Patrick Tosani


 

Joseph Simas
"Still in Time, The Photographs of Patrick Tosani"
ArtsMagazine, U.S.A, Décembre 1990, Pages 68 à 71

The newspapers are now preparing the populace for a coming bestial war in which poison gas will be used; they recommend gas masks to protect the lives of the civilian population. To photograph an infant wearing a gas mask, instead of being at its mother's breast, and to label the photograph as being from the Twentieth Century would be sufficient. It would express the whole, brutal inhuman spirit of the time in universally comprehensible form.
- August Sander

August Sander's 1929 publication of Face of Our Time used photography to document the actual conditions of human beings and landscapes in a straightforward, sober, "unenhanced" manner. The still photograph was seen by Sander as a contemplatable image of the human spirit and its manifest forms in class, profession, people, nation, and so on. Though inspired by the then widely used and accepted, now dubious, notions of the science of physiognomy, Sander's photographic endeavor typecast social roles - literally tens of thousands of documents - into a personal vision of what it really means to be human. His sense of an era is exemplified by individuals whose sum total of widely diverse experiences constitutes a kind of generic human face. For Sander, the "straight" photograph engenders meaning when the medium is effaced in favor of the photographed subject "as it is." This is not to suggest that the medium is neglected; rather, it remains subjugated to a feeling for experience that only incidentally comes into contact with the camera. The photograph is not an end in itself but a means to construct thought and story regarding the conditions of humankind. Its nature, as a medium, is its technical economy in relation to other image-making media; and the making of an
image always implies a human face.
Bernd and Hilla Becher have specialized Sander's sense of a comprehensive photographic documentation, the face of a time, by creating an archive of industrial structures such as water towers, blast furnaces, silos, pumps, etc. Their still photo becomes a bit of information that can be stocked, retrieved, and used in a variety of "anthropological" and/or "sculptural" configurations. The Bechers' ongoing archive of industrial forms not only records a certain past, it also records the consciousness of a dying present, and poses the question of how this present can be
conserved, and for what purposes. "We wanted to provide a viewpoint or rather a grammar for people to understand and compare different structures. This is often impossible in their natural setting." So the photographic still functions as a sign in a comparative grammar of conservation that depends upon the destruction of the very physical structures giving rise to it in the first place. "Many of these structures are disappearing. All the time they are being dismantled or rusting and crumbling away. Our main problem is a fight against time." The technical photographic procedures used by the Bechers are themselves conservative, "unaffected," stable, and repetitive. The photograph does not draw attention to itself as such. Again, thoughts about its "nature" can only be considered in concert with the nature of its subject. Still, only photographs could be used to create the grammar the Bechers have in mind : the effacement or banalization of the medium gives rise to the conservation of its subject and photography in yet another realm of experience.
In Chris Marker's film, The Jetty (La jetée), still photographs are used as the near-exclusive means of visual narration in a form that he calls the photo-novel (photo-roman). Marker employs the still shots in a romance, a story that is also a critical reflection on the nature of historical discourse and its relations to the lives, or former lives, of lovers, which is to say Marker's image of the social essence of humankind. By subjecting the perception of the still to its position in a defined temporal sequence, the formal nostalgia of the old snapshot is reversed by the forward march of the story and the filmic sequence : the images of The jetty are apprehended now in the past, now in the future, and as this critical narration moves in linear fashion (from beginning to end), the film's succession of stills repeatedly thwarts any sense of progress - the plot does not develop as much, it is as if its parts were shaken loose from story and confronted with the still lifes of a world suspended between unforgettable past and unforeseeable future, whose present is a "museum which is perhaps the museum of memory...," and photography its eye and idea of place.

I am no doubt stretching a point to connect the art of Patrick Tosani to the photography mentioned above : the narrative content of his pictures occurs within a single frame, not in a succession of shots ; his work documents nothing more than his own procedures and choices of subjects; there is no archival, nor for that matter serial, significance involved in his work. Whereas the photography I've commented on tends to neutralize the specific material qualities of the photographic print, Tosani forefronts them; whereas the photographic object of the former is is its subject matter, Tosani's object is intended to stem from a certain "photographic paradigm" ; in one case the world appears to enter art, and in the other art appears to enter the world. Yet no less than the artists above - and in today's art world perhaps more directly - Tosani's work, among other contemporaries, has given rise to a discourse that questions the nature of photography as practice and product : what is photography good for ? how can it be used ? to what end ? what is its relationship to experience ? and art ?
In his Portraits (1984), Tosani takes the conventional straight-on bust shot of portraiture (in the form of a color slide), and projects the blurred, now featureless figure against a Braille primer. The raised surfaces of the Braille text become the features of the projected face - raised surfaces outside the facial area are erased. The results are disturbingly effective. What is never meant to be seen, but touched, is given image on the smooth surface of the photographic print, itself a surface that tends to erase or deny texture. The filled-in features of the face are now an epidermal text whose possibility of being read has been canceled only to be presented to the viewer as a text unreadable by sight alone. In referring to this group of pictures during a self-questioned interview, the artist says : "The only question is sight and touch, therefore photography." Without being as reductive as Tosani himself, these portraits could be perceived as the mere illustration of an intellectual riddle - if it were not for their pictorial beauty. Something in their composition presents us with a face, which is to say a portrait, but the face of what ? I daresay not photography. Or, if photography, then a highly idealized conception of the nature of the photographic print. A conception that would be extremely materialist in the end, and one which would then be hard to jibe with Tosani's depicted subjects. The effects of the photographic print are useful in the execution of Tosani's picture in the way that the effects of oil paint are useful in the execution of a still life; the medium influences the choice of subject matter. So what is the nature of photographic subject matter ?
The Rain group (1986), in which the artist has taken close shots of (artificial) "rain" (a frontal plane that fills nearly 120 cm by 160 cm of picture space), deals with one conception of photographic time, namely a photograph as the punctuation of continuous duration. In some of these pieces, Tosani has inserted a single transparent symbol - +, x, /, punctuation marks, etc. - which is used to break or interrupt the downpouring rainfall, punctuating time-as-duration as it transforms the sign into a kind of reified moment. What had been the symbol for a mathematical or linguistic operation becomes a metaphor for an operation that is pictorial, taking the picture itself. What Tosani has shown is that the photograph accepts these operational symbols happily, for the simple, and perhaps usefully repeated fact that taking a photograph is one kind of operation. But so is making a cake an operation, and a doughnut too can become an apt symbol for a conceptual, indeed pictorial, consideration of time. Or of what it means to take and display a photograph. The doughnut can also be a simply delicious metonymy of cake. In other words, a metaphor tells us more about its maker than it does about the nature of its object or analogy. What makes this group of pictures intriguing is not the fully intentioned concept of photography behind them but something in the picture itself, the pictorial forms that Tosani has given life to.
In Alphabet of Spoons (1988), enlarged close shots of the bowls of common coffee spoons fill the picture space. Light used when the shot was taken is now drawn onto the spoon-bowls as the light in the exhibit space reflects off the encased, predominantly silver print. The change of scale (from hand size to full body size), and cropping, make the spoon-bowls resemble mirrors, but mirrors which do not reflect the onlooking viewer and instead absorb the thought that one might be able to see one's own image. The sleight-of-hand displacement (spoon-bowl to mirror), and presenting a common object in another dress are common tactics of the art of (perceptual) deception. By deceiving the senses, the artist doubles the act of perception in the same time and place and sets up a play between expectations and effects. Trickery would involve completely masking the source of expectation by insisting that the effect is all there ever was to begin with. None of Tosani's pictures do that, and their strength often derives from the quick deceptive play between what we know a thing to be and what it has now become in (and as) the picture. His sense of which objects lend themselves to fruitful deception is particularly acute.
For example, in Heels (1987) each picture depicts a single factory-direct leather high-heel (before being painted or covered). Built out of layers of leather, then cut, the unadorned heel looks like anything but what it is. The deception here is not what it has become, which is rather unnameable (unlike the spoons), but how it resists being called what it is. The rising strata of earth-toned layers is a kind of construction or building-up, a geologist's cut, or a curiously elegant monument to something or other. The visual pun arising from the vertical climb of layers and the function of the high-heel justifies the change of scale to extra-large proportions. But what strikes me most about these pictures, again, is their respective forms and gracefully vertical elegance. Tosani's choice of a visual form as the single subject of a picture is the gift of a picture-taker - and one I am elated to accept, preferably in silence, in stillness.

The material terms of Tosani's art are those of the technical means and qualities of photography, or more precisely the photographic print up to a certain point. This is not a camera work but one which puts its emphasis on the photographic product, namely the printed picture. With but a few exceptions the pictures are microphotographs or close shots of small "objects," such as falling rain, ice cubes with frozen figures, coffee spoons, high-heels, drums, and more recently, pastry covered in chrome paint, fingernails, the air bubbles of carpenters' levels. These pictures are generally printed on a human scale, which is to say large format, and framed. Nearly all of his pictures have a single subject. The printing is done by a commercial lab after the artist has decided upon the exact scale, blocking, paper, bordering, and frame.
In each of Tosani's pictures, material photographic problems of scale, texture, focus, size, framing, subject, lighting, and so on are conceptualized and confronted with an object (usually a common one) that then becomes the main subject of pictorial form and conceptual interrogation. Despite the appearance of serial presentation - most subjects are in groups ranging from 7 to 20-odd pictures - the number in "a series" is arbitrarily fixed; it would be more exact to call them "groups" or "subject repetitions." The forms found in the pictures appear to have no particular geometric tendencies, though the large-format picture frames come off as repeatedly monolithic.
Once in front of Tosani's pictures there is no doubt that the artist has also meticulously reflected upon the meaning of their subject matter, which is to say the properties of the objects themselves when depicted. The skin of the drum invokes the surface of painting, (absent) sound, wear and tear in time; the air bubbles of the levels are used to equilibrate the wall upon which the picture is placed; bubbles resemble glass; pastry covered in chrome paint comments on both painting and the black-and-white print, desire inconsumable...
...A collection of still lifes. Curious still lifes, many of which tilt the exhibition space and the viewer's sense of perception, or become strangely deceptive objects of (pictorial) contemplation. Contemporary still objects that tend to emphasize temporal, conceptual play over spatial, formal play; language games over color games; abstract ideals over experimental ideas.
Many of Tosani's pictures derange conventional manners of describing the way we perceive photography. But they remain largely within the limited confines of pictorial appreciation. The play of the intellect caused by the more intriguing object-pictures seems to lack an experience of language, objects, and ideas that would extend its frame beyond the borders of art. The still shot moves within itself. And in considering the collection of Tosani's works, I am faced with the critical problem of experience in a world (larger than art) where the "face of our time" may indeed be featureless.