![]() ![]() “When we started having these conversations,” Cristello said of her preparatory meetings with Kasten, “she was pretty vocal about a dissatisfaction of being lumped into a medium.”įor the curator, Kasten’s ephemeral, in-studio installations-not the photographs of them-are at the core of the artist’s practice. ![]() The limitations of the labels foisted on Kasten were apparent to curator Stephanie Cristello, who edited the Skira book. “ It was a mechanical, technical achievement rather than an artistic one that brought photography into our lives,” she said.īarbara Kasten, Scenario (2015). This, Kasten said, is a masculine approach to thinking about photography that has been baked into the medium since its creation. It also decenters the artist’s own role-and her body-in our understanding of her work. ![]() Such a single-minded approach lowers the ceiling of her creations. I f this is the only aperture through which you think about Kasten, then her work will merely serve to reaffirm what we already know about photographic images-that they can be manipulated in the name of aesthetics or politics, that they lie. The installations themselves, and the work that went into them, are subordinate to the final picture. Kasten is painted as a kind of dogmatic formalist who erects temporary installations just to take a picture of them. One of the joys in looking at a Kasten photograph is figuring out how they were made-and the artist, to her credit, often gives viewers just enough clues to solve the puzzle: Even as scale is distorted and perspective muddled, the materials are recognizable, as is the setting in which they were arranged and documented.īut with so much attention paid to her ability to turn photographic properties in on themselves, her work has historically been portrayed as though it was fundamentally about photography. Indeed, much of the criticism around Kasten tends to focus on how her work exploits the flattening and compression effects of the camera to turn three-dimensional scenes into two-dimensional objects that play with perspective. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York. All of those things are more important to me than the production of a photograph that ends up being the object that you see.”īut, Kasten conceded, “sometimes you get identified one way and people have a hard time letting go of it.”īarbara Kasten, Collision 5E (2016). The core of what I do is really sculpture-sculpture that incorporates the use of space and color and light and form. Photography, she went on, is “sort of circumstantial to what I do. She was in London at the time, prepping for her new show at Thomas Dane Gallery, and wearing a pair of effortlessly chic, pistachio-colored glasses. “The reality is that I never thought about myself as a photographer,” Kasten said in an interview over video chat. But you’ll notice that in the passages above, as with almost every piece of writing about Kasten, the descriptions of the artist’s work are actually just descriptions of her process, and they’re recounted largely through the language of the photographic. It’s even useful, offering readers ingress into the artist’s reference-laden world. You almost certainly read that she prefers old-school, analog processes, and never uses Photoshop. You probably also learned about the illusive quality of her pictures and their supposed debt to the geometric abstractions of the Constructivists, say, or the material preoccupations of the Light and Space movement. If you’ve ever read an article or review about Kasten, chances are it contained a line like this: “In her studio, Kasten stages makeshift tableaus with angular pieces of plexiglass, mirror, and other industrial objects, then lights and photographs them.” “Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020),” 2023, published by Skira. ![]()
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