Sophy Rickett
Romantic Artifice
by Mark Durden
There is a compelling simplicity to many of Sophy Rickett’s pictures.
In her Untitled Landscapes, (1998) photography is pared down
to a simple binary of black and white, dark and light. Only there is always
more black than white, more darkness than light. As single projected beams,
light appears in these pictures as lines or cuts in the image, an illumination
which only partially illuminates. Against the excesses of darkness, more
is concealed than revealed.
One of her most spare and minimal pictures— Untitled Landscape-Part
VI, 1998— shows nothing more than a sliver of projected light
as it illuminates the ground, cutting a horizontal line across the photograph.
The panoramic format of the picture itself appears to have been elongated
in order to contain the extent of this line of light. This picture of
nothing, evokes at once an empty stage and the ‘slashes’ in
Luciano Fontana’s canvases or the ‘zips’ in Barnet Newman’s
paintings. Only the earthbound horizontality of Rickett’s line counters
any connotations of elation and transcendence that would be prompted by
verticality.
In other Untitled Landscapes, (1-4, 8,10), figures are there
to indicate scale, provide a measure against the blackness. The lone figures
against the void have a particular iconic resonance: from Caspar David
Friedrich’s painting, The Monk By the Sea to the existentialist
closure of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up, with
those long shots of the lone, diminutive, disappearing figure of the photographer.
Untitled Landscapes (8-11) give a viewpoint looking up and from
a distance at what appear to be the railings on bridges, illuminated in
such a way they appear as a series of markings, as if calibrating or mapping
the empty and ambiguous space. In all of these pictures, the source of
light remains out of frame. Yet the panoramic format appears to contain
the light, each picture shows us the total extent of its illumination.
Lit in an exaggerated manner, these landscapes draw attention to the
process of illumination. But for all the romantic allusions, the metaphorical
connotations of light and illumination in these pictures, they also possess
a distinctive medium-specificity, a materialism which literalizes and
pulls against more metaphysical responses. The banality and ordinariness
of the lighting is succinctly and wittily revealed in the reflexive picture
showing the lamp illuminating the generator which powers it in Untitled
Composition, 1999.
A central concern of Rickett’s is to break with traditional Albertian,
monocular perspective, in which the viewer is provided with a fixed and
privileged viewing position that serves to draw him or her into the dynamic
of the image. In many of her pictures, the foreground is obliterated,
or the horizon emphasized to unfix the viewing position, so that the viewer,
as Kate Bush has said, “could be anywhere and nowhere”. In
more recent works, Playing Fields, London, (2001) and Untitled
Landscapes, Rome, (2002), an apparently continuous landscape that
stretches over four panels, turns out , on closer inspection, to incorporate
viewpoints that shift from image to image. Bereft of the co-ordinates
by which we map, measure and ‘enter’ photography’s illusionary
space, these pictures hover between flatness and depth. Rickett has spoken
of how the effect of “spatial uncertainty and lack of perspectival
fixity within the pictures... leaves the viewer out.” Excluded from
the images, we tend to scan the photographs, look across them not into
them.
In Untitled Landscape, Part 12, 1998, a picture of a blind person's
white stick, an opposition between seeing and not seeing is set up. The
panoramic format, the simple formal compositional elements— a white
line against a black background— underline this picture’s
relationship to the rest of the Untitled Landscape series. In many senses,
this final addition to the series is a literal joke about perception.
Photography details an instrument which helps a non-sighted person to
‘see’. We are looking at something that is not looked at,
but felt, physically used as an instrument with which someone without
sight is able to physically move around in the world. The image also recalls
the way in which an anti-optical notion of sight pervaded thinkers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of vision as touch.
In evoking touch this photograph also highlights the limits of photography.
A corporeal engagement with things in the world is of course the very
experience the photograph cannot offer. I also see the work in connection
with Paul Strand’s powerful portrait, Blind Woman, 1918,
in which the subject wears a placard bearing the word BLIND, a documentary
image which as David. P. Peeler put it, “sends the mind looping
back to photography itself”.
In relation to seeing, her series of panoramic pictures, in which the
base and tops of trees are cropped out, Forest 1-3, 2000, is
of interest in that the pictures have the appearance not only of photographic
negatives but afterimages. They thus evoke an internalised, subjective
view. Bereft of light, these dark, flat pictures, also come closest to
miming the condition of abstract paintings, an Op Art photography made
up the rhythm of vertical grey lines over black.
