James Casebere’s Visions from After the Flood

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James Casebere photographs places that don’t exist. Or, rather, in lieu of photographing real places, he photographs ideas about them—their political inclinations, their psychic textures, their dream logics. Take, for instance, his work “Stairs,” which is on view in his solo show “Seeds of Time,” at Sean Kelly Gallery, in New York. A riot of interlocking pastel-colored façades, smooth and featureless as a CAD model, float atop their blurred reflections in a pool of pellucid water, under a moody sky. It is as if a modernist architect tried her hand at reinterpreting the charming Venetian island of Burano but came up against a catastrophic flood. The scene is simultaneously cheery and discomfiting; it appears to be a stage set awaiting players who will never come. If you squint, you can see compacted within it the hopes and fears of the project of modernity itself: our desire to endlessly improve our way of life, while the spectre of self-destruction dogs at our heels.

“Stairs,” 2023.

“Balconies,” 2023.

Like all of Casebere’s photographs, “Stairs” was made without his ever leaving his studio. Since the nineteen-seventies, when he was an undergraduate at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, he has been constructing ever more elaborate tabletop models of architecture and interior spaces which he transforms with the aid of his camera, lights, and, in the past decade or so, some digital tools. When I visited him recently in his studio, in upstate New York, he explained that he had originally sought to “make something temporary, so that the photograph is the only thing,” an impulse inspired, in part, by artists who used photography to document performance art and earthworks. In school, under the influence of his professor Siah Armajani, a sculptor with a strong interest in architecture, Casebere wrestled with the heady theories of figures like Edward T. Hall, Gaston Bachelard, and Martin Heidegger, which directed his attention toward the built world. One of Casebere’s earliest works, “Fork in the Refrigerator,” features the titular fridge, rudimentarily constructed out of what looks like cardstock, skewered with a gigantic fork. On the surface, it might seem like a somewhat pat representation of suburban angst, belonging to the same aesthetic universe as the near-contemporaneous doll-house pictures in Laurie Simmons’s series “In and Around the House.” Growing up, outside Detroit, Casebere was a self-described “typical teen-age counterculture radical” who bristled at the boredom of suburbia, so such a reading would make sense. But there is also a nagging feeling, typical of Casebere’s work, that something primal lurks just beyond the bounds of legibility. “That was a very dreamlike image to me, and it may have actually come from a dream,” Casebere told me. “At the time, my father was either very sick or he had just died. And I feel it was kind of the raging-against-the dying-of-the-light moment for me. It was an expression of anger.”

“Fork in the Refrigerator,” 1975.

This productive tension, between legible references and slippery, subterranean mood, became something of Casebere’s signature style. You see it, for instance, in his works from the nineteen-eighties and nineties, pictures of prototypical architectural centers of power, such as churches, factories, government buildings, hospitals, and, most prominently, prisons. (This typological study, Casebere told me, was inspired principally by the architectural historian Anthony Vidler’s book “The Writing of the Walls,” though you would be forgiven for thinking that Casebere was following the era’s vogue for the work of Michel Foucault.) Constructed out of monochromatic materials and lit in a dappled, chiaroscuro style that recalls German Expressionist film, the pictures have an eerie beauty that belies their staid subject matter. They are works simultaneously concerned with “theories of institutional form,” as Vidler would have it, and expressing something altogether more personal, plumbed from the well of the unconscious.

“Patio with Blue Sky,” 2024.

“Chulah Cookstove,” 2024.

This interest in psychic depth, which is also evident in Casebere’s passion for magic-realist literature and his affinity for Jungian thought, puts him at odds with the group of artists in the so-called Pictures Generation with whom he is often associated. (Casebere’s work appeared in a 2009 survey of these artists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince were, by and large, interested primarily in the depthless realm of media images, and how the jarring interplay of signs within it structures both our social and interior worlds. Casebere, however, seems to have shared more common artistic cause with friends like Matt Mullican, another heterodox Pictures Generation member, who staged performances while he was under hypnosis, or his former CalArts classmate Mike Kelley, who became a notorious spelunker of the American id.

Though the interaction of light and space has always played a central role in Casebere’s work, it was only in the late nineteen-nineties that another elemental force entered his pictures: water. He began to make images of flooded hallways and underground passages, an inundated prison cellblock and the waterlogged interior of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The inspiration, he told me, came from a trip he took to Berlin, where he found a book in the Potsdamer Platz visitors’ center which featured pictures of flooded basement bunkers in the Reichstag. “It was a moment when everybody was really optimistic about the future of Germany, and the coming down of the Berlin Wall,” he told me. But the bunkers struck him as “the unconscious of the moment,” and a reminder of the lives lost during the Holocaust. “To me, it was an unspoken reality: How can we possibly just move on?”

“Greenhouse,” 2024.

In his new body of work, water is everywhere. It has not just inundated individual structures but seems to have drowned the whole world. Where in his previous pictures the floodwaters represented a kind of welling up of historical and psychic forces, here a more overt kind of catastrophe has been unleashed. The climate crisis is the series’ obvious subtext, so obvious that it’s barely a subtext—we all see the writing on the wall. “It’s the world in which we live, it’s the background of our every thought,” Casebere told me. The structures that are featured in the images have their origins in quasi-utopian architectural projects in the real world. The pastel-colored buildings featured in “Stairs,” and another, similar, work, “Balconies,” for instance, were derived from drawings made by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Balkrishna Doshi for a low-income-housing project in Indore, India. Another work, “Chulah Cookstove,” which features a looming, ziggurat-like structure in pale yellow, loosely mimics the design of an outdoor stove by the activist and architect Yasmeen Lari, which is designed to reduce carbon emissions and increase safety in rural communities. A pair of works titled “Beach Huts (Day)” and “Beach Huts (Night)” draw inspiration from a surgical clinic designed by the architect Francis Kéré in Burkina Faso. These projects supply Casebere’s images with a provisional kind of hope. It is as if he is rooting for the triumph of human ingenuity and caring against the rising tides of fatalism and despair. For now, the planks of Noah’s shattered ark are still bobbing on the surface of the deluge. Ultimately, though, as in all of Casebere’s pictures, the works’ precise meaning wriggles from our grasp. These are not quite nightmares, and not quite reveries, but images dispatched from some liminal zone between the two, which is perhaps where the murky waters of our minds run the deepest.

“Beach Huts (Day),” 2024.

“Beach Huts (Night),” 2024.

Sourse: newyorker.com