Interpellation Revisited: Gina Osterloh’s Group Dynamic

A review of Gina Osterloh, Group Dynamic. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 2013.

Group Dynamic is a brief but intensive introduction to the work of Gina Osterloh, a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her photographs of meticulously crafted room-sized sets with partially obscured figures that flout the conventions of portraiture. The occasion for the book is Osterloh’s three-month residency at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 2012, during which, at the invitation of curators Carol A. Stakenas and Robert Crouch, she moved her studio to the main gallery, there to engage visitors in both her process and her completed work. Group Dynamic includes an interview with the artist, a detailed account of her video installation Pulling Apart Voice, and contextualizing essays by art historians Kris Cohen and Matthew Thompson. Aptly designed by UCLA’s Willem Henri Lucas, this compact monograph features foldout color photographs and smaller black-and-white images of both work in progress and finished compositions.
 
Osterloh’s cross-platform project, fully titled Group Dynamic and Improper Light, amplifies and extends her exploration of the cognitive and perceptual operations by which we identify objects–and human bodies in particular. At the beginning of her residency, she built a large wooden set, lining the walls and floor with hand-striped paper in a neutral shade. Inviting gallery visitors to position themselves in front of cardboard, she traced their shadows and cut out their silhouettes, later covering these with the same striped paper. Osterloh then experimented with various groupings of the cutouts within the papered “room,” photographing the final assemblages with a four-by-five-inch large-format camera. In the resulting group and individual portraits, the patterned figures mimic their patterned environment. While their edges are discernible, figure-ground contrast is muted, such that visual recognition is slightly delayed.
 
In this moment of visual hesitation, the viewer becomes conscious of what is ordinarily a very rapid and unconscious process: distinguishing objects in the field of view by way of familiar optical cues. By intentionally withholding some of these cues, Osterloh impedes the interpretive process and calls attention to how representational practices guide our understanding of photographed bodies. In traditional portraiture, figures are typically foregrounded and centered, facing the viewer. Backgrounds provide color contrast, and faces are sharply focused. Standard lighting plans bring out facial detail and control shadows. Expression, posture, and gesture may be staged to suggest mood or personality. And clothing and other props provide selective information about the figures and their social contexts. As Cohen observes in his essay on Osterloh’s earlier work, “The conventions of photographic portraiture accommodate, even coddle, the act of looking” (20). Interpretation and identification are rapid because specific expectations are already in play.
 
In photographs leading up to those produced at LACE, Osterloh has progressively decentered the human figure through a number of bold antiportrait strategies. In early self-portraits, her face is turned away from the camera or hidden by her hair, or her eyes and mouth are covered by paper ovals. Her clothing frequently matches the color or pattern of her set, and in some photographs only parts of her body are visible. Gradually replacing the human figure with faceless papier-maché models and then faceless cardboard cut-outs, Osterloh has moved increasingly toward abstraction; in recent work, her backgrounds seem almost to absorb the shapes before them. As the artist indicates in her interview with Michelle Dizon, “I consider the backdrops active and having as equal a presence as the figure” (8). Without the focalizing effects of sharp contrast and “proper” light, her photographs resist the patterns of inference that most viewers–including artists and critics–customarily employ. As one of her LACE curators has confessed, he initially found the work quite perplexing. “I could not figure it out at all,” Crouch has said. “I found it really confusing but in a good way” (qtd. in Mizota).
 
In her interview, Osterloh explains that she wants her work to raise questions, including “what is the line between formlessness and recognition of a body?” (7). Citing Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, she reminds us that recognition of the other occurs through difference, and it is in the manipulation of difference–particularly in the removal of expected differences–that she draws attention to how identity is articulated in the photographic realm. But Osterloh’s work is much more than an academic exercise in challenging the status quo. As one who has lived with the consequences of racial difference, the artist has a personal interest in interrupting what she terms the “call-and-response process” of identification: “Growing up in Ohio with mixed race parents, there was a literal calling out to me in school, ‘Hey, are you white or black?'” (10). From her perspective, the partly camouflaged figures of her photographs signal a resistance to the assignment of reductive social categories.
 
With Pulling Apart Voice, the three-channel video installation that accompanied the striped set and photographs described above, the call-and-response process and its interruption are literally enacted by human speakers. Seven actors have taken turns articulating basic calls (“Hey, you,” “Hi,” “How are you?”) and select responses (“Fine,” “Good,” “Yes,” “No”). The calls play on a central monitor while the responses play on either side. These familiar words and phrases do not mimic the rhythms of everyday speech but are, as Osterloh explains, “slowed down, pulled apart, stuttered, articulated, and repeated” (15). The actors’ scripts (included in Group Dynamic) indicate how many seconds are to be spent audibly breathing, articulating beginning consonants and vowels, and pronouncing entire words or phrases. The result is not so much a three-part chorus as a series of jazz riffs in slow motion–with irregular timing. At any one time, three actors face the viewer in conventional portrait mode, but the three screens require the spectator to direct her attention without a prior sense of where to look or whom to follow.
 
By using multiple centered figures and by extending the duration of habitual speech acts, Osterloh again engenders a useful uncertainty, calling attention to behavioral norms by way of their absence. Though the words spoken are among the simplest in our daily vocabulary, the “exchanges” of the actors are not conversations as we know them, and “yes” and “no” are not typical replies to “hey, you,” “hi,” and “how are you?” (Does “no” indicate a refusal to respond?) “Fine” and “good” may be perfunctory or even obligatory responses to “how are you?” but may also serve respondents who choose to withhold information. If, as Louis Althusser has suggested, the process of hailing is a process of interpellation, a means of imposing cultural identities through discursive practices, Osterloh’s installation can be seen as modeling her resistance to, and rejection of, some of these practices. Acknowledging that “[i]n terms of subject formation, call-and-response is a perpetual . . . force we all participate in” (10), Osterloh shows that our roles in that dynamic may take unexpected forms.
 
But if resistance is a primary motivation for her body of work, what is to prevent our seeing her partially obscured figures as emblems of cultural assimilation or of an oppressive invisibility? What is to prevent the slowed speech and repetition of the videos from signifying the unhurried but inexorable forces of dominant practices? The answer, of course, is nothing–and therein lies the strength of Osterloh’s oeuvre to date. The experiences that define human beings, for themselves and for others, are active, passive, surprising, familiar, individual, communal, contradictory, consistent, transgressive, compliant, and so forth, and together form a differential field from which identity emerges. Even as her work is driven by a particular sense of self–that of a resisting self–Osterloh as artist is committed to exploring this differential field. Her concern is not to offer up readymade identities but to provoke us to consider the conditions required for producing identities. In line with this concern, her art does not tell us what it is or how to view it. It leaves us to ponder how we delineate ourselves and one another.