Breathing, The Breath of the Artist

Little puffs of condensing air make up this work – Breathing, The Breath of the Artist. The observation of a cycle, as repetitive as it is ephemeral, is a necessity occurring for every human being around 14 times per minute. This is incessant, ad infinitum, or at least until one’s end. The act of breathing is so banal that the contradiction has moved me to cherish each manifestation like an epiphany. I have preferred not to merely document the phenomenon but rather “capture” a trace of exhalations, redeploying them into the piece. The subjects were observed and captured at night; laden with condensation therefore they appeared visible [to photography].  I have collected these views, objectivizing them before they expired and are forgotten which occurs throughout humanity billