Barbara Kasten at Hannah Hoffman

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Kasten's are like exorcisms to make photography reveal its surface: what was made to represent everything but itself - not to see its silver substrate as Deschenes or an self-indexing gambit of Beshty's mechanical noodling- but a surrealist project of photography's desire-surface, the paradox of photographing glass, making its car-body self expose without getting a look under the hood, desiring the wet image of surface. Like making love to someone's glistening sweat.

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

“Every Day I Make My Way” at Minerva

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Photography may be comprised of the accident, but its an accident captured and cast in the glass of its image; there is nothing more horribly crystallinely concrete than a photograph, "an object which virtually produces itself." Chetrit's video shows its molten form, the slow liquid flow of "photography"'s staging, strung and malleable in its cheesy goo before cooling into its hard representation of us. Photography's glass found perfect deployment in advertising and the commodity who craved its ability to deliver a glass-like surface of perfection that even then Barthes, Benjamin and Sontag were, it's possible to believe, already reacting to then in their nostalgic interest in photography's yellowing, like now pretty much every photographer today not necessarily trying to break the glass, at least looking to place a sticker on it or find some odd way to warm its domination of us, with a filter say, the image.


See too:  Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, Tony Conrad's Glass