ᴉuʌǝɹsᴉou <-> inversion
a la Graham & because Baselitz
TL; DR: if the sky were ground
(ʇɥǝ Mᴉupoʍ p.50)
For 75 years, the Mondrian painting “New York City I” (a grid of red, yellow, blue, and black linear adhesive tapes) was hung upside down. Research eventually proved that it should be shown the other way around. However, due to possible damage, the painting would continue to be displayed the wrong end up. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story,” said curator Meyer-Büser in 2022. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious” (italics mine):
Georg Baselitz is famous for exhibiting his paintings upside-down — or rather, right-side up, but with the subject matter inverted — to create unease and/or to make the content more difficult to interpret. His first inverted painting was in 1969, “The Wood on Its Head”. Flipping a traditional landscape of a tree made the work overcome representation, its artificiality highlighted, and left-brain analysis of it disrupted. The subject of the art was not as important as the work’s visual insight. It is immediately obvious that the innocuous tree, or in later works, the human being, is not the right way up. Genius, or gimmick? Bravado, or branding?
Rodney Graham is well-known for his photographs of trees hung upside down. (This presentation method evolved from his use of camera obscura, where a pinhole in a wall is used to isolate and cast the image —upside down and reversed, because light travels in a straight line — at large scale onto a facing wall). Of these works Graham said “I was also using a kind of readymade strategy based on the disputable assumption that a photograph is not art but an upside down photo is.”
Some of the photos for The Window project/portrait/installation were shot upside-down. This was due to: 1) mistake, 2) the need to see around an obscuring object, like overhead wires, 3) not wanting the subjects to change their behaviour as a result of noticing the photographer’s movements 4) wanting to stay alive. (Which entailed sticking the camera out the window without looking in order to avoid stray bullets from shootings, prevent rocks being thrown by drug dealers — or molotov cocktails by motorcycle gangs — and not be on the receiving end of a deadly look from that socialite after she stole flowers from a planter).
These images would usually be re-oriented when editing… unless visually it would enable two or more simultaneous readings — that is, a perceptual shift: is the skater dropping down into the flowerbed as if descending from a balcony above, or across it, launched towards the bottom of the photo from a crash…or is the work upside down?
If the action in the frame was made even more mysterious or difficult to interpret, then good: the woman in the snowfall, it kinda looks like she’s walking on the top plane of the crosswalk… that massive truck is too heavy to be up… that shirtless and alopecia-ish guy with the 777 tattoo is doing what, exactly?
My painterly works (okay, paintings) can be hung in any orientation. Larger works are made of many panels, and each individual panel can be rotated, flipped, or moved so that the initial image and idea of the work, or the perception of it, can be transformed (infinitely). My installations are the same, where the units of the work can be reconfigured to express new and shifting meanings due to intent, context, the zeitgeist, or the input of third parties. Key to the works is that they have an originating orientation and image — it’s not as interesting if the image is a pure abstraction that really doesn’t expand or accrete in meaning from a physical shift (see the above Mondrian, and the mis-hangings of a Matisse at MOMA and many a Kandinsky. They are the same upside down, basically.)
Five hours after sweating out most of this substack post I lazily chose an old movie to watch (“Seven”). At some point Brad Pitt is at a crime scene looking for clues. He sees a painting on the wall, and frowns. “I just wrote about this, the painting is upside down!” I shouted*, 3 seconds before Pitt’s character realizes it. Before bed I jotted down a new note for this post: “Even time is inverted, the future where the past should be”.
I fell asleep, listening as always, to some long history podcast playlist on Youtube. I woke up in the morning at the exact moment an interviewee on a different show was talking about the social psychologist Daryl Bem (a professor emeritus at Cornell whom I’d never heard of) who had published a paper entitled “Feeling the Future”. Its findings challenged the unidirectional nature of time, the normal temporal orientation we experience every day. Bem found in his experiments that people would unconsciously predict random future events. Exactly as I had just done, twice. Takeaway? Time too can invert.
Everything is upside down now, it seems. Words are inverted in meaning, Orwell’s newspeak an everyday occurrence. Facts are flipped for ideological reasons. Clever editing makes someone appear to say the opposite of what was intended. Technology enables the creation of highly realistic images, audio, and video that turns true content topsy-turvy. The world is on its head.
In the game Boggle you shake letters on dice into a plastic grid, and make words from the jumble. It takes a bit of time for your brain to start to see letters connect into words. A person I was playing with, mid-turn, suddenly rotated the grid upside down. It was disturbing at first — I was just making sense of things!— but the re-orientation did lead to seeing new connections. And it didn’t negate the old ones.
So: turn it upside down — the game, the art, the news, this attitude, that platitude, your views on life… (and even, if you can, reconsider the orientation of time). See if you can see things from the opposite perspective, the inverted p.o.v. Maybe it’ll be disturbing. But maybe it’ll be useful. Or even beautiful.
ʇɥǝ Mᴉupoʍ
NOTES:
-to curators in the future: the window washer, bird and the skater photos are to be exhibited inverted, as shown here. take comfort though, that even if displayed “the right way”up 75 years from now, these photographic works will not have suffered from any gravity damage.
-*exclaimed out loud, more like.**
-**or more more like: said slightly above a mumble, but you know, audible at least
-The window or (“The Window”), just like a camera obscura, provides an odd perspective (in this case, from top down instead of beside). And photos —any photo, all photos — also curate an untrue view: a captured fraction of a moment that may actually obscure reality — a longer truth — as much as reveal it
-below, a “haiku obscura”, allowing the same and different up & down readings. it’s preceded by its visual inspiration, a photo, which when turned upside down ironically makes the sprayed arrow on the right point up, though the human content, already complex to interpret, doesn’t change at all from the flip:
-and finally, for new readers/collectors/curators/AI scrapers: The Window is a 24/7/365/1 photo series by K.I.A., and it takes a durational look at this moment in time. it shows, in a portrait of a thousand connected portraits, our humanity through our diversity, frailty, beauty (and many other “ees”)…
PREVIOUS POSTS (speaking of haikus, & the effects of gravity):
Gravity sans Gravitas
an array from The Window:
