ARTIST STATEMENTS / WRITING BY OTHERS ABOUT THE ART WORK
(for Rebecca Hackemann’s research/scholarly publications click here)
WET COLLODION PHOTOGRAMS
Artist Statement
These works are mostly available for exhibition, Some are now in the collection of the Museum für Photographie.
These camera-less wet collodion (8” x 10” in. tintype) photograms on metal reference a sense of cultural and personal nostalgia for lost technologies and cultural tropes such as the homemade mixed cassette tape, the single or the compact CD and the projected home movies. Many generations of people now remember and have lived through more technological change than any generation before.
This process itself – the wet collodion - reflects the subject matter by using an even older technical process to talk about a younger defunct technology. The work centers on our emotional attachments to disappearing technologies in populist and professional areas of various fields - music, film, photography, the sciences and even the home.
Camera-less photography is often read as the ultimate rejection of the retinal image plane (and the camera’s ability to represent), questioning it as a language, emerging from 1970s conceptual work. This new method serves also as a metaphor for our nostalgia for the tactile materiality of the print, the questionable condition of digital culture, and the ways in which our digital footprints, trackable as they are may or may not have staying power. On a formal level these works purposefully seek to expose the flaws of the wet collodion and to challenge its existing use by creating large installations of the plates. The wet collodion plates evoke the very chemistry that the photograms are made onto. Some of the metals in the objects react to the collodion substrate. Other works shimmer silvery (in their unvarnished final state) with matte highlights and glossy black area formed by the substrate plate and irregular shapes. They are framed in floating (box) glass frames.
Photograms represent the objects one to one and therefore hold extra significance here, as we know that the object touched the plate and was exposed to light circumventing the need for film or a camera. This process of the photogram then results in a unique image as a 1/1 edition.
Available: 1 hr academic lecture on the history and contemporary photogram that includes a general overview and new unknown artists. Lecture was given at SPE national conference 2020 and Museum für Photographie, Braunschweig Germany in 2021
THE INSTITUTE OF INCOHERENT GEOGRAPHY - S T E R E O S C O P I C P H O T O G R A P H S
Artist Statement
Availability: Most works are available for exhibition as projection or in 3-D printed stereoscopes, that are wall hung.
I am interested in the process of vision and visual communication itself and how we bring meaning to what we see and experience through the medium of photography. Photography is ubiquitous, yet the art photograph aims to provide a critique on existing everyday photography in our culture. In these conceptual stereoscopic works I use fictionality within photography to create the most extreme opposite of what documentary photography claims to do. 3-D scenes are constructed in the studio that become worlds unto themselves, to be destroyed later. I use text with images to evoke third meanings and associations in the viewer’s mind on a variety of topics. Sometimes the meanings are derived from the image text combinations - they become more focused through them - other times questions emerge through the use of image and text. This is also how advertising photography works to influence consumers. Only in my case, I hope to encourage people to question the world around them, the role photography plays in society (and perhaps to make people laugh a bit, too). The work is influenced by Barbara Kruger, Rosalind Krauss, John Heartfield and the Brothers Quay as well as George Melies and pre cinematic histories of optical devices. Many of my images are political, feminist and are about photography as a field. It examines how it intersects with our lives in different forms - the family snapshot, the government archive, news photography, advertising, photography of the body and how it is sometimes objectified, iconic imagery in the collective unconscious.
The deliberate use of black and white photography can produce nostalgic and appropriated utopian associations in a viewer. While the images are poking fun at our “society of the spectacle” (Guy Dubord) by creating their own commentary on it, the work aims to provoke thought, amusement and questions.
Stereoscopic 3D space with a black background is used here, as an imagined, subjectless space, one with no referents or context in the real world, a dream space. The stereoscopic effect of space in film and photography positions the viewer in an extremely individualized spatial matrix within the 3-D world. Only one person can see it at a time (unless it is projected in 3-D). Stereoscopy can be used to call attention to the way in which vision functions within our bodies (it feel seamless and invisible), and to make the point, that stereo can disrupt the traditional Cartesian structure of vision.
These images can be viewed as projections with 3-D glasses, flat prints on the wall using hanging or hand held black plastic stereoscopes that contain small mirrors or inside wall mounted white box like stereoscopes with glass lenses, that I have designed myself. These stereoscopes that are wall hung have gone through many iterations, from wood to rubber to 3-D printed UV resistant plastic.
ACADEMIC STATEMENT ON THE STEREOGRAPHIC WORK (by Rebecca Hackemann)
mini Essay in Public (3d Cinema and Beyond) Journal number 47:
https://issuu.com/publicjournal/docs/complete47preview/1?e=4054275/4119765
In these conceptual stereoscopic work contained in this publication, I use fictionality within photography to create the most extreme opposite of what documentary photography claims to do. 3-D scenes are constructed that become worlds unto themselves, to be later destroyed. The stereoscopic images are combined with non-descriptive, appropriated or written text. The results are often political, whimsical or satirical and differ depending on what meaning and connotations are brought to the work by the viewer. The addition of non-descriptive text taken from old literary sources, adds to the multi faceted connotations that arise from the work. Allan Sekula notes that “the photograph is an incomplete utterance of some sort, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. This, the photograph is only readable if the viewer decodes it.” This incompleteness of the utterance of the image, is met with the free and chance associations that the visitor brings to it and it is this process that interests me. In other words, the viewer completes this incomplete utterance by bringing their own understanding to it. Rosalind Krauss articulates this when she is talking about surrealism–she notes that the “[A]ssociative fragments within the image are not simply a function of subjectivity” of the viewer, but also of “[T]he space of thought, the unconscious”. She continues, that “[I]t is as well a function of external space, of reality convulsed by the condition of the index, in a continual process of reference.” –hence one cannot control the meaning of a work. I do not endeavor to control the meaning of my work. In these images then I am attempting to do the opposite, namely infuse as many variables into the image / text combinations as I can, without the message becoming too arbitrary, surrealist or random. The busyness of the content of the work in many ways matches the intensity of the 3-D viewing experience. Instead of showing something beautiful to wonder at, the work pokes the viewer with questions and philosophical propositions. The black background in these works eludes perhaps to what Lacan calls the real, namely “[T]hat which is outside language and inassimilable to symbolization.” –or to a dream space? Here the metaphor of an “eye torn from the subject and freely thrown around” returns. What is so pertinent here is that it is described as being thrown and it perhaps aptly could be used to refer to one’s brain in a dream, throwing images about, which are in fact very important. Fictionality then can be used as a tool to show reality, because we cannot see how things really are, and our only indication may be in a dream like space–perhaps that of 3-D. Photography’s unique relationship with reality and the retinal therefore serves as a good (rhetorical) tool to draw the viewer closer into this three dimensional space.
To use the metaphor of the camera’s eye floating about, what does this mean in the context of two lenses? Johnathan Crary aptly describes this phenomena and claims that we become part of the stereo photograph and it part of us, when we look into it. He questions the Cartesian structure of vision–the idea of subject / viewer–object / artwork separated in space. “The relation of observer to image is no longer to an object quantified in relation to a position in space, but rather to two dissimilar images whose position simulates the anatomical structure of the observer's body.” This creates a certain privacy within the viewing experience of 3-D, that differs markedly from looking at flat imagery - because of the spacial nature of the visual sphere. One is positioned as the seemingly only viewer.
ENDNOTES
The prevalent idea that photography offers a ‘window on the world’, it's evidentiary role, or what some refer to as it's ‘retinal’ quality, that sets it apart from painting or drawing. I would argue that it is not set apart by these media.
These might be life experiences, experiences looking at imagery, our ‘image bank’.
Sekula A. On the invention of photographic meaning, in Thinking Photography. (1974). Macmillan. 85.
Krauss, 36
Evans, D., 1996, An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Psychology Press. 159.
Bond, Zizek, xiv
Crary, J., 1992, Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century, The MIT Press, 128.
