On The Brink

There is something heavenly about Catherine Yass's lightboxes, reminiscent of stained glass windows. They are illumined not by available daylight, but by the pulse of an electrical current that can be controlled at the switch of a button. Portraits of contemporary saints and patrons, they occupy provisional temples to the higher being we now call Art. God Himself appeared relatively early on, in Portrait: Director, made for the exhibition Swimming Underwater at the Imagination Building in London in 1990. Sited at the far end of the company boardroom, the work consisted of four lightboxes fixed to self-supporting braces. Each lightbox showed abstracted images of the building's highly stylised architecture, the product - along with Imagination's whole creative ethos - of Gary Withers, its Director, who was portrayed with a modesty that itself bore witness to his institutional omnipotence. Invited, like the other artists in the show, to make work in response to this company's new headquarters, Yass had chosen to make her 'commission' clear by offering up a classic boardroom portrait.

Yass has continued to make portraits of people who have invited her to show work, raising obvious questions about their motives and her own position - and by implication other artists' - with respect to the powers that be. It is a fragile relationship she sets up, in effect commissioning her patrons to pose for her even when scruples might disincline them to oblige. The range of her sitters over the past two years provides a fascinating sociological comment on the recent institutions of art, including as they do the Director of a major design firm, a representative of the London Docklands Development Corporation, a receiver for the Butler's Wharf Company, two freelance curators, a Director of Olympia & York, and the Director and Assistant Director of a publicly funded independent gallery. All but the last of the exhibitions corresponding to these portraits occurred in new or unorthodox venues for the presentation of contemporary art.

Such works do not, however, make up the whole of Yass' subject matter or represent a programmatic research into art patronage. The power relations they depict are emotional rather than precise: the Olympia & York director, for instance, shown sitting proudly behind his desk high up in the tallest building in Europe, iconographically lord of all he surveys, is in fact one of six directors of the company, and what we see in the background is much of London rather than the huge Canary Wharf site that the Canadian corporation in fact owns. What draws Yass to these portrayals is not so much the circular, conceptual project of laying bare the relations between her product and its means of production, or a thorough investigation into the rhetoric of representation. It is rather a powerful sense of the contingency of her art. Its site-specificity (of which the subject matter is but one feature) avoids the chilly generality of the large scale cibachrome portraiture of Clegg & Guttmann, for example, with which it might on the surface be compared. Regis Durand has contrasted the 'utopian' use of photography by this German duo with 'the wholeness of images closed in on themselves, gloriously pregnant with meaning,' which he interprets as having either 'nostalgic' or 'narcotic' aims. Durand also brings into the discussion Michael Fried's famous dismissal of 'theatricality' in art, in favour of the spectator's full absorption in the 'de-theatrical' and self-contained work of art.1

One of the achievements of Catherine Yass is to undercut such distinctions, inadequate as they are for an understanding of the power and sophistication of contemporary visual culture. Yass' recent works simultaneously encourage their ideal solitary viewer to enter into their fiction, to engage face to face with their subjects, and to be led through precisely controlled mechanisms to an increased self-consciousness.

The inherent seductiveness of the lightbox format, its unremitting glow and self-containment, are in themselves persuasive fictional devices. Yass reinforces them by most often shooting at twilight. Twilight is a time of heightened perception of both natural and artificial light, given focus precisely as they fade into each other. Their overlap induces a hallucinatory (not 'narcotic') clarity, a sense of super-saturated colour and exaggerated contrast. The coming of evening is also an emotionally saturated moment, a time of suspension and of expectancy. For Yass, the completeness of the fiction is necessary to emphasise its fragility: switch it on and it's magic, switch it off and it's entirely mundane, nothing but a dull piece of plastic. Light sources themselves frequently appear as subject matter, whether streetlights, a sunset, car lamps or the red rear lights of an Underground train. Seldom static, these mobile points of light further serve to express moments of transition by disappearing down tunnels or sinking into the river. And where fixed, the perspective of the scene itself often extends and gives them motion, as in the strong diagonals of Portrait: Art 91 numbers II and III (made for Art 91, Olympia Art Fair, London, 1991) or Portrait: Director. Here also, the use of multiple lightboxes serves simultaneously to extend and undermine the psychic fictions shown, creating unreal but coherent and believable landscapes of the imagination. Structure and its delineation, reality and its perception, the artwork and the circumstances of its production, all fuse into one contingent moment of awareness.

The device Yass employs of overlaying a negative image over the positive colour transparency adds a further, significant dimension to her work. Sometimes barely perceptible, it is more often very evident as in the three Portrait Art 91 works and the two pieces Portrait: The Tavistock Clinic. For technical reasons the negative colour is a deep azure. It is also fractionally smaller than the positive. In the twilight images, bright streetlights or car lamps are therefore largely blocked out by circles of blue, which however leave around themselves an eery penumbra of the original. An oscillation occurs between the positive and negative reading, between representation and the void into which it always threatens to tumble. The negative covers up the representation of the 'real', while at the same time it is framed by it. The negative turns the positive into its own aura. Instead of offering us this or that image, or nothing, Yass presents us at the same time with an image and its denial. When this superimposition occurs in images of people, the negative can seem no more than a faint shadow, or appear as strong as the positive itself, suggesting a process of dematerialisation, a fading of foregrounded subject into the background play of light and colour.

It cannot be purely coincidental that this negative blue is so substantially the same as the deep blue of Yves Klein's monochrome paintings or the negative figurative images of his Anthropometries. The simultaneous implications of this colour for Klein, of spirituality and of the void, are also present here. The negative blue marks are like conceptual black holes that establish their own context as they punctuate the picture plane,while following the rhythm and echoing the significance of its representational intentions. Nor can coincidence alone explain how in some works, the blue gives a strong sense of verisimilitude. In the Clove Building portraits for example, one senses that the lowering sky could just about be that colour. The void is actually around us, as well as in the accidents of process and in our minds.

The sense of contingency in Catherine Yass' work, described here both in terms of direct physical engagement and of the interdependence of separate elements, is nowhere more evident than in the two works produced for display at the Tavistock Clinic for Psychotherapy in North London. Portraits respectively of a mother and child and a father and child, each work is similar formally to the earlier Portrait: Director (although hanging directly on the wall rather than on free-standing supports). The Clinic is another unconventional site, but one imbued with a sense of modesty and private purpose rather than grandiloquence and show. Instead of expressing a single central idea, the imagery unfolds across the format. In each of the two works, streetlights form a pattern that carries the viewer's vision across the four lightboxes, naturally echoing the landscape's discernable though fragmented panorama. It also embodies a kind of pulse that connects the otherwise isolated figures. Through this electric tension between isolation and connection, through the filmic implications of time suggested by multiple framing, and through the direct gaze of the mother and father compared to the children's more protean, unfocussed, presence, familiar iconic images of parent and child are transformed and invigorated. Occupying distinct and structured spaces, the characters in these as in Yass's other works are joined together by light, and by the psyche.