P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2007 Fall

Shannon Ebner: Evacuated Landscapes

Conversation between Adam Putnam and Shannon Ebner

Shannon Ebner

Untitled

2002

Gelatin silver print

Courtesy the artist and Wallspace

Kicking off a new series entitled Art­ists-on-Artists, P.S.1 Project Artist Shannon Ebner started a conversation with her friend and collaborator Adam Putnam on icons, artifacts and invisibility.

Adam Putnam: I’ve been wondering if this new piece at P.S.1 could be seen as a par­allel to what you have been doing with your other more widely known work. It’s almost as if inserting the text in the first place was such a literal signifier that it became harder and harder to read your other images as being anything other than the absence of text. To put it another way, I think that the incidents or marks in the environment you document serve a function similar to putting up a sign; only the language isn’t English, its something else. The tree on the hill, bottles, spilled paint—it’s almost as if language becomes discontinuous from the thing it describes.

Shannon Ebner: William Burroughs said “words are pictures and pictures are words,” which I have never fully understood; yet at the same time, it makes sense to me. There’s a way in which these pictures are about a different type of language beyond just the language of marks on surfaces. The images come from a place similar to your Into the Abyss project, where the images dealt with or pointed to a sexualized and violent landscape. For example, the bottles occupy an evacu­ated landscape, which has been ravaged by recent fires that had pulverized everything. As I walked around the mountains discover­ing them, I felt as if I had found artifacts of a former civilization. Only artifacts function like written statements.

Adam, perhaps you could talk a bit about your relationship to the iconic? I always get the sense that there is an attraction to paradox, or tension between opposites in your work, es­pecially the piece exhibited at P.S.1 this sum­mer. On one hand, you made an obelisk—one of the most iconic forms known to mankind. At the same time, you created an unknown space, literally a space into the unknown. In other pieces, you have often explored a type of evacuation. I’m not sure how you feel about the word “evacuation” but there is a constant presence and absence in your work, a separation between what you see and what you know.

AP: I love the word “evacuation.” It brings to mind two things at once–-the event of leaving a place and the condition of a space that has been emptied out. Emptiness or evac­uation is meant to imply an activity around a central condition. In theater, actions or events are implied off-stage, not unlike what you are trying to do with your table. For me, it has al­ways been a question of how to describe the indescribable. If you can present something as familiar and iconic as an obelisk while blur­ring the immediate reading with something happening “off-stage,” you can turn it into anything you want—a dildo, a grave, a sundi­al. Similar things happen through repetition–-a monument repeatedly photographed starts to lose its impact and becomes invisible.

SE: I really like what you say about your interest in presenting the iconic nature of the obelisk as a means of exploring an overex­posed symbol. It’s too bad that there can’t be a kind of Dorian Gray effect where every time an icon—whether a person, place or thing is photographed—the overexposure begins to brighten the subject to the point of annihila­tion, actually creating invisibility—a subject evacuation.