ARTWORK OF THE MONTH:
CONTEXT COLLAPSE by ARDEN SURDAM
ARDEN SURDAM
Context Collapse, 2019
Archival Inkjet Print
27 × 18 in (each)
68.6 × 45.7 cm
Edition 2/2 + 1AP
Context Collapse originally exhibited at ABXY during Surdam’s 2019 solo show, entitled Offal. In culinary terms, Offal denotes the entrails or internal organs of a recently slaughtered animal. As an artist who works with food, Surdam frequently includes raw ingredients in her images. For this exhibition, she has captured fare such as liver, fish, and dead birds in cleverly staged scenes, which recall the traditional still life paintings of canonical masters like Chardin, Soutine, and Cézanne. While set against elegant fabric backdrops within the glorified compositions of traditional genre paintings – here – food matter appears alongside burning etiquette books and sex-toys in disguise. By confounding our expectations of this historical art form, Surdam’s still lifes playfully tempt and offend our appetites, exposing tropes deeply embedded in our concepts of class and cuisine.
With Context Collapse, the artist illuminates our expectations and burns them to the ground at once. The only work in this exhibition absent any food matter (typical of a still life), Context Collapse perhaps toys most successfully with any preconceived notions the viewer may bring to the piece. In these five images - what appears to be the stage for a future (or is it past?) still life (II), has been lit on fire (IV). Draped in swaths of pink silk, the objects that burn, dangle and push into view (I, III), reference tropes characteristic of both the artist’s studio and kitchen setting simultaneously. A spool of sticky fly-paper hangs like a roll of drying negatives beside the form of an apple crate (often used for staging in photo studios) (I), while pages torn from a Mexican cookbook (containing images of food preparation, still lifes of their own accord) - burn, curl, and dissolve into ash (I, III). In the final frame, smoke wafts through the rosy folds of the silken backdrop.
Creating work which so often incorporates food matter, decomposition is an integral part of Surdam’s practice. Throughout Offal, the rot and spoil the artist witnesses on a daily basis is implied, but with Context Collapse, it is represented (in acceleration) by the fire. Like decomposition, images of a fire’s rapid progression reveal the passage of time. In this pursuit, (and in an ode to Muybridge) the smoldering images in Context Collapse are presented sequentially. However – in Surdam’s photographs, (chronology be damned!) the natural order of events has seemingly gone askew. Nothing here is where, or when, it is supposed to be, challenging the viewer’s desire for a narrative and bringing awareness to our anticipation of order in its absence.
Surdam frequently interjects pages torn from vintage cookbooks into the gravity defying table-scapes which make up this exhibition. Curiously cast into scenes featuring the carcasses of dead animals, the artist poses these tidy representations of meal prep in absurd conversations with the active decay of organic matter. The resulting images suggest the privilege (euro-centricities) associated with “good” taste while speaking to the ever growing physical and intellectual distance between earth and our dinner plates, farm and table, reality and illusion today. But here, in a format, which itself references the instructional imagery typical of cookbooks – the “how to” manual itself is set aflame (I, III).
The drapes, the crate, the fly paper too - all lay in Surdam’s line of fire here. Taking these falsifying devices of the artist’s studio as her subjects and setting them ablaze, she symbolically destroys the illusions they represent. Intrinsic to the basic mechanisms of a camera, exposure to light is elemental in the creation of any photograph. By exposing her subjects directly to the flame, Surdam represents this truth quite literally; however, in presenting the results out of order and from various perspectives, the artist plays on the fictitious expectation that photography stands as a witness to and recorder of reality.
“With Context Collapse I was interested in exploring what it means to rely on images as truth - both historically (in relationship to traditional still life painting) and in the context of our digitally driven visual landscape today,” says Surdam of her work.
Much like the instructional imagery found in your average cookbook, the typical still life gives the viewer little indication of what’s happening behind the scenes. Whether painted or photographed, studio backdrops, lighting devices, staging equipment, not to mention the rot and decay (bugs!) that an artist (chef!) commonly encounters when making these perfectly ‘still’ images – are all historically concealed in the final work. In social media spaces, context is destabilized in much the same way. Here too, images sugarcoat whatever is happening behind the scenes. Anything that has occurred before or after the image was made - the staging and masking of our own inevitable decay - have been removed from view in order to present our “best” versions of self to the internet.
