DYSFUNCTIONAL FUN
NOVEMBER 5, 2009
YAUTEPEC GALLERY
MEXICO CITY
Say what you will about the breadth and depth of my references in light of the following, but I heard this interview with Jack White on the radio back in '03 or thereabouts in which he remarked that constraints actually gave momentum to his creative process. I have no doubt that idea had been expressed innumerable times before the man in black, red, and white spoke his gospel — certainly by folks of towering erudition who I am embarrassed in advance not to recall — but Jack blew my little cerebrum at that moment.
You see, the chromosomally XY half of the White Stripes was articulating a gut feeling of mine which I had yet to regurgitate in any actionable way. I’ve always hated the instruction "Do anything!" My neural circuits would light up like phosphor and drop me into some sort of stammering, slack-jawed, infinite loop. But this kid — granted, a couple years older than yours truly — had it all figured out. The spice flows once you define your rules and stick to them as if the hand of God had chiseled them out before you on your Facebook wall.
Flash forward to the end of the decade and Abe Atri approaches me with this project of his. He tells me, "I want to show this series of photos I've taken on my cellphone."
Sure, lots of people take pictures on their phone. Everybody and their mother took Polaroids but all we needed was a Robert Mapplethorpe to turn that particular consumer-level, photographic technology into a statement.
And while there aren't any cocks in Abe's photos, he exploits the inadequacy of the tool itself —pun halfway intended. That’s exciting to me, in the same way that when one sees bougainvillea in full bloom, there's this sense that the human eye can't even process the totality of its color.
Abe's photos — all shot with Motorola's KRAZR, RAZR, and the V400 (with which their marketing team apparently couldn’t be bothered) — bring us into a similar world in which perception is limited by mechanical limitations and malfunction.
The photos are technically "crappy," but there's gold in that crap. Now that phones ship with multi-megapixel cameras, there's little to differentiate their output from that of any standard point-and-shoot digital camera.
In Abe's photos, on the other hand, one feels the presence of an obsolete technology's metaphysical longing to be perfect. All the while, Abe is forcing it to go to the proverbial school dance at its most awkwardly pubescent moment — zits, braces, and all.
In this case, we're talking about image distortions, color phasing, lens burn-outs, and general light-source weirdness. But just as Monsieur White found his formidable muse in the face of limitation, Abe Atri has found his in pushing the constraints of his chosen medium to its literal breaking point.
— Brett W Schultz