Paint It Black

The Fall 2010 issue of Aperture has a short essay on photographs by Barney Kulok.  Here is Kulok's own site.  The set of photographs of interest to Aperture are the set under the title In Visible Cities.  Here is the description of the work by the creator:

"I began by choosing two point in Manhattan which would act as the frame.  The titles of the pieces were chosen for places that once existed at this coordinates, but no longer exist today.  I then walked between these sites and, using my phone, collected the names of all the WiFi networks that appeared on my screen along the route.  I arranged the found text from each walk into grids and produced large stencils.  On four-by-eight-foot aluminum panels I used acrylic paint and sprayed the background black.  Using the same pigment I then sprayed through the stencils, creating a field of names rising in low relief above the monochromatic surface.  The resulting works are camera-less landscapes, invisible snapshots...." 

I wonder what this work is doing in Aperture.  The magazine is about photography -- "Aperture Foundation, Inc., is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting photography in all its forms."  Where is the photography in this project?  Kulok collects names on a mobile telephone, concatenates the names into a grid, paints a piece of aluminum black and then stencils names in black on the black painting.  Where is the photography in that?  Is anything an image within the scope?  Anything not sculpture?  I don't see what this project involves that could be thought of as photography?  Best I have come up with is that there might have been a camera in the mobile phone (not that it was used in this project).  I am not trying to draw a line between chemical and electronic photography here, nor between constructed images and photographs.  The problem here is that there nothing in Kulok's process that has any meaningful connection to photography.  The process is a pretty ordinary form of painting, of no particular technical value.  It is not a technical innovation.

Well, maybe we should just take it on its own terms, so to speak, and not linger over whether it fits under photography.  I don't see how it does, but that is not the most important issue.  Taken on its own terms, has Kulok given us anything of significance?  No.  The images are not interesting on their own.  Meaningless lists of names in black on black, get some minutely tactile black rectangles.  Black rectangles are not all that interesting and not interesting enough to do more than once or twice and that happened about 40 years ago (well, actually, more like 80 years, but never mind that).  Nothing much to the images, so maybe it is the idea?  Again, no.  The ideas here are quite small and trite.  Beyond the banal things change and lots goes on in a city, there is nothing much here.  What information is conveyed by a list of WiFi networks?  Is there supposed to be something important or interesting that the names are harder to make out than the networks themselves would be (with proper equipment)?  I suppose, but I don't see what it would be.  

 

Comments

[Winston Kulok]

Kulok's panels are elegant, memorable and somewhat disturbing. Perhaps the reviewer is simply too tired and jaded to get it. But if Kulok's work is banal and empty why bother to review?
Winston

[T. Gracchus]

I would not dress up the comments as a "review" - that suggests more than they deserve. Nevertheless, to answer the question: Because I happened on the work in a place I thought it did not belong and then,looking at the images and thinking about them, because I thought the work failed. (Better in something devoted to painting or such -- Art in America or Art Forum or such.)

So what is memorable about the images, and disturbing? Happy to be set right.

[james hyde]

I thought the show challenging-- Kulok's objects re-imagine photography without being technically photographs. Of greater interest is what the works trace-- an invisible and temporary landscape. Looking at the works felt like a visual braille and I thought this wi-fi landscape was at turns banal and funny but very human and contemporary.