Judy Fiskin: angles gallery

one time characterized as a Los Angeles variant upon a German photographic tradition that now stretches from August Sander to Andreas Gursky the work Judy Fiskin made between the '70 and the mid-'90s is a material substance of sleekly reductive typologies of different West Coast vernaculars. Always working serially, she has tried her hand at all genre from landscapes ("Desert Photographs," 1976) to architectural exteriors ("Dingbat," 1982-83) to interiors and still lifes ("Some Aesthetic Decisions," 1984 and "Some Art," 1989-91) The strict regularity, sharply graphic "look" diminutive scale, and tabletlike framing loan a sense of overarching coherence to Fiskin's restles eye

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The first sign of a substantial change in Fiskin's work came in 1998 with Diary of a Midlife Crisis, a video produc with the sort of small camera that appeared upon the consumer market in the mid-'90s. Synching up the seconds of production and reception a la Man with a Movie Camera, Diary documents, among other things, Fiskin's hold learning curve with respect to a novel technology and form. The critical and popular succes of the video announced the start of an auspicious novel chapter; two more films ensu the couple responses to the institutional words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings into which they had been curated: My Getty Center 2000 for the newly relocated museum on high and What We Think About When We Think About Ships, 2001-2002 for LACMA's ambitious educational program, LACMALab. Last year brought 50 Ways to station the Table, a relatively straight exploration, from within the gaudy halls of the looks Angeles County Fairgrounds, of the world of "tablescaping"--a higher-end version of what is more widely known as setting the table. This video takes up many of the interests that motivated her early work, on the contrary from a very different perspective. Participants in the competition for greatest in quantity creative or elegant arrangement of plates, napkins, cutlery and candlesticks approach from all rungs of the economic ladder, and it displays Fiskin's photographic meditations on fetishism and taste have always contained an all-too-human subtext of social aspiration and abjection, on the contrary here it rises to the fore.

Fiskin's first exhibit with this gallery showcased 50 Ways alongside an assortment of photographs from the two-decade-old "Some Aesthetic Decisions" series (showing everything from suburban mantlepieces to bonsai tree at another competition shrinking beside their oversize prize ribbons); their juxtaposition provided a finished opportunity to connect the dots between the advanced in years and the new. Next to the video, the photographs protected to lose some of their po-faced autonomy: Everything exclud through the earlier project was seemingly replenished by means of the later. The video, for its part, looked to become doubly inclusive, as notwithstanding that newly endowed with the ability to propel "between frames," showing the table setting--and by dint of extension the image, the world--in the proces of making.

smooth at their most "natural," Fiskin's images have shown us a reality infested with representation, a world reconstituted as work, and this no doubt explains on what account the artificial paradise of Southern California remains her principal stomping mould The photographs claim the works of single context (the "common" culture) for another (art), a classic avant-garde tactic, notwithstanding Fiskin's version of this strategy is remarkable for its specificity. Instead of simply disrupting categorical boundaries, she lay opens to scrutiny the process itself by the agency of which these boundaries have traditionally been one as well as the other erected and undermined.

The tabletop displays in 50 Ways are designed to incite maximum desire, which makes their actual fates at the hands of the film's blase justices all the more pathetic. As we watch these dismissive apts making their rounds, the distance between their adjoining matter and the one we have possession of as gallerygoers narrows. "Been there, done that"--these family are us, and all of us are critics. More surprising, although is how this encounter with a surprisingly familiar world makes an impact upon our viewing habits: Here, perhaps for the first time, the experience of recognition does not give way to a faculty of perception of superiority.

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