A photographic imagination

Mysteries of the Glance.
By Norman Taylor

Ron Diorio's imagery initially evokes qualities of the 'Hopperesque'. These sparsely populated cityscapes, with their angular deployment of architectural detail in compositions like Cornerstone and Hustler club, conjure urban nooks that reference directly the loneliness and faintly sinister atmosphere we have come to associate with Edward Hopper in paintings like Sunday (1926). Furthermore, a heavily voyeuristic quality Diorio has inscribed in images such as Ten thousand days, Lobby at night or Moving day, mobilises a dialectic of compassion and alienation that can be found in Hopper's Office at Night (1940).

But comparison with a major figure of American Art, while no doubt flattering to Diorio, may also come too quickly, curtailing further appreciation of his images. One difference is that, while Hopper's paintings are not exclusively urban in content, the significance of anything approaching rural iconography for Diorio - in Botanica or Cruising for example - actively denies access to a bucolic world beyond the horizon. However ironic such references may be in Hopper, their possibility remains part of the enunciation of his work. Not so for Diorio, who confesses to finding 'green difficult to deal with'.

While there is a contemporary aspect to the costumes of the young men in Cruising, elsewhere Diorio renders historic markers ambiguous. In Widows walk for instance, nineteenth century fashion and architectural references lend a timeless quality, while the figures that punctuate Cruising include a contemporary predatory note. As in Botanica, this implicates the viewer in social questions, which an artist like Hopper tends to eradicate in favour of the psychological. The figure emerging from the dry, leafless trees in Botanica evokes the stroll of a park ambler rather than the purposeful gait of a country dweller: his narrative and identity remain the subject of speculation rather than indicated by his environment.

Despite this socio-urban tone, Diorio's imagery is also evocative of quietly tragic moments, in which hunched figures are reduced to objects by the metropolis that oppresses them. Images like Lament on the death of a Blackberry™, Hustler club or Piccadilly show people suspended in a temporal hiatus, who appear to be either waiting for something to happen or contemplating something that has already befallen them. And we wonder also whether it is more likely that they are doing both, since the syntax of personal narrative saturates their forms, as if they were characters in an ironic film noir.

But if these images evoke oppression, a lighter mood is also present in a variety of Diorio's images. The mock-heroic light that falls in the bathetically titled Lament on the death of a Blackberry™ corresponds to the sheer, childish exuberance of Puddle jump. And if the title of the latter evokes an innocence in the poetry of e e cummings, its falling, starry spangle of city lights owes as much to Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: Falling Rocket (c.1874) as to the darkness of a Scorsese text. Alternatively the contemplation of a strange perspective in Yesterday's empire has the effect of morphing compassionate markers of homelessness and alienation into a sinister figure of a Taliban-like spectre among the ruins of an anonymous ground zero. Or there is the theatrical surrealism of other images - like Learning to fly or Clouds fall for example - which refer more to Dali than Hopper, both of whom would no doubt have done more to lend significance to a facial expression of their lone protagonists.

From the facelessness of Diorio's figures a further opposition emerges: far from obscuring a direct address to the viewer, the lack of a face makes their pose more essential. These postures articulate the complexity of interaction habitually adopted by city-dwellers, in the glance that avoids eye contact on the street. Thus, by presenting for closer scrutiny what is casually taken as sufficient in the glance, Diorio forces realisation of what is also deficient in the 'data- gathering' activity of a glance. And this returns us to the impenetrability of Dreiser's "streets of wall-lined mysteries" referenced in the preface, that translate to the twenty-first century 'Anytown'.

Dreiser introduces Caroline Meeber, the eighteen year old 'Sister Carrie' of his novel, as "possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis", so the quotation that introduces 'Anytown' functions as a manifesto for an urban 'aesthetic of the glance' that is also innocent. The strange mazes of Diorio's 'glances' interrogate Dreiser's "wall-lined mysteries". Light on surface is made to symbolise the "vaguest conception" dwelling in the unconscious of Dreiser's Carrie: the wall of divisive opacity in Outsiders; an easy resistance to human emotion in the walls of Moving day or Ten thousand days; and finally a disturbing, robotic face with glowing eyes that seems to stare from beneath the surface at the left of the frame in Man ray. These are elements of the impressionist glances that comprise Carrie's observation of the city.

The merging of Theodore Dreiser's 1908 text of urban confusion with conditions that pertain in the twenty-first century metropolis lends temporal resonance to these images, extending beyond content. We have been comparing digitally manipulated images with those of painters not simply because computer applications can render a painterly surface or prompt the pursuit of an 'aesthetic of the glance'. As well as surfaces, their compositions have been manipulated, using a computer-aided program to affect addition and deletion of objects. In fact Diorio's application of digital montage techniques resurrects a nineteenth century practice of combination printing, like those of Henry Peach Robinson (1830 - 1901) and Oscar G. Reijlander (1817 - 1875).

New media theorist, Lev Manovich, reminds us that editing or montage was a key twentieth century technique, creating fake realities in mainstream film and provoking conceptual aesthetics in avant-garde treatment of both moving and still images. In the 1980s computers began to extend the possibilities of montage by making it easier to combine disparate visual elements: in the art gallery, 'copy-and-paste' elements, in works by David Salle or Barbara Kruger for example, began to celebrate the resultant hard-edged boundaries of combined objects.

But it turns out that computers do more than simply expand the possibilities of combining elements from different sources: in fact they have led to a new paradigm, one which replaces montage with compositing as the dominant aesthetic. The aim of montage was to create visual, stylistic, semantic and emotional dissonance through active juxtaposition of consciously disparate objects. Compositing, by contrast, blends these elements into a single whole to create a visual gestalt.

What Diorio's work confirms is that a logic of the postmodern aesthetic of the 1980s has finally passed: his technique erases boundaries and rejects the montage aesthetic of juxtaposition in favour of a smoothly continuous appeal to the eye. At the same time the inherent compositing of these images interrogates the conceptual logic of their glanced fictions.

© Norman Taylor
Brooklyn. July, 2005.
Reproduced from visualculture@visualculture.free-online.co.uk