Bill Davis: The Palimpset Series
Postmodernism posits that what we see, and what we perceive, are predicated upon individual, and thus subjective, experience. Three predominately differentiating perceptions are differences in race, gender and class, and how these signifiers fit within the voracious demands and needs of a capitalist machine, and who has power over whom. Bill Davis' photographs walk a tightrope between objective observation and subjective experience, fertile postmodern territory.
If we summarize Plato's objections to art and beauty as seducers of the soul, because subjective information and experience are mediated through our senses, which sensualize objectivity and reason, Bill Davis' photographs combine the oldest and the newest critiques of perception — from 400 BC to 2009 AD — and bracket the sense of seeing and what meaning lies therein: his photographs examine the nature of perception itself.
Davis' brilliant photographs comprising 'The Palimpset Series' offer both proven physical formulae and laws of optics and physics, regarding the nature of sight, light, and of perception, and so fall between and amongst the interstices of aesthetic theory and discourse, between idea and execution: his work is both procedural and conceptual, and explores the dialectic between the seemingly objective and the subjective. Davis formats his photographs as information drawn in his handwriting, and on chalkboards. The formulae examining lens and light may appear complete or in process. The process work allows him to luxuriate in the beauty of markmaking and/or the erased surface. The photographs that feel and look universal, iconic, totemic, appear intimate, personal, and subjective concurrently. Plato meets Derrida in Davis' photographs.
Proposing that the lens of a camera and the lens of an eye (perceiver and perceived), are coequivalents since the invention of photography and/or of the camera, Davis distills, appropriates, and invents theorems regarding how light travels, how it moves, through what physical inventions and manifestations it changes from a Platonian abstraction into knowledge and into a specific image on paper. The photographs are not only about the process of invention, but can be understood both as First Principle (Plato) and as contemporary theory and practice, pieces of a once pristine Whole and Abstract. Davis' process and his product are interchangeable. Each photograph can read as a lesson plan, and, as a teacher himself, allows Davis to celebrate his two careers: teacher and photographer. The photographs acknowledge the beauty of and joy in making marks (markmaking being an important definition of the how and what of contemporary art). Each of Davis' prints becomes a total work of art (a nod to aesthetics, metaphysics, philosophy and literature). Learning and teaching and photographing are equated with the processes implicit in doing, in making, in seeing: in the nature of perception itself. The chalkboards are thus full of narrative implications as well.
Photography is a science as well as an art, and by placing them both in an as-if-classroom format, Davis slyly interjects the Aristotelian view of culture and art within the Platonic, so the images project a kind of non-verbal Socratic dialogue about the nature of art, the intellect, The Infinite, The Idea, and the sensuousness of surface seduction all at one time, proposing that learning and perception are on a spectrum to and from an Infinite. Davis' 'experiments' propose a palimpsest of perceptions growing from other perceptions, or erasable therefrom, as pentimento may in painting, or as Lillian Hellman suggested in her book by that title in, about, and as memory.
Davis proposes that learning is a cumulative process; one formulaic breakthrough leads to, or builds upon, another. Learning and mental activity are constant processes; his images seem to be in a constant state of physical motion. In selecting the chalkboard as the images' ground, numbers and abstract ideas or solutions to ideas about lenses, light, movement, and perception become the figures upon the ground, dancing about the surfaces of the photographs. Davis' writing brings Cy Twombly's 'automatic handwriting' to mind, although it also feels like discoveries from the caves at Lascaux. Many of the photographs feel as if they could be lithographs, and/or etchings, or abstract expressionist doodles, with their allover format. There is something elegiac about erasures; we are as curious about what is gone as we are about what's present. Presence and absence are metaphoric figure/ground relationships in Davis' photographs, implying a transcendent spiritual yearning.
So the invention of Braille (a particularly sensuous Davis image), about the spectrum from non-sight to a form of sight, (while introducing the tactile - an image nearly Baroque in its lighting and Caravaggesque in composition) is as much a challenge as a solution to issues of perception, and as different as John Cage's marks for his dances for Merce Cunningham, based upon the I Ching, and the laws and possibilities of chance. From the proof of how light travels to the use of chance is an enormous intellectual range of examination. Davis' great strength and gift is to aestheticize the nature of perception into concrete images that are both self-referential and universal, concurrently.
