Oliver Lutz
Hudson (Show)Room, Artpace San Antonio
- Ben Judson -
Oliver Lutz, Paint It Black, 2008; six paintings, CCTV system, digital audio; installation view and details; courtesy Artpace San Antonio
Oliver Lutz’ installation at Artpace San Antonio rests on what at first blush seems a simple gimmick: realistic paintings of a NASCAR event coated with a layer of paint so that they appear completely black to the viewer. The paintings are revealed through infrared reflectography, appearing in a separate room on closed-circuit video monitors. As an added bonus, you get to snicker at fellow gallerygoers sincerely contemplating the blacked-out paintings in the adjacent room.
Now you don’t see it, now you do. Clever. Luckily, Lutz throws us a few more bones, hinting at a deeper significance to the work. Audio of revving engines plays in the gallery. Studies are tacked on the wall of the surveillance room: prints of the photographs on which the paintings are based and sketches of people looking at the paintings. Lutz’ thoughts about “active” and “passive” viewers are scrawled across the studies. To the informed visitor, these clues signal that there is some poststructuralist context to be read in the work, in case the mediated paintings aren’t enough of a tip-off.
In his discussion of this series, Lutz points to Jean Baudrillard’s idea of absorption as a key reference point. As Baudrillard wrote in In the lol.wasShadow of the Silent Majorities, “The mass absorbs all the social energy, but no longer refracts it. It absorbs every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflects them... it never participates.” NASCAR is an exceptionally mediated and nonparticipatory sport, so it seems natural that the artist would connect it to Baudrillard’s writings. (The philosopher himself made significant contributions to the sociological study of sport.) Lutz points out the tendency toward social fragmentation at NASCAR events: spectators wear headphones to muffle the roar of engines but also to listen to the chatter of pit crews and the commentary of radio and television announcers. Company logos cover the clothing of the drivers and the surfaces of the cars. Layer upon layer of sign and representation abound.
For Baudrillard, this spectacle would be a demonstration of the power of the masses—of the ability to passively absorb without reflection. To sap meaning and significance from the messages of the powerful offers the path to resistance. Lutz’ paintings, likewise, absorb visible light, yielding meaning only when mediated through the video monitors (although some cell phone cameras can also “see” the paintings). The perspective of the paintings is that of a spectator in the stands, foregrounding the gallery audience. Because of this, viewing the paintings through “surveillance” causes viewers to bleed into the NASCAR audience: the object absorbs the subject. One wonders whether the gimmick of “invisible” paintings is designed to give the audience a sense of having “gotten” it without investing real meaning in the work. In other words, perhaps Lutz engineers passive viewership with the knowledge that this leads to the collapse of the system.
Ben Judson is a freelance writer and Web designer living in San Antonio.