What can Barbara Kasten’s approach to abstract photography tell us about the relevance of physical and manual processes to contemporary art in an era of advancing digitisation?
Introduction:
I became interested in Barbara Kasten’s work when I was investigating cyanotypes. The lockdown-precipitated retreat from the physical into the digital world – for work, school, culture, friendships, family – had thrown into sharp relief the importance to my practice of artefacts or products of artistic practice; face-to-face engagement; the physical and natural world; and fundamentally, the haptic nature (related to the sense of touch and the perception and manipulation of objects) of making and experiencing art. With limited access to materials and facilities, I had adapted to lockdown restrictions by photographing the sunlight that often hits my kitchen table in the morning: I was placing or creating objects for the light to play upon and through and recording those moments with my phone camera. I was frustrated not to have something more permanent or tangible than a digital photograph as a record of the phenomenon, so started to think about light-based processes that might assist in capturing images of light and its effects; I remembered two cyanotypes – among Kasten’s earliest work as an artist – that I had seen in the Tate Modern exhibition The Shape of Light.
In fact, Kasten built her practice around ‘presenting the qualities of light, not light itself… the intangible experience of witnessing a phenomenon’ (Kasten, 2015, p.35). Her work, influenced by constructivism and the Bauhaus (apertureeducation, 2009, 03.55), explores materiality, the boundaries between 3D and 2D and the characteristics of photography: the same kinds of issues I had stumbled up against in this new vein of my own work . But I was also intrigued by an artist whose practice was so focused on the physical - on making and materiality - working in a medium that elevates visual perception; specifically given seemingly exponential advances in digital technology and the particular restrictions - to a largely digital interface with the world - that lockdowns have imposed. I wanted to find out why she developed her practice this way and what I could learn about how we make and share our art in a digital world.
Hands and the Haptic
“Different parts of the body have varying degrees of sensitivity to touch but the hands have evolved a specific capacity to communicate sensory haptic data to and from the brain .” (Treadaway, 2009, p.186)
It has been argued that primates’ opposable thumbs are among the principal reasons for our elevation among mammals, that our manual dexterity, particularly the ability to make and use tools, has been fundamental to human evolution (Handwerk, 2021). Juhani Pallasmaa goes further and claims that our hands not only represent us as individuals - our fingerprints being “… these engravings on the human skin [which] are the secret prenatal hieroglyphs of individuality” (Pallasmaa, 2009, p.27) - but that touch is our primary sense and means for engaging with and understanding “…things before they have been trapped by language. We touch things and grasp their essence before we are able to speak about them.” (Focillon, 2018, p.36). Henri Focillon linked our manual capacity to the development of knowledge itself suggesting that, without our capacity to draw, to make marks with our hands, we could not describe - and so understand - the essential characteristics of our world:
“This is how gestures increased knowledge, thanks to a variety of touch and drawings whose inventive power is concealed by the fact that it is an age-old habit. Without hands, geometry would not exist; lines and circles are needed to speculate upon the shape of objects” (Focillon, 2018, p.17)
Indeed, our capacity for touch and manual manipulation seem to be so profoundly linked to our ability to engage with, understand and adapt to our environment that it has altered the architecture of our brains, the very infrastructure of our consciousness:
“There is growing evidence that Homo sapiens acquired in its new hand not simply the mechanical capacity of refined manipulative and tool-using skills but, as time passed and events unfolded, an impetus to the redesign, or reallocation, of the brain’s circuitry. The new way of mapping the world was an extension of ancient neural representations that satisfy the brain’s need for gravitational and inertial control of locomotion.” (Wilson, 1998, p.59)
We understand the plasticity of human brains – that each new experience a baby has creates neurological pathways that will shape their responses to future experiences (Nelson, 1999, p.1). From this notion of neurological development and the sense of touch being inextricably linked, we can conclude that embodiment in learning and physical mimesis - the copying and repetition of actions to learn and develop skill - are as important as visual or auditory perception:
“...the transference of the skill from the muscles of the teacher directly to the muscles of the apprentice through the act of sensory perception and bodily mimesis… The same principle of embodying… knowledge and skill continues to be the core of artistic learning… the task is lived rather than understood.” (Pallasmaa, 2009, p.15)
Barbara Kasten’s Practice
Kasten studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts training in textiles, sculpture and painting in the early 1970s. She could not help but be influenced by the light and space movement that was operating out of the state at the same time, focusing on the particular qualities of light in California and the effect on it of the varied landscape - coastal, urban, agricultural, industrial (apertureeducation, 2009, 01.10). While artists like Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse sought to replicate or manipulate light respectively, Kasten’s approach has been to give light something to interact with and to document the effects. A self-taught photographer, she began experimenting with primitive types of photography where solid objects are used to prevent light from hitting a light-sensitive surface, creating images with the resulting negative spaces. She describes her experiments with these photograms and cyanotypes as part of a…
“… fascination with light and its inevitable companion, shadow. The process of making complex shadows led me to photograms which were the entry point of my photographic career. Having a studio art background, the negative-positive photogram allowed me to explore the illusionist properties of photography with tangible sculptural materials and constructions.”
