Post-postmodernism and the archive: uncertain identities and "forgotten" legacies.

THE DISCOVERY

Early in 2005, a dramatic discovery was made in the attic and basement of a home in Southern California. It was the complete archive of a photographer apparently active in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. A battery of prints, negatives, logs, and equipment constituted this surprising discovery and revealed a previously unknown chapter of photographic history.

The findings were contained in numerous trunks and crates containing crumbling platinum prints and well-preserved glass negatives along with volumes of logs and journals detailing the journeys and activities of one Timothy Eugene O'Tower. From these notes it is known that O'Tower explored the West in the era of Manifest Destiny's westward expansion. The archive was transferred to Terry Towery, a distant relation of O'Tower's, who is a professor of photography at Lehman College of the City University of New York and Parsons School of Design in New York City. Towery, who teaches History of Photography as well as other courses, says that one of the most startling aspects of the discovery was the familiarity of so many of the images. In reviewing the archive, one notes images that scream photo history from images that are similar (to the extent of almost exact framing) to seminal images from the 1860s and '70s by Mathew Brady, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and the like. Many were labeled with locations but very few with dates, leaving chronological identification to the text of the logs and more often to conjecture.

O'TOWER'S STORY

The following biography is excerpted from a catalog produced by Towery and Peer Gallery where the first exhibition of O'Tower's work was held in the Fall of 2006:

Timothy Eugene O'Tower (1829-1900) grew up in the shadow of the Tower

of Eire. At ten years of age he was apprenticed to a gentleman scholar

interested in optics and chemistry as well as philosophy and

aesthetics. In his youthful apprenticeship, he spent his days making

lenses and mixing chemicals and his evenings discussing philosophy and

aesthetics with his master. In 1841, he attended to his master at

Henry Fox Talbot's presentation to the Royal Society on The Pencil of

Nature.

Although much of his history is lost, it is known that he explored the

American West and Far East at approximately the same time as those

photographers in "the Canon," but his imagery went mysteriously

undiscovered until now. In the early 1860s, he fled Ireland after

shooting his wife for allegedly having a torrid adulterous affair. He

went eastward in 1865 and simultaneously discovered photography as his

chosen career path.

After making an undetermined number of images in the East he made his

way to America and continued in the tradition of the American

exploration photographers. His close friends included both Edweard

Muybrige and Timothy O'Sullivan. While Mathew Brady was away on one of

his many extended journeys, Timothy Eugene had an affair with Mathew

Brady's wife. Because of the affair, Brady refused to include O'Tower

in the official exploration group. Unbeknownst to Brady, O'Sullivan

hired O'Tower as an assistant for his expertise in both technical and

aesthetic matters. In this manner he traveled with O'Sullivan and

Muybridge, thus revealing the frequent similarity in imagery.

News items and his death certificate reveal little about his demise.

O'Tower's body was found both stabbed and shot. Never claimed by

friend or family, he was buried anonymously in a public cemetery and

he effectively disappeared from history. (1)

THE FICTION

O'Tower never existed. He is an identity and fiction created by the photographer Terry Towery as a vehicle for presenting a body of work that engages questions of authenticity, authorship, originality, the contemporary sublime, and the postmodern obsession with the simulacra of the past.

Culling images from the history of American landscape photography, Towery set out to reconstruct these iconic views of America's self-representational legacy. The "sets" are handcrafted from modeling materials with each sublime view no larger than a tabletop. The photographs were made in a studio using a large format 4x5 inch camera, a system that to this day is not dissimilar from early photographic methods. The photographs were then printed as platinotypes, a process that was quite popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and pressed further the appearance of historical "authenticity" in the work. O'Tower and his invented biography were the final step in the project that provided a framework through which the project could be presented.

Towery is a photographer for whom antiquarian picture-making practices and "alternative" (read historical) printing techniques have routinely been part of his artistic practice. Having studied at the University of Florida in the late 1980s under Jerry Uelsmann, who is best known for his masterful multi-negative darkroom composites that explode the notion of photography's mimetic function, it is perhaps not surprising that Towery is engaged in questions around what Barthes recognized as the "evidential force" of the photographic document. Towery writes:

From the inception of photography, "truth" has been suspect. However

photography has a veracity that is, even today, undeniable. Most

people still believe that if it is a photograph it must be true. The

inherent believability of the photographic medium lends truth to an

artificial realm. We are left with an unfamiliar tension between truth

and fiction. Using the veracity of photography, I create worlds where,

at first glance, everything appears as it should. It isn't until

further probing that we realize that our sense of scale is unnerved

and we are left to figure out what is real and what is created. (2)

Towery is intrigued by "the postmodern idea that there is no such thing as originality" (3) and locates the O'Tower project in a long line of similar "unoriginal" photographic explorations such as those of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and the Rephotographic Survey, who all create work that challenges the modernist "ideology of progress and originality." (4)

THE FICTIONAL IMPULSE

The fictional artist is not a new invention. From noms de plume, alter egos, and public personae (think of Marcel Duchamp's Rose Selavy) to such contemporary fakes as John Dogg, Reena Spaulings, The Atlas Group, and Otabenga Jones & Associates, the creative identity has always lent itself to a fair amount of ambiguity. Of late, this denial of authorship and veiling of artists' identity seems to have gained momentum, with three of the above mentioned "artists" and groups having been featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, an event generally regarded for setting or ushering in contemporary creative zeitgeist. Holland Cotter of the New York Times has written that these kind of identity projects are often utilized to raise critical questions "about art and the often unquestioned ideas surrounding it, like originality, authenticity, influence, history, formal value and biography-as-value." (5) Most of these art fakes include entire franchises of artwork, biography, writings, and other "evidences" that manufacture a post-identity, post-structuralist critique of the current art market and creative practice at large.

For further consideration of the fictionalizing impulse, I would like to introduce two additional projects that are founded on invented artist figures. One of these was engineered by an art gallery, the other by star filmmakers, suggesting that Cotter's questioning of oft-unquestioned ideas is relevant throughout the contemporary creative industrial complex.

THE FORGOTTEN MINIMALIST

Triple Candie, an alternative art space located in Harlem, New York City, recently mounted a retrospective of the work of Lester Hayes, a long-forgotten but influential, fictional artist who was active between 1962 and 1975.

According to the biography provided by Triple Candie, Hayes was born in Philadelphia in 1936 to an African American father and an Italian American mother. He studied chemical engineering in college but, after reading an anthology of Dada painters and poets, began making art in the vein of conceptual assemblage.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Hayes moved to New York City in 1962 to pursue his new career. He worked as Richard Tuttle's first studio assistant, ran with the Castelli circle, and had his first solo show at Richard Feigen Gallery in 1967. The show was a bust and Hayes sank into depressive anonymity as a professor in various universities. He continued to make art but, after retiring to North Carolina in 1984, his accumulated works were destroyed in a house fire. He died of complications from diabetes in 2004.

The exhibition consisted of thirteen "replicas" of Hayes work, reconstructed from his notes and journals. All of the pieces were actually cobbled together from scrap material by volunteers and Triple Candie founders, Shellie Bancroft and Peter Nesbett. The work is decidedly critical, political, and racially charged with witty pieces like Beyond the Pail (1973), a floor assemblage incorporating a bucket, and a mural-size work made of unpainted, unstretched canvases titled Elegy in Seven Parts (for Lena Home) (1965).