Lynne Cohen

In the painting tradition, from Johannes Vermeer to Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, interiors, whether they contain people or not, are intimate and familiar. These are the places where we work, read, eat, bathe, make love and, finally, die; they are the sheltered spaces in which our lives occur, and for that reason the fabricated objects they contain—the sofas, desks, chairs, and tables—seem also to have a private life of their own. The interiors in Canadian photographer Lynne Cohen’s “Nothing Is Hidden,” on view at Toronto’s Design Exchange from May 3 to June 30, 2012, are markedly different. The exhibition and publication, a handsome, 172 page book co-published by German publisher Steidl and Scotiabank, with an introduction by Ann Thomas and an essay by Jenny Diski, are in recognition of Cohen’s having received the 2011 Scotiabank Photography Award.

The living rooms, lobbies, offices, gyms and spas that have dominated her work for nearly 40 years are not so much impersonal, devoid though they are of people, as they are estranging, their intensely focused formality peeling ordinary objects away from their purpose and turning them into enigmatic figures, sculptural elements and, ultimately, metaphors.

In the centre of the black-and-white Model Living Room, c. 1977/88, is a planter with a sprawling fern behind which is a standing lamp, its light reflecting back into the corner of the room. Suspended from the ceiling on either side are thinly cut steel silhouettes of a woman reading a book and a man reading a newspaper. Shot directly facing the room’s corner, the photograph is dominated by the twin triangles formed by the ceiling and the parquet floor and the picture’s upper and lower edges; the two sculptures, which allude to Michael Snow’s “Walking Woman” series, satirize the whole idea of the model home—real homes do not, after all, have abstract models but are wholly idiosyncratic. Corporate Office, c. 1976/88, has a big, wooden office table shunted into the foreground, a padded swivel chair behind it. The lamp on the table behind the clean, empty desk—this is an office that is not only not in use but has perhaps never been used at all, there isn’t so much as a stray paper clip on the grey carpet—is intensely bright, shining back on a wall that is all sky and drifting, cumulous clouds. The centred composition of Corporate Office suggests the anonymity, desolation and aggression of corporate culture, but the sky, which is printed on sheets of paper loosely pasted to the wall, evokes not so much sky-is-the-limit ambition as the daydreams of an imaginary executive. The whimsical temperament of René Magritte seems to have infiltrated the head office.

As Cohen’s work evolved into the 1980s and 1990s, it became both more complicated and more poetic, relying less on the formal structure of the rooms (Cohen was adept at finding the primary forms of minimalist sculptors like Carl Andre and Dan Flavin in everyday furniture and fixtures) than on the surreal disjunctions between the objects in them. In Classroom, c. 1984/86, for instance, there is a wire sculpture topped by a real human skull. Opposite the sculpture are a chair and a table, and on the other side of the room a running machine is hooked up to what now look like old-fashioned monitoring devices. Painted high on the wall are white stick figures replicating the stop-action movement of a man running. Classroom alludes to the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, but in Cohen the focus is not on living and breathing human beings but on the tools used to study them. In Spa, 1991, a rotund pillar in the middle of the picture rises from a cleanly tiled floor. At the base of the pillar are wooden stools set in front of slanted apertures with plastic tarps spilling out of them, metal drains beneath. On either side of the pillar are rows of benches, and on the ceiling, rectangular bands of Fluorescent lights that recede down the corridors. Spa less resembles a place to relax and heal—with austere stools and benches and harsh, white light—than the temple of a sacrificial cult.

Black-and-white photographs work through subtle variations from the grey scale to stark contrasts. Cohen’s more recent colour photographs, on the other hand, function less through luminous gradations than through blocks of colour that, as in the groundbreaking work of William Eggleston (think of Red Room, 1973, just a saturated red ceiling and a bare light bulb), take on a life of their own. In the stunningly beautiful Untitled (Underwater Beds), 2003, for example, the ceiling is a bright, solid blue, the pool below, with its tile walkways and sunken beds, a mineral blue-green that shifts to a foggy white. In Untitled (Red Door), 2008, two brown sofa chairs are set on a low platform, a small, circular white table between them; the wall behind is an expanse of red, the closed door only visible in outline. And in Untitled (Green Walls), 2010, a white sofa is pushed up against a moveable green wall, a band of white lights arcing across the darker green ceiling, and the carpeted floor is an impacted pattern of green and white triangles. In the black-and-white pictures, light is a source of cruel visibility that pushes toward erasure; in the colour photographs, colour asserts mood into the uninhabited rooms.

Cohen’s interiors, I suggested earlier, are not so much anonymous as estranging in much the way Franz Kafka’s sinister descriptions of offices in The Castle are estranging; they create spaces that disrupt our expectations and short-circuit the narratives we might auto- matically impose upon them. These are corporate offices without executives, spas and gyms without people seeking fitness and serenity, corridors and doors with no one to walk through them. Contemplating them we begin to lose our otherwise solid grip on what they were ever for, as though our built environment were fabricated with obscure, ulterior purposes in mind. But while these are works of great formal precision—one is tempted to simply admire them the way one admires the forms and the pure colour in an Ellsworth Kelly or Brice Marden painting—they are neither airless nor inhuman. By making ordinary, functional objects and places strange, and strangely indeterminate, Cohen frees us to invent narratives of our own. ❚

“Lynn Cohen: Nothing Is Hidden” was exhibited at the Design Exchange, Toronto, from May 3 to June 30, 2012.

Lynne Cohen: Nothing Is Hidden, introduction by Ann Thomas and essay by Jenny Diski, Steidl/ Scotiabank, 2012, hardcover, 172 pp, $102.02.

Daniel Baird is a Toronto-based writer on art, culture and ideas.