Jesse Bercowetz: Stall Writings
By Fred Camper
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By honoring a form of speech that’s usually dishonored Bercowetz also creates contradictions. Most viewers will have trouble accepting blow-job references as if they were award inscriptions. The messy handwriting of graffiti somehow suits their bad grammar and spelling, but reading “Tomorow W Dye” neatly etched in a standard font in metal is disorienting. On the one hand Bercowetz elevates the vulgar, but on the other he underlines it by printing these messages so clearly and cleanly.
There is something irritating in Bercowetz’s presentation, however. By removing the hand-scrawled spontaneity of these messages he risks sterility. The bronze surfaces are so reflective, almost aggressive in their sheen, that one sometimes has to move to read the text. Though Bercowetz has heightened the “importance” of the words, he also risks imprisoning them. As long ago as the 1920s the young Allen Walker Read, later a noted language scholar, collected bathroom graffiti observed on a trip across the United States; only in 1977 was he able to publish it here, as Classic American Graffiti. To read it today is to be reminded of plus ca change: the slang may be different, but the referents are the same. And one can peruse this book, or another, with a reader’s freedom to skip some pages and return to others. Bercowetz’s plaques seem to freeze the words in space and time.
The two photos called Atlantic(s) are hung side by side: on the left the ocean is in focus but on the right the identically framed ocean is a blurry haze seen through a piece of glass in sharp focus, revealing water droplets and two bugs. There’s no obvious explanation for the glass and bugs, since the camera is high up; instead they seem metaphors for obstructed vision. Sadly, Blanchon is now losing his sight, though he first conceived of this work before his vision problems began.