In all these cases: the cookbook, the still life, the selfie - the viewer is meant to (and often does) assume that an image (or sequence of images) represents some order of truth. But this inclination has never been more problematic than in the Digital Age. A situation of ‘context collapse’ occurs when physical and virtual worlds collide. Social media platforms in particular allow for such limited context that today the same image online can take on a variety of contradictory meanings and interpretations offline, depending on author, audience, and the subjective nature of interpretation. The resulting confusion – intended or not (what the theorists refer to as context collisions or context collusions), comes with a variety of unpredictable real-world consequences.
“Context Collapse Theory refers to the study of these kinds of phenomena, which all hinge on the premise that we continue to trust images as representations of reality and the work is meant to provoke the viewer’s interrogation of that,” explains Surdam of this series.
In Context Collapse, the swooping folds of lush pink drapery allude to complex symbolic languages developed by medieval still life painters, which would have been familiar to audiences in their time and place of origin. However, today - outside the context of a museum or classroom, meanings coded into the folds and flutters of these plush fabric backdrops are almost completely lost upon the contemporary viewer, particularly online. On social media, a photograph of such a painting could be ‘liked’ millions of times by individuals whose beliefs do not in fact align with messages embedded in the contours of its curtains - unaware as they are – that messages lie hidden there at all. The sheer obscurity of Surdam’s reference to the conventions of medieval still life painters exemplifies the concept that in the absence of context, all representations are vulnerable to (mis)interpretation. Because that’s all they are – mostly very contrived representations.
While our online identities achieve the goal of the traditional still life (immortality in an image), with Context Collapse Surdam reminds us (ashes to ashes) of death’s inescapable scythe. Lacking the context of our physical, spiritual, and social selves - our digital remains will do just that – remain – open to interpretation by any number of individuals and audiences for eternity. Sinking into obscurity, like the symbolic codes of medieval still life painters, might be preferred.
Instinctively, images of a fire’s natural progression convey the passage of time, but by resequencing the order of events here, Surdam cleverly directs our focus to the deception inherent in all images. As the viewer searches for truth in these pictures, the fire burns. The point (and latent joke) is that – images, if relied upon for the determination of truth, will betray you. Magritte of course, made this case almost one hundred years ago – but it seems, in the age of social media, rather than rejecting images as stand ins for the truth – we have accepted and integrated their treachery by turning our real lives into theater on social media.
“When I made the work, I built the set backwards, the second image in the series - which seems the most constructed – is actually the remnants of the whole scene, after the fire had been lit and extinguished – rebuilt to mimic the original. There’s a little clue in the burn holes of the cloth,” explains the artist. Having sabotaged our faith in images, with this resurrection, Surdam satirizes our accommodation of the spectacle. The reconstructed platform (II) comes to convey our romanticized reconstructions of self on the internet; the burn holes – trace evidence of our fragile humanity. The ultimate memento mori for our time, each of the disruptions present in Context Collapse exposes images as false idols; but taken together, the artistic gestures contained in this work illuminate the real-world consequences such folly can yield in the age of digital media (and forest fires).
“In other words,” quips the artist, “It’s all a lie.”
Text by Allison Barker
ARDEN SURDAM (b. 1988 New York, NY) received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2015 and her BFA from Oberlin College in 2010. Her work has appeared in GARAGE Magazine, CARLA, Tzvetnik, Singing Saw Press, Kubaparis, Paris Photo Parcours, TERREMOTO, and Photograph Magazine among other publications. Recent exhibitions include: Offal, ABXY Gallery, New York, NY (2019); NAUSEA, Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX (2019); Hold Your Breath, SLOAN Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Not All There, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2018); A Curious Herbal, GARDEN, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Real Shadows for Mere Bodies, College of the Canyons with Stephanie Deumer, Santa Clarita, CA (2017); Exposed with Jo Ann Callis at the California Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Paris Photo (2017), and Solid Liquid at The Situation Room, Los Angeles, CA (2016).