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The unending argument about photography – is it art or simply reportage, or could it be both at once? – takes a new turn in this beguilingly odd exhibition. The principle is that light-sensitive paper is exposed with parts blocked, or shadowed, or chemically manipulated; the results vary wildly within one artist’s work, never mind among the five shown here, although there is common ground. All are obsessed with time, unsurprisingly, and with nature: Adam Fuss likes snakes, Garry Fabian Miller has a thing for leaves, Floris Neusüss puts photographic paper out in storms with surpassingly odd results (one resembles a half-formed face; another is simply grey splotches).
Susan Derges’s ‘Arches’ are probably the most traditional works here, although her methods are nothing of the kind: bracken below, foliage above, altering for each season so that ‘Summer’ is blue and bursting with life while ‘Winter’ resembles a moonscape – albeit one with grass. She also holds photographic paper under water, leaving undulating evidence of a ripple. Is that art? Or simply a recording?
The scientifically astute will probably be agog, but the rest of us cannot escape the suspicion that all these artists, despite their differences, are the grown-up versions of the plastic-goggled science nerds we knew at school. The fifth, Pierre Cordier, is the proud inventor of the chemigram: no amount of explanation, in print and in an otherwise interesting video, could enlighten me as to what that actually is, but it involves developer for dark areas and fixer for lighter parts and then mucking around applying all kinds of strange things (in the film, he mentions sandwich spread). The results are inevitably various: one looks like the contents of a petri dish, another resembles the lines on a pre-digital television set, a third seems to have ghosts moving across an umber field. Cordier, who is 77, makes works that reference Borges and Georges Perec, and presumably sees his images as the kind of intellectual examination of the world’s workings those writers engaged in, but they are hard to love.
Beauty, here, is to be found in Neusüss’s women: the German uses life models to create elegiac memories of touch on paper, like fairy shadows; the most heart-rending is a wooden chair set above the shadow of a seated woman in the process of getting up; it is called ‘Be Right Back’.
It is these gelatin-silver photograms, with their nod to history (gelatin silver prints dominated early photography) that assuage the viewer’s hunger for narrative; many others have the prosaic attractions of a scientific experiment. Cause and effect is also, of course, a kind of story, as the gradually darkening, obscurely erotic petal Miller displays in eight incarnations demonstrates. But a man who makes a photograph every day for a year, then selects an image for each month and builds a special cabinet to house them may be said to be more interested in the mechanics of time than in the poignancy of its passing. With a few exceptions, this is a chilly show that sides with reportage over art, and features artists who probably think that setting hearts afire is something you should be able to do with a Bunsen burner