Todd R. Forsgren

Traversing Lines on a Map – Part I

Like photography, mapping has gone through several technological sea changes in my lifetime: GPS, GIS, smartphones, TripTiks, MapQuest, Google Maps and Street View. These changes extend beyond literal maps and into the way we navigate information and ideas. Such technologies have also altered how our brain functions and is structured.

I’ve almost always thought of image making as trying to figure out interesting ways to get from point A to point B. Perhaps it is my analytic training: the scientific method that I spent so much time thinking about and applying during my most formative years (incidentally, years when mapping and photographic technology were both changing rapidly). In the scientific method, one progresses from a question to research to a hypothesis then an experiment to analysis of data to a conclusion followed by reporting the results. Normally, this leads to ever more questions in an ever-expanding field of knowledge.

This path of the scientific method still matches my artistic process as much as any schematic I’ve encountered. There are other lines superimposed onto how I map my approach photography, those lines that help me decide what question to ask or how to construct my photographic ‘experiments.’

Traversing Lines on a Map – Part II

In her 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Rosalind Krauss lays out how several transects create a framework for new practices in sculpture during the Post-War upending of the medium. Her result is a square within a diamond, denoting interlocking pseudo-opposites which one can use to map these new approaches to sculpture, and how sculpture was pushing beyond its traditional frame: site-constructed—sculpture, marked sites—axiomatic structures, landscape—not-landscape, architecture—not-architecture, (complex—neuter).

In 2005, her former student George Baker tried to do something similar in his text, Photography’s Expanded Field. Closely mirroring Krauss’s approach while considering photography in the digital transition: “still film” projected images—“film still” cinematic images, digital montage “talking picture”—modernist photography, narrative—non-narrative, stasis—non-stasis, (complex—neuter).

There are plenty of other “maps” of critical issues in photography beyond Baker’s. Perhaps the most persistent vernacular framework, somewhat miraculously to me, is the analog—digital divide (throughout my career it has persisted as the first question most people ask about when they hear I make photographs; I happen to use both, often quite blended together). The second question has often been, are you a Canon or a Nikon person (i'm neither).

Barthes wrote of studium and punctum. Szarkowski’s came up with five fundamental principles: The Thing Itself, Vantage Point, the Detail, Time, and the Frame. Vilém Flusser grounds his Towards a Philosophy of Photography on the idea that “two fundamental turning points can be observed in human culture since its inception,” “linear writing” and “the technical image.” But like Krauss and Baker, my map is made of interlocking opposites: expressive—analytic, abstract—representational, past—future, specific—general, (observation—experimentation).

Absurd Topologies and Topographies

I bought my first cell phone in 2003. This was shortly after America invaded Iraq and just as I was graduating from college. When I walked into the store to buy that Nokia, a greeter welcomed me and asked if she could help. I explained what I needed, and she directed me to a long line of people... As I waited in line, this greeter welcomed more and more customers, asked them what they needed, and directed them to the same line.

But finally, someone asked her a question that she thought she could answer, “I’m moving to the Middle East, will my phone work there?”

The greeter responded, “Yes, it should,” walking to a map of the United States filled almost 90% in red, “we have coast-to-coast coverage,” she added.

“But I’m moving to Kuwait,” the customer said. So, the confused greeter directed the customer to wait in line.

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From October 1^st to November 10^th of 1968, Nobuo Sekine, with the help of his friends, made Phase—Mother Earth. This sculpture would become the most iconic object from an artistic movement called Mono-Ha (translated from the Japanese, this means “School of Things”). It consists of two parts: a negative and a positive… One cylinder of dirt 270cm tall with a diameter of 220cm, and a hole in the earth with the same proportions. It is meant to be a somewhat absurd experiment of what would happen if we emptied the planet of its contents.

The surviving images of this first incarnation of Phase—Mother Earth are grainy black-and-white 35mm photographs of a bunch of 20-something guys playing in the mud without shirts on. In one image, they proudly stand in front of the completed work and celebrate the accomplishment with Coca-Colas in hand and lots of laughter. In another, Sekine, in a subtle contrapposto, stands triumphantly in front of the squat sculpture.

Just one month shy of its 50^th anniversary, I first encountered Phase—Mother Earth in person. The piece was reincarnated in Howard Rachofsky’s front yard. Well, yard sounds a bit too vernacular a way to describe the grounds of the home of this prominent Dallas art collector: Rachofsky’s house is like a museum. The grass is more immaculate than any golf course I’ve been on (though I don’t play golf, my father does, and he was with me that day admiring the lawn). As we approached the sculpture, our guide warned us that our feet might get a bit wet.

But my biggest surprise was not damp feet, it was the Styrofoam plug stuck into the hole of the sculpture, like some huge wine cork. The guide explained that it was so the Rachofsky’s dogs didn’t accidentally fall in. My father, an experienced veterinarian, seemed skeptical that any dog would make this mistake.

The reason I was at the Rachofsky house that day has to with my wife. She is the reason that Phase—Mother Earth was at the house too, actually. You see, Mika was a champion for the Mono-Ha movement, writing about it for her PhD and curating an exhibition of the work that propelled many of the artists to new-found fame and fortune 50-years after the fact. It was also because of my wife that I found myself having lunch at Sekine’s Los Angeles home in 2018, six months before his death.

The lavish lunch included dark black sea urchins, served whole and raw with their spines still moving as they lay upside-down on top of large white porcelain plates. Most all the conversation was in Japanese, which I don’t speak, so I was largely left to my own thoughts. My mind wandered to Phase—Mother Earth as I watched everyone eat their sea urchins: emptying the yellow insides of the urchins into their bellies. As more and more of the sea urchin’s soft insides were removed, the urchin’s hard bodies and spines began to sag and collapse onto the white plates.