A N A M O R P H I C D R A W I N G S
Artist Statement
These 360° anamorphic drawings explore cultural and historical ideas surrounding the mirror and its reflection, vision and perception. Anamorphic Drawing has existed as a technique for 500 years - the first examples appear in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. These anamorphic drawings use a cylindrical shaped mirror placed at the center of the drawing, which ‘decodes’ the morphed image on the paper.
Rebecca Hackemann's anamorphs incorporate the cylindrical mirror as an intrinsic part of their meanings. Using fairy tales, psychoanalytical and historical references such as Alice in Through the Looking Glass (sequel to Alice in Wonderland), Jacques Lacan’s mirror phase and the myths of Narcissus, anamorphic ink drawings are created that have two sides. The viewer walks around the drawing and its cylindrical mirror to see another related drawing opposite on the same piece of paper. In the case of Alice in Wonderland, one side shows her going into the mirror, the other side her coming out of it – the mirror becomes a metaphor for ‘The Looking Glass House’ itself.
These works were exhibited at Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, as well as at Hunter College, who printed a catalogue of the exhibition in 2010 (available upon request).
Artist Statements
THE URBAN FIELD GLASS PROJECT (by Rebecca Hackemann)
The UFGP consists of custom made aluminum/steel binoculars/stereoscopes, that show stereo 3-D slides of the past and future of the location at which it stands. The passerby turns a crank to rotate the images. The past images are sourced from public photography archives and then converted to 3-D, the future images are created in collaboration with community organizations and open calls.
This project was anchored into the sidewalk at two locations over the Vine Expressway, that was built to slice through Philadelphia's Chinatown. It was also installed in Brooklyn and Manhattan in 2012-13.
The Urban Field Glass Project is available for other cities. Please use the contact form on this site for inquiries or email meATrebeccahackemann.com.
The Public Utteraton Machine is an interactive public art work that looks like a public telephone from the 19th century. Its aim is to provide a service, gage and record perception of other public art and install public art in unconventional locations in New York (outer boroughs and sidewalks). Results are archived in local libraries.
Currently, little research exists that examines the reasoning behind the locations of public art in New York, as well as what residents might think of it, or wish for it after it has been installed. Whereas 'gallery' art normally has a publicly constituted apparatus of commentary and scholarly interrogation, that surrounds it, public art which exists outside the traditional gallery space paradoxically does not have such an apparatus of dissemination and discourse. There is less public art in the outer boroughs of New York that in the neighborhoods and outer boroughs. The Public Utteraton Machines will, in the form of objects in space provide a counter narrative to this established system of locations. As urban interventions, they will uncover whether people really want, care for or are indifferent towards public art.
If more funding is secured for installation costs, the Public Utteraton Machines are available for other cities and other NY boroughs, such as Harlem or the Bronx.
Fabrication: J.Stemmler, Northpenn Machine Works
Permits: NYC Parks and Recreation
Research support: Kansas State University Dept Art, University of the Arts London
CATALOGUE ESSAY by Christopher Ho for Light Work Annual, Syracuse, NY about Rebecca Hackemann’s Stereoscopic photographs, written in New York, 2003
Offered here are eight observations that, like Rebecca Hackemann’s boxes—or “optical sculptures” as the artist calls her works from her 2002 residency at Light Work—can be approached individually or read successively:
1. Lying alongside the works rather than laying claim to them, the observations foreground this central motif: The construction of a view, its counterpart, and the distension of the pair in a chain of variations. As the fluttering wings depicted in The Independent Wing! suggest, movement around Hackemann’s works is crucial. Privileging no single viewpoint, they also refuse a single account.
2. Evenly spaced and wall-mounted, Hackemann’s works resemble minimalist objects. Their horizontal span accentuates the architectural frame, while the matte white surfaces subtly register the immediacies of light. Yet lenses embedded in their sides open onto stereoscopic images. Just as the pregnant angel in The Revolt of the Angels is both mother and child, container and contained, the boxes cater to two viewing distances—far and near—alternately bleeding into their context or presenting private, interior worlds.
