David Letterman used to feature a preposterous segment called “Is This Anything?” You may remember it: Behind a suddenly drawn curtain, a crazy human spectacle would be underway, and the audience declared by applause whether it was “anything” or nothing at all. They would always reach a consensus despite having no methodological rationale. Was “anything” a measure of talent, entertainment, uniqueness, sympathy or art? Who knew it was rhetorical. But still, they did know: From the confused input always came organized, consensual output.
Several weeks ago, I found myself daydreaming about this very subject while I shuffled cautiously through a room of delicate displays of side-by-side photos with a pair of homemade binoculars pressed against my face and silently posing a modified version of that “Late Night” interrogative to myself: “What is this?” This was, or is, an exhibition of magical stereoscopic photographs aptly titled “The Stereo Photography of Hal Rammel,” which is currently at the Cedarburg Art Museum through Sunday, March 31.
It looks at first like a standard-enough show of intimate black-and-white photographs and photograms, until the handmade viewing contraptions and dioramic setups that bring the show to life are understood and utilized. Rammel has a long history of making, tinkering with and playing homemade musical instruments. His life and work blur the lines between science and art the way Samuel Morse, Henry Fox Talbo and Sir Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of the stereoscope, did at the dawn of Modernity, when distinctions between art and science meant little.
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I eventually engaged with one of the photographic tandems and initially saw only two blurred images bisected by the bridge of my nose. Turns out that to get the full effect from the 10 stereoscopic works, a viewing apparatus and a certain amount of mental focus is required…or a lack thereof, as was explained to me by Rammel himself during the opening. For one’s visual cortexes to process the two slightly shifted photographic images into a single, three-dimensional composition, the eyes and consciousness must be relaxed. My initial frustrations eventually gave way to satisfying visual triumphs, not unlike recognizing the dolphins in one of those holographic posters at a Deck the Walls in 1995, but, of course, with more meaningful content.
Once I made it inside Rammel’s stereo universes, the builder-scientist gave way to the odd and unique perspectives of an artist: pinhole visions of a ghostly water tower; a shadowy interior overseen by a Sun mask; and, most memorable of all, a silver gelatin print of a ghostly garden statue whose eyes seemed on the verge of opening. The dramatically compressed space and high-contrast print make “In the Garden” striking enough in two dimensions but completely haunting in three. That the content of the image came into focus as I was trying to turn off the left side of my brain and Zen-out made for an extra-phenomenal moment of reception.
Rammel does an admirable job of mixing up the nature of the imagery and allowing you to see the range of possibility in the stereoscopic process. His vegetation and wire photograms flirt with pure abstraction, in which case the eventual accordioning of space seems magical. Not in a supernatural way, but in the technologically illusionistic way it must have seemed to the audience of the Lumiére brothers’ “The Arrival of the Train,” who are said to have screamed and lurched out of the way during the screening in 1895.
I departed the exhibition without fear, but also not caring exactly where science ended and art began in Rammel’s work, which ultimately lives as both an instance and a symbol of the process of turning complex information into manageable content. In other words, his work is both art and science—an interactive demonstration of the reductive forces of gestalt psychology and those artistic anti-forces that resist and complicate them. Everything and anything, processed by our minds into something manageable.
