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Evidence
Text: Jana Minka : Photo: N/A
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Like last night’s cache of dragonflies caught in a Mason jar, the wonder of what looked to the art world like a diminishing celestial horizon—the ephemeral art object threatening to disappear altogether—promptly revealed a paradox. The burning question formed in the 1960s and 1970s of object vs. non-object rightfully became a question of seeing and not seeing, or how it is we actually perceive or even fail to perceive “things” in their real contexts.
Encumbered with this new perspective, two recent art school graduates visited the photographic archives of NASA, JPL, various fire and police departments, and other municipal agencies to pilfer their coffers of sublime “evidence” photos. Brandishing only a grant letter from the NEA and healthy bravado, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel spent two years pouring over two million photographs, culling some two-hundred and forty-three images which began their existence as evidential proof to, among them, patterned crime scenes, unrelenting astronaut suits, or dubious types of nuclear-related experiments recalling the specters of the Cold War era. The duo’s project culminated in the exhibition and the eponymous book simply—provocatively—titled Evidence. In 1977 the serial assemblage of eighty-nine such images débuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Both were instant cult classics.
If the advent of modern imaging technology invites purely digital incarnations, Evidence is the fresh analog of such a future. Each black and white, eight by ten inch “file photo” is a clear refrain to a host of questions whose answers are all but forgotten. The subject matter reads like a laundry list of the absurd: person in astronaut-like protective outfit doing push-ups; a car busting into flames; horse's hoof being x-rayed; three men in suits bending over water-spraying machine; man examining specimens through wall and strung wires; man with radioactive plants; man's gloved hand holding rope; man wearing plastic bag over head, torch applied to bag; missile in bale of hay; workers with hard hats walking in deep foam; three people and bag in arid landscape; man breaking bottle against machine; monkey's shaved head and arm, face hidden in leather pouch held by glove.
Tensions generated by the paranoia of the 1950s are palpable throughout the series. Among other things, it brings to mind the era’s burgeoning sci-fi genre, and alien invasions films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) churning out of Hollywood with regularity. More than a decade earlier than the stirring Ground Zero exhibition at the International Center for Photography, in New York, exposing post World War II nuclear testing at the military proving grounds of Nevada and Utah, Evidence is less about evidential proof and more about subtext (usually part and parcel to conceptual art). Though Evidence brings this ideology to the fore, it resists simple narratives. And in doing so, begins to perform a documentary role as instruments—or detritus—of culture, technology, and societal mores.
The original, unorthodox presentation of prints merely affixed to the wall with glass tacked over—now floating in frames, resolutely defied the notion of art as a museum commodity. Ironic Pop Art precedents like Andy Warhol’s 1963 series of “found” photographs screen printed beside and beneath one another on canvas detailing spectacular car crashes, suicides, and other catastrophes, or Ed Ruscha’s book Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963), essentially twenty-six black and white photographs of gas stations all taken from the same matter-of-fact viewpoint and plainly captioned with their location and the name of the oil company, seemed to set the stage; Ruscha followed-up with Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and Thirty-four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967). However the Evidence endeavor took it a step further by doing away with any obligatory text or images titles, in the book or in the gallery. The eventual sequence of pictures is marked by a lack of hierarchy, giving way to a serial arrangement, not unlike film, where the context is derived from the sum of its parts.
Reassembled and back on exhibition Evidence Revisited: Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel is joined by letters and related ephemera that laid dormant in the archives of the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson, AZ, since they purchased the entire collection and completed the exhibition’s first international tour. Reappearing like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (for decades covered by the Great Salt Lake), awaiting the our twenty-first century proclivities, Evidence reconsiders the precipitously complex debate of found photographs as art, and their continual impact on our perceptions today.
Jana Minka is an independent curator and scholar residing in Tucson, Arizona.
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