ZOE CROSHER: THE SANTA CRUZ KIDS
       By Misha Ringland


Dry, Empty swimming pools.


The only terminal ovarian things in California are the empty swimming pools. 
Forlorn and blank even accusatory as if the suburban house up-ended and 
pressed itself into the pavement, as if the numbers of it all demanded an 
empty contrapuntal embrace matching the thousands of drywall hyphenations 
between one space and another. Only a Manhattan exile could live in a one. 
So this is the place.


The bodies are all bending into some current of air that presses against them 
in the small confining interiors of small rooms. The people are shaped by these 
faint currents and the force of the pressure presses muscle under synthetic 
material into angular contortions like milk spilled and blown thin by a straw on a tabletop.


These compact groupings of people who just barely touch in solitary orbits and 
are compressed by the lens into positions as ephemeral as the the number of Smiths 
in the phone book. They have no choice, really. They have to be where they are at 
that exact moment. And the camera too.


The portraits by Zoe Crosher are of artistsand musicians living and working in California. 
They project a certain malign indifference keyed to artificiality, and even theatricality. 
The people of these pictures are even to a certain extent bored with the whole thing, 
having discovered that they too are products of a scene manufactured by medialysis 
pumped by images from this or that runway, atelier, opening, etc etc. So the effect 
is a crushing of precedents (why bother?) while still celebrating the traces as if owned 
in just that minute. I'll try it. There is a knowing registration that an image is being 
made or will be made just because they are there. They are subjects and the evidence 
suggesting a way and willingness to take on commercialized ennui by manufacturing 
existence not as a reaction to violence, desire, or love but as exhaustion without 
breaking a sweat. It's like taxidermy. Don't the collapsed figures seem familiar? 
Unlike commercial fashion photography which seeks to convey a lifestyle that the 
clothes can create by being simply worn for a few hundred dollars here and there - 
these artists are within the context before the money exchanges hands. They are 
both the product and consumer. We are far, far away from "I am the wound, I am 
the knife." Baudelaire, Bert Lahr.


This is the course of our art and literalism that will find significance in repitition but 
not ruin. California is where sorts and types lose their orbits, they become transfixed 
into patterns of recognition. Predictable and welcome. They suggest a kind of seedy 
retreat. a clandestine party on a back lot, maybe, even, just a motel.


Desire is withheld. Buy and waiting. Desire is coaxed by images linking feeling to a 
thing that punches you with cold thin veneers of emotion.


Find a way to valorize the absence of effect.

Langor pushing into time, waiting for something to happen that shifts what is natural 
somewhere in a world controlled not by time but mood. This is a world that makes 
sense in available light.


I feel as if I'm in an elevator.


The space is so cramped and filled with other bodies that contact is unavoidable and 
even so, eroticized. It is as if the distance we normally give our selves , the barrier or 
the buffer, was somehow squished and sudden proximity itself is sufficiently magnetic 
to cause desire for more penetration. And this is the underlying idea of the photographs. 
Almost every physical form is pushing against something else- that holds it back or yields. 
Only thin straps (the body itself has shadows that seem as straps) hold anything; everything 
else is pushing.These rooms have no books (no received tradition), there is no decoration or 
only the most rudimentary (pages from a magazine, a poster, in any case images as flat and 
cheap as possible) there is in short nothing but piles of soft things. 
Sofas, clothes heaped, rugs.


There is electricity leaving used light flat on the floor around lamps. The men are crushed 
into style and sometimes into drag, feminized because that is understood as the most 
direct expression of sexuality through clothing. They look dry. Underneath they are skinny 
men like wire in concrete. The women are getting out of their clothes- skirts, straps, shoes 
are all tight against the push of skin. The camera shows them close and penetrating space 
with heels, toecaps, elbows, shoulders, knees. It is as if their bones themselves are erotic 
engines poking against their smooth skin bags as if to say, I'm tight, made tighter. The clothes 
cling to the swoop of muscles trailing behind bones, smooth and skimming with static electricity 
some of which trips the shutter. These are images of preparation.


These are a series of adjustments.


Colors are patterns and flat belonging to surfaces like walls and floors. The shift between 
colors is muted, easy, without strain. Skin is a pattern swallowed, dissolved, felt. Taxidermy.


A house is a hole above ground.


Dry bodies swim in dry currents across the hole of the camera. Hard and enough.


MR
  
  
      #### 1999 ####