A STRING OF CRIMES AGAINST ANSEL ADAMS
Arty Nelson
In George Haas’s photo-based compositions, the only subject granted
the unadulterated luxury of triumphant repose is the tree. Everything
else exists as some kind of ghost, or maybe, an abandoned husk,
totems otherwise hollowed, their sole purpose to refract the glorious
tree at the compositional heart of each piece.
But what is it that we should make of this favoring exactly? Is this a
simple object correlative gone wild? Some falsehood perpetuated by
Haas, imposing a vision that’s surely a far cry from how things ever
are? Well-heeled negation disguised as process, all in the service
of Haas’s romantic re-rendering, his ongoing meditation manifest in
two dimensions, foraging through permutations of cityscape,
attempting to bolster the premise that the best things in life seldom if
ever speak actual English, and thus lack the capacity to lie?
Who really knows?
And therein may be the single strongest element in this work. From
the craggy peak on which I’m stationed, the questions of intent are
what prompt me to return to the pages of Forcing Nature. Despite
being made aware of the almost monastic process required to create
these pictures, one is spared the didacticism inherent in so much of
the work requiring a comparable amount of labor. Haas conjures
tirelessly but never insists we feel one way or the other about what we’
re taking in; it is a wisdom that alludes to a substantial degree of
artistic maturation—brave enough to whisper where others feel
obliged to scream. And yet, those quiet pictures when gathered
culminate into a sonic exploration of the afterlife of the altered image,
with Haas’s pursuits amounting, at their apogee, to a string of crimes
against Ansel Adams. And I mean that in the best of ways.
His is a prayer laid opened across the ravaged desert range upon
which we’ve cast the dreamscape of our mistress. His work pays
homage to the warm and fuzzy artificiality of Los Angeles, a city that
has lovingly schooled me never to dismiss the lessons taught by the
fraudulent, forever prodding and reminding the onlooker that fake
doesn’t necessarily mean bad. A quiver of eighty images, this book is
an adulterous journey into the unholy alliance between the precise
and the random.
In my initial encounter with this work, I was drawn to the colors: their
effusive but controlled boasting, ROYGBIV conspiring in a Technicolor
orgy enveloping the artist’s beloved hero-tree. In the black and white
work, though, with its near-monolithic graphic levity and
solidity of composition, it’s as if inspiration for each was drawn from an
early communist propaganda poster; the bands of black & white as
propped up by a geological layering of grays. But, then time passed,
and a longer view, something very different, began to emerge.
More and more, my eye was drawn to the artist’s very intentional trail
of evidence. Haas was like a thief, stealing imagery, erasing as he
saw fit, yet always with a hint or two trailing behind—proof that he
took what he needed, but then by leaving a residual, almost like a tag,
he invited us to look beyond what remained in the frame. We must
use our imagination to fabricate another layer, the specter of another
dimension, that prompts us to forge onward past the obvious and
embrace that notion that there is always something equally if not more
arresting lurking underneath. Haas performs like a stealth puppet
master, his cosmological mission unfolding and gathering momentum
with each flipped page. In fiction, the truth is always much more at
liberty to reveal itself: THIS IS NEVER ALL THERE IS.
In Redwood #2 Filipinotown, 2005 (color p13), a pair of redwoods
stand in front of the Beverly Discount Mall. The clouds above hanging
heavily, give the appearance of roiling past the scene, abandoning the
image. A lone, white van is parked in foreground, and a figure clad
in a red top crossing the frame is smudged in motion. There is little in
the way of story here. Trying to transpose or imagine a drama seems
futile, with any kind of constructed narrative feeling far too much an
exaggeration. The image acts much more naturally as a mirror, the
haze pushing the trees into the foreground and the signage with its
fusion of English title and Spanish description evoking the reality of
their economic embrace. Meanwhile, in front and running along the
left border, the two trees stand like verdant pillars holding up the man-
made elements in the field. One could quite easily envision the trees
standing alone in the shot, the pre-shot shot, a benevolent witnesses
to what comes next—the moment when everything else around it
comes crashing down from out of the sky.
In Palm #11, Chinatown, 2002 (black-and-white p49), a Palm arches
ever so slightly to the left, the earth flattened all around it. The lean of
the tree, like a staggering prizefighter, implores one to cock one’s
head, adjusting the point of view to take in the full breadth of the
image. As we scan our eyes downward across the image, resting
upon the swath of pavement that runs the entire bottom of the image,
we can see that the delicate balance of the composition—managing to
be crooked yet somehow also holding true to the vertical field—is the
result of Haas’s hand deftly sculpting the wrongness into a formalist
right.
Even the most banal vista offers the human eye infinite fodder. The
myriad options make the visual artist’s process of selection, at the very
least, a behemoth act of negation: a near-Byzantine mental lottery of
attrition. With thousands of decisions to be made, the synapses sift
and filter through all layers, conscious and otherwise, searching for a
sense of order that appeases the original impetus.
Though, in truth, agendas are doomed to be forever changing things.
The tumblers spinning, backward and forward, are in hot pursuit of
some magical and unpredictable combination that will convey, in a
compelling way, what it was that moved the artist to stop,
look, listen, and report at exactly the moment they did. Haas, rooted in
what at first glance appears to be the mundane, takes us to a place
very far away from the ordinary—his vision a galaxy dangling coyly
over the sublime.
