“The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”-Aby Warburg.
Constellations, catalogues, and correlative image processing are at the fundament of Batia Suter’s efforts to respond to images that she deftly places in thick, long-running sequences, in which the associative power of images, in their constellation, invokes a response from the viewer based on memory, history, and the webbing of her sequences. There is no singular adaptation for meaning in her effort. There is the image and the consciousness that consumes it through the reading of the work, in which the text becomes illustrative rather than defining of the image that it circulates. There is no concrete use of definition in her work; instead, it functions as suggestive. It treats such information as an image as much as the image it highlights. This tension in the work denies the categorical. It suggests instead that our ontological processing must occur on disagreeable terms as to how we understand the images and their utility.
What strikes me as fascinating about Suter’s practice is that it feels, on one hand, like a natural magpie order from someone obsessed with images. One must be able to locate, accumulate, sift through, and process such a significant amount of visual information, finding it interesting enough to initiate the lengthy process of responding to and repurposing it. It brings me to thinking about how we interact with images in their various forms. For example, are these books scanned, perhaps culled from a microfiche library? Are they clipped from existing physical material and books? Are they purloined from the far corners of the Internet? How much physicality is required to transform these images into a physical object in this manner? Do the photos ever come into contact with human hands to get shuffled and reorganized? I don’t think so, somehow. I can’t imagine the physicality of so much information, though I can process it in the book and digitally.
This brings me to another point in thinking about how we organize visual material for exhibitions. Alot of what I think of as taxonomical or categor-based work stems from the appropriation of vernacular material. This is not a new pursuit, and numerous artists draw inspiration from German polymath Aby Warburg for their understanding of how we interact with images, icons, and their emotional and intellectual effects in both individual and cultural contexts. There is a penchant to organize such toves of images through these categories or a system of reliability contrary to their oppositional potential. This is something worth recognizing, as it is, in some ways, similar to thinking about positive and negative layering or subtracting from clay or stone to produce art. One adds depth or context by an additive process, building a category for which associations can be drawn. In some ways, the opposite is also true: we carve from the vast rock of floating images something more refined, more delineated. However, when referencing sculpture, one does not usually re-add material after sculpting it out. With clay, it is different, or assemblage, but the finite act of carving from a large material signifies choices with no backtracking once it has begun.
With Batia’s work, I feel like both actions are happening in a forgiving manner. She chisels away at our world of images, seeking to refine forms and group them by her individualized perspective, while also having the latitude to add and combine images from the world as she encounters them, painstakingly assembling a new form, a continuity of visual elements that defines less the outward world than her interactions with images. Images are not the world; the world is arguably not an image. In her practice, Suter challenges, without dismissal, both sets of values, suggesting that her choice of images forms her choice of world without a forcefully congruent declaration of categories for others’ consumption. They are a version of the world of her imagery, not THE world of imagery for others.
“We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.”
― Phenomenology of Perception
I often wonder why this interest in assembly seems to originate from the mid-to-northern European perspective. I imagine it is tied to the continental philosophy of meaning and materiality, perhaps how spirit or anima is understood through what is observed, observable, or comprehensible. This is not specific to the European mindset per se, but the roots of philosophical preponderance indeed share their origins in the geography. Materialism, the relationship to the world, and its image derive from a quest to understand the self in relation to the world it inhabits. Further notions of how we relate, from the mind-body divide to the world, and how its images are processed and affect associations in language and ontological pursuits are deeply embedded in this processing. As arguably cogniscent beings, one does collect and assemble granular iterations of understanding and meaning, with some hope of finding stable ground on which to transmit relative awareness, understanding that failure is often a complicit category itself from which to manage.
Suter’s work, her selections, and assemblies provide deep reaches of investigation. It is a research project that denies the utility of absolutes between image and meaning, and therefore, and not in an obtuse manner, asks the reader/viewer to share their relationship to the world through projection and presentation. It is a project of ambitious scale and dexterity. Although I am somewhat late to the party, I greatly applaud the artists, the designer, and the publisher for making these volumes of world-building possible. Highly Recommended