ZOE CROSHER: OUT THE WINDOW (LAX)
By Julian Myers
I leave half-conscious while the morning is bruise-purple; time stutters
past, eyes open and shut. I am in the air watching the night retreat over
the ocean and then, as if in a dream, I’m in a dim bathroom in Sea-Tac
airport. I stay for minutes, watching the mirror and listening to passengers
piss fitfully. I splash my face with water, and then call you again. Has
it only been six hours? “I’m in Seattle. I’m here.”
I don’t know why I’ve come, but now I can’t go home.
Out the Window (LAX) is a series of thirty-one photographs taken over
a period of four years, from 2001 to 2005. Each picture is, in its exhibition
size, twenty-seven inches square, the size of a window. The photographs
are discernibly of a piece, and share formal particularities across the
series. The sharp geometry of the cropped edge is often echoed within the
image itself, with windowsills and standing lamps carving up the picture
into planes of faded color. There are great shifts of focus within each
frame. The photographer is in a room, but her eye is sharpest in the long
distance, looking out through dust-smeared windows and smoked-glass patio
doors; this habit tend to soften the details of her immediate surround into
a sensuous blur of patterns. It is a look is simultaneously alluring and
alienated. The photographs work as studies of form, cascades of expressionist
off-color structured by the architectonic vectors of window jambs and catwalk
railings, though great attention is nevertheless paid to the contents of
these rooms, to their hissing air conditioners and patterned curtains, and
to the wedges of morning illuminating their shadowy tableaux. These are
Better Homes and Gardens profiles shot by a modernist, Neo-Plasticist painting
brought back home again.
These spaces are not homes, however, but hotel rooms, all from the area
surrounding the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). This distinction
is meaningful. There are twenty-seven hotels, and so twenty-seven pictures,
a figurative map of the periphery of the airport. Each photograph is named
for the hotel in which it was taken, which gives them blank, descriptive
titles, which evoke the vanilla poetry of tourist cliché (“Sea Breeze Inn”,
“Adventurer Hotel”), clunky neologism (“Travelodge”), and class pretense
(“Embassy Suites”). The rooms themselves speak this limited language
fluently, and reproduce its most naked aspiration:the promise that travel
might momentarily free the one who performs it from themselves,
from the ballast of their class, personality, memory and responsibilities.
Therefore these spaces are without any distinct character, and approach
the character of semiotic signifiers: beds proffer duvets less comfortable
than intending to represent comfort, and shag carpets are less luxurious
than designed to evince luxury. Parenthetical curtains are thick, to hold
out the light of morning; generic nightstands declaratively present business
cards and lists of cable channels. Plastic-strap deck furniture waits passively
to carve its signature into someone’s derrière.
The series has the consistency of a conceptual project, if not the look
of one. In his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, ” published in
Artforum in 1967, Sol LeWitt wrote, “When an artist uses a conceptual
form of art, it means that all planning and decisions are made beforehand
and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that
makes the art.” The idea that produced Out the Window (LAX) was simple
enough. The photographer would spend the night at the hotel, sometimes with
a friend, and sometimes alone. (Several collateral photographs depict these
friends, sleeping or standing in the doorway, but Out the Window scrupulously
excludes their presence). When morning came, she would aim her camera through
the frame of the room towards the airport—the center of gravity around
which all these hotels orbit—and press the shutter when an airplane
came into view. The camera’s focus would be trained on the plane in
the distance, rather than the foreground; marks of the immediate environment
would be allowed to intrude. The body of work would admit a single image
from each site, creating a “basic unit” which, in the presence of the complete
series, would offer a virtual map of the LAX hotel belt.
Crosher’s method works through the difficulty of taking pictures of Los Angeles,
and what she understands as its resistance to being pictured. Photography has
typically been understood to be an indexical practice, one bound to recording a
certain place and time; LA, however, is best characterized by constant motion,
and by the duration of transit. It is a place seen through windows of cars, or
airplane windows, always while in motion. How should we approach, in the
artist’s words, “a place that moves in shifts and perpetual motion, with no
real center, no point of concentration"? Her response is to take a sidelong
glance at one of its most transitional spaces, a conduit through which people
are constantly in motion: the airport. Her look is not direct or documentary,
but is figured through an array of photographic feints, reflection, and
circumstantial filters. The silver airplanes, when they appear in the field of
these photo-maneuvers, are an image of a technological promise flashing
into view, a myth of motion with bright steel skin. What they promise is a
way out of the self, and a passive immersion in the endless flow of travel,
promises as powerful as those made by the hotel interiors, and bound to
the most powerful dreams of modernity:anonymity, frictionless travel,
luxury, and freedom from the passing of time.
But this is a dream from which she is always waking up. A mirage, shimmering,
bent in the sun. It unfolds then disappears. The plane is grounded, and
the trip is over. The traveler off-boards, and enters into the bustling
corporate zocalo. She pays a stoned employee three dollars pulled from her
bag, and sips a reconstituted orange juice from a clear plastic cup. She
checks the mobile if it’s got bars, pulls down her jacket, and marks
time until her bags emerge. Piss. Pass some time. Home again. These are
images of time passing slowly in a world where everything is supposed
to be traveling quickly. They are monumentally still for a place about transition,
and missing all the people conceivably moving about in them, inhabiting
planes and leaving them, driving, sleeping, eating, fucking in the rooms
or arguing in the carport. None of that finds a place in the pictures; there
is no city-bustle, just solitude. The room is empty and still; bags of fast
food, indices of habitation, are scattered across the table; chips of paint
flake from the grille of the radiator. The hotel fills the photograph, overwhelms
the punctum of the aircraft with details seen in the muted half-light of
the hotel suite. Time passes but slowly; the claustrophobic ecstasy of travel
dissipates into a narcotic haze.
[…]
(more to come when book is published!) |