PHOTOS

Photography is the other visual medium through which Crowder takes up the work that is HERE LIES.

Photography and its adjuncts, video and film, are arguably the central art form of our times, usurping the place occupied by painting in the days such hierarchical ranking was taken seriously. This position is justified by photography’s allegedly privileged relation to the real, making it vehicle of choice for contemporary theory and the truths which are so important to it.

By contrast, the photographs of HERE LIES continues the critical work begun by the paintings. They question the ‘real’ on which photography bases its claim to seriousness, and foreground instead the metaphoric and fictive dimensions of the photographic image, underlining this with Crowder’s typical puns-as-titles. Freed in this way from the conventions of denotation and the burden of truth, photographs become as multi-layered and meaning-productive as any poetic utterance.

Indeed, Crowder’s artwork titles are just such an utterance: the HERE LIES Cantos, a text for performance, are made from the names of works in the HERE LIES project. (The Cantos’ are reproduced in the text section of this website.) Together with the paintings and photographs, they constitute a single gesture: a philosophical pseudo-biography directed not toward some predefined ‘truth,’ but to an explicitly non-sacrificial meaning. That is, an understanding of things gained without destroying them in the process.