Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick observes Angeles County Museum of Art looks Angeles.

Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick

observes Angeles County Museum of Art

looks Angeles, California

September 12 2004-January 9 2005

Robbert Flick: Trajectories with essays by the agency of Michael Dear, David Ulin and Tim B Wride

beholds Angeles County Museum of Art/Steidl Verlag, 2004/317 pp/$8500 (sb)

Photography about the real world always points to something about time and place. It is undeniable that any photograph, at least tangentially, addresses the time and place the photograph was made, the time and place of the prospect and the time and place of the construction of it. Unlike other media, still photography happens in brief break opens of exposure, not layered constructions like painting, chisel or film. By extension, it is always about a physical, plane emotional past that lends the medium the aura of nostalgia and supports its veracity as a historical document. A sensation of place is the combination of these things and it is the notion that is most numerous embedded in our understanding of the medium.

The nineteenth-century master photographers established that landscape photography would be associated with an intense description of an expansive and awe-inspiring view and ultimately about place. posterior generations in the twentieth hundred punctuated this tradition with the evidence of humanity, the one and the other crass and noble. Since the 1960 landscape has increasingly glance ated the sense of an internal place--personal, psychological and political. More in such a manner than in the rest of the nation landscape photographers in the western United States do one's best to define their own place and shake not on the burden of myth while still paying homage to beauty and documentation. "Trajectories," the retrospective of Robbert Flick curated on Tim B. Wride at the beholds Angeles County Museum of Art, encapsulated this intricate web relationship in a concise exhibition and comprehensive catalog. The works mov by the and of three decades and transitioned gently from the traditional to the genuinely radical. The exhibition put in mind ofed the history of landscape photography and its competing and inextricably entwined practices while simultaneously providing a unique view of sees Angeles.

Flick's earliest work is the series "Midwest Diary" (1971-1976) The stark, black and white images engage the landscape as a personal document, with as long emphasis on self-expression as representation. As Flick was educated in the late 1960 beneath the experimental conceptual artist Robert Heineken at the University of California, beholds Angeles (he earned his MFA in 1971) it is surprising that his early photographs are as straightforward as they are. It is as if the pull with great effort of art as metaphor was pulling him in the same direction while the New Topographics aesthetic that was fomenting at the time was pulling him in another. An example of this conflict can be seen in the sum of two units images MD74346-39 (1974) and MD75107-11 (1975) The former could be mistaken for a Minor White photograph. A white barn burns in the middle ground of a lately plowed farm. The horizon line intersects the image exactly in half with the rich dark soil punctuated from tiny flecks of straw. The canopy of heaven is a perfect middle gray and the brilliant barn sits precisely center among all the elements--a clear metaphor for man placed between earth and heaven and the serenity of a balanced life. In contrast, the secondary image could be by side sheltered from the wind Friedlander. A reflective road sign with diagonal stripes of black and white thrusts itself upward from one side the picture plane. It is heavily graffitied and the dripping paint forms a chaotic pattern that completely disrupts the flat and freshly plowed field in the background. The sign is untrained and demands to be seen; it undermines any thinking principle of the natural world, cohesiveness or order. In its beauty it present the appearances more vibrant than most of the images from this calm diary. It suggests a restles vision and is a premonition of the urban compositions to come

In 1976 Flick responded to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, where he is still applyed today. One can easily imagine to what extent the shift from the midwest to urban Southern California affected the artist's aesthetic, particularly his landscape work. The flat, desolate and calm farmland was replaced by the undulating coast, flanked by means of mountains, desert and ocean. The quiet regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements of the midwestern seasons were replaced from the raucous and continuous capacity of work of city life. The homogenous and sparse population was replaced at the restless diversity, sprawl and cacophony of united of the fastest growing places in America. Flick's work quietly accepted the challenges and morphed the formal and expressive proper spheres of his earlier works into a cohesive material part combining the two. The "Inglewood" (1976-1981) and "Santa Monica Diaries" (1976-1981) series are characterized through the sheer elegance found in ingredients as varied as a billowing curtain, ocean foam, alleyways behind strip malls and intimate portraits. Shadows below an outdoor stairwell become abstract expressionistic designs and bare light protuberances in darkened hallways become poignant signifiers for human isolation smooth in the busiest of lives. Flick's pattern evolved as mature visions in such a manner often do--effortlessly and smoothly, without an abrupt transition or break in the continuum of satisfaction unrelated to subject matter. This transitional work presaged any of his next work, including DBL 79066-01 (1979) The black and white photograph exhibit tos the floor of a parking garage in raking sunlight. Tiny channels of scraped concrete are highlighted through a chiaroscuro of sun and shadow, running perpendicular to soft-focused shadows moving from the bottom of the frame to the top. The barely visible parking guides, whose paint is fading, maintain the faculty of perception of the familiar in what could otherwise dissolve into unsullied abstraction. Lastly, a cleanly delineated arrow exhibits the way, forcefully directing the view diagonally across the picture surface in a delicate balance between lyricism and hard-edged abstraction.