The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature. Platonic dialogues of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.
Gaston Bachelard 1
Everyday life, on Heidegger's view, is the pre-reflective life one leads without paying attention to it. Situated within everyday life prior to any reflection, one indwells. This situatedness is not static, but inherently obtains within a domain of change. Change entails time as the form of sensibility in which entities appear. 2 Time is not experienced only in the Augenblick of a present now, but in the anticipation of a future and the recollections of memory. As Husserl notes:
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. 3
If this obtains within pre-reflective everyday life, all the more so for those cultural forms which employ the modes of lived experience of the temporality of one's being-in-the-world. Thus photographs, on Roland Barthes' view, engage a unique mode of temporal consciousness:
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. . . . 4
These twenty one small cyanotypes of Kendall Davis are contact prints from 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 inch negatives. These are photographs of quotidian moments. Nothing extraordinary happens. Everything that happens in them is extraordinary. That is too easily overlooked, in a time when large scale is too readily equated with quality, and loud visual rhetoric is too frequently confused with seriousness of purpose.
The intimate scale of the works precludes more than one viewer at a time from closely seeing the image, or a single viewer from seeing closely more than one print at a time. Seeing the images closely is essential, not merely because of the scale of the woks, but for their quiet character. Looking at a small image, one draws near to pay attention. One's drawing near is of course a function of visual acutance; one comes closer the better to see. But more than the optics of visual perception is entailed in one's drawing near. Drawing near engages both nearness in the everyday spatial sense of the proximal, and nearness in the Heideggerian temporal sense. 5 The viewer's experience of nearness is proximity to the work, and an intimacy with the work, which is not merely a matter of proximity but also of Einfühlung, empathy. 6 One's proximity to the work reflexively manifests one's embodiedness. One's spatial proximity to the work also precludes one's simultaneous experience of an other work: close to a work, adjacent works are removed from the field of view. The duration of one's attending to a work is manifested in the concentrated viewing of a single work, though one's viewing is informed by the retention in memory of works already viewed. Those other works already viewed vary of course, as a function of the experience findividual viewers. Nevertheless, some categorization is possible: the previously viewed works on the gallery walls, the canonical works of the history of photography as a medium, the snapshots of family life. Both of these latter polarities are referenced and encompassed in Davis' works. Both are organizations of memory, of a culture and of a family, respectively. These categories are not mutually exclusive, they are rather mutually informing and constituitive. As categories, they are merely frameworks for understanding, and nothing more than that. Any number of works transcends what might too easily seem a clear distinction between the categories: the works of the Lumière brothers, of Jacques Henri Lartigue, of Emmet Gowin, for example, are canonical while the photographs of countless amateurs are not. 7 This is not a matter of what was photographed: the ostensible content of canonical and noncanonical work is frequently similar. Nor is it simply a matter of technical skill. Nor is it simply a matter of canonical works being known and appropriated for the archive, while the incalculable number of photographs produced by everyone simply to record the events of their lives languish in innumerable albums and boxes. If the distinction is not always as clear as it might be, this is in part because the matter entails a complex
set of conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or totally new statements, and in accordance with which it can be modified. 8
Michael Foucault's assertion alludes to the field of practices within which a body of work is constituted, and which each instance of practice redefines by its addition. This is not novel: T. S. Eliot asserts much the same with respect to poetry:
what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens to all the works of art that preceeded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for the order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; . . . 9
Eliot's formulation is helpful,but in itself insufficient. Arthur Danto's thesis serves adequately as the fundamentum divisionis that Eliot presupposes but does not provide. To thus perturb the existing order entails that:
works of art, in categorical distinction with mere representations, use the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented. 10
The modes of practice of photography as an artist's medium (as with any medium) employ the sedimented conventions of the medium, even when the employment is one of negation. To work within a medium is equiprimordially to work with a tradition of conventions and to work outside that tradition, to position oneself at once between retention and protention.
So in Kendall Davis' photographs. The cyanotype process is venerable, dating from the early history of the medium. 11 Using it now, when the expectation of how a photograph appears in the physicality of its material cause is commonly a chromogenic color print, or an gicleé print appearing as if it were a chromogenic print, or a gelatin silver print, is precisely to emphasize the physicality of the print, handcoated on rag paper, the edges of the coated area distinctly visible as such. The cyanotype process does not favor high resolution, but broad areas rather than fine detail. The effect of this a more painterly 12 descripton of form, conducing to universality at the cost of specific particularity. The notion of the snapshot is yet more venerable. The first recorded use of the term occurs in an entry, in 1808, in the diary of an English sportsman fortuitously named Hawker, noting that nearly every bird he had bagged was had by means of a snapshot, made hurriedly, without deliberate aim. The term is transferred to photographs as early as 1860, Sir John Herschel speculates on the eventual possibility of making photographs using very brief exposure times, "as it were, by snapshot". 13 In their seeming informality no less than their ostensible content, Kendall Davis' photographs allude both to the quotidian, mass culture practice of family snapshots and the history of previous appropriations of that practice. Something more obtains, however. The informality of Davis' work proves illusory on close examenation. The ostensible content, recording moments of family life, obtains but generates a supplement of photograph qua locus of memory as an overarching level of content. This is so commonplace that one forgets how extraordinary it is. As John Berger has urged:
The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory. . . . Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. . . . Meaning is the result of understanding functions. 14
The works function as repositories of memory, for the artist certainly, but for the viewer as well; if the specific memories differ from individual to individual, the motifs of family and home are universal. As such, the works elict a depth of response. It is this depth of response-what is in the end its inexhaustibility-that distinguishes the work as aartworks. Thus Mikel Dufrenne:
The depth of the aesthetic object is measured by the depth of the existence to which it invites us. Its depth is correlative with ours. 15
clockwise from the gallery entrance
All works are cyanotypes, contact printed from 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 inch negatives.
Recent exhibitions by Dallas artist Kendall Davis include: Assistance League of Houston Celebrates Texas Art 2002; Three Photographers, 500X, 2002; Home Sweet Home, Arlington Museum of Art, 2002; Being Connected, Swedish American Museum, Chicago, 2001; If These Walls Could Talk, Texas Council on Family Violence Conference, Fort Worth, 2001; Illuminance, Lubbock, Buddy Holly Center, 2001; Just Good Art, Hyde Park Center, Chicago, 2001; Art With A Southern Drawl X, The University of Mobile, 2001; Everyday Life, Irving Arts Center, 2000; Departure / Return, Meadows Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University, 2000; Image 2000, ArtCentre of Plano, 2000; Art in the Metroplex, Texas Christian University, 2000. Kendall Davis received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Methodiist University and the Master of Fine Arts from American University, Washington, D.C.