Border Lights: Imaging Hybrid Space
Dan HoldsworthPicture gallery Angus CarlyleFriday March 23, 2001Guardian Unlimited
'The lack of certain knowledge in a world of unpredictable change creates borderlines that exist as distinct, often extensive, spaces in vast grey zones of transition. These borderlines no longer separate certainties, but become spaces where uncertainties meet, interact, fuse or are repelled.' 1
'Hybrid space proposes an approach to architecture that creates new cultural codes and modalities - turbulences and disruptions within the physical and electronic networks that connect our international and local cultures.' 2
The work of photographer Dan Holdsworth is most cogently addressed under the sign of hybridity, the interaction of heterogeneous elements that occurs with greatest intensity at the planet's borderlines.
This hybridity is manifest in Holdsworth's fluid oscillation between commercial projects and more identifiably artistic enterprises.
On the one hand there are the extended assignments for the British Council, an Adidas campaign that saturated the cities hosting Euro2000, an evocative video for counter couturiers Vexed Generation, and various other scrupulously selected commissions through which his characteristic style surreptitiously infiltrates the consumer's visual field.
On the other, exhibitions at London's Atlantis, Chisenhale and Photographers' galleries culminating in last autumn's solo show at Cork Street's Entwhistle, by whom he is represented.
His successful movement between ostensibly disparate cultural locations enables him to be championed by The Evening Standard as one of the five faces to watch in 2001, while also attracting plaudits not only from the bleeding edges of contemporary publishing in Themepark, Sleazenation and Tank's coverage but also from the more sober photography journals like Camera Austria and Aperture.
It should come as little surprise that when the subjects of Holdsworth's photographic endeavours are explored, they reflect a parallel emphasis on the hybridity that is emerging at the planet's borderlines.
In a recent interview, Holdsworth declared his resistance to 'the idea of separation' that conventionally operates to demarcate the world into mutually exclusive poles: rural / urban, wilderness / civilisation, natural / artificial, third world / first world.
This declaration echoes a statement of intent announced four years earlier to investigate 'areas which I have termed "inter-liminal" spaces [and] in-between forms'.
It is perhaps this iterated commitment to mapping hybrid spaces which introduces a consistency to the potentially perplexing diversity of images.
The very number of these images that have appeared in a relatively short period of time dictates that in the few words that follow I only have the opportunity to discuss a fraction of this output.
Holdsworth's Autopia series locates itself in 'the empty halogen arenas that perforate our automotive cities' and the 'motorway flyovers' that punctuate the outer peripheries.
Yet the resultant images do not amount to any predictable day-lit representation of unsightly vehicular velocities colliding in a sulphurous haze.
Instead, the camera's exploration is conducted from a nocturnal perspective - in which the car parks are evacuated - and through a long exposure - from which any movement along the transport routes is visually compressed into ghost-trails from passing headlights.
The hybridity of these spaces depends to a large extent upon the dynamic opposition that emerges between the still, empty zones captured in the photographs and the viewer's appreciation of the frenzy that characterizes the same environments after sunrise.
Other inferred juxtapositions energize Holdsworth's more recent engagements with the spaces of traffic.
One of his contributions to Gasworks gallery's What We Call Progress depicts a smallholding that superficially evokes an autumnal American Gothic, yet investigation locates this chicken farm in the very immediate vicinity of the M8 motorway.
Similarly, the image Megalith manages to establish, through its framing of the skybound artificial light leaking from the top of a Dutch illuminated road-side hoarding, a strong vertical momentum.
This upward trajectory is positioned in interrogative contrast to the horizontal plane to which the just-out-of-shot motorists are hopelessly confined.
The vertical axis assumes an even more fundamental dimension in the At The Edge of Space sequence, which mobilizes a photographic analysis of the Port Spatial de l'Europe in South America.
Again, what is drawn out from Holdsworth's investigation of this French-Guianese installation of European rocket science - which he calls "the projection of architecture into space" - is, at least to this viewer, spatial hybridity.
This hybridity occurs across a number of borderlines between which the photographer identifies degrees of 'friction': the fecund jungle and the brutal attempts to repel its re-expansion; the supposed order invoked in the base's clinical interiors and clutter of equipment that threatens to destabilize it; the cosmological consciousness potentially provoked by contemplation of the extra-planetary environment and the worldly banality of satellites' functions once successfully sent into orbit.
Holdsworth's most recent project, as yet unpublished, involves a sustained exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland.
Initial encounters with these images might intimate that his arrival at even higher levels of creative distinction has simultaneously involved a departure for a gentler intellectual terrain, one less fissured by borderlines and less vulnerable to the instability of hybridity.
Yet, closer examination reveals that the ideas which animate his other work continue to exert their powerful presence, yet are now more submerged and, ultimately, more effective for that.
To describe the conceptual component of Holdsworth's photography as submerged in his most recent work should not be regarded as an implication that his earlier images announced their meaning with crude blatancy.
One of the intriguing aspects of Holdsworth's work relates to its resistance to being coherently located along the continuum between abstraction and representation.
Although the images possess figurative veracity, they are rarely inhabited by human presence or labelled by overt signage and they succeed as optical impact, characteristics more clearly associated with abstraction.
In Holdsworth's own terms, this formal hybridity invites the images to be engaged with as 'indeterminate', refusing to 'specify interpretation' and instead providing densely detailed 'surfaces of information' that are amenable to being 'scanned' for their multiple meanings.
Exploring Holdsworth's work, with its compelling mixture of cerebral sophistication and sensory stimulation and its persistent disclosure of the otherwise unseen, evokes for me the experimental energies in ideas and in image-making encapsulated by the following quotations.
'Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed.' 3
'Here I am, a camera, pushed about by resultant force, positioning myself amid the chaos of motions, fixing motion after motion in the most complex of combinations… Here I am deciphering a world unknown.' And here we are, in front of Dan Holdsworth's images, encountering the sublime hybridity emerging at the borderlines.
1 Lebbeus Woods, 'Inside the Borderline' in: eds. Lebbeus Woods and Ekkehard Rehfeld, Borderline, Springer Verlag, New York:, 1998, p. 39.
2 Peter Zellner, 'Introduction' to Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1999, p. 11.
3 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Allen and Unwin, London, 1911, p. 1.
4 Dziga Vertov cited in Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity, Sage, London, 1998, p. 86.
