Fotonet

Research Residencies

DAVID SPERO

David Spero
Balls, Wood and Audiotape
The Winchester Gallery, Winchester School of Art
26 February – 27 March 2009

Conceptualism, originating in the 1960s, was all about ideas as art. By the middle of the decade the physical object had virtually disappeared from most avant-garde art practices. In its place came events, actions and only the most temporary of items made by the artist; the art itself often existing outside of the gallery space and sometimes with little or no audience.

The ephemeral nature of such works and their physical distance from gallery-goers meant that photography and film were often used to record them. Initially photographs were taken in a snapshot or utilitarian style, the identity of the actual photographer usually remaining unknown and irrelevant. Adrian Piper walking through the streets in 1970 with a ‘Wet Paint’ sign around her neck was documented in a series of snaps recording both her action and the reactions of passers-by; forensically deadpan photographs of Keith Arnatt’s Self-Burial the previous year evidence the artist’s performance as he disappears into the ground standing up (mimicking the disappearance of the art object itself). In Arnatt’s sequence a finger even seems to have strayed in front of the lens at the edge of each image. During the early years of Conceptualism it was clear that the actions, not the photographs, were the art.

As the movement progressed through the early 1970s photographs became more significant, more aesthetically engaging: Gordon Matta-Clark’s systematic removal of precisely shaped portions from derelict buildings was documented by carefully composed photographs joined together; John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get an Equilateral Triangle (1972-3) was an action that not only relied on the timing of photographs to record both the failed attempts and the actual moment the desired shape was formed, but also resulted in starkly striking images of the orange balls against a blue sky. By the time the initial impact of Conceptualism had come to an end many artists had even turned into ‘real’ photographers.

The legacy of this movement is apparent in a certain strand of art photography in the 21st century. For instance Thomas Demand’s paper and card models of rooms are created, photographed and then destroyed: the pictures ending up on gallery walls and in expensive photobooks. The work of David Spero appears similarly informed by the conceptual.

In the last decade Spero has consistently made work united by an idea: the adaptation of an existing place. Settlements (2004-2005) was a series about environmentally friendly homes built from natural, sustainable materials in forests; Churches (2002-2005) documented the resourceful modification of secular buildings (warehouses, shops, etc) into places of worship; while with Ball Photographs (2001-2004) Spero himself placed numerous differently shaped and coloured rubber balls around cluttered domestic rooms and some exterior spaces.

For his 2007 commission, managed by Fotonet as part of an Arts Council England International Research Fellowship, Spero undertook a residency at the Northern Photographic Centre in Oulu, Finland. There he returned to the Ball Photographs series, this time adding two other elements to those painstakingly positioned rubber balls: the thin planks of wood and strips of audiotape referred to in the new series’ exacting name. As the creator of works such as Ball Photographs and Balls, Wood and Audiotape Spero is quite unlike Demand in that he does not remake locations for photographs, but adjusts ones that already exist. He is the anti-Matta-Clark, adding to places rather than subtracting from them.

Again the settings in which Spero has positioned these elements were designed for purposes other than the making of photographic art. The spaces invaded by the balls, wood and audiotape during his residency mostly consisted of dance studios and rooms undergoing reconstruction that were effectively building sites. Spero employed the wood and tape like mid-air graffiti to describe lines between the balls, connecting them into constellations rather than individual satellites. In the ensuing photographs exhibited at The Winchester Gallery the moment of transition from the older series to the new seems to occur across two images: one showing a room with the balls on their own, the other showing the same room with the balls in the same place but now joined and joined up by tape and wood.

With the pictures made in dance studios it is hard not to see the lines as tracing the past and future movements of the absent dancers (the audiotape suggesting the music which might accompany them), while the wood in the half-finished rooms blends with planks, paint tins and bags of cement apparently left by the builders rather than placed there by the artist. Spero’s photographs also recall everything from the plotted lines of journeys to diagrams of molecular structures, from spider webs to the directions drawn on screens by television sports pundits as they comment on footballing set pieces.

Beyond such prosaic resemblances, many of the images in Balls, Wood and Audiotape are quite beautiful. The glorious natural light illuminating Spero’s structures through the large windows in ‘Studio 1, Hallituskatu 7, Oulu’ is aesthetically enticing, while the finely poised objects in pictures such as ‘Torikatu 2, Oulu’ suggest a meticulously judged compositional harmony. Spero’s blankly descriptive titles do not evoke these readings, but the images do.

As well as their connections to Conceptualism it may be that Spero’s latest photographs link far more directly with much older concerns stretching back beyond the 1970s to the 1790s and the theories of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. The decisions the artist makes in the creation of his work transcend the development of an idea, resulting in images whose primary theme is visual pleasure. Perhaps the photographs in Balls, Wood and Audiotape might be best enjoyed while remembering Kant’s phrase in The Critique of Judgement: ‘The beautiful is that which pleases universally, without a concept’.

[This piece originally appeared in Source: The Photographic Review Vol.1 No.59. Summer 2009]

Stephen Bull is an artist, writer, lecturer and Course Leader for Photography at University for Creative Arts, Farnham