I. No action
Our attempt to represent reality for ourselves involves, in modern times, the need to 'respond' to it. We are asked to measure our ability to understand and then to act by our response to the representations we encounter. Part of what 'modernity' signifies is the need to develop an awareness of the temporal map in which we find ourselves, both as individual subjects and as a group, so that we can devise a strategy that will enable us to change the current state of affairs. Such a system of thinking is based on the premise that in order to be present in the present, one has to act in accordance with what is happening both in the world and in one's immediate reality. We are valued according to the impact we have on the world through the sum total of all our actions, in other words, our life.
Sharon Lockhart's work - her films and photos, though the latter in a different way - moves in another orbit. Her works challenge us to wait for something to happen. They refer to the possibility of a self-awareness that is uncertain, not because of one's inability to trace this temporal map that I have just referred to, but because one hesitates to do so. Her working methodology is based on another premise: the need to explore other modes of experience in contexts and situations that are 'ungovernable' from the point of view of the action. The filming in Goshogaoka of a group of young girls training in a Japanese gym for what seems to be a basketball team, or in Teatro Amazonas of the audience in the stalls of a theatre in the jungle in Brazil, disregards the narrative genre entirely. The non-action shown in part only by the fixed camera makes us want to observe from a temporal horizon what is consummated as an 'event', and when the intrusion of the camera does not follow this predictable narrative model, the spectator's position changes radically. This halt, this being there with virtually nothing except the camera, tends to be read as the melancholic intrusion of a lost moment from the past into the present. It is as if the implicit negation of narration for a 'describing-in-itself' represented an attempt to position oneself in a time prior to modernity.
Lockhart's way of working, however, seems to point in another direction. A critical gaze asserts itself precisely in the midst of the temporal awareness of this 'describing-in-itself'. Her images determine our understanding of time and action through the growing discrepancy between aesthetic expectation and the seeming unity of time passing. The films mentioned above form a potentially endless stasis difficult to recognise or delimit in terms of action or conclusion. This is not a reference to pre-modernity but rather a way of slowing down moments that should be in process in order to find out what is at stake.
Lockhart's work also ignores the concept of the image as a central 'place' or platform from which to explain a situation or a context. Instead she penetrates the construction of visual categories themselves in ways that define the particular way notions of gender, class, sexuality, family, country and urban or rural society are configured. In other words, her works deal with the often-covered theme of the rapid and complex process of modernisation. Her extensive vocabulary of images, which in many cases include contexts with growing cultural and economic divisions, captures the paradox of this process by focusing attention on the point at which the need to distinguish the individual within the so-called collective is underlined. This individualisation has a parallel in the position of the individual viewer who must find the critical parameters appropriate for interpreting the whys and wherefores of these images while experiencing the lack of narrative urgency. To do so, the viewer must be referred to the singular time that Lockhart's works 'inscribe', a time that, from the point of view of the person watching, is both experienced as 'now' and imagined as 'then'.
II. Fragmented Perception
The difficulty of Lockhart's work lies in the presentation of a series of settings in which each of us has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to endow what is seen with interpretative parameters. Viewers are put in a position where they are forced to structure what they are viewing. Hans Blumenberg remarks that 'there are no witnesses of the threshold of an epoch. A change of epoch is a boundary that cannot be observed, it is not attached to any important datum, any evident event.' Lockhart's images seem to corroborate this statement in numerous ways. Not least, there is the constant question of determining what type of fluctuating 'entity' reality is and how a gaze capable of distinguishing can become a prime witness to any change to it. Through her body of works, Lockhart constructs a kind of poetics of fragmented vision. Equally, the dynamism and temporalisation of the experience of being there and observing occurs within the situation that the camera records, not through the camera's intention, so to speak, of presenting us the whole. Teatro Amazonas is a good example of this second fragmentation. The piece delivers a real-world situation that is fully experienced but one that we cannot gain full admission to because the experience of what is taking place and our experience of it do not correspond. Here, Lockhart seems to assert that it is impossible to arrive at such correspondence, only at otherness.
Lockhart's ability to avoid 'total' images brings us paradoxically to the issue of the function of the individual in the social project of the community to which he or she belongs. I am here referring both to the person or people shown in the images - the girls training in the school gym in Japan (Goshogaoka) or the teenagers kissing on the staircase landing (Audition Four: Kathleen & Max, 1994) - as well as to those of us experiencing these images. Finding the lost whole once again is intrinsically allied to the desire for happiness that was aroused and questioned at the dawn of modernity. Radical modernity, whether political or aesthetic, demanded that an understanding of the material, social, geographic and gender conditions that underpin the illusion of a 'civilised society' required a thorough revision of the concept of 'culture' and an active intervention into the social. In Lockhart's work, such fundamental structures are questioned. The stubborn fixed camera denies nothing but reformulates the desire for wholeness from a radically different point of view. Lockhart's works, and above all the protagonists in them, inquire into the concept of what is a system in a singularly acute manner. Instead of the traditional dialectical contrast between nature and civilisation, feeling and reason, collective and individual, her works are resolved in an unexpected shift towards a third possibility. This seems to revive a critical dimension of subjective experience in that it is not the event that counts - the 'objective', so to speak - but the aesthetic force of the subjective, something which is more closely bound up with the artificial than the natural. The image cannot, therefore, be understood as the imaginary land of revolutionary dreams, but neither can it be seen as an anachronistic, romantic turning-back, the emblem of the neo-conservative phantasm. In particular, Lockhart's photographs employ subjectivity as a way of questioning the presumed objective description of everything around us, of inquiring into what new knowledge may emerge from every possible interpretation, what new conflicts might arise on the horizon spanned by her works. The result is a certain dumbfounded desire for more (or less) of the same.
