ART REVIEW : John Divola Tunes In With a Post-Conceptual Rehash

In “WX6276, V8102, KU100382, X14149, X13194, X10117, V8161, WX6230: Seven Song Birds and a Rabbit” at Jan Kesner Gallery, photographer John Divola plunders an archive of stereographic negatives housed at the California Museum of Photography, in order to offer a critique of the institutional structures of knowledge. This tactic, however, is rather embarrassingly after the fact.

Like Christopher Williams, whose 1990 “Supplement” this work more than superficially resembles, Divola appropriates archival images of birds in order to engage with the recalcitrant, 19th-Century penchant for gathering, categorizing, systematizing and presenting information, as if such proprietary practices could guarantee something as arbitrary as the truth. Yet, whereas Williams insists upon a complex engagement with the politics of these classificatory practices--the colonialist impulse behind them, the violence implicit in any desire to control the flow of information, and so on--Divola drops the politics as if it were a hot potato.

That Divola’s Post-Conceptual rehash is cautious (indeed halfhearted) turns out to be a good thing, for Williams’ brand of critical practice has exhausted itself as a genre. It seems apparent, in any case, that Divola is far more closely attuned to formal questions, among them the way in which the warp of the photographic linen onto which the images are printed subtly distorts them, nullifying their claims to truth.

Most of the images he chooses depict the birds (and one rabbit) camouflaged in foliage. Divola delights in perceptual hide-and-seek, but he cuts the game short by highlighting his animal subjects. The aggressive move undercuts the work’s pretensions to playfulness.

It is, in fact, quite a serious project. Seeing the invisible, and obscuring that which offers itself to be seen, are paradoxes that have long interested Divola. The Conceptual apparatus merely weighs things down.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.