instruction to think about it.

TEXTS, ETC.

ABOUT

RIDGEMONT TYPOLOGIES

RIDGEMONT

ACCOUNT CONTROL TECHNOLOGY

OFFICE PARK HEROES

POPCORN

40 MONUMENTS TO PROGRESS

HYPOTHETICAL PASSERBY (BLOG)

MARK LUTHRINGER @ BLURB

ETC.