John Divola
Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, 1996-1998 | As Far as I Could Get, 1996-1997 | Vandalism, 1973-1975
AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY is a very simple newsletter where I share a collection of creative expressions I enjoyed coming across.
Spanning over 40 years, John Divola’s work has consistently questioned the limits of photography, interweaving sculpture, installation, and performance to highlight the inherent tensions within the medium. Divola’s imagery often examines the Southern Californian landscape, including urban Los Angeles or the nearby ocean, mountains, and desert. Initially inspired by Minimalist and Conceptual work while in college, which he accessed predominantly through photographic reproductions, Divola was one of the first artists to highlight the role of photography in mediating our experience of the world and our surroundings.
Yancey Richardson Gallery
It could easily be a melancholy body of work, were it not for Divola’s endearing sense of the absurd and his disarming knack for getting at profound ideas about images and human experience.
David Campany
My acts, my painting, my photographing, my considering, are part of, not separate from, this process of evolution and change. These photographs are not so much about this process as they are remnants from it. My participation was not so much one of intellectual consideration as one of visceral involvement.
John Divola
Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, 1996-1998
The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present. […] A dog can hear your car coming for several miles and will see you coming almost as far away. By the time you arrive he has developed a level of anticipation.
From 1995 to 1998 I was working on a series of photographs of isolated houses in the desert at the east-end of the Morongo Valley in Southern California. As I meandered through the desert, a dog would occasionally chase my car. Sometime in 1996 I began to bring along a 35mm camera equipped with a motor drive and loaded with a fast and grainy black-and-white film. The process was simple; when I saw a dog coming toward the car I would pre-focus the camera and set the exposure. With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film. I’ll admit that I was not above turning around and taking a second pass in front of a house with an enthusiastic dog.
Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. It could be viewed as a visceral and kinetic dance. Here we have the two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.
John Divola
As Far as I Could Get, 1996-1997
In the work, the artist captures himself running away from the camera in a 10-second sprint: the amount of time he has set the exposure for each photograph.
Linda Theung | LACMA Unframed
Vandalism, 1973-1975
In this visceral, black and white series of images Divola vandalized vacant homes with abstract constellations of graffiti-like marks, ritualistic configurations of string hooked to pins, and torn arrangements of card, before cataloguing the results. The project vigorously merged the documentary approach of forensic photography with staged interventions echoing performance, sculpture and installation art.
MACK Books
