At his opening at Crawl Space, Brendan Jansen watched his baby beam with Buddha calm and said, “In 15 years, he’ll wish I were dead.”
From Crawl Space:
Jansen explores the space between premeditated experience and the choices that presuppose modes of depiction. As his title (No Chasm, No Cleft) alludes — referring by way of negation to the location where ancient Greek oracles tapped into the unseen, mysterious, and infinite — Jansen is searching for new ways of conceiving or understanding the world by breaking down the photograph, the most prevalent archetype of representation in the present day.
Although the work in the show makes use of several photographic processes such as recording, scanning, slicing, editing and projecting, combined together in several unique techniques, Jansen captures not only the flat appearances of the picture plane but also structural information from multiple and fixed viewpoints. The work is also premised on the notion that how we choose to represent what engages us in the world is inextricably linked to how we understand our place in reference to it, conscious of the limitations of our points of view.
There is a chasm, of course, but it’s the uncertainty afflicting those who examine the unreliability of perception, a terra not firma. In art, few subjects are as well trod. Jansen stakes a believable claim, even if he’s staking it in the wrong medium.
He began as a painter working from photos but lost faith in his ability to undermine the solidity of their depictions. Hence, video, which is in hands is a dubious prospect.
In the insistence of their flickering lights, his videos berate the audience with what it doesn’t know, which being an art audience, it knows already. Unlike Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth, scoring on the same theme in 1999, Jansen’s videos are both painful and obvious. If they were just painful and offered something not done better elsewhere, that’s one thing, but painful and obvious is not worth the anti-pleasure price he’s asking.
What works are the stills from the videos. He’s really a photographer, and video should be part of his process at arriving at his final product, a means to what could be his significant end.
His self-portrait in chalk, which glows in the dark:
Through Oct. 11.
It’s not my place to rebut quality judgments of my work, but I think I should take advantage of the dialectical potential of the blog form to reply. Ms Hackett mischaracterized my intentions as revealed by the work and the press release cited, and her misunderstanding led to a flawed critique. Perhaps because work concerned with the “unreliability of perceptions” abounds, she thought it natural to interpret the work as that.
Had she spent more time with the videos I think she would have noticed something different about the work, namely that what she mistook for a dissolution of form was no such thing. The perceptual shifts in the work actually show more, not less, about what is depicted, and I would argue that form is never “assaulted”. Viewpoints shift, structure is recast as a staggered procession of planes about an axis, and in one case an object alternates with another, but in all cases a kind of cohesive structural form maintains, the exact thing that is missing from normal photographic depictions.
Never in my time as a painter or since have have I been concerned with the unreliability of perception, or “lost faith” in my “ability to undermine the solidity of their depictions” whatever that means. If anything, my intentions have been just the opposite. My interests are more related to the question of whether and how depictions show more truth, being artifacts of only conditional truth anyway (and not illusions), not the dismantling of perceptions of reality or notions of perceptual truth. Cubism would be an obvious touchstone, especially as an antithesis to the other obvious touchstone, Platonic idealism.
Hi Brendan. Your work (at present) is about uncertainty. That’s what I thought when I saw it, and my perception of what you said when I talked to you. The gap between our perceptions illustrates the reality of the theme. Your videos don’t work, but I think something is going to work for you in the future. Regina
Gawd artist’s art-babbley statements suck shit! Looks like a trippy show though.
You reviewed the exhibit you wished were there, instead of the one that was. Whatever the artist says, it’s about what you called jittery, and you gave it way too much credit. I saw it. It sucked. When he shows photos, let us know. Till then, you should stick to the videos and give them hell.
Hi Beth. I don’t agree that Brendan Jansen’s show “sucked.” I’m intrigued by his work and want to see more. About viewing the show that’s there (videos) instead of the show that isn’t (photos), you have a point.