| There’s a disquieting stillness to the hot rods in Jack Butler’s pinhole photographs. Streamlined shapes of hard steel that should suggest speed and testosterone-driven rivalries à la Rebel Without a Cause appear instead to float in a diffused wrap-around light, a knocked-back world of lustrous finishes and mechanical repose. But stillness has its advantages…by not competing with the optics that caress the rods’ contours it allows the photographs’ wide-angled perspective to create its own kind of movement, exaggerating curves, elongating carriages and animating whitewalls, pin-stripes and custom pipes. |  |
Kulture/Culture – Kim Bockus
There’s a disquieting stillness to the hot rods in Jack Butler’s pinhole photographs. Streamlined shapes of hard steel that should suggest speed and testosterone-driven rivalries à la Rebel Without a Cause appear instead to float in a diffused wrap-around light, a knocked-back world of lustrous finishes and mechanical repose. But stillness has its advantages…by not competing with the optics that caress the rods’ contours it allows the photographs’ wide-angled perspective to create its own kind of movement, exaggerating curves, elongating carriages and animating whitewalls, pin-stripes and custom pipes. In ‘31 Ford the metallic grin of a gleaming grill and pop-eyed headlights dominate the foreground, reminders of the automobile’s quasi-anthropomorphic and -zoomorphic (fins and gull wings) past. The past appears to be what the car club guys and girls are about, her polka-dot skirt and his cuffed jeans and tight white tee date back at least five decades, but the rods are clearly more than meticulously restored and polished relics. Each functions as a vision of ultimate car-ness, pushing the industrial design envelopes of mechanics, aerodynamics and aesthetics in an anthem to the individualism that demarcates all sub-cultural terrain.
Butler teases at the dichotomy of high- and low-brow art in the exhibition title, aware that his photographs fall somewhere outside easy classification. Yet he makes a point of avoiding identification with either camp, matter-of-factly emerging from the studio onto the pavement and seamlessly folding the work into the “fine art” milieu he has navigated for over 30 years. This feat bears examination. The current fascination with low-brow art is yet another swing of the pendulum in the history of aesthetic value-making, where critics and the modern-day equivalent of salon cliques are successively outraged then captivated in a predictable reactionism antithetical to the artist’s self-generated creative process. Choosing not to overtly advertise the flame-patterned tattoos and Von Franco car paintings as outlaw art is a kind of innovative customization in itself, one that asserts exemption from the vagaries of categorization and art world approbation.
Traveling up and down the California coast in his 1932 five-window Ford coupe, Butler found that the camera itself opened doors into the world of the car kulture enthusiasts, who responded to the simplicity and ingenuity of its design. Based on the linearity of light particles, pinhole camera optics were first recorded in the fifth century BC Chinese texts of Mo Tse, in fourth century BC texts by Aristotle and later in the tenth century AD observations of Arabian physicist and mathematician Ibn al-Haytham. During the Renaissance the pinhole design, also known as a camera obscura, was used by astronomers and as a drawing aid for artists and painters. Today, the populist appeal of the medium resonates internationally with an annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. This year’s image bank at www.pinholeday.org features 3,000 photographs from 60 countries and will attract approximately three million hits. Butler has used the site for several years to post test images and gather feedback on his craft.
“Kulture/Culture” began with Butler’s 2005 COLA (City of Los Angeles) grant and was completed with additional funding from Polaroid. Images are captured onto Polaroid film, scanned and digitally printed as archival 22’ x 28’ Piezo pigment prints on a warm-toned Legion Concord Rag paper.
