A Review--Zimmerman & Clark

Andrew Zimmermann & Everitt Clark

Photographers

09.24.03

One expects certain things from the art of people in their late teens and early twenties: most of all enthusiasm, sometimes emulation, sometimes the rejection of standards, and sometimes the need to shock. These qualities intertwine with and feed on inexperience and a degree of ignorance. Conversely, however, the work of mature artists is just as often marred by too much experience and knowledge: in making a living by doing art, the living gets in the way of the art. What shows? What sells? What is the easiest to produce? Facility in doing something that comes from experience quashes curiosity to explore the new. Slow and steady pays the bills and deadens enthusiasm.

Andrew Zimmermann and Everitt Clark embarked on a youthful project, The Project (my coinage), a year ago. It grew out of Andrew’s exploration of combining duplicate exposures. As a starting point for The Project, they made a series of cut-papers: large sheets of Kraft paper were drawn on with a knife blade. When hung up, the paper edges — falling forward or behind the plane of the paper —

created what Frederick Sommer called light-sheds, where light moves from shadow to highlight or highlight to shadow. While Sommer is famous for his cut-paper photographs (the first made in 1962), Francis Bruguière made cut-papers, light abstractions, in the 1920’s, and many photographers explored the Cubist sense of distortion, most prominently the Vorticists, among whom Alvin Langdon Coburn is the best known.

From a group of about thirteen cut papers, they selected six to be the basis: the theme for a set of variations.

The Project is a marvelous amalgam of those three precursors, Sommer, Bruguière, and Coburn. The curvilinear strokes of the Zimmermann/Clark cut papers fall stylistically between Sommer’s very graceful line and the more angular, aggressive line of Bruguière. Printing with multiple negatives of such similar subject matter suggests the breaking up and repetition of subject elements explored by Coburn in his Vorticist images. But from Sommer they took one more thing, the love of the contact print. Sommer loved the effect of the contact print: the sharpness, the sense of detail, the unadulterated, rich middle-tones that were possible. The prints in The Project are all 20 X 24, and the negatives are all 20 X 24: an ambitious undertaking for any photographer. In their enthusiasm and practicality, their solution was to convert a room into a camera, by mounting a lens in the door, and placing the film on an easel, which could be moved closer or farther away from the door/lens board, to bring the image into focus. With the darkroom behind the door, they had a remarkably elegant solution to an interesting problem: how to make large-format negatives without investing tens of thousands of dollars.

I had the fortune of having Andrew and Everitt stay with me this last summer, and while my wife and I were out one afternoon, they put up the entirety of The Project, sitting the full sheets, 32 X 40, of white mounting board on the floor around the room. Thirty 20 X 24 black and white prints, mounted identically, is a stunning presentation. Each image was perfectly printed and dry mounted. Nothing was “close,” everything was right. Often in youthful work, presentation is not high on the priorities, but just this alone was impressive.

The images are a marvelous set of variations—Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations come to mind. Like Beethoven, Andrew and Everitt were, perhaps, overly ambitious. Instead of a few simple images, they created a colossus. Certainly, any one of their images can stand on its own, but taken as a whole the set is breathtaking. The mature artist would never have untaken such a project—look at the scale of each of the other contestant’s pieces who entered a variation on Diabelli’s theme, from Lizt and Czerny, to Schubert. What makes Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations remarkable is also what makes Andrew and Everitt’s Project remarkable: scale, the creative sense of variation on a somewhat narrow theme, the depth and breadth of those variations, and their dazzling execution. Perhaps, as Bach’s Goldberg Variations also demonstrate, it is often a simple theme that best suits an immense exploration.

While Andrew and Everitt wanted to explain which images were combined and how, or to test us to see if we knew, this is not how I looked at the images. I did not think that the original images should have been shown with the variations, nor did I think it mattered if one knew which themes were being stated and how. This was the only flaw in the show, and, perhaps, it had more to do with our knowing them than how they would have shown the work elsewhere.

The unity of the pieces brought them together as a cohesive whole, but the printing, some darker than others, the expressive use of controlled bleaching, the variations in tone and color, differentiated the pieces, allowed them to be seen as stunning individual images.

Some exhibitions gain because of an accumulative quality; other gain because enough individual pieces are strong. Too often the overall sense of an exhibition is lowered because weak pieces drag it down. Certainly this group of twenty-four variations had stronger and weaker pieces, although this was very much an idiosyncratic judgment. But if we could have agreed on one or two images that were weak, they did nothing to mar the overall sense of the group.

Sommer often talked about the need to know one’s antecedents, and to be a thief greater than ones loot. On both counts, Andrew and Everitt have honored their antecedents.

One might ask if they would ever reprint these images, and if so how? This is a pedagogic device, a way to get someone to look at their work as if through different eyes. It would be an unfair question to ask of them at the end of a year's work, but it is a delightful hope for someone who liked The Project.

In their enthusiasm, Andrew and Everitt drove the collection across the country, stopping at galleries along the way and showing them The Project. “Send slides, write letters, make a few calls,” the mature artist says. “You’ll just be rejected.” Andrew and Everitt were rejected, almost unanimously. They completed a daunting project, and they had an adventure showing it across the country. They have, I am sure, a few scars. But I hope that they bring to their next project the same enthusiasm, craft, and wit, and a fine disregard for wise and practical advice.

Contact Andrew Zimmermann at geegan60@hotmail.com