(Kasten, barbarakasten.net, no date)
Untitled 29/75 from the Amalgam series, 1979
She has continued this approach of attempting to capture light throughout her career, but moving on to photography from photograms, and creating what she calls constructs or stages for the light she photographs to play on and around. Kasten has described the concerns of her practice as being around transparency, colour, light and structure and, using the documentary nature of photography, she seeks to convert her 3D creations into 2D forms. She has described her work as expanding the fields of painting, drawing and sculpture, rather than doing something new in photography, however, at the same time,
“The fact that her constructions are fabricated to be photographed is at odds with a prevailing strain of purism in photographic ideology that insists only natural realities – landscape, people, street activities – rather than imagined and conceptual realities are the appropriate subjects for the camera” (Jussim, 1984, pp.2-3)
Kasten operates within abstraction – “I like to think about what I do more as an idea-based progression of abstraction than as a deconstruction of a real object… there is no recognisable subject and no representational value” (Kasten, 2015, p.34), but materiality is a core component of her practice.
Art historian Catherine de Zegher, discussing the Venezuelan visual artist Gego and her contemporaries, wrote “Though characterized as pursuing the dematerialization of the art object, this generation, perhaps paradoxically, made processed based works that can be seen as materializing line.” (de Zegher, 2007, p.56). Although working at the same time as Gego, and having as her inspiration the same constructivist ideas (Cotter, 2007), Kasten’s focus on materiality is to dematerialise the subject of her photographs. Her work is determinedly not representative, its subject is intangible and immaterial light and shadow, but materiality is intrinsic to the process of creating the image. Estelle Jussim explains:
“Lens and film together coalesce Kasten’s optical fantasies into an artifact. Fabricated to be photographed is the essence of her current preoccupations, but the fabrications are as important to her as their final record on film.” (Jussim, 1984, p.10.
Kasten has discussed her use of plexiglass in front of the camera because it becomes transparent and invisible except for the geometry of its edges: “…it had physicality, but it didn’t have a visual identification” (apertureeducation, 2009, 03.20). She describes her work as “…the translation of light into something readable or experiential”, so while the path that light takes through and around the objects is ultimately what the viewer experiences or perceives, the materiality of those objects and obstructions to the light is central to the outcome (Kasten, 2015 p.34).
Studio Construct 8, 2008
Kasten appears to look for the haptic in every aspect of her work: “She finds the physicality of the surface of polaroid prints ‘luscious’ and is delighted with the kind of ‘etched line the layered emulsion gives you’; Kasten feels Polaroid materials permit her ‘a working dialogue with the sculpture’…” so it might seem contradictory that her preferred medium is one in which the audience is kept at arm’s length from the product, which is itself secured behind the physical barrier of a glass screen (Jussim, 1984 p.2). Although Kasten has also produced stage sets based on her ‘optical fantasies’ and has talked of working with choreographers and dancers to interpret and elucidate the spaces she creates, her principal work has been in a medium that records and illuminates what is already in existence. The flattening of her 3D creations into 2D images is at the heart of why she considers her work to be a form of painting or drawing as much as within the field of photography (Kasten, 2015, p.33).
