Everything, Everywhere, Now, All at Once:
Adam Baer's Pictures of Simultaneousness Thoughts

An excerpt from an essay written for UCR/CMP's exhibition by Bill Arning, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center

Its Sunday June 11, 2001 as I write this paragraph and Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to be executed tomorrow and he probably will be, which will be old news to anyone reading this, yet in my here and now the fact that he had given up fighting death is vivid in my mind, as is the fact that he is preparing for it, and one has to wonder how one does that, and also as an American citizen, in whose name he is being killed, what role I am playing in my relative inaction in his state added suicide, and how McVeigh really has a sweet, innocent young face to have killed that many people, a face that looks not unlike the first guy I ever slept with in Junior High School, although that guy was French and had dark hair and probably never killed anyone and if he did I do not believe there is a death penalty in France these days, but that I could find out on some web site and maybe I could find out what happened to that French guy too....

Aren't run-on sentences wondrous things? While impossible to read and therefore failures when considered as communication, they do accurately reflect the way thoughts flow one after another. Abutting thoughts are linked often only tangentially. Clear sentences, with a reasonable number of thoughts before the final period are merely repackaged versions of run-ons to be easier to consume, individually wrapped slices of thought.

Of course language, when written, is linear and one word must follow that which came before it. Pictures in the Western tradition do not function that way. We can start at any point in a still picture and let our eyes meander across the surface, according to unpredictable laws of attraction. Our eyes dart toward a glimmer of red, a flash of flesh, and disturbing detail. We must reassemble the whole of the picture in some mental storage bin in our brain, as we can never be looking at the whole at once. When we know a picture well what we know is not the experience of examining it but rather the reassembled accumulation of details in our brain that by human nature we have remade as a coherent whole, a clear sentence rather that an endless run-on.

Adam Baer's recent photographs resist our reductive memory patterns. They duck our desire to reduce them to a singularity and frustrate our attempts to file them neatly away in memory. Rather Baer has gone to very elaborate processes to create images that maintain the logic (and illogic) of human thought and in so doing traps you before his creations in an unbearably complex present.

It would be easy to call Baer's images surreal or Felliniesque and stop puzzling over it. We could say that these images are together because our subconscious is illogical and puts thoughts and images together willy-nilly, or in a Freudian sense take these as dream images that actually refer to the real world obliquely. While interpreters of dreams could obviously have a great deal of fun treating these scenes as coded manifestations of Baer's repressed thoughts that would get us nowhere. Baer's labor intensive working method requires a deliberateness that makes the spontaneous expression of repressed thoughts unlikely. While a few details are unreal and never seen and every transition point between abutting tableaux is conspicuously unlikely. Yet each still seems more the type of simplified images we have in our heads when we imagine something unseen and we fill in only the salient details.

So if time is not compressed to fit these scenes together then what is? It must be time's other half: space. And in that too it mirrors human thought processes as we can as easily think of places-other-than-here as of times-other-than-now. We can in the space of a second flip from worrying about our jobs to thinking of a landslide in Mexico, till we can begin to blend the personal and social, then micro and macro. This is not crazy thinking. Just as we desire to recombine the pieces of a picture into a whole coherent image-even images as incongruous as Baer's-we want to take the sequence of events we experience and render them as a coherent understandable life. We know that somehow all these events are interrelated, if we could just find the key.

That intersection of the world in our apartments, homes and backyards with the world we see on the news and read about in the papers was more conspicuous in Baer's earlier works. In pieces such as Untitled #991 the seeming protagonist pedaling furiously on a bike is surrounded by images of consumerism, the environment and home. In Untitled 981 and 982 other central domestic scenes-the troubled sleeper, the threatened couple are likewise surrounded by external dangers-social/political/environmental-that threaten them at home. And most have more than one potential protagonist for us to identify with, suggesting a commonality of the experience of our lives woven into and inseparable from the larger world issues beyond our control.

Untitled #001 is different in that we have no central domestic human or couple but rather the series of apartment windows all showing scenes that are somewhat out of whack. Instead we have the bus driver-someone in charge of the lives of others who does not seem at all in control. The floating suburban house instead of showing a safe home reveals scenes of destruction. Its former occupants revel in the beginnings of a three way sex show on the roof reminding us that pretend private act of sex still has the power to distract us from our troubles at least temporarily.

Baer's works are shot on one negative and not manipulated latter. The sets only look anything like the finished photograph from one perspective, and the tricks of scale and perspective the artist uses to create this fiction are startling. Baer speaks of the effects he can achieve formally yet this revealing of his means in this exhibition at UCR/CMP impacts deeply on our understanding of what kind of image this is-more theater than film, more tableaux vivant than constructed photograph. To know that there was one moment when this was in fact the view before the camera changes the ontology of the picture.

That the multiple events depicted in these images were simultaneous leads back to the understanding that the real subject here is the racing thoughts of one consciousness symbolically cited in the lens' one perspective. That mind was thinking as deeply as the depth of field Baer uses is shallow and will eventually think about and connect all the incongruities in the work, and in making those connections make things if not right at least better. Like the perfect visual run-on sentence he has captured the nature of such expansive thinking as beautiful and terrifying as deep thought itself.

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