For Clement Greenberg photography was defined against abstract painting.
If for him the essence of modernist painting, meant any content, any narrative
association is emptied out of the picture, then the essence of photography
concerned narrative, its capacity to tell stories. Photography was closer
to literature than painting. Rickett consciously opposes this— “I
have never been concerned with making pictures that operate within the
realm of ‘what happened next’.” Many of her recent works
foreground photography’s non-narrative identity. In doing so they
further extend the quality of occluded and incomplete vision that characterises
her 1998 Untitled Landscape series. Rickett hyperbolizes the sense of
photography missing an event, photography as the act of not seeing something.
In these pictures light is linked with an activity taking place out of
the picture: the event which lights from behind the trees in her series—
Cypress Screen, Dundee (2001)—
or in her images, London Studio 1 and 2, (2002) which shows light
seeping though the edges of veiling curtains. Rickett has also produced
succinct textual works which concern the ‘edges’ of an event,
the build up of expectancy signalled in such theatrical cues as: [Music
Swells.] CURTAIN or [Enter Ballet and Singers] CURTAIN,
(both 1999). These stage directions are printed in the top left of otherwise
blank photographs, offering a conceptual and formal variant on the oppositions
between seeing and non seeing, event and non-event, narrative and non-narrative,
which characterises her photography.
When Rickett uses colour photography, her pictures tend to highlight
the synthetic aspect of its colour. Here, as in some of her landscape
panoramas, she plays with romantic motifs, for example, the skeletal and
cruciform lone saplings of Poplar Plantation, Dundee, 1 and 2,(2001).
While the motif might link such pictures with romantic iconography, the
lurid light tends to divest them of any transcendence. Yellow sodium light
on the saplings gives them a fake and phoney aura. In contrast to the
austerity of Poplar Plantation, Dundee, her recent series of pictures,
taken on the edges of sportfields in Rome, are much more pictorial. In
these nocturnal landscapes, the night sky, formerly reduced to a black
void in her pictures, is now an animate and integral element of the image.
Some of them appear to have adopted the tradition
al spatial compositions of landscape pictures— the tripartite structure
of foreground, middleground and background. Rickett even deploys the repoussoir
object of framing trees. But these are pictures in negative in the sense
of the generically familiar landscape paintings they might evoke. The
lack of daylight makes them the obverse of paintings from nature. These
are mock classical landscapes, in which the chemical aspect of night lighting—
the ‘pollution’ of the night sky by sodium street lights and
the tungsten lights illuminating some unseen sports event, always out
of frame, off screen— is set in tension with the landscape motif.
Natural landscape views are made unnatural, tainted, stained by light.
Such pictures in their visual plenitude and fullness signal a shift from
the starkness of earlier works. They also seem to look more towards the
classical landscape tradition and ideal. But in many respects it would
be too constraining to see her simply as a landscape photographer. Photography
is as much her subject as the landscapes and views she offers us. Rickett’s
is an oeuvre in which the integral elements of photography are highlighted
and accented. Her landscapes are studies in lighting, scale and perspective.
Her most recent series, Untitled Landscapes, (Rome), 2002, are
studies in colour photography, the distinctive effect of colour film’s
responses to differing types of light.
If one was to look for a key precedent for her work one finds it in certain
conceptual photographic practices of the late 1960s and the 1970s. There
are affinities here, for example, with John Hilliard’s revelation
of the material elements of photography. Hilliard moved from photographs
about photography— cameras, darkroom clocks etc.— to landscape,
which for him became a means to raise questions about the nature and limits
of photographic representation. In a series of diptychs, Over Mount
Caburn, 1978, for example, Hilliard presents two different images
from the same landscape view, with each picture exposed alternatively
for land and sky. Hilliard then went on to explore narrative scenarios,
staging events which were often drawn up in terms of antagonist relationships
between male and female protagonists. While Rickett has no interest in
the narrative possibility and potential of the medium, in many respects
she continues Hilliard’s work with landscape, using landscape as
a means to accent and highlight photography’s non-narrative and
formal possibilities. Her views of nature are mediated and filtered by
the processes of photographic representation. Landscape is a motif to
play with and against, a romantic and romanticised counterpoint to photography’s
artifice.
[This essay was commissioned for a forthcoming publication on Sophy Rickett’s
recent work]
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