You have to feel Jeff Wall’s pain when he laments, speaking of the art of the last quarter century, that “everything is possible, everything is great.” His reading can be extended to include not only the perceived sunsetting of Modernism, but also its subsequent and predominantly rhetorical critiques, as both have been met with an opening of floodgates. This is a time — however fleeting it might eventually come to be seen in retrospect, as will any sunset euphoria — during which any degree of personal obsession is indulged as a valid indicator of meaning, or as sufficient material for the construction of a universe, so long as the production values involved are justifiably awe-inspiring.

Yet if nothing is forbidden, neither is any outcome guaranteed. Rather than sanctioning total abandon, Wall’s anxiety could be understood as insisting on the disenchanted determination to persist in the creation of a body of work at once engaged with the social reality of the time — the medium of photography as such being inherently representational — yet sui generis in its greater structure as an oeuvre. If individual examples of photographic depiction seem exhausted, there is yet the possibility that a nimble rearticulation of the same material’s breadth might instead yield a viable enaction of one unique model — indeed, only one of a conceivably infinite variation — of experience’s naturally fractious and nonlinear character.

So it is that if you never experience much of a barrier-to-entry to a Roe Ethridge photograph by itself — if you not only sense its instantaneous visual “hit,” but then, too, recognize its roots, however ambiguous, in the artifacts of the wider common culture — you might still wonder what exactly he intends by the larger accumulation of them in the magazine stories and personally assembled books he’s known for. Viewed in succession, Ethridge’s images function according to neither the classical formulation of the photo series as journalistic essay, nor Conceptualism’s alternate inversion of seriality as antiformal evacuation. Instead, they loosely coalesce into something like a makeshift code, or the spasmodic transmissions from a broken-down satellite, tumbling anarchically off course and into empty space — Is anyone out there?

Rockaway, NY, Ethridge’s latest book and his first published by Steidl, takes as its namesake the denuded town-as-reliquary of Robert Moses’ derailed ambitions for the modern urban utopia. Rockaway is also the stand-in for heroic failings and foreclosed possibilities: Its Shore Front Parkway — the name of which is a contradiction as indicative of the bureaucratic effort at construction as the road it identifies — was part of Moses’ grand technocratic design to unify and mobilize all usable space on Long Island. The Parkway, its municipal supporting funds long since terminated and its length forever truncated to a total of twenty-seven hundred yards, was soon enough renamed by locals with a resonance equally totemic, if somewhat less deterministic, as “The Road to Nowhere.” It lies a few blocks south of the house Ethridge rents and often photographs from. He talks of Rockaway as “a place that seems a bit of a border town: loose zoning laws, weird crimes, housing projects, and a generally sketchy vibe.” In the larger repertoire of photographic types, Rockaway is far shy of bearing the mantle of the essentializing landscape paradigm. It is not a place so much as a placeholder, an interstitial place-of-no-place.

Just as certainty is never fully achieved, neither is its visual representation, and you can suss Ethridge’s natural inclination toward indicators of transition across the range of his work. His Polaroids, for example, function as subsets of both photographic technique and degrees of flux. Most anyone can understand that sense of desire that comes with waiting for a Polaroid’s image to chemically form in your hands — the rubbing, the waving, the blowing on that small bit of plastic, anything to make the wanted projection materialize as you so need it to do. A tangential subject in these images becomes that state of desire itself, as Ethridge first makes a digital scan of a unique Polaroid, then reprints it at a larger size as a standard photographic print, and in multiple. Any pretense that the Polaroid may have suggested about its physical status as a unique or genuine aspect of knowledge is vacated. Reprinted and redistributed yet again in a different form, such as Ethridge’s book, or this magazine, the image, its attendant memory, and its meaning are repeatedly dislocated and atomized in a way that is uncannily most like the dynamic mental processes by which we as humans unmake (or, just as easily, resynthesize) the fabric of our experience.