Arty Nelson
In George Haas’s photo-based compositions, the only subject granted
the unadulterated luxury of triumphant repose is the tree. Everything
else exists as some kind of ghost, or maybe, an abandoned husk,
totems otherwise hollowed, their sole purpose to refract the glorious
tree at the compositional heart of each piece.
But what is it that we should make of this favoring exactly? Is this a
simple object correlative gone wild? Some falsehood perpetuated by
Haas, imposing a vision that’s surely a far cry from how things ever
are? Well-heeled negation disguised as process, all in the service
of Haas’s romantic re-rendering, his ongoing meditation manifest in
two dimensions, foraging through permutations of cityscape,
attempting to bolster the premise that the best things in life seldom if
ever speak actual English, and thus lack the capacity to lie?
Who really knows?
And therein may be the single strongest element in this work. From
the craggy peak on which I’m stationed, the questions of intent are
what prompt me to return to the pages of Forcing Nature. Despite
being made aware of the almost monastic process required to create
these pictures, one is spared the didacticism inherent in so much of
the work requiring a comparable amount of labor. Haas conjures
tirelessly but never insists we feel one way or the other about what we’
re taking in; it is a wisdom that alludes to a substantial degree of
artistic maturation—brave enough to whisper where others feel
obliged to scream. And yet, those quiet pictures when gathered
culminate into a sonic exploration of the afterlife of the altered image,
with Haas’s pursuits amounting, at their apogee, to a string of crimes
against Ansel Adams. And I mean that in the best of ways.
His is a prayer laid opened across the ravaged desert range upon
which we’ve cast the dreamscape of our mistress. His work pays
homage to the warm and fuzzy artificiality of Los Angeles, a city that
has lovingly schooled me never to dismiss the lessons taught by the
fraudulent, forever prodding and reminding the onlooker that fake
doesn’t necessarily mean bad. A quiver of eighty images, this book is
an adulterous journey into the unholy alliance between the precise
and the random.
In my initial encounter with this work, I was drawn to the colors: their
effusive but controlled boasting, ROYGBIV conspiring in a Technicolor
orgy enveloping the artist’s beloved hero-tree. In the black and white
work, though, with its near-monolithic graphic levity and
solidity of composition, it’s as if inspiration for each was drawn from an
early communist propaganda poster; the bands of black & white as
propped up by a geological layering of grays. But, then time passed,
and a longer view, something very different, began to emerge.
More and more, my eye was drawn to the artist’s very intentional trail
of evidence. Haas was like a thief, stealing imagery, erasing as he
saw fit, yet always with a hint or two trailing behind—proof that he
took what he needed, but then by leaving a residual, almost like a tag,
he invited us to look beyond what remained in the frame. We must
use our imagination to fabricate another layer, the specter of another
dimension, that prompts us to forge onward past the obvious and
embrace that notion that there is always something equally if not more
arresting lurking underneath. Haas performs like a stealth puppet
master, his cosmological mission unfolding and gathering momentum
with each flipped page. In fiction, the truth is always much more at
liberty to reveal itself: THIS IS NEVER ALL THERE IS.
In Redwood #2 Filipinotown, 2005 (color p13), a pair of redwoods
stand in front of the Beverly Discount Mall. The clouds above hanging
heavily, give the appearance of roiling past the scene, abandoning the
image. A lone, white van is parked in foreground, and a figure clad
in a red top crossing the frame is smudged in motion. There is little in
the way of story here. Trying to transpose or imagine a drama seems
futile, with any kind of constructed narrative feeling far too much an
exaggeration. The image acts much more naturally as a mirror, the
haze pushing the trees into the foreground and the signage with its
fusion of English title and Spanish description evoking the reality of
their economic embrace. Meanwhile, in front and running along the
left border, the two trees stand like verdant pillars holding up the man-
made elements in the field. One could quite easily envision the trees
standing alone in the shot, the pre-shot shot, a benevolent witnesses
to what comes next—the moment when everything else around it
comes crashing down from out of the sky.
In Palm #11, Chinatown, 2002 (black-and-white p49), a Palm arches
ever so slightly to the left, the earth flattened all around it. The lean of
the tree, like a staggering prizefighter, implores one to cock one’s
head, adjusting the point of view to take in the full breadth of the
image. As we scan our eyes downward across the image, resting
upon the swath of pavement that runs the entire bottom of the image,
we can see that the delicate balance of the composition—managing to
be crooked yet somehow also holding true to the vertical field—is the
result of Haas’s hand deftly sculpting the wrongness into a formalist
right.
Even the most banal vista offers the human eye infinite fodder. The
myriad options make the visual artist’s process of selection, at the very
least, a behemoth act of negation: a near-Byzantine mental lottery of
attrition. With thousands of decisions to be made, the synapses sift
and filter through all layers, conscious and otherwise, searching for a
sense of order that appeases the original impetus.
Though, in truth, agendas are doomed to be forever changing things.
The tumblers spinning, backward and forward, are in hot pursuit of
some magical and unpredictable combination that will convey, in a
compelling way, what it was that moved the artist to stop,
look, listen, and report at exactly the moment they did. Haas, rooted in
what at first glance appears to be the mundane, takes us to a place
very far away from the ordinary—his vision a galaxy dangling coyly
over the sublime.
Arty Nelson writes about art for the LA Weekly, contributed an essay
to Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture and is the
author of one novel, Technicolor Pulp.
to Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture and is the
author of one novel, Technicolor Pulp.
