Preface
reprinted and with the permission of Marjorie Perloff
In 1980, when I first met Susan Rankaitis at the home of a mutual friend, we were both at threshold stages of our careers, she having just completed the break-through Fire River series and I having written a critical book called The Politics of Indeterminacy. The instant rapport between us must have had a lot to do with the fact that her startling photographs could have served as illustrations for my book, whose thesis was that the "new" aesthetic, whether in poetry or visual arts, was one of process rather than product, surface rather than "depth." What I meant by this was that the important artworks of our time no longer present us with images of something else so much as with images tantalizing in the power to suggest rather than designate- to create mysteries that can never be fully explicated even as they draw the reader/viewer into the frame.
In such work, the oscillation between representational reference and compositional game produces an exciting surface tension, the canvas or photograph or poem no longer being either representational or what John Cage has called both-and.
Susan Rankaitis' work epitomizes this new undecidability. for one thing, her large-scale mono prints occupy a space somewhere between photography and painting and these "photographs" (or are they paintings?) contain images at once wholly literal (an airplane wing, a propeller, a photograph, a wheel) and yet curiously indeterminate. It is, accordingly, extremely difficult to classify Rankaitis' work. Hers is by no means documentary photography, designed to convey particular cultural or political messages. Yet the brilliant coloration and metallic tone of her mono prints turn out to be more "political" than one would think. An airplane, fragmented and shorn of its tail, weaving in and out of black and gold colorfield, its not just an airplane; it takes its place as do all our technological artifacts, among the most elemental figures that haunt our consciousness: the flight of a bird just over the horizon, logs floating downstream, the flotsam and jetsam of our threatening yet oddly enticing late-twentieth century landscape.
The word "landscape" must be qualified. For Rankaitis, landscape in its traditional sense- the green world of trees and grass, rivers and streams, forest and ocean and starry sky- is no more. Ours is not even an urban world, it having become, in its truest sense, what Marshall McLuhan was first to call "Global Village," in which national and geographic identity are finally less important than such common features as the network of communications and spatial arrangements. A Rankaitis "landscape" is thus an indeterminate space in which outer (a jet landing on a runway) and inner (a bust of energy, a fear of edges) meet and collide.
Rankaitis' severe and uncompromising art tells us that we must not get too complacent about the world in which we live, which is, after all, already the world projected in science fiction and futuristic film. By the same token, so these photographs seem to say, we must avoid categorization, and easy classification. When is a photograph not a photograph? When it has a colorization, structure, and imagery one associates with the painterly abstraction of the post-war era. But why then does this "painting" have such metallic texture? Perhaps because we increasingly live in a universe of metal and paper products, a world of color that, especially in Los Angeles, is startlingly bright but never quite primary or "pure."
There is nothing pretty of ornamental about Susan Rankaitis' art. On the contrary, her monumental and demanding painting-photographs bring to mind the poet Frank O'Hara's account of what David Smith's outdoor metal sculptures seemed to "say" to the viewer: "don't be bored, don't be lazy, don't be trivial, and don't be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death."
Marjorie Perloff