NYAB Event - John Divola “Clive Wearing’s Dilemma”

John Divola “Clive Wearing’s Dilemma”

Wallspace

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Clive Wearing is a renowned neuropsychology patient with no short-term memory, finding himself in a continuous present, in a continual condition of awakening. For Divola, Wearing’s case provides a possible analogy for the photographic experience, the reception of a present devoid of context. And, it elucidates the twin concerns that have undergirded his practice for the last four decades: An insistence on the indexical nature of the photograph alongside the medium’s phenomenological and existential potential.

Clive Wearing’s Dilemma features an untitled body of work made in 1990 that has never been shown in New York. It was recently exhibited as part of As Far As I Could Get, a retrospective exhibition of Divola’s work held across three venues in Southern California, led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and shown simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pomona College Art Museum. The eight large-scale black and white photographs were made in what has become Divola’s signature mode – a combination of documentary photography, conceptual art, performance and painting – where the figure of the artist, or a surrogate for him, is often present. For Untitled, 1990, Divola painted 8 photographic backdrops in an expressionistic manner and threw handfuls of flour at them, photographing this action with a 4x5 view camera. The resulting works achieve goals seemingly at odds with one another; they are a cold, industrial index, a blunt recording of what was there. Simultaneously, the works are emotive, suggestive, subjective and existential, using a poverty of means to invite contemplation and transcendence.