Josh Winegar’s Future Monuments, currently in the Projects Gallery at UMOCA (behind the gift shop, which the gallery doesn’t employ as an exit) includes 12 untitled, heavily manipulated, black-and-white composite photographs assembled from, among other things, photos of carved stone sculptures (presumably originating from monuments). Winegar has gone far beyond clumsy cutting and pasting, not only using the latest in digital processes to camouflage the seams, but apparently using the visual qualities of one file to control how those of another are employed, so that shapes and textures are swapped among them. Two of the many meanings of “render,” including “to draw” and “to melt down,” are neatly conflated: some of what seemingly began as stone has instead been “rendered” as biological matter, possibly raw meat, merging the two so that the immediacy of flesh is made durable as marble.
Several details are clever, even witty, though the subject matter may preclude some viewers from appreciating the humor. On at least two figures, plastic bags printed with labels or diagrams and including paper labels have been superimposed, making another parallel, this one between the butchery that is usually only implied in a monument and today’s retail butcher shop, with its sanitary facade. In another, sockets for flag poles seem to anticipate the future use of heroes as political arguments. In perhaps the most devious instances, the iron reinforcing bars used to repair broken stones are exposed like the shattered bones of warriors.
During its first century of spectacular growth and establishment (ca. 1850–1950), photography was celebrated for its powerful capacity for telling truth. Now, three-quarters of the way through its second century, a cascade of fictional devices that include, but are by no means limited to, physical manipulation, mislabeling, digitalizing, Photoshop, CGI, and most recently AI, have given the photographic image a very different power: the ability to lie that is so complete as to undermine the audience’s confidence in even the most pure and sincere previous examples.
Josh Winegar has come forward with an effort to reverse that historical process of deterioration. In Future Monuments, he uses those same manipulations not to produce a false, yet genuine-appearing image, but instead to put forth an image that doesn’t lie because it doesn’t pretend to be a copy of some real thing in the world. Instead, his works deliberately identify themselves, in the tradition of the painted or sculpted versions, as original images that resemble a copy, but in actuality, deliberately exists apart from some original it might, in other contexts, have claimed to represent. In other words, he joins the select body of photographers who make art.
Substantial claims will be made that Future Monuments represent qualities of the present day, such as more extreme violence or the contemporary desire to criticize both sides in a conflict. Neither claim can be substantiated. Whole populations have been extirpated from time immemorial, and the only thing responsible for the increase in destruction is the preceding increase in population size. As for the wish that objective, third perspectives are a modern improvement over the black-and-white choice between one side and the other, we must remember that Shakespeare’s Mercutio, neither a Montague nor a Capulet, when caught between the two warring clans, dies vowing “A plague on both your houses.”
Which is not to say that Winegar doesn’t have something new to say. The invention of color photography gives him the choice to revert to monochrome imagery, with its claims to documentary accuracy. Audiences of recent motion pictures will certainly have noticed how candid depictions of violence have reflected both the ability, and the willingness, to show wounds that were once barely hinted at. Choosing a point of view takes away the observer’s power to find a previously unseen perspective, which is why didactic or propagandistic art seldom lasts. There’s arguably nothing wrong with speculating about the arguments works of art can be used to support, but there’s good reason to think that artists are like scientists, who gather evidence for its own sake. The work of art that survives is the one that accommodates not just what is known to its contemporary audience, but is willing to grow along with them.
Josh Winegar: Future Monuments, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through August 23.
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
