ZOE CROSHER: EMERGING ARTIST
       Jonathan Gilmore trips the light fantastic



One of the enduring provocations Los Angeles has offered 
artists is its resistance to being fixed or captured in some 
essential principle. Writers who try to ascend to some high 
plateau from which to survey the city, often end up in thin 
air with nothing but reductive generalities about commodification 
or bland conformity. Norman Mailer, for instance, dismissed 
LA as ‘a playground for mass men’ animated by ‘the spirit 
of the supermarket’ while Bertolt Brecht noted in his journal 
that, in LA, ‘you are constantly either a buyer or a seller, 
you sell your piss, as it were, to the urinal’.  Other writers, 
or a seller, aspiring to expose the city’s genuine core but 
recognizing the futility of that endeavor, fall back, coyly, 
on only ironic formulations, as in Umberto Eco’s positing 
of the ‘hyperreal’- the stimulation of the desire for mocked-
up or ersatz experience – as a local-born national condition.


However, painters and photographers, exploiting the open-
endedness that visual representations allow, have been able 
at times to discover approaches that, often tentative and oblique, 
avoid the two extremes of either falsifying declarative summary 
or capitulation to lack of fixedness. Zoe Crosher belongs to 
this tradition – one that includes Ed Ruscha’s photos of gas stations, 
Catherine Opie’s prosaic, documentary-style representations of 
mini-malls and shopping strips, and John Baldessari’s windshield 
views of National City – pursuing a photographic practice that is 
conceptual in orientation yet bound to vernacular representation. 
Out the Window (LAX) (2001-05) is comprised of a series of 31 
photographs taken from just as many hotels surrounding the 
Los Angeles airport. Each image, roughly window-sized, records, 
with a casual, seemingly snapshot artlessness, a plane landing 
and taking off as seen from the room. Recognizing the challenge 
of representing what she has described as a ‘place that moves 
in shifts and perpetual motion, no real center, no point of concentration’, 
Crosher, whose Mother was a flight attendant, documents one 
of the sites of those transitions, registering in the less-focused 
foreground the regulation faux-bois air conditioner, polyester 
drapes, stain-resistant rugs, clock radios and tidy beds.  These 
photos set up a relation between the plane, as an icon of untethered 
movement, escape and arrival, and the cheap hotel room, as 
a fixed, marginal site that never serves as a destination, but as a 
place one passes through.  Crosher would stay for the night in 
each of the hotels, a program which suggests that the systematic 
structure of the experience is more significant than the recorded 
experience itself.  While LAX is the ostensible subject, Crosher 
uses the airport and its surrounds as a figure by which to 
understand Los Angeles itself, a strategy shared by those who 
embraced such things as its freeway system, not as a cause or 
symptom of the city’s elusiveness but as a key to its identity: 
an ‘autopia’ for British critic Reyner Banham, who wrote that, 
just like earlier generations of intellectuals ‘who taught 
themselves Italian to read Dante in the original, I learned to 
drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original’.


Crosher continues this indirect approach to Los Angeles in LA-LIKE, 
a series of photographs begun in 2004 that record the city’s 
abundant light, an element often taken as a standing metaphor 
for the place, alternately, of spiritual transcendence, vacant 
pleasure, natural plentitude or sunbaked narcissism. Images 
of the rising and setting sun as seen through nearly closed 
curtains or shutters, garden gates, palm trees and foliage, 
as well as of bright white skies and what appear to be moonlit 
nights, the prints are sometimes developed as so dark as to be 
nearly unreadable or as so light as to withhold any significant 
differentiation. They suggest that, just as light cannot be 
perceived in itself but only through its effects on objects that 
it illuminates, so Los Angeles, whose ineffability frustrates 
any direct encounter, can be seen only in a sidelong glance.


A third kind of work, created in collaboration with fellow artist 
Leslie Grant, is the Michelle du Bois Project, constituted of 
various installations and exhibitions of photographs drawn 
from a collection of pictures belonging to a woman who 
worked as a prostitute throughout Asia during the 1970s 
and 80s.  Often adopting conventional calendar pinup poses, 
du Bois appears in some photographs as if on-site in elaborate 
costumes of a kitsch-exotic equivalent of traditional, ritual dress.  
In others, the context is far from an exotic locale: in images 
that form part of an installation at D’Amelio Terras, she poses
in a cheesy ‘gypsy’ get-up, all glitter and veils in a cheap wood-
panelled suburban kitchen. Drawing from what is described as 
the personal archive of a white, Western woman traveling in 
Asia as a prostitute, the project necessarily touches on question 
of self-fashioning and self-representation. But it also reflects on 
photographic practice itself: with their crude, vernacular style 
and willful self-assertiveness, the images have at once a pathos 
and an authority that is prior to any high-art manipulation of the 
images as ready-mades. Here, as in Crosher’s ever-mediated 
attempts to register the essence of L.A., we see the self-reflexivity 
of photographic depiction – in which the object of representation 
makes salient features of the practice and practitioner of 
representation itself.