3. Simultaneously and respectively channeling each eye towards slightly different photographs, the stereoscope eliminates the single viewpoint assured by monocular perspective. As Jonathan Crary has noted, the stereo image offers “an assemblage of local zones of three-dimensionality [that] never coalesce into a homogeneous field.” Visually fragmented, the resulting composite’s effect is theatrical. Indeed, early Wheatstone stereoscopes employed angled mirrors to reflect photographs held parallel to the line of vision—mirrors to which The Progress appropriately adds a crystalline cloud of smoke.
4. In lodging vision within the subject, the stereoscope disengages observer from object of vision. Similarly, while the female figure in The Institute of Incoherent Geography clasps a double-lensed apparatus to her eyes, apparently mirroring the stereoscopic observer, her sightline, in fact, pitches to the upper left. Fracturing monocular perspective’s equation of eye and vanishing point, the offset axis voids the mutually affirmative reciprocity that once bound subject and object together in an immobile universe, heralding instead a geography that, as the title suggests, is insistently incoherent.
5. If Hackemann’s stereoscopic images undermine the fixity of monocular perspective, the collective arrangement of the boxes simultaneously dismantles the disembodied eye of modernism. Not only reminiscent of minimalism’s incorporation of the viewer’s bodily movement, the ambient sound generated by other viewers recalls the approaching footsteps that interrupt Sartre’s visual mastery through a keyhole and underscore his corporeality in “The Look.” Indeed, The Unbearable Lightness of Being—An Intellectual conjures less the lightness of the body distilled to its pure optical faculty than its inescapable heft.
6. Hackemann’s concomitant reference to stereoscopy and minimalism is not accidental. Just as the former places the viewing subject in a fluid world of ceaselessly circulating commodities, so the latter replaces the art object with total design, reflecting the rapacious expansion of capitalism. In this regard, The Turkey, depicting a quasi-anthropological bird surrounded by theatrical props, is less disarmingly fictional than disturbingly portentous, describing as it does an objectified subject within a totally controlled environment.
7. Presenting two exemplars of corporate capitalism, The HuMans elaborates this cautionary tale. Despite their upright bearing, the suited figures are headless, devoid of visual and linguistic abilities alike—the defining features of the human. In contrast, Hackemann’s works comprise precisely a combination of image and text. Indeed, the caption here specifically elaborates the centrality of language: “The reason they never mastered conversation wasn’t because humans were too complex, but because they were so simple.”
8. Hackemann draws from early nineteenth century physiology to late twentieth century art. With systematic consistency, the elements of her works demonstrate a commitment to maintaining multiple viewpoints—a commitment that is not merely theoretical, but has practical political consequences too. As the replacement of the notes in the first bar of the Star Spangled Banner by blindfolded heads in “Oh, say! Can you see?” suggests, this project is perhaps now more urgent than ever.
Christopher K. Ho is a curator and art historian who divides his time between New York City and Providence, Rhode Island where he teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Rebecca Hackemann lives in New York City and participated in Light Work’s
Artist-in-Residence program in July 2002
Short Text by Carrie Lambert Beatty, written in New York after a studio visit, 1997
Professor of History of Art and Architecture and of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University
Rebecca Hackemann's dreamlike images oscillate between present and past, liberation and repression, beauty and the bizarre. Views from the perspective of a child comfortingly crouched under a woman's skirt, for instance, turn to nightmare visions of the maternal body. A tongue doing weight training curls out from the picture plain. A tea-tray emulating the hoopskirt turns punny and funny. These image text combinations, be they within her photographic books or her stereoscopic 3-d photographs challenge and trick the viewer both visually and intellectually not to accept the world at face value and to question 'fact', 'history', 'social norms' as well as 'phantasy norms'. Influenced by such figures as Hieronymous Bosch, William Kentridge, John Heartfield, Oscar Wilde and fairy tales, her images are haunting, beautiful, sometimes disturbing, but uniquely humorous, intellectually sharp and recognizable.