Past Exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Angela Grauerholz: Sententia I to LXII

Angela Grauerholz began Sententia I to LXII when she realized she had taken all the photographs she could take. For years she took pictures of waiting rooms, details of the landscape, landscapes, skyscapes, libraries, people waiting, details of paintings, women she knew, and windows. The standard formats for these works were black-and-white snapshots enlarged to the size of monumental paintings. Sometimes aged through sepia tones, the works were always slightly out of focus. The question became how to order this profusion of visual information. She said, "At this point I have so many photographs, I keep taking the same photographs over and over again."¹ By placing sixty-two of these images into a specially made cabinet, Grauerholz extends the questions that have consumed her throughout her career – questions revolving around the nature of photography and its role in memory, Romantic doubt, and the physical manifestation of "in-between" states.

Photography is seen as both truth and fiction. Because it can document the real world precisely, with the aid of a machine and without error of the human hand, its lens is accepted as truth. When the photographer's subjectivity is taken into account, assumptions of accuracy give way to discussions of myth, fabrication, and invention. Although her images seem inconsequential, by taking pictures of windows, Grauerholz draws attention to the selective framing of the photograph. She emphasizes the photographs' temporality by extending the quintessential "decisive moment" into a hazy blur. As many photographers have done, she makes the very nature of photography the subject of her work as a way to expose its construction. For example, in Églogue or Filling the Landscape,² 1995, Grauerholz recorded various glimpses of the landscape – close-up images of the water or a blast of light through the trees – rather than more traditional compositions of the landscape that provide a deceptively clear record of the external world. She fills her landscape with images and abstractions of itself. Her photographs document the process of looking, rather than what is being looked at. Grauerholz herself says, "It [my photography] is almost always from the inside looking out. Which, if you want, is an allegory for living in your head and looking and observing out; it's a photograph. The window is just a framing device, like the camera is a framing device. So it [the photograph] sort of becomes an image for what I do and what I see is secondary."

By suggesting that the act of looking is like the photographic act, Grauerholz questions memory – the function of most personal photographs. The things and the ways we remember are as much a piece of fiction as the photograph; they are subjective decisions made to create a certain cohesive narrative. While we look at these large black-and-white photographs in the hopes of grasping some truth, we ultimately must construct a story for ourselves. The images appear to be from a place we have trouble seeing clearly. Taken in black and white, they suggest an earlier time. They are slightly hazy, like a memory in half focus, subject to fade at any time and able to provide us with only fleeting glimpses of our past. Like Grauerholz's images, memory oscillates between what is knowable and what is imagined. Just as a dream is likely to fade unless we record it, the very process of preservation destroys its fullness.

Memories transmit history, and history, with all its detail, is something Grauerholz mistrusts. She said, "I can't wrap my mind around it. Someone else will always tell a story another way and in the end you end up making your own history because you can only understand things through your own experiences." As a result, history in its most complete sense, like memories, has a familiarity about it as well as an uncertainty. There is a time element about memory that is in flux. Our views of the future are directly influenced by how we see the past at this present moment.

Consequently, this tangle of time, truth, and objectivity – this doubt – is central to photography, to memories in general, and to Grauerholz's project as a whole. It is informed by Grauerholz's upbringing as a German and by Romanticism, a literary and artistic movement that asserted the validity of subjective experience. A Romantic doubt, therefore, is a deep awareness that there is no absolute truth. As Grauerholz says, "You are always in between poles that constantly pull you." Grauerholz named her 1995 book Aporia, a book of landscapes, after a word meaning, "full of doubt or a doubtable matter." Deconstructive writers have used the word aporia "to refer to a place in a text of unexpected difficulty or impasse, a passage that does not yield to the reader's usual quick, logical, frontal approaches to understanding."³ Grauerholz's book therefore names a doubt that is full of ambivalence.⁴

Grauerholz is happy to be caught at this impasse, between things. "I try to conjure it up all the time. You do a lot of stuff not to be in that space, so much stuff. I want to find different ways to have easy access to it." In a sense, doubt occupies an in-between place between all forms of seeming opposition: between truth and fiction, certainty and uncertainty, the past and the future. It also describes one's possible feelings as one stands at a window. This space of reflection holds ideas in process, ones we have yet to fully resolve – whether it be to consider what has happened before and what will happen in the future. By photographing windows and doors, Grauerholz has captured the membrane between the inside and the outside. This passage between entering and leaving is a place of possibility as much as one of loss.

Half of the images in Sententia I to LXII are of windows; the other half are secondary images that concern themselves with alternative ways of being "in-between." Railroad tracks, pictures of airplane wings, and stairways suggest travel of all sorts. As Grauerholz says, the passage of time is evoked rather than "time past." ⁵ Parks are a space of nature between man and the wilderness. Libraries, archives, and desks are places we go to travel mentally, to research and consider the past, as we move into the future. Grauerholz first photographed this "in-between" place in her images of waiting rooms as uninhabited but slightly menacing places of plush furniture where no one ever sits down. As with her project as a whole, we are left in the "anterooms of desire,"⁶ the rooms, places, and mental spaces through which we stumble in our quest for something else.

Turning to this wooden monument as a whole, the viewer is again caught in an in-between state of mind, as if (s)he were caught in the window's membrane and in Grauerholz's spaces of expectation. A three-dimensional equivalent of her photographs, this cabinet resembles an old arcade of shops when all the files are opened up. By alluding to a covered shopping mall – a place hung with clothing, jewelry, and other tawdry remnants – Grauerholz recreates a place one fears to enter and rushes to leave.⁷ The name "sententia," a Latin word meaning both an aphorism and a feeling or opinion, reflects the cabinet's amorphous position as a work of art caught "between." It suggests importance with its massive, finished state while revealing fleeting, ambiguous images of subjective, personal states. It is a proclamation of doubt.

As a sculptural manifestation of Grauerholz's photographic project, Sententia I to LXII appears to provide some order, while prohibiting any such possibility. At the turn of the century, photographs were initially collected in standardized photographic archives as a way to order visual records and tools of evidence. These collections seemed to fulfill a utopian hope as they simultaneously proved the failure of documenting the sum total of the "known and the knowable."⁸ A single truth was not possible through the accumulation of all attainable data. Order and selection were always required. With Sententia I to LXII's accumulation of "unselective" data, Grauerholz an archive resembling a human memory bank.

By placing memory back into the archive in its questionable state, Grauerholz's cabinet also questions the very institution that houses it. Like the photographic archive, the art museum collects, preserves, and catalogues images (and objects) into often rigid categories. Grauerholz suggests that the museum's memory might work in its own idiosyncratic way, despite logic and detached objectivity of its presentation.

Finally, Sententia I to LXII resembles a tomb when closed, becoming a burial chamber for the past. Nevertheless, once opened one asks, is there the possibility of resurrection?

- Claire Schneider, Assistant Curator

NOTES:

Interview with the artist, February 13, 1999, Montreal, Canada. All subsequent quotes are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
Grauerholz's installation, Églogue or Filling the Landscape, 1995, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, consisted of 216 photographs placed in twenty-seven boxes that filled one large see-through case. Each box was labeled with words suggesting its contents. The photographs were only accessible when a museum staff member opened the case with white gloves, lending the piece a certain mystery.
See Janet Malcom, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Path and Ted Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Grauerholz refers to Malcom and her interest in the word aporia in the artist's book Aporia, a book of landscapes (Oakville: Oakville Galleries).
Aporia could also be used to describe Grauerholz's cultural position as a German who moved to Canada in her early twenties. Her position is a place of loss, longing, and becoming.
From her 1999 lecture Time In Its Passage, But Not Time Past...Recent Work.
See Lynn Pearce's discussion of this aspect of Grauerholz's work in her book Feminism and the Politics of Reading (New York: Arnold, 1997).
In her Time in its Passage lecture (see footnote 5), Grauerholz quoted Susan Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcade Project (MIT Press: Cambridge, 1991).
See Marnie Fleming's discussion of Grauerholz's Églogue or Filling the Landscape,and the history of the photographic archive in the book Putting the Past in Order (Oakville: Oakville Galleries, 1995).