A week ago a brand new book by Ann Veronica Janssens arrived in the mail. The parcel was heavy as a rock, and unpacked revealed Experienced, a huge, thick, exciting catalogue filled with thousands of images. The catalogue was published earlier this year on the occasion of her exhibition Are you Experienced? at EACC - Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló, in Spain. It’s a source book for Janssens’ work and contains images of every project she has made. But what’s really interesting about it is that there is no hierarchy employed. All the captions are the names of the image files from her digital archive, and there are no defining images of particular works, nothing placed in more prominence to anything else. The images often seem to look around the work somehow, as if the photographer has the intention of documenting her artwork, but becomes distracted and turns the camera on the people observing, or wanders off to look at the view out of the gallery window – or perhaps the work has somehow made the view out of the gallery window noticeable. Sometimes the images show the installation and de-installation of the work, and the people involved are given just as much space and time as the physical objects. It’s like the work itself is merely the trigger that induces a wandering attention and a heightened perception of the surrounding environment. The work drifts in and out of focus, but what it makes possible is a kind of being (present) in the world. (I think this is what I’m looking for in my own work – that all these activities of recording and documenting are really about being alive, being present, or just being.) Her catalogue doesn’t reduce the experience of her work through photographs. The book creates new experiences in the absence of a physical encounter, without the feeling that they are secondary. Somehow it seems to open the work up, to multiply the possibilities of encounter.
(Another influential reference for my “overview book” idea)
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