III. Maelstrom of description
The world cannot be represented because it is in itself always and already a representation: the spectacle is reality itself. The way in which this artist has recourse to the understanding of the scraps and snippets of the world - which can be seen, for example, in Lockhart's more recent photographs - responds to an effort to find a language that is adequate for breaking away from the omnipresence of narrative force.
The devices that Lockhart uses to achieve her ends are dazzling, precisely because of her mastery in drawing up a chosen catalogue of the everyday. For this reason her works are difficult to access through words. There is always a gap between the image and the viewer that cannot easily be bridged by description or critical comment. Photographs, such as those from the series Maja and Eloide (2003) or NO-no Ikebana, arranged by Haruko Takeichi, December 1 (2002), create a space that we cannot appropriate - the thereness of the image and the hereness of the viewer are radically different. These works show talent to spare, an ability to render, through rather 'common' images, the world as an utterly persuasive labyrinth of meaning.
This is not to say that there is no possibility for understanding but rather the opposite: the demarcation of this contrast is fundamental to understanding that the images are part of a specifically visual rather than textual culture. When one describes visual reality, one leaves aside any intention to tackle the significance of human action and reaffirms that the image in itself is already a way of approaching another mode of 'knowing' the world. The order of the visual in modernity is thus constituted in a self-aware, no longer uncertain way. This certainty emerges from the image's capacity for self-representation vis-à-vis the viewer. As I mentioned at the beginning, the modern model of awareness is a continual process of analysing and mapping our position vis-à-vis other people, the society of which we are a members, and the contexts that we can only access via the media. In doing so, we fix our sense of self in the images that tell us who we are.
Instead of inscribing a heroic sense into the image, Lockhart diverts our attention by suggesting another way of ordering reality. For example, in the photos she took of Duane Hanson's 'Sculptures of Life' installation Lunch Break (2003), Lockhart does not 'create the image' but rather uses the figures as catalysts to reunify the elements of workers on a break, artwork figures and the space into a single layered, but found composition. She focuses on the private individuals, the workers, who determine the location and tenor of the space they occupy with Hanson's work, and share it with the viewers in the gallery and, now, by way of the photograph, with us.
We can perceive in her works a constant determination to avoid the prescriptive. She deliberately places the camera in front of a situation that in many cases is seemingly trivial. It would seem that her mode of action is to distance herself from any effort to define the details or to set the boundaries, and in this way her work tends to merge with life. Employing an evident and well-constructed brevity, the artist presents a surface upon which a vast amount of contradictory information can be gathered. She offers aggregated visions and with them forms a single ambit; she dispenses with the whole in order to recompose reality bit by bit. The cultural and social barriers that are so essential for the definition of the West and its position vis-à-vis the rest of the world are thus blurred in a curious exercise of osmosis. The obligation to look carefully in order to find out what I am supposed to discover in what I am looking at automatically turns the image into a challenge. It is not the order or the representation that gives us guidance on how these images are to be images, but the instantaneous, ungraspable aspect that alerts us to the difficulty of relating conventionally to them. An estimation of their verisimilitude is not a valid criterion and in this way Lockhart redeems the photographic genre with her personal determination to avoid pumping out the world in images, to avoid turning the people she portrays into characters.
Another interesting and related question is how we perceive distance and how we estimate the size and importance of what appears in Lockhart's photographs. In many of them, our expectations concerning the standard unit of measurement the camera should employ to approach the world are shattered. Our normal estimation of what we see is transformed into something variable and uncertain. We never know the precise dimension of the scene that the camera is filming or photographing. Without precise terms of comparison, we are incapable of accurately describing the real importance of what we have before us, of what we are seeing. The way Lockhart positions the camera indicates her enthusiasm for shifting the spectator away from a central position in relation to the image. We are not, as we look at her images, the unit of measurement of anything. The juxtaposition of shots, the near and the far, is a fervent affirmation of a relativity that celebrates the conjunction between the small and the large, the essential and the trivial. Her works can be seen as tied to a photographic language, where the images produced serve as a way of approaching the identity of things, and in which it is made clear that the camera is always a recording device. But this does not go to the heart of her work, which seems more about a persevering interest in approaching the world through vision and seeing what can be discovered there.
Translated by Sue Brownbridge
