Pryde’s current show in San Francisco, “Lapses in Thinking by the Person I Am,”
a breath of fresh air in a contemporary art scene that is not infrequently
marked by cynicism, partakes of the kind of playful, understated
mastermindfulness of Félix González-Torres or Jillian Mayer and of the peculiar
poignancy of Jason Lazarus (especially in his “Too Hard To Keep” series) and of
the poised presentness of Michael Galinsky (especially in his “Malls Across
America” series). In this exhibition of eccentric tenderness, Pryde probes the
Here and Now as a scientist would organic matter, yielding unusual beauty and a
kind of nostalgia for the present. In “Lapses in Thinking by the Person I Am,” our intimacies with time and space
and the prism of brilliant existences that they generate as they intersect
Venn-Diagrammatically (that very sacred holy ghost of this existential trinity)
are made elemental in such a way that the audience’s interaction (even a
limited interaction, like mine, which has consisted of looking at and reading
about the show online) becomes one of this constellation’s crucial stars. I have not even addressed yet what will naturally be considered the heart of
this show: a small but mountable train that basically orchestrates the entire
place (creating the sense of place of the gallery space, whereas the
photos—works of an odd sort of urgency, which at once insist upon themselves as
products of an attuned consciousness and refuse to make excessive demands on
our attention, like the picture of a pine cone in a
metallic-silver-nail-polished hand—work only in relation to this
massive-as-a-model, small-as-an-authentic train. There’s much to recommend the belief that, even more than airplanes, trains
have captured humanity’s imagination in a unique and poetic way. For all the
bird metaphors that pepper this planet’s poetry, planes seldom appear as
similar symbols of freedom, not to mention how the kamikaze pilots or suicide
mission hijackers may have marred planes metaphorical potential. In his caustic
criticism of the proclamations made in Walt Whitman’s poems, D.H. Lawrence
writes: “An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or
the Ocean, or the Stars […] It takes a steam-engine to ache with amorous love.
All of it.” From the press release: “Pryde’s dual practices of photography and sculpture
will be showcased in this first solo presentation of her work in an American
institution. Making use of the technical and iconic potential of photography in
its various forms, Pryde creates visually arresting and conceptually precise
images that play upon the relationship between two dominant historical uses of
the camera: scientific analysis and artistic endeavor.” In his probing book Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, cultural critic
Ben Highmore asks, “What are the circumstances of a favorite armchair when we
seem to be so unconcerned by it, while it perfectly performs its role of
comfortably supporting us precisely so we don’t have to ‘give it notice’?” and
“Does the old adage ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ really apply when we consider
the precociousness of a family photograph that we see each day but rarely pay
any heed to?” The unassuming photographs in Josephine Pryde’s show initially seem about as
far from precociousness as photographs can be, but the intelligence of their
silence (all photos, of course, are mute, but these ones seem to hint at their
subject matter’s silence also) is acute. Modest but ideationally vast, this show seems to me to echo, over and over,
some of Albert Camus’s most potent words in his masterpiece The Myth of Sisyphus: “If there is an ‘absurd,’ it is in man’s universe. The moment the
notion transforms itself into eternity’s springboard, it ceased to be linked to
human lucidity. […] Man integrates the ‘absurd’ and in that communion causes to
disappear its essential character, which is opposition, laceration, and
divorce. This leap is an escape.”
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