. . . a myth is a device to mediate between culture and nature, either by culturizing nature or naturalizing culture.
Thomas McEviley 1

I am not claiming that rightness in the arts is less subjective, or even no more subjective, than truth in the sciences, but only suggesting that the line between artistic and scientific judgment does not coincide with the line between subjective and objective, and that any approach to universal accord on anything significant is exceptional.
Nelson Goodman 2

Experiences are ephemeral, consisting in perceptions. Memories perdure, subsisting in the retentions and transformations of experiences. 3 Memories are made from experiences; experience is made from memories. From experience art arises. 4 What begins as a perception of particularities moves to representations of universals given form for intersubjective perception; retentions transformed into projections.

Dornith Doherty's photographs are positioned in a liminal zone of discourses between the found and the made, the discovered and the invented, the subjectivity of individual experience and the intersubjectivity of experience commonly shared. One might well urge that this is the situation of all artworks; 5 in these works that situation is thematized as a portion of the content of the work. The layering, the sedimentation, of images and things in Doherty's works are formally analogous to the temporal as the form of sensibilty. 6

Doherty's works site the mediation between nature and culture within the motif of the landscape, itself a cultural construction 7 in distinction from the pregiven unconstructedness of terrain. As with Heidegger's distinction of 'world' from 'earth,' 8 the distinction of landscape and terrain entails the respective presence or absence of human agency. That is to distinguish culture as that which has its being by virtue of human agency, and nature as that which has its being apart from human agency. This is aporetic, for on this distinction landscape as a mode of world-making 9 is itself a cultural construction. Landscape in Doherty's images is at once literally a projection and a metaphor for the constructedness of landscape. Doherty's photographs employ the projection of photographic images of terrain onto assemblages of natural history specimens and artifacts, rephotographed to produce an image of a fictive landscape of the imagination. To term these images 'fictive' landscapes is to specify their status as inventions, as being other than indexical 10 representations of pre-existing actualities. To characterize these landscapes as fictitious is not to characterize their truth status, which is independent of their inventedness: the entities represented are not the referent of these representations. Indeed, Doherty's works both engage the indexicality common to photographs and the iconic and symbolic modalities 11 of signification common to the fabrications of still life. On the one hand, the photograph in its indexicality evokes the once-presentness of the thing photographed. The causal narrative connecting the photograph qua index and the thing photographed underwrites a particular mode of viewer response; thus Roland Barthes:

The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have now is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence. . .its reality [is] that of the having-been-there. . . . 12

Any photograph containing another image is, in a broad sense at least, a picture of picturing. More narrowly, in this structure of embedding, one voice conveys in a single discourse a visual dialogue by images that seems typical of language. 13

Through associative linkage, the no longer living worlds of memory also get a kind of being, despite their no longer being actual; the present 'awakens' a past, flows over into a submerged intuition and its world. 15

Chapter 18 incorporates lines text fragmented by a field of imbricated rectangles, alternately revealing and concealing the text, rendering it unreadable but for isolated words and letters. The text is inverted in the upper register; the 18 of the title appears alone and prominently at a larger scale in the middle register, while the lower register presents three lines of fragmented text. While the text is overlapped by the rectangles, it is visually proximal. A landscape image is projected over the field of rectangles and text, a level plain receding to mountains at the left, and a blue sky cut from the left by a streak of rose cloud. Particularly in the sky, the syntax of image grain structure and the texture of the paper rectangles combine in interaction with the hue gradient to suggest the effect of a watercolor wash.

In Family Tree, the texture of cloth is imposed on the image field, with linen handkercheifs or napkins floating in water. A branching plant specimen with dried leaves floats, layered above the underlying field, grafted to a trunk with a rubber band: a family tree as a construction. An image of an ochre field with a blue sky is projected onto the assemblage. Small specular highlights and reflections of light sources speckle the surface, and like the 'tree' pull forward, while the square of the cloth recedes behind the 'tree' but nevertheless appears above the landscape image projected onto it. Seeds attached to cottony fluff, perhaps from a cottonwood tree (Populus deltoides), float across a blue field in Primordial Soup as if stars. A sense of random motion is produced by repetition of the seeds in various orientations across the field. In Primordial Soup, the projected landscape iamge is somewhat out of focus, the unsharpness a metaphor for the not yet determined. The zone of brightness concentrated in the middle left of the image field is suggestive of an area of higher energy. Entropy does not obtain here; rather, the concentration of luminosity is an abrogation of isomorphism. This brighter zone within the field appears as a nebula, an accumulation of luminous gas from which stars form. More aptly with respect to the title, it suggests nascent biological activity concentrated within a solution of complex organic molecules.

