Jacob Kassay at Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art
by:
Axel Bishop
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
Jacob Kassay, Footage, 2019. Installation view: Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, 2019. Photograph: Natalie Dienno
A good magician never reveals the secret to a trick. A masterful demon shows us what is behind the illusion yet coaxes the eye to the wrong cup nonetheless. The late Ricky Jay—trickster, card sharp, and historian of magic—would narrate his own legerdemain, telling us what we are seeing while defying our perception. Jay recounts the history of the trick (the very trick and trickery itself) while his act is in play, and the informative yet distracting patter that is the tactical deception of sleight-of-hand artistry goes to work on us. Jay jumps time, moves faster than the viewer can see, doubles back, slows down, chews on the elasticity of non-linear time, stretches his sequence out again, arriving repeatedly at the same result. The observer’s constrained frontal view is framed and predetermined; the viewer understands that what is known has become destabilized by what can be seen. This sort of “card artistry” is entertaining on its face, dangerous in its implications. Jay’s verbose manner, for him a technology of artifice, is an homage to historic illusionist showmen and an accomplice to his motives: the images he transmits in his narrative are a furtive veil to cover his hands as they sneak around the muted, felt-top table in plain sight. This is a tactic that magicians refer to as “misdirection.” What purpose is served?
In Jacob Kassay’s recent Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center exhibition Footage, oriented strand board (OSB) panels are arrayed above a sea of blue carpeting, which dampens the sound of walking around the space and heightens the sense of being out of place. Kassay manages to sustain this effect, even as we get oriented to the installation. The carpeting absorbs the light, evening out the space as it sets off a contrast to the yellowy panels. The machinations of Footage hinge on the use of a crude material typically used as underlayment in roofing and other construction applications. While not visible in the finished interior, such material is essential to defining three-dimensional space. This seems significant when considering how the space of the image refuses to settle in one place in this installation: the artist has utilized the space of the gallery as a way to navigate us through slightly modified repetitions. One first encounters the panel on the wall and then again freestanding to reveal its back: now here, now there. But this is not a sculpture in the traditional sense of a many-sided, dynamic object: behind the OSB panel is a stanchion, merely the infrastructure that serves to prop up the front of this work, the screen.
“Footage,” of course, also refers to sequential motion captured by film or video. Kassay’s sculptures—slightly enlarged and off-register images of the OSB printed onto itself—have the contradictory effect of standing as fixed objects in space while eluding being held in place by just perceptible degrees of difference. These are not so much composites of images as they are collusions between image and material. The photographic image and its referent are nearly reunited in order to reveal the distance between the two.
Jacob Kassay, Footage, 2019. Installation view: Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, 2019. Photograph: Natalie Dienno
Here, then, are objects that come equipped with their own propaganda, persuading viewers to believe even as we cannot quite reconcile this with what we are seeing. Or rather, this installation is not a series of objects but really one object told again and again. A card repeatedly pulled from behind our ear. Sometimes in varying scale (with constrained proportions) or varying presentation (wall or freestanding), the OSB panel reintroduces itself, persuading us to be in the material world and “within” its representations at once, much like Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini) (1933), simultaneously an icon, a machine, a vectorized image, a static object about motion, a picture never at rest. Replicated and endorsed by Italian Fascists, the circumferentially constant image of Mussolini appears everywhere and supplants reality by its effect. It is a magic trick that contrives bronze as a time-based medium, the volumetric subject as perpetual image. Kassay’s manipulation of engineered wood and image is an appropriate strategy for considering our current moment in history. The tyranny of the space created here results from the recurring blurred and therefore destabilizing image. Perception is shaken in a manner that influences the audience to be both aware of and susceptible to the illusion. The photograph and its subject hide one another. Which is the predatory figure and which is the ground that serves as its camouflage? To promote the exhibition, Kassay created a poster that also advances the concepts of Footage and how we might approach the work. The poster contains a double image of a leopard stalking its prey. The cat’s hide blends into the golden field in which it discreetly moves. This image acts as a rubric, relating the visual to the thematic.
To this point there is another curious inclusion to the show: Andy Warhol’s Polaroid photograph of O.J. Simpson, which breaks ranks with the aforementioned recurring imagery and insinuates a possible application of the artist’s critique beyond the cool minimalism of the boards. Polaroid as a medium is associated with immediacy in its photographic processing, yet ironically the image here is clearly of another time both in material and representation. The portrait of O.J. arrests a moment of ambition and praise, but can only be undermined by what we have come to know in the interval since its “capture.” It is a picture of two coexisting truths. Years after the image was made, viewers were entranced by the urgent banality of O.J.’s low-speed car chase and the equally heightened monotony of the ensuing trial as cultural event. Both chapters were excessively mediated experiences connecting and distancing us from the elusive certainties of the subject, our prey. The outcome of the trial and the stark oppositions of black and white, innocence and guilt provoked polarizing viewpoints, whereas the compiled facts were unpacked as a complex gradient.
In 1967 Dutch artist Jan Dibbets made the first of his Perspective Corrections, minimal trapezoidal shapes that collapse into squares when flattened in the documented image. The “corrections” explored and undermined the phenomenon of mapping depth in two dimensions, describing three-dimensional space on a flat plane by exploiting the limitations of photography as a surrogate for the human eye. Dibbets’s “corrected” dimensional spaces are activated by the way in which they were compressed with representation. The works of Kassay’s Footage operate on our eyes in a similar manner. After the subsiding stimulation of effects, the experience may be a suggestion for how to begin to interrogate the combined real/virtual environments that we increasingly navigate: our cultural landscape of obfuscation, where a plurality of perspectives can be bent into a prism of multiple non-truths, of existential incidents and their sharp but degrading representations. Perhaps Kassay’s raw footage has captured a new Perspective Correction of tangible forms and the dazzling shadows that they throw.
Jacob Kassay, Footage, 2019. Installation view: Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, 2019. Photograph: Natalie Dienno
Axel Bishop is a poet based in St. John’s Newfoundland. Bishop often writes on Contemporary Art, Architecture and Film, and is currently working on a biography of Bern Porter.
Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art
341 Delaware Ave
Buffalo, NY 14202
