Stan Denniston: Original Copy (Exhibition Brochure Essay). TPW, Toronto, 2002

Mitch Robertson: Original Copy

I have a confession to make; I'm not much of a writer. And looking at Mitch Robertson's photographs, I could also say he's not much of a photographer.

Robertson's work demands a closer examination. He is, after all, showing at the Toronto Photographers Workshop, an artist-run gallery that has a history of professional shows. Robertson is part of the recent generation of photo artists who employ scrappy techniques and accept photographic information without aesthetic or pictorial enhancements. I have often wondered what's behind this choice?

Could it be a savvy rejection of the aesthetic path taken by printmakers of placing an enormous emphasis on technical achievement rather than ideas: a path that has relocated their production to a ghetto within the art world?

Could it be an approach that signals an emphasis on concept, or process, over technique? (Some of us may hear an echo of the situation during the 1960s, and in particular the 1970s, when some photographers persisted with black-and-white photography long after most everyone, out side of the galleries, had enthusiastically embraced full colour products. Why? To signal a seriousness of purpose.)

Or could it come from a realization that the photographic image carries such a surfeit of information that the immediacy of the gesture or the intimacy of the sketch is almost unavailable to it, photographically speaking? Should we then consider it a more direct rendering of the visual experience? Is this a continuation of the Modernist project to eliminate separations or distinctions between art and life?

Could we interpret it as a sign of the generations-old resistance to the art market transforming virtually any art activity into a commodity?

If I can ask one last question: Since Robertson heavily contextualizes the use of his photographic prints, are these questions really of concern to his elaborate installation Original Copy? We'll see.

Mitch Robertson's short career has consistently addressed issues of commerce, fame, and art with enough ambiguity of intention to make me, for one, uneasy. He has accepted, as his uncomplicated inheritance, Andy Warhol's adage, "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," and General Idea's statement, "If we say we're famous, we're famous."

Curiously, he has never seemed interested in either the achievements or the misdeeds that confer fame, but appears to see fame as a random, isolated benediction. Robertson, instead, has focused his explorations on the bottom-feeding merchandising that washes out from celebrity culture—what we might call collectibles. (Ironically, much of what we consider collectible is based on our profound understanding of just how disposable celebrity and the commercial exploitation of it are.)

Until I encountered Robertson's Famous™ Buddhas (1997), I had never thought of the great ancient religions of the world as celebrity culture. Making a mold from a gift shop ceramic Buddha, Robertson recast the figure in plaster in a signed and numbered edition. Crudely painted in garish enamels (reportedly at a work party with a number of friends), no two buddahs are alike.

In his early project Famous™ Artstars (1998), Robertson featured thirty artists of his acquaintance as a set of trading cards (such as baseball or hockey cards) with a photo reproduction of a work by the artist on the face and some "career stats" on the back—available in packages of six.

For Red Bird Paparazzi (1999), Robertson posed toy red birds in typical bird hangouts (on fence posts, bird feeders, statues) and produced an editioned set of prints in cornea-scraping high-chroma colour. The combination of obviously fake birds and lurid colour sets up gentle bird watchers as paparazzi, surely an absurd foray to the frontier of the culture of celebrity.

For Stories for Grandchildren (2001), Robertson solicited over two hundred decidedly un-famous people for their most noteworthy "claim to fame" and recorded their responses. Engraved on small metal plaques—name most prominent as the top line, claim in the middle, and date of occurrence at the bottom—they are arrayed in an enormous grid on a gallery wall, appearing a little like a model mausoleum. One can't know precisely the manner in which he presented the question, but the replies are notable for their superficiality.

Robertson's previous exhibitions have been largely comprised of various combinations of these and other projects. Like little retrospectives, they have mimicked the museum blockbuster show, with its attendant gift shop, only with Robertson there is a deliberate confusion as to what is the art and what is the souvenir; what is the exhibition and what is the gift shop.

This confusion is most ambitiously extended in Mitch Robertson, 1974-1999 (1999), an eight-metre-long motor home renovated into a museum-on-wheels, complete with a souvenir shop entirely devoted to the short life of Mitch Robertson thus far. The exhibits included fourteen framed enlargements of family snapshots of Robertson at various ages and numerous glass cases containing baby teeth and school report cards amongst other more arcane personal mementos. Piloted around the country for its numerous pre-scheduled (and of course pre-promoted) stops by the artist himself, its pretension is punctured by one's realization of the withering commitment, in hours and energy, by Robertson as promoter, driver, hawker, museum guide, and shop clerk. If any of us linger at all over Warhol's prognostication, Robertson reminds us that we could end up minding our own souvenir shop.

In Original Copy , Robertson for the first time addresses the celebrity of place, as in the travel and tourism industry's basic component of marketing: the sight.

At its simplest the experience of travel is difference —in architecture, climate, plant life, or even the facial features or hair colour of the local populace. We can't forget, as well, the difference in the daily routine of any traveller, compared to that at home. But travel is also a search for the authentic , a desire for a more profound understanding of society and culture: in experience (an authentic neighbourhood pub); in historical or cultural production (an actual Gothic cathedral); or in a site (the very house where the author died).

The intractable contradiction here is that mass tourism, wherever it thrives, displaces the authentic. Just try to find that untouched bar or trattoria known only to the locals in Venice. On the other hand, in their transformation into attractions, places such as convents, factories, and palaces are detached from their social or religious contexts. The "destination" is an inventory of displaced sights. (I am reminded here of the Heizenberg uncertainty principle, a scientific metaphor stating that in the world of sub-atomic particles the very act of observing alters the reality being observed. The second part of the principle states that the uncertainty in the uncertainty principle cannot be done away with by better observation techniques but becomes part of the nature of reality itself.)

