McKnight Fellowship for visual artists, minneapolis

Essay by Jan Tumlir, May 2006

In the most general sense, the work of Suzanne Kosmalski seems to take shape on and around the concept of a territory, meaning that it is from the first moment concerned with the experience of “being there” in relation to an “elsewhere.” Of course, these two perspectives (on and around) are mutually supportive, just as territory is itself as much a product of what is included as what is excluded. Furthermore, for photography in particular – Kosmalski’s chosen medium – all such territorial questions are entirely germane. The space of each individual shot is determined by the act of framing, the mapping of a strict set of pictorial coordinates upon a visual field that is continuous, expanding outward in every direction. The photograph is thereby a virtual territory, cutting the world away at its borders, and in this light, a sequence, a suite, or series of photographs bespeaks territorial expansion, the exercise of virtual colonialism, the consolidation of a virtual empire. Innately, photography dramatizes the aggressively acquisitive nature of the gaze, but in so doing it also invites a host of self-conscious regrets and frustrations. “Everything I see is on principle within my reach,” writes the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but this is not exactly true in the case of the photograph which is precisely a record of where one was, and is, not. At least, at that moment when the picture was taken – a moment made eternally present, “there” – the subject is plainly “elsewhere.”


To an extent, these are points that may be applied to all photographs (although perhaps increasingly less so), but here they are glaring. Kosmalski’s own gaze has vacillated impulsively between territories that are both fantastic and real, but whether it lands on Marlene Dietrich in a scene from her famous farewell concert or an actual section of the Texan landscape, the outcome is consistently pictures of pictures.


Dietrich herself has made the case that she is leaving the stage and screen because she has been “photographed to death.” In a related video project, her last words are “carried over,” as if from “the other side,” to silently crawl across a field of pixilated static. Periodically, this cloud of agitated video-grain is brought into focus around the über-entertainer’s curvaceous frame; shimmying about before her appreciative public in form-fitting sequin gown topped off with an enormous feather-boa, Dietrich resembles a species of exotic bird, all aquiver in the spotlight. Our sense of the image as trap, capture, is rendered all the more acute via Kosmalski’s various manipulations which are, for the most part, utterly indifferent to what the image is “of,” whatever it might be that has been caught within its frame. Rather, it is to the dictates of the image as such that she attends, baroquely emphasizing the innate push-pull between imagistic disintegration and reintegration. The sheer effort involved in maintaining one’s outline as a media figure against a mediated ground – that is, to keep from being swallowed whole – is here given palpable form.


In photographs derived from the same archival source as the video, the movement of a lens zooming in and out on Dietrich is enacted across a succession of discrete prints. Between the moving and still image, the aging star undergoes a range of kaleidoscopic distortions that bisect and multiply her shape, fracturing her singular being into a proliferation of ever smaller informational bits. This process bespeaks iconoclastic irreverence and something like its opposite. Threatened with imminent eclipse, Dietrich imprints the last luminous rays of her “star-power” on film; these concentrated emanations are subsequently cut, via montage, into a kind of “fairy dust” of cinematic mulch that may then be sprinkled back over the field. It is almost as though she were being reclaimed, at the very moment of her ostensible departure, by the screen itself.


Marlene Dietrich is cited as a virtual pioneer, having been among the first to make contact with this “new world” of filmic photogenia, and plant her flag in it. However, Kosmalski’s project is pointedly retrospective, even  elegiac, inasmuch as it concerns the star’s attempted return to anonymous normalcy, after successfuly “crossing over.” A very similar mood hangs over her images of the American West, for here as well we are basically revisiting a frontier that has been settled, and thereby no longer descibes the outermost edge of anything. The tabula rasa of the original “Silver Screen” and this “big-sky” Texan landscape are linked in their mythic appeal as foundational grounds of a whole new way of being. The Western genre is in effect their point of intersection, narrating the spontaneous generation of selves and societies, unencumbered by former attachments, as if out of thin air. To survey the seemingly endless recession of open land that Kosmalski’s photographs offer up to the gaze is to recall a freedom that is integral to the American experience, but what happens when the horizon lines converge on a dead end? When space “runs out,” this work suggests, we wind up in those “Western Lands” of Egyptian mythology: the realm of the dead.


In “Circle,” a video piece that Kosmalski shot on the site of a live rodeo event, the abstraction of once-vital gestures of horse-taming repeated ad infinitum as patriotic spectacle evinces only exhaustion. Here, again, the artist does not intervene into, so much as corroborate, what is already there. Her formal tactics of kaleidoscopic fracture and proliferation follow the logic of media, but also, more substantively, the sense that we are running out of a precious commodity, and that what little remains must be somehow extended. A horse that gallops in tight circles to the delight of the public is thereby split into two mirror-images, each of which is forced to repeat the same act twice. Yet one senses that the animal is from the first moment “photographed to death.” Like Dietrich, it is attempting to find a way back “home,” oblivious to having become already a ghost caught in the endless loop of its farewell concert.