										Nice Machine By gil blank You have to feel Jeff Wall’s pain when he laments, speaking of the art of the last quarter century, that “everything is possible, everything is great.” His reading can be extended to include not only the perceived sunsetting of Modernism, but also its subsequent and predominantly rhetorical critiques, as both have been met with an opening of floodgates. This is a time — however fleeting it might eventually come to be seen in retrospect, as will any sunset euphoria — during which any degree of personal obsession is indulged as a valid indicator of meaning, or as sufficient material for the construction of a universe, so long as the production values involved are justifiably awe-inspiring. Yet if nothing is forbidden, neither is any outcome guaranteed. Rather than sanctioning total abandon, Wall’s anxiety could be understood as insisting on the disenchanted determination to persist in the creation of a body of work at once engaged with the social reality of the time — the medium of photography as such being inherently representational — yet sui generis in its greater structure as an oeuvre. If individual examples of photographic depiction seem exhausted, there is yet the possibility that a nimble rearticulation of the same material’s breadth might instead yield a viable enaction of one unique model — indeed, only one of a conceivably infinite variation — of experience’s naturally fractious and nonlinear character. So it is that if you never experience much of a barrier-to-entry to a Roe Ethridge photograph by itself — if you not only sense its instantaneous visual “hit,” but then, too, recognize its roots, however ambiguous, in the artifacts of the wider common culture — you might still wonder what exactly he intends by the larger accumulation of them in the magazine stories and personally assembled books he’s known for. Viewed in succession, Ethridge’s images function according to neither the classical formulation of the photo series as journalistic essay, nor Conceptualism’s alternate inversion of seriality as antiformal evacuation. Instead, they loosely coalesce into something like a makeshift code, or the spasmodic transmissions from a broken-down satellite, tumbling anarchically off course and into empty space — Is anyone out there? Rockaway, NY, Ethridge’s latest book and his first published by Steidl, takes as its namesake the denuded town-as-reliquary of Robert Moses’ derailed ambitions for the modern urban utopia. Rockaway is also the stand-in for heroic failings and foreclosed possibilities: Its Shore Front Parkway — the name of which is a contradiction as indicative of the bureaucratic effort at construction as the road it identifies — was part of Moses’ grand technocratic design to unify and mobilize all usable space on Long Island. The Parkway, its municipal supporting funds long since terminated and its length forever truncated to a total of twenty-seven hundred yards, was soon enough renamed by locals with a resonance equally totemic, if somewhat less deterministic, as “The Road to Nowhere.” It lies a few blocks south of the house Ethridge rents and often photographs from. He talks of Rockaway as “a place that seems a bit of a border town: loose zoning laws, weird crimes, housing projects, and a generally sketchy vibe.” In the larger repertoire of photographic types, Rockaway is far shy of bearing the mantle of the essentializing landscape paradigm. It is not a place so much as a placeholder, an interstitial place-of-no-place. Just as certainty is never fully achieved, neither is its visual representation, and you can suss Ethridge’s natural inclination toward indicators of transition across the range of his work. His Polaroids, for example, function as subsets of both photographic technique and degrees of flux. Most anyone can understand that sense of desire that comes with waiting for a Polaroid’s image to chemically form in your hands — the rubbing, the waving, the blowing on that small bit of plastic, anything to make the wanted projection materialize as you so need it to do. A tangential subject in these images becomes that state of desire itself, as Ethridge first makes a digital scan of a unique Polaroid, then reprints it at a larger size as a standard photographic print, and in multiple. Any pretense that the Polaroid may have suggested about its physical status as a unique or genuine aspect of knowledge is vacated. Reprinted and redistributed yet again in a different form, such as Ethridge’s book, or this magazine, the image, its attendant memory, and its meaning are repeatedly dislocated and atomized in a way that is uncannily most like the dynamic mental processes by which we as humans unmake (or, just as easily, resynthesize) the fabric of our experience. order issue 8
	Winter 2008