Dumb Space
(excerpt)
There is an old Maine locution “You can’t get there from here” that is a response to a question from a lost driver getting directions in the Maine back-country. Factually it states the obvious: it might be hard to describe the way places are connected by convoluted country roads but it also embodies a kind of laconic Yankee spirit that raises the question of why would one bother to go elsewhere when ‘here’ might be just fine. Joseph Podlesnik adds to this dialogue: once you get there, he leaves us in a quandary: There may not be a ‘here’ at all. …
Can’t get there from here? Just at the moment where Podlesnik seems to abandon the here and now, while “the place” seems to be lost in an existential dead end, the viewer is transported by a kind of transcendence into the language of painting. It might be considered, in computer parlance, as hypertextual, the simultaneity provided by the computer in our modern life where one image suggests another.
-- Martin Mugar
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During the 1980’s at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, one of my undergraduate art professors, Adolph Rosenblatt, when discussing paintings - often citing works by the French painter Édouard Vuillard as examples - would use the term “dumb space”.
Rosenblatt used this to describe areas in paintings which don’t seem to serve a descriptive, spatial or narrative function. Instead, to him, the areas simply lie there flat, inert, ineffectual, but perhaps at the same time acting as an energizing contradicting foil against readable illusionistic space. The idea presented here is an extension of something similar addressed in my previous photobook, “Surfaces”. Perhaps this space isn’t so “dumb” after all.
--Joseph Podlesnik