Reviews of Situations

Reviews

Some purists disclaim the effects of words upon a photograph. Only for identification will they accede to even the use of a title, and that, they contend, should be noncommittal; i.e., “Untitled 17” or “Portrait of Tamar.” Titles are not significant to David Arnold or Lisa Bloomfield (Project Arts Center, 141 Huron av., Cambridge), yet letters, words, and punctuation function in their work.

Arnold alters unpeopled spaces—burned-out rooms and condemned apartments. His imagery derives in no small instance from that of John Divola, one of the first contemporary photographers to alter spaces. Divola uses colorful spray paint to decorate his decrepit environment with slashes, dots and curvy lines, after which he photographs in color.

There is a visible narrative element in Arnold’s black and white conceptions. His photographs are suffused with nostalgia, often sporting the tag ends of a scene that can be inferred or invented. He will assemble a group of chairs in a dingy apartment whose windows have been battered out. Beneath the chairs, which seem arranged as for a small lecture, he will paint words that echo and repeat themselves; “I could hear it/I could see it/I was delighted.” The antecedent of “it” must somehow be determined.

Around the ceiling in one of his images is the alphabet as penned painstakingly by some moronic giant. Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd. The walls are charred, and the room is vacant save for a fire of newspapers in a tiled fireplace. Visually, the image is complete; it speaks of the ache of loss or stifled despair without rendering particulars. Arnold’s variation and expansion of Divola’s construct is often beguiling.

Kelly Wise; Boston Globe, December 19, 1982



It’s a strange scene. Not this rolling, rollicking street-car city—though it certainly has its peculiarities—but the graffiti-scrawled and battered room of a Victorian farmhouse where toy airplanes hang from a charred ceiling and a riderless horse peers mysteriously through a window. The black and white image is just one of the add gems produced by local photographer David Arnold and on display in the Mission District’s Eye Gallery. But are these photographs truly reasonable? Folding chairs line up as silent soldiers in dilapidated rooms—what are they waiting for? Buildings ruined, burned or collapsed are juxtaposed with new, bright beach balls and toys, mannequins, working televisions (from where came the electricity?). Pin-ups from the 40s peer through wall-to-wall layers of a baffling language—Magic Marker snippets from Arnold’s novels, journals, and poetry.

“I wanted to get across a sense of play,” the soft-spoken, Iowa-born Arnold says. “My work is serious, but not deadly serious. It’s graffiti, or anti-graffiti. But, then again, maybe it’s not.”

How admirable. An artist unafraid of subtle humor in an era of high-mindedness. Situations, the book, is a 88-page collection of photographs more fancy than fact about his 5-year photographic adventure in vacant and abandoned buildings in central and northern California. He visits them with a truckload of props. Photogenic as these once-busy interiors may have been, documenting them for their own sake is not Arnold’s intent. Arnold, 34, says he wanted to create within them a photographic “situation,” a fiction that otherwise would not have existed. The result is as startling and fun as it is strange. “These are not installations or sculptures. The paramount concern is the photograph.” After building up these abandoned structures for his camera, and taking the photograph, he empties the buildings out again.

Arnold is an author, too, of Chain of Letters (Trike, 1977), a graphic work, and he has been represented in Artweek, Kaldron, Aspen Anthology and the Boston Globe, among others. His photographs have been exhibited in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad.

George Myers Jr.; Sunday Patriot-News, 1985