Compositions 7D, 7E and 7T, 2017
Making in a Digital Age
If the use of our hands and sense of touch are so essential to our understanding of the world, to our capacity to learn and communicate, even to our sense of self, that suggests that the physical act of making - “the seamless and unconscious collaboration of the eye, hand and mind…” (Pallasmaa, 2009, p.86) must be a key factor in the human drive to create art:
“Total absorption in the making process by the practitioner, so that the physical activity becomes automatic, provides the mental space for imagination to flourish. In order for this to happen, movement, timing, body position… sensory information concerning the weight, texture, handle, visual properties, sounds and smells of materials is developed over time through memory of physical experience. This information exists as a knowledge that is beyond language, frequently hard to explain in words and easier to do than describe.”(Treadaway, 2009, p.190)
Yet we live in a period of exponential growth in technology, possibly even more significant than the progression from horse and cart to jet planes in the first half of the 20th century: “Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in our history – reaching around 50% of the developing world’s population in only two decades and transforming societies” (UN, 2020). In the West, computers only began to be introduced in standard offices and workplaces around the beginning of the 1990s, yet within 20 years the iPhone introduced the concept of a pocket computer that has now become almost ubiquitous. As the hardware has shrunk and the software become more ambitious, the scope for digital creation has also grown: digital styluses facilitate a virtual facsimile of drawing and painting, photo manipulation software enables the creation of ultra-realistic yet physically impossible images; programmes allow the development of 3D models – on a 2D screen – that can then be printed with height, depth and width through the seemingly simple extrusion of layers of plastic polymers.
Installation view at Aspen Art Museum
However, the physical manipulation of the tools of making (in this case planning an architectural design) arguably creates “…a direct haptic connection between the object, its representation and the designer’s mind; the manual sketch, drawing or physical model is moulded in the same flesh of physical materiality that the material object being designed and the architect himself embody…” (Pallasmaa, 2009, p.96).
Nowadays, creative practitioners might spend much of their time “… interacting with technology in which hand use and tactile sensory stimulation may be restricted to the micro-movements of clicking a mouse or typing on a keyboard” (Treadaway, 2009, p.186). This could result in a more sterile product, that contains less of the artist - “… a passive visual manipulation, a retinal survey.” because the use of a computer arguably imposes distance or creates a barrier between the practitioner and their creation (Pallasmaa, 2009, p.97). This potentially serves to deprive the maker of the haptic feedback loop which informs their decision making:
“ Hodes comments in the recorded data that the lack of involvement of both hands enhances her emotional detachment from the work. In physical activities where both hands work cooperatively, the artist feels a sense of emotional satisfaction in the making process.” (Treadaway, 2009, p.191)
Pallasmaa returns to his fears about the effect of digital technology on creative practice: “The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy and facilitates efficient design work. I wish to express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in education and the design process” (Pallasmaa, 2012, p.13). It is also becoming understood that aspects of the use of digital technology and lack of in-person engagement can be harmful, increasing a sense of isolation, for example (Primack, Shensa et al, 2017, p1). The current pandemic context, with its sustained exclusion from the office for many, has brought this issue to the fore: “Those working more days at home experienced greater emotional exhaustion and cognitive distress associated with reduced social support from their colleagues” (Oakman, Kinsman, Stuckey et al, 2020 p.7).
Untitled 74/1, 1974
Findings
There appears to be something of a dichotomy: that digitisation offers enormous opportunities, enabling us to connect with people and cultures that we could not hope to engage with in-person; but at the same time, prevents us from engaging in a haptic or embodied way, effectively removing the primary sense of touch and physical experience from our range of tools for making sense of the world. Against this current backdrop, it is interesting that an artist like Kasten, with a practice rooted in practical and manual skills would forge their career in a medium where vision is king. She actively explored the contradiction between physical and manual production of 3D objects and the hapticity of that creative process to effect a 2D product or artifact that is hung on a wall untouchable by the viewer.
David Hockney’s paintings on iPad and iPhone play with the medium, scaling up to create immersive pieces across a multitude of devices or animating what would otherwise be traditional landscapes to stimulate – and simulate – the constant scanning that constitutes our visual operation. From this, we can conclude that there is huge potential for digital technologies to enhance our capacity to imagine and create. But it is important to remember that “Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination..” (Pallasmaa, 2012, p.13).
Covid restrictions have allowed us to see the potential for connecting digitally – and the implications of climate change and the costs of global travel are already causing organisations and individuals to think more about virtual meetings as the norm. Reducing the environmental impact of the art industry has to be a goal and there is increasing availability of digital software to offer some facsimile of the real-life experience (online gallery space and virtual exhibitions, for example). But haptic experience and the physical manipulation of tools and materials are vital to human well-being, to our capacity for learning and have been at the core of our species’ development.
Conclusion
Digital advances offer many opportunities to artists and viewers alike: for novel and interesting means of creative expression; to increase and widen audience reach; and potentially to address some of the environmental concerns contingent in any global industry. But in embracing 21st Century opportunities, the importance of the tangible, tactile and physical raises questions about how digital technology can be used to make the viewer experience, and the connection between artist and audience, more meaningful; and how our primary tools for engaging with and understanding the world around us can be fully utilised in an increasingly digital environment.