on the edge of clear meaning

"In Wood's work, the photograph often represents the given thing, what is received from the world. The work then is to put that given and received thing into play, to activate it conceptually, aesthetically, and kinesthetically. For Wood that means transforming it haptically, through the hand. his drawing and collaging and intricate manipulations of images are a way of understanding and informing photographs. In the conflicted history of 'art photography,' this has been considered in some quarters at some times, a heresy. But it is a heresy that preceded the orthodoxy, and will certainly outlive it. The 'pure' photograph was a temporary, though powerful, fiction. Photography was born out of a desire to write and draw differently, to write or draw with light, and was always integrate with other arts."

this guy raises a lot of interesting questions about photography(& art in general, actually). it could be called the "gilding the lily" problem or the issue of needless artistic intervention or a problem of borderlines, where art begins & ends in relation to the world but also in relation to its maker.

i first ran into this in regards to photography nearly 15years ago when considering the turn the great robert frank had taken some time after his monumental series, the americans. there was a huge retrospective of his work at the national museum in dc when i was at uva. i spent several weekends there going over & over the moves he'd made & thinking about where they took me, the viewer. frank had moved from the classical(in terms of framing & composition & approach to subject matter)to a hybrid form(spontaneous & kinetic, collage-like w/scrawled words & phrases ADDED to the pictures). i'd also been thinking a lot about sherrie levine's idea about what "taking a picture" meant in terms of her re-photographing "great" photos by "masters"(eg, walker evans). in a way, frank was "taking" his pictures & reconfiguring or redirecting them & that second, or even tertiary, action had to be "taken" into account by the viewer. where did the art begin & the commentary end? where & when do the things of the world become art? where are the contact points between these things?

john wood is right there on the edge of all these questions. someone pointed out that he's adapted jasper johns' credo: take a picture. do something to it. do something else to it. that aesthetic worked for johns & rauschenburg but wood takes it in a more explicitly political direction. my lai, the valdez oil spill, the civil rights movement & more are all TREATED to wood's photographic interventions. here the contact points are somewhat different but no less illuminating. how does viewing something, say, a catastrophe, as art impact the definational conditions of the act & the thing & the art? where or how does the viewer's actions implicate them in the view? how does the viewer's response open out onto responsibility & where is the contact point between those two conditions?