David Griffiths
Exhibitions of work by David Griffiths often seem to be incomplete. I mean by this not that he is unable to do himself justice because of some technical problem of display or artistic incompetence, but that the objects on show refer to something outside of themselves. The real subject of enquiry is elsewhere. This is neither a question of the works being illustrative of an idea that can't be contained by the gallery, or that they are part of some long-term project. It's something more fundamental than either of these. The pieces lack. They manifest a certain emptiness or uncertainty: little grey question marks in the gallery.
Griffiths is a photographer but there are no photographs in this show. No photographs, that is, in the sense of paper covered in light sensitive emulsion, or transparencies illuminated from behind. It is nevertheless a show about photography. The restrictive demarcation between one medium and another is a source of wry amusement to him, rather than of polemic. He finds his label as a photographer irritating at times, but ultimately inconsequential.
This show contains three distinct works, but they all share the same title: White Stick (1994). Common to all the works is a sense of displacement. Of the three, one most obviously signals this. A large-scale map, showing the gallery's locality, is presented along with a description of objects held in a safe deposit box in a bank a short walk away. Arrangements can be made to view the work which reveals itself to be more than merely a conceptual conceit. The deposit box itself is a surprise, turning out to be a photographers' polished aluminium carry-case, rather than the bank's own svelte deposit box. Inside is a cassette tape with a short sound recording of the walk from gallery to bank. Additionally there is a phial containing grey dust, the scrapings from the surface of a negative.
On one level this is a discourse on what photography cannot do. It cannot record the sounds of the street. It is, after all, a chemical process and cannot escape its own mechanics. But this in itself is unrewarding. Painting can't swim and sculpture can't drive a car, but nobody minds too much. Art relies on scientific laws. Plaster mixed with water goes hard, and white light splits into the spectrum.
What Griffiths has on his tape is time - a reproduction of that real-life time that occurred when he made the recording. And in listening to the tape the viewer-turned-receiver is using up a similar quantity of time. Doubly so, for they've already made the same walk. There's a subtle form of coercion going on here: to experience the work. the gallery-goer must invest a little of their own time and make a commitment to engage. A photographic print, on the other hand, would allow the visitor to view the work in a fraction of a second. No such formal contract would be required.
The phial of silver is coercive too. It's contained in a plastic sample case, about the size of a roll of film - the kind of thing a scientist would take on field trips, to catch and pore over interesting beetles. A lens at one end magnifies the subject within, establishing an ideal viewpoint. The scrapings from the negative are close to the kind of silver you would keep in a bank vault (apparently one third of the world's silver production is used in photography).
The negative had been of a signing stick, more commonly known as a white stick and used by the blind and partially-sighted, not only to navigate but to indicate their disability. Here, photography itself has been disabled. Paradoxically, Griffiths suggests a closer contact with verity. Back in the gallery, the stick is present, painted black and attached to the white wall. This simple reversal again confounds the photographic process of negative to positive in order to comment upon it: the stick has been stripped of its use as an indicator, overtaking the negative stage of photographic reproduction.
A further white signing stick is laid along the top of an illuminated fluorescent tube, set off against a rectangle of black velvet which seems to have been unfurled to reveal it. The stick is white but from directly above, it can only be perceived as a black form against the harsh glare of the fluorescent light. The piece parallels the mechanics of photography with optical processes of its own. In photography, what, it asks, would be the true colour of the stick?
One might argue the toss as to whether Griffiths works from within or outside of photography. Is he a sculptor? It matters little. What counts are the works, restless indicators probing the belly of an often self-satisfied profession, and proposing a new kind of photographic reality.