Rather than focusing on obvious international tourist sights, Robertson gives his attention to a decidedly simpler order of attraction: sights of local importance. These monuments, historical buildings, and roadside attractions are beyond the scope of most any guidebook. One could even say they are obscure.

Instead of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in New York, with their abundance of film, literary, and other artistic references in addition to the vast heaps of ordinary markers of their significance (postcards, fridge magnets, miniature replicas), we are presented with the Navarre Anderson Trading Post in Monroe, Michigan or the World's Largest Sausage in Mundare, Alberta. These prosaic, unencumbered sights all have one thing in common: they are represented in the ordinary postcard, the basic order of circulating markers, or publicity.

Postcard representations of places or structures are always evocative of the travel ideal: sunny and warm, devoid of crowds or queues, without a hint of traffic or parking hassles. Even though we understand its baldly promotional nature, and are used to reading its deceptions, the postcard can still fan that longing for the ideal.

The travel snapshot is by definition a declaration by the traveller that "I was here," yet the sights in these snapshots are often adorned (redundantly) with friends or loved ones. One could argue that snapshots signal a kind of resistance to the heavily mediated postcard representation. I would argue that the snapshot is more a re-creation of the postcard, aspiring to the ideal.

At first glance Robertson's photos mimic the travel snapshot, although they are carefully emptied of people. Devoid of the sophisticated photographic techniques used by those in the business, they are full of the contingencies of travel: the disappointments of weather and light, the pressure of time, and the limitations of access.

Yet Robertson's strict procedure belies their apparent casualness. Robertson takes the contingencies as more than givens. His encounter with the actual sight occurs only after combing a nearby postcard rack and, card in hand, locating the photographer's exact point of view. Only then does he make his image. What could be behind this doubling of the image, this slavish re-presentation of the postcard?

At the same time as Robertson calls into question the possibility of the authentic experience of the tourist, he calls into question the possibility of the authentic work of the artist—the quality and freshness of artistic ideas and products. One might rightly recall post-modern theorizing about the death of the author but Robertson's re-presentation is also a strategy that tosses away, as much as possible, his decision-making (point of view, composition, light) implicit in the making of the photograph.

So what (or where) is the responsibility of the artist?

In Original Copy Robertson has incorporated the source material for his "recasting," in this case the postcards, into the exhibition. But there is to be no side-by-side comparison. While his photographs ring the gallery in a continuous band, the postcards have become dematerialized as a separate slide show that takes place in a room within the room—a re-creation of the artist's living room, the kind of space where any traveller might share his or her pictures.

This separation, or gap, between the source material and the wall-mounted prints becomes an exercise of the mind—and memory—should we (and we will) try to match them up. It declares the place of authentic work: the conception and process of Robertson's production. But that gap also brings to mind the real efforts expended in this production. Baldly put, the real project is to work and live as an artist while trying to find out what the minimum requirements for an art object might be—an index of that activity, a memento, a souvenir.

He restates this in Original Copy with the inclusion of Vacations, a half dozen or so solid, gypsum re-castings of snow-globes, at once one of the silliest, yet most entrancing, of travel keepsakes. A snow-globe is a transparent, liquid-filled plastic bubble surrounding a scrap of a miniature world. Details of that tiny model landscape are modified to reflect the place of which it is a memento, but the universal element of every snow-globe is snow, flecks of white material that stir and swirl with the slightest movement creating a dream-like space. (Yes, Canadian readers, snow can be the stuff of dreams, especially when none of the figures populating these protected worlds is ever dressed in serious winter gear.)

As sculptural objects, the re-cast Vacations resemble simple lumps, but their forms are dictated by the snow-globes Robertson has collected. Covered with opaque white enamel, they deflect our projections of elfin fascination but can't extinguish our feeling that the imaginary—the ideal—is locked away inside. You want to take it home and break it open.

What is worth noting here is that the above-mentioned paradoxes consistently re-occur in Robertson's work, as deliberate and practiced as the oxymoronic construction of the exhibition title. He could have presented it in the once popular form Original/Copy. But that wouldn't have caught us up—naturally copy follows original.

Paradox, irony, oxymoron: the gift shop Buddha, the desire for which contradicts the teachings of the faith; the simple postcard that hints at the Ideal at the same time as it serves lowly commercial ends; Original Copy —just as in Heizenberg's uncertainty principle there is no solving it.

Also included in the exhibition is a single 18-minute video projection that illustrates the contradiction that inhabits much of Robertson's work. Shot from above the ruins of Castle Urquhart, on the shore of Loch Ness, the image is primarily of the wind-stirred surface of the lake. However, in the lower left corner of the frame there is a souvenir shop. Though the choppy body of water could be any body of water, anywhere, the souvenir shop ratifies it as a sight. This anonymous shed of a building is tucked inside the ruined castle walls in such a way as to suggest that it commands the best view of the Loch (visible between the postcard racks). As much as we try to focus our attention on the suggestive rippling of the lake, the busy comings and goings at the gift shop hold their own.

Robertson has given prominence to the water, allowing us at least the anticipation that something extraordinary may appear. And who knows, maybe something was captured on tape back at the Loch and he's saved the revelation for his exhibition—how canny of him!

Ah, Mitch, fame at last.

- Stan Denniston