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Contemporary photography often focuses reflexively on its relations to painting, or to painting's objects, or to film. It comments, or attempts to comment on its own conditions through stagings or restagings of painterly or filmic arrangements. For all the reflexivity of such work, and despite all its simulations, an underlying assumption seems to persist, that photography is principally a medium which deals, more or less transparently or representationally (if, inevitably, ironically), with objects. In the worst case, a photograph reinvents, for instance, a generic film still, as though it were about its own distance from objects, but only manages to represent another order of objects. It's as though photography were doomed to be more accurate. To support this contention, one might cite the overwhelmingly positive critical response (in New York, at least) to Cindy Sherman's most recent work, in which she dressed up to look like various historical genres of portraiture: no one seems to have noticed that the photographic process makes all the images look the same (just like cibachromes), presumably because they look more real than the original paintings. (It might be added that these images are less rigorously engaged with history than Anne Zahalka's earlier, similar works). Or one might cite the relative critical success of Bill Henson's hackneyed (and otherwise suspect), representational fragments of urban narrative.
Perhaps this persistence of similitude explains, in part, the paucity of critical response to the work of Geoff Kleem, who has been a sorely underestimated artist. For Kleem's recent work undertakes a sustained, somewhat poetic, investigation of the condition of photographic representation, in which the status of painting is complicated and shifting, and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline