Investing objects with individual desire is always a tricky proposition for the visual artist, if a conceptually enticing one. Portraits of inanimate objects assign an importance to what they represent, giving them a pathos not apparent with an incidental gaze. The significance of being chosen for representation transforms them — an operation that has become something of a platitude since Duchamp made it explicit in 1917 with the famously infamous Fountain. As the seminal promoter and photographer Stieglitz wrote in support of Duchamp-cum-Mutt, “Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object, “ While this is, of course, also one of the exciting transformational possibilities of the camera, it does gets dicey fairly quickly. Perhaps the inherent contradictions, tensions and presumptions in what amounts to a portrait series of abandoned objects accounts for the vague but identifiable annoyance that is Bernhard Fuchs’ show, Autos, on display at the Jack Hanley gallery in Tribeca through 3 October.

Mr. Fuchs tells us the work is inspired by bicycle trips, during which “time and again, I saw passenger cars, buses, and trucks which just stood around. I think my first reaction was o [sic] look for the absent owners. Since I hardly ever saw anyone, I stayed alone with the situation, and a relationship to these vehicles began to develop as I would not have expected it. The car in the landscape had an impact on me, similar to the impact of actors on a stage, and since then I began to collect their wit and their tragedy.” The idea of this collection as a collection is interesting and troubling. It’s interesting, if not terribly original, to consider how objects are transformed by our relationship to them, by the privileged stature that is conferred by the act of being collected. Suddenly, because Mr. Fuchs has chosen to photograph them (and, then, because a gallery has chosen to display those photos), the vehicles become meaningful; because this meaning derives from Mr. Fuchs’ choice in representing them – and because he encountered them on an alternate mode of transportation – he is inscribing them with an emotional and aesthetic value he has determined. There is a disconnect in these photos between the ‘tragedy and wit’ Mr. Fuchs wants us to read in the images, and, at least for this viewer, the independent emotional response. I was not particularly moved by any of the vehicles—in fact, they all looked pretty much the same to me, and, while I think this may be the point (each of these is, initially, unremarkable), it also creates problems that I’m not certain the photos themselves are strong enough to overcome. Mr. Fuchs wants us to do a lot of the work here; for the exhibition to be successful, the viewer must be willing to re-perform his action of forming an intellectual perception and an emotional attachment. This attachment is necessary to individuate the vehicles from each other, but the photos do not convey enough to invite that extra step.

Part of the trouble is that, in choosing to focus so exclusively on such a specific set of images, Fuchs leaves a lot of questions, probably too many, open to the viewers. The vehicles are all proportioned similarly in the frame and most lack much of anything of interest surrounding them. We are quickly drawn away from what Fuchs has told us he wants us to see, and to other, perhaps more formalist concerns. The specificity and exclusivity of Fuchs’ focus, and the repetitive nature of the photographs, makes everything in the images that is not the autos really count. This works both in Fuchs’ favor, by allowing to us to see his practiced confidence and fine sensibility for light, but also against him, as the composition appears trite under the scrutiny. In photo after photo, we have a car (usually a vaguely 1990’s, nondescript model with a boxy frame, trapezoidal angles and the surprising colors Americans associate with European cars), sitting in a wooded area, or near a highway, or, alone in a parking lot. In pictures like Weißer Fiat-Bus (White Fiat Van), and Grüner VW-Transporte there is a regrettable surfeit of what I always think of as ‘serious-memory-light,’ a sort of aggressively mellow, late-afternoon-inflected, golden tone that is just desperate to be described as “evocative” but comes across as intensely maudlin. This sentimentalizing tendency is evident in other heavy-handed touches: the repeated use of a grey-on-grey theme, the mists, the path-heading-into-mysterious-woods motif, the way the gaze lingers on the beginnings of rust around a window frame.

The “moment of the ‘happened upon’”, as the gallery has it, is a potentially rich one, as is the metaphor of the random, motionless vehicle, but the photographs, on the whole, are too flat to elicit an independent identity. Any feelings of “wit and tragedy” belong solely to Mr. Fuchs, not to the objects he seems to wish were possessed of grander significance than they are. I’ll happily grant that if we look long enough, we can invest anything with meaning. That, as Stieglitz recognized, is how art works: once it’s presented as such, we can make ourselves experience it artistically. But the fact that we can find meaning in Mr. Fuchs’ images, if forced to, is more a testament to the imagination than his power to excite it.

Auto Biography: Bernhard Fuchs at Jack Hanley

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