In Paseo de Cortes, a white blouse with round collar forms two mountain peaks framing a pass; the effect is at once enhanced and contradicted by the shadows cast by the collar on the support. The association of the landscape with the female body inherent in the production of the effect of mountains through the use of the collar of the blouse is ancient.16 Three gray shamrocks appear at the upper left; two more are visible to the left and right of center in the lower register. A landscape with a walking figure, seen from behind, is projected over the assemblage. The horizon, emphasized by a line of bare trees, makes a stong horizontal axis against the lighter central vertical axis set up by the figure, the vertical fold of the blouse, and the opening of the collar forming the pass.

On the central vertical axis of Paradise Lost, dried pepper pods, split open to reveal their seeds, form leaf shapes suggesting a plant; a watch glass holding a seed head suggests a flower. The abundance of plant forms in Paradse Lost evokes a garden, but a garden in winter, a garden gone to seed, a garden after a fall. A thorny cane parallel to the image plane marks the foreground space, dividing the viewer's space from the deeper virtual spce of the image. The objects in Paradise Lost, like the blouse in Paseo de Cortes, casts shadows on the supporting substrate of the set, producing a shallow, almost bas relief effect, in contrast to the deeper virtual space of the projected image. The shift from shallow to deep space is a matter of one's regard in selecting those relationships between image elements that are given attention. The copositioning of incommensurable spatial readings within the work introduces an ambiguity that obviates closure.

Doherty's works place into question a simplistic distinction of nature and artifice which would ignore the cultural production of nature qua concept. This making visible of the aporia inherent in the distinction of nature and artifice reminds one of Kant's dictum:

Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.17

Doherty's works are at once rich memory palaces with personal associations in the objects and images employed in their facture, and transcend the personal in their engagement of questions fundamental to considering of the means by which meaning is made from memory and experience, the particularity of sense perception and the universal of thought. For as John Berger has urged,

Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. . . . Meaning is the result of understanding functions.18

Dornith Doherty is Professor of Art at University of North Texas, following thirteen years on the faculty of the Herron School of Art, Indianapolis. Doherty received the Bachelor of Arts from Rice University and the Master of Fine Arts from Yale University. She was recently Fulbright Lecture/Research Scholar at Universidad de las Americas, Cholula, Mexico, and was a Indiana Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship Recipient in 1993-1994. Recent exhibitions include: James Gallery, Houston, Texas, 2000; The Shelf Life of Objects: Contemporary Still Life Photography, University of Texas at Dallas, 2000; Spectres Dornith Doherty and Sybil Miller: Contemporary Color Photography, Rhode Island College, 2000; Voices: Recent Work by Dornith Doherty, Texas A & M University, Commerce, 1999; Blurred Boundaries, Winter Street Art Center, Houston, 1998; Introductions: Contemporary Texas Photographers, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, 1997-1998; Revelation, Dallas Visual Arts Center, 1997-1998.

1. Thomas McEviley, "Heads its Form, Tails its Not Content," Art and Discontent: Theory at the Millennium (New York: McPherson and Company / Documentext, 1991), pp. 23-62. [Initial publication: Artforum 17:5 (Jan. 1979), 50.] Return
2. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. 140. Cf. Martin Heidegger, "Science and Reflection," The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 155-182; initially given as a lecture "Wissenschaft und Besinnung," August 1954. Return
3. See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Geneaology of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Initial publications as Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Geneaology der Logik (Hamburg: Claassen und Goverts, 1948). Return
4. Aristotle, Meta. 980a-981a. Return
5. Inter alia, see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on the Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), especially Hegel's Introduction, 6.i.a-d., pp. 25-32. Hegel's lectures on aesthetics were composed in the 1820's, and postumously published. Return Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Geneaology of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 164. Cf. Kant's thesis that "Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever." Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A34 trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), p.77. Initial publication as Critik der reinen vernunft (Riga: Johan Friedrich Hartknoch, 1787). Return
6. For an introduction to the historicity of the concept of landscape as such, see Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art (London: John Murray, 1949, 1976). Return
7. See especially Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971, 1975), pp. 165-186. Initial publication as "Das Ding," Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), from a lecture first given at the Bayerischen Akademie des Schënen Kunst, 6 June 1950 and printed in Jahrbuch der Akademie, Band I, Gestalt und Gedanke 1951, p. 128 ff. Return
8. Reference is to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Return
9. For the concept of indexical signs (those having signification by causal relation) see Charles S. Peirce, "Logic As Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," ed. Justus Buchler, Philosophical Writings of Pierce (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 98-119. Return
10. I am using 'icon' and 'symbol' in Peirce's technical sense; see Charles S. Peirce, "Logic As Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," ed. Justus Buchler, Philosophical Writings of Pierce. New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 98-119. Return
11. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 44. Return
12. Norman Bryson, Mieke Bal, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73:2 (June 1991), 20. Return
13. See Francis A. Yates' magisterial classic, The Art of Memory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1966). Return
14. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 178. Return
15. 16 See Vincent Scully, The Earth, he Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Return
16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929, 1965), p. 93. Return
17. John Berger, "Uses of Photography," About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 51. Return 4