By Eric Miles, February 10, 2025
In what must be one of the most wryly philosophical metaphors for photography ever, John Divola writes in the preface to Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert(Nazraeli, 2004): “Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car, and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.” This acknowledgment of the futility inherent in both acts—chasing and photographing—feels central to Divola’s decades-long career.
For this project Divola held a camera out the window of a moving car, one hand on the steering wheel, shooting anywhere from a few frames to an entire roll of film. The process was casual, almost haphazard, and tinged with the absurdity of trying to capture something fugitive, but it was also deliberate in its embrace of chanceand a shambling, Lebowskian quest for meaning in motion.
This tension between effort and entropy—the sense of a presence fleetingly inscribed in a desolate place—runs through the two bodies of work in Divola’s exhibition, The Ghost in the Machine, on view at Yancey Richardson from 9 January-22 February. Produced almost five decades apart, Vandalism (1973-1975), and Blue with Exceptions (2019-2024), both of which only a small selection is on view, involve quasi-performative, highly ephemeral interventions into abandoned spaces, where his presence is captured on film (or in pixels) before it fades into the ruins. The actions themselves bridge the gap between mischief and art (with the rebellious energy of street art) yet none of the exhibitionism. He is a post-minimalist tagger armed with both spray paint and a camera: break in, hit the walls, shoot photos. Leave. And though his prints are eye candy, Divola’s way of working has been decidedly low production value, then as now. For Vandalism, which he worked on while studying under Robert Heinecken at UCLA, Divola scouted peripheral neighborhoods of LA in search of derelict houses. Armed with nothing more than spray paint, string, and cardboard, he’d enter spaces illegally and set about making temporary abstractions: filling corners with spray painted grids, spirals, or dots in black, white, and silver, or stretching lengths of string between opposite sides, gestures only to be photographed.
In the resulting prints, the black, white, and silver spray paint he used had a particular material and optical resonance with silver gelatin photographic emulsion. This was discovered somewhat by happenstance after he printed a black-and-white image of a propane tank with its industrial silver-gray surface. Taken with the result, he set about looking for things out in the world he could paint silver without getting arrested. That's what started him looking for abandoned houses. (That, and the fact that as a dirt-poor graduate student, he simply had no studio.)
As a result of this visual punning, the optical data in Vandalism a does not cohere as a readable space. Throughout the series, Divola explores this spatial confusion, blurring perspective, light, and depth of the corners, planes, and interior walls, calling attention to photography’s inherent unreliability in recording three dimensions, and by extension the fallibility of perception.
Divola’s fascination with the poetry of the ruins and the artistic possibility within derelict structures calls to mind his contemporary Gordon Matta-Clark and the similarities and differences between them are instructive. Both make temporary, site-specific alterations to existing structures that are documented in photographs;both are thus naturally drawn to locales where they can tap into ambient entropic forces. Matta-Clark’s interventions, however, were deeply political as his dramatic building cuts were sharp critiques of urban decay and gentrification and involved a far higher level of risk and physical labor, in contrast to Divola’s quick hit, artist-vandal approach. There is an enormous ontological gap between Matta-Clark’soperatic, 'anarchitectural' gestures and the humble photographs that documented his work and for Divola---the photographs being the whole point.
In a 2005 interview, critic Jan Tumlir’s observed that, ‘The idea of using a photograph to document something that you do in the world is different than using a photograph to document something in the world that you think has aesthetic potential.’ Divola pointed out:
Right, but they’re not mutually exclusive. I was always interested in intervening in a way that was visual or sculptural or performative, but not particularly interested that there be a clear line between what I had done and what was there… ’basically just knowing that this thing is going to be translated from three-dimensions to two, and that light can be added, and that an abstract gesture can be inserted.’
Work from the more recent series, Blue with Exceptions, was made at the decommissioned George Air Force Base in Victoriaville, east of LA. The closed base now stands as a relic of Cold War militarization and environmental degradation. Like his earlier series, Divola did not simply document entropic processes; he used these sites as his canvas by rearranging and spray-painting the surrounding walls, floors and ceilings. Shot in large format, the prints are suffused with a cool blue light with pops of red.
Divola has long been fascinated with photographic indexicality and for him the specificity of time and place in the titles is critical. In referring to the series as archives the photos in Blue with Exceptions don’t just document his interventions but serve as their index, a direct trace of his presence.
An early adopter of digital technology, Divola has always been an inveterate experimenter. Perhaps in the Strangelovian spirit of the place, several works inBlue with Exceptions incorporate pictures of birds, products of stock photography conjured by an AI algorithm, appearing as incongruously pristine additions to the crumbling walls and peeling paint inside the former barracks. Divola has referred to AI as the “collapsing of the index”. If traditional photography relies on the physical trace, AI’s processes are fundamentally detached from such traces, generating rather than recording. Divola’s not so subtle point is to contrast these two modes of creation: one grounded in the specificity of a time and place, the other untethered from either.
Eric Miles is a writer and photo researcher based in Brooklyn. He contributed regularly to photograph magazine and is a Visuals Editor at Vanity Fair.
© John Divola, "Vandalism" (74VO6), 1974. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.
© John Divola, GAFB F16576 (12_16_2020) from Blue with Exceptions, 2019-2024. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.
© John Divola, "Vandalism" (74V18) 1974. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.
© John Divola, GAFB F4777 (6_22_2024) from Blue with Exceptions, 2019- 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.
© John Divola, GAFB F7418 (10_27_2023) from Blue with Exceptions, 2019-2024. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York.