Linda Armstrong

Linda Armstrong
Chastain Gallery
Atlanta, Georgia
November 5-30, 1982

The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it; its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object —it becomes a "vision" of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it.

— Victor Shklovsky, Art as Technique, 1917

Victor Shklovsky's description of the technique of art goes far in describing strategies evident in Linda Armstrong's recent exhibition titled She did not have a map. The color Xerox images of boats, buildings, landscapes and interiors are, for the most part, enlargements of slides that Armstrong shot while traveling in the United States and South America, but the more significant aspect of the work lies in the "revisiting" Armstrong accomplishes through the manipulation of the image.

These image alterations are somewhat similar to the manipulated Polaroid work of Lucas Samaras, but Armstrong's work possesses a more "hands-on" look. A stronger comparison can be made with the films of Stan Brakhage (especially Brakhage's Scenes From Under Childhood) in terms of the greater similarity of intention and process used by both. Armstrong varies the controls on the Xerox machine to produce — in some cases —highly unnaturalistic coloring; she then smudges, smears, and draws on the unfixed prints. Armstrong rearticulates time and place by imposing thoughts and memories she has about the photos in a stream of consciousness kind of mark-making.

Some of the pieces are single-panel images, while others are groupings of several separate but thematically related images. The titles lend some clue as to possible interpretations of the piece, such as Within the walls some spent their lives, a series of images made from photographs taken at a convent in Arequipa; but other titles such as they were waiting, moving, are as elusive as the pieces themselves. However, in general, I don't think Armstrong is attempting to be clear; rather, she is engaged in a process of reviewing, reflecting and re-seeing. The Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky called this process defamiliarization — making the familiar seem strange.

The underlying photographic images are not unfamiliar. Even the terraced gardens in Moray, depicted in the title series, afterwards, she discovered she did not have a map, seem familiar through National Geographic magazine and elementary school geography classes. The majority of the images have a tourist snapshot quality and don't strive for photographic greatness — when Armstrong made most of these photographs she was still working as a painter making large, extremely subtle, darkly colored canvases.

The photographs themselves are only a small part of Armstrong's overall work. They serve primarily as reference points for both Armstrong and the viewer. For the artist, they are objects with specific meaning — "oh yeah, it started raining right after I took that picture, and I ended up sitting in that cafe, talking to the old man for several hours." She is able to look at the unaltered photograph and recall situations and emotions; in effect the image becomes her map for the manipulations which she performs on the image. Through the manipulations, she "defamiliarizes." The viewer is confronted by images which only vaguely conform to the real world. In Armstrong's world, objects acquire auras, grasses becomes yellow, tree trunks are orange, human hair becomes a flame shooting straight out of a human head into the darkness, skies are too blue, some objects are blurred beyond recognition while others pop out with hyper-clarity.

Not only is the viewer distanced from photographic objectivity and provided a defamiliarized world, Armstrong too is able to see a new version of her remembered reality. Several of the same underlying photographic images appear in different pieces in the exhibition, but they are manipulated to make each version unique and autonomous. The original manipulation is a synthesis of memory and presence, assuming its own identity and providing Armstrong new raw material with which to explore the original photographic experience. This is much like revisiting a place and realizing that it's much different than remembered — the place hasn't changed but its memory has been reshaped by time and additional experience.

Armstrong made some installation decisions in the exhibition which gave the images a final added strength. The normal wall color at Chastain Gallery is middle gray. Armstrong felt that because of the rather small size of the individual images (less than 9" x 11") and, in some cases, problems of conflicting color combinations, the walls had to be altered. Her solution was white photographic back-drop paper tacked continuously floor to ceiling around the gallery walls. The paper dramatically transformed the space and became a unifying structural element connecting the separate images into one large drawing.

Armstrong had very few preconceptions about the actual sequencing and groupings of the various images into distinct pieces, and, using the drawing paper-like quality of the back-drop, arranged the exhibition in much the same intuitive manner in which she works on the individual images.

In the final arrangement, individual images began to function much like words in a sentence with occasional isolated punctuation. The overall effect was a very mysterious visual narrative reading left to right through the gallery. The narrative was further enhanced by the numbered title sheet, available at the entrance, that corresponded to the left to right visual sequence supplying a final cryptic verbal ingredient: She stepped back, Cuzco, Transiting the Alta Plano, Wari-Wilka, Two stops before (Puno gets bitterly cold at night), Montrose Park, (it was a dry day, tomorrow), They made it their custom, Stafford Beach, A visit to Lanark Village or Elizabeth plays with fire, Cumberland, Puno, Before an hour in the rain, They were waiting, moving, They finished and left the restaurant, Arequipa (SILENCIO), Walking from Willcawain, Within the walls some spent their lives, Afterwards, she discovered she did not have a map.