IMMINENT PERSPECTIVES

With the images in Imminent Perspectives, aberrant family snapshots, I hope to depict the human condition in an era characterized by the perpetual dread of such appalling phenomena as runaway global warming and widespread terrorism. Standing naked in public places, metaphorically vulnerable to the fear and apprehension accompanying isolation, the figures wear gas masks—symbolic safeguards against a profane state of nature.

The works in Imminent Perspectives are clichés verres, (a French term translated into English as “glass prints.” An avant-garde printmaking technique used by the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain and the Barbizon School in France, during the mid-nineteenth century, clichés verres combine elements of etching and photography. Arising naturally out of primitive experiments with photography, the cliché verre technique was simple; it required neither ink nor a camera to produce images.

Most early manifestations of photosphere in the 1840s and 1850s were, in essence, variations of the cliché verre. Those artists who used the technique to create original works, as opposed to reproductions, generally executed their negative designs on glass plates, either by painting directly on them or by coating the plates with a dark emulsion and scratching designs out with etching needles. Exposure was usually accomplished by turning the plate face down on light-sensitive paper and exposing it to sunlight. To print the picture the artist typically developed and fixed the paper in a darkroom.

With the introduction of the portable Kodak camera by George Easton in 1888, photography quickly became on the one hand, an art form unto itself, and on the other, a bourgeois avocation, used to generate family snapshots. As a consequence, the cliché verre virtually disappeared as an artist’s medium.

THINK TANK

I am working on Think Tank, an installation. The work will employ 8 life-sized models of human brains suspended in a clear medium in 2 1/2-gallon glass jars each connected by tubes and wires to a central control apparatus.

When the term think tank first came into English usage, it referred to military advisory organizations, such as the RAND Corporation (Research and Development), formed as an offshoot of Douglas Aircraft in 1946.

The first think tanks, generally with large research budgets and staffs, offered the United States government non-partisan military and policy advice. After 1970 an explosion of much smaller, ideologically driven think tanks began to focus exclusively on influencing both specific government policy and partisan politics for specific interests.

Contemporary think tanks represent a variety of ideological views but since all are privately funded, their critics have suggested they publish only those findings that ensure the continued flow of funding. Think tanks that are funded by the energy industry, forinstance, may ignore well-documented evidence of climate change, muddying the scientific debate and perhaps impeding a solution to what many consider a global catastrophe.

Think Tank employs eight life-sized models of human brains suspended in water in glass jars. Each brain is connected by tubes and wires to a central control apparatus, much as members of think tanks are managed by their employers.

The image of the human brain in a jar may have entered western iconography in Renaissance European cabinets of curiosity, encyclopedic collections of odd objects gathered by popes, princes and scholars. Organic oddities floating in jars of liquid later became standards of carnival and circus side shows and museums of the macabre and unusual.

The first visual reference to a brain in a jar I remember seeing was in James Whale’s 1933 film Frankenstein, in which the Doctor sends his assistant to his old medical school to steal a brain. The image itself had experienced a profound revolution, going from a curiosity on a seldom-seen dusty shelf to a prop in moving pictures projected on screens for millions of people around the world to see. It had also gained self-awareness—knew that it was helplessly trapped in a glass jar and being kept alive by a mad scientist hoping to communicate with it telepathically and harness its (inexplicable) extrasensory powers for his own often evil ends. It played to two of the deepest and most terrifying fears we share as a species—inescapable confinement and the utter loss of control.

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Ted Herlinger

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