Review / Lisa

“Surface Tension” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition, “Surface Tension” deals with photographs by various artists, which demand your attention to be directed to the surface, as they play with the tension between the actual surface of the photographs and the illusion of depth. One way of achieving this tension is by placing several small square photographs next to each other, each with a different image inside, so that the viewers are aware of this flatness, but can see images within each flat square. It is similar to a wall with many windows that you can see into. This technique was done by Giuseppe Penone. Some did not even look like photographs, but instead, looked like paintings. A specific one that comes to mind is Robert Demachy’s “Struggle” (1903), which shows a nude woman from behind, and from the position and strange background, it leads our minds to someone in the womb. The woman also looks very much like someone who would be in a Renaissance painting. Another technique was to actually photograph flat surfaces, such as Walker Evans’ “[Torn Movie Poster, Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts].”

Going with this idea of photographing flat surfaces, the main focal point of the exhibition was Miles Coolidge’s “Accident Investigation Site” (2005). Coolidge was always extremely fascinated by accident sites, and would photograph them. This particular photograph was taken with a large format digital camera as many photos, but later put together, piece by piece, to create a 7.5’x22’ photograph of an asphalt freeway ground. You can see a cigarette bud, cracks, holes, blackened gum, and stains on the ground. Although this fits the exhibition’s theme, I wonder what exactly the purpose was of this photograph, and why he enlarged it to a one-to-one scale when, in my opinion, there is not a great deal of interesting detail to examine in the photograph.

Similarly, in Pertti Kekeraine’s “TILA (Passage I)” (2006) and Daido Moriyama’s “Suwa, Nagano” (1982), there is not much detail or depth to allow your eyes to move around the photograph to receive more information than you did within the first few seconds of looking. Kekeraine’s photograph contains many glass walls and doorways, which finally lead to a glass window. This creates a handful of layers filled with rectangular shapes, and frames within frames, while Moriyama’s photograph has a fly sitting on a window that has raindrops, and a blurred city with mountains in the background. This image also creates a layered look.

I thought that the theme of this exhibition was quite interesting, and I liked it very much because the photographs clearly supported this theme of “surface tension.” However, I felt that most of the photographs lacked conceptual depth when they lost most of their spatial depth, which gave me less of a chance to really jump into the images and discover more the longer I looked at them. Instead, after the first few seconds, I felt like I was finished looking at the images because there was nothing new to see in them, and I would move on. To clarify, I believe these photographs were excellent in supporting the exhibition’s theme, but if they were to stand alone, I would be a bit bored of them because of their lack of detail.