[Dialogue Magazine, Columbus OH August/September 1991]
Christopher Pekoc at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art
“Cameras…(are) clocks for seeing.” So said Roland Barthes in his essay Camera Lucida. If
that is so, perhaps Christopher Pekoc’s recent photo-based works are a painter’s attempt to
reconcile photography’s sweeping second hand with the mysterious, unmeasurable duration of
human passion.
There is something, too, of Dr. Frankenstein in Pekoc’s efforts to stitch together a living entity
out of the dead flesh of his own photographic studies. The five works on exhibit were quite literally
constructed on a sewing machine, spliced and hemmed with cross-stitching. Each of the five
consists of a strong, central image rebuilt from a series of high contrast black-and-white
photographic enlargements. They include two studies of the model “K.P.” in an antique pose as
Hermes, and tied by one hand to a pillar in Untitled (Portrait of K.P. as St. Sebastian). Two other
pieces use the human hand as an emblematic presence to speak powerfully of private pain and
secrecy. The last is subtitled Bridge, a menacing depiction of a riveted industrial construction, laid
tightly into a background of night.
An ambivalent and carnivorous affair with photography has been the basis of Pekoc’s drawing
and painting for the past 20 years. These days, Pekoc seems interested in the photograph not
only as a source of imagery, but as a substance, something real to the hand and part of life in
itself. He incorporates it with a more diffident version of the same intention that has led other
artists to include blood and urine in their works. Pekoc has also employed “joss” paper in several
places, which is burned in Buddhist ritual as money for the use of the dead in the afterlife.
Possibly photographs are also a metaphysical currency of some kind. Certainly many writers have
commented on the peculiar status of the photograph in our society, the simultaneity it imposes on
past and present as it subtracts the instantaneous from eternity. Barthes has suggested that it is
the way in which, in the absence of religion, our culture acknowledges death. Pekoc’s
juxtaposition of these elements is intriguing.
Pekoc’s works are, however, first of all about boundaries, about the sensuality and significance
of the edges of the human body. Untitled (Portrait Study of K.P. as Hermes) arrests the viewer
first by the outward, direct, amused gaze of the model. She stands in profile from just below the
knee, a fragment of her journal and a bluebird’s wing (from a photo of a stone angel) has been
attached to the left side of her head, while a corona of pale spikes emerges from the right. The
model’s strangely sexual, self-absorbed half-smile at once intrigues and repels. Her terribly white
slenderness seems inserted into the blackness of the background like a soft scalpel. One of
Pekoc’s techniques is a sense of covert movement in background spaces that might at first seem
to be blank. Behind or beside K.P., the shiny, exposed photosensitive paper has been creased
and torn, then carefully mended, sometimes in small, square patches.
There is more than a hint of abuse in Pekoc’s pictures, an abuse that perhaps comments on
psychic injury in general, rather than relating specifically to the model or to women. But it is
damage that has been painstakingly repaired. There are no gaping wounds in Pekoc’s reality, but
no seamless repressions either. Here, the world is scarred beyond any doubt; it is indeed a
pastiche of dubiously integrated experiences. Most interesting and encouraging is the feeling that
despite or on account of this fragmentation, the work of repair is inevitable and is honest and well
done.
The stitches on a sewing-bee quilt could not be more practical. The message seems to be that
the real coherence of the world lies precisely in the lines of stress that divide it, the fissures and
wounds of a transcendent necessity. Pekoc’s work advocates a very private rebellion against the
mere gloss of consistency imposed by a forgetful or disingenuous consciousness. What is
damaged is everything, what is restored is everything. The world, the self, the work of art is not
chipped away trivially or gratuitously. It is cut savagely to pieces every day, and restored every
day to frank and bloody integrity as an undying spirit billows within.