Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
[...] Take Joseph Cohen’s series of “paintings,” as the artist calls them. The choice to call these paintings rather than photographs is a telling one. It is a tongue-and-cheek nod towards the way that Joseph intends for these works to be read within the genre of painting rather than photography. As an alternative name for these objects, I offer here the term “prepared photographs,” à la the prepared instruments of John Cage and others. These are not photographs, per se, or at least not in a conventional sense. These works evade the traditional demands we make of the medium: to convey some kind of “truth value,” to supply evidence, or to act as a mnemonic device. They fail intentionally, because Joseph is interested in something else.
These photos are a slantwise attempt to document a painting-performance. Via Joseph’s treatment and interventions to these photographs—adding chemical baths, punching holes, scanning and printing them—their ostensible subject is distorted or obscured entirely until the result is something more akin to nonrepresentational, abstract painting.
Here we can chart a transformation—in scale, medium, and material—from the initial large canvas to the postcard-like (4 x 6 in.) “paintings” framed on the wall. This transformation, Joseph tells me, was in part the product of a change of material circumstances: moving from the larger studio in Middletown, CT where the “action-paintings” were originally made, to one in Tivoli– a desk in the living room of a one-bedroom sublet. Whether the product of necessity or intention, these smaller-scale works invite closer inspection. One of their most poignant details, to me, which Joseph points out in our conversation: on one of the prepared-photographs, Spray tan: a single black human hair (Joseph’s) lies on the physical photograph itself, which the scanner then captures and reproduces, in a flattened, pixelated form. To borrow from Roland Barthes, this is the “painting’s” punctum: “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” [...]
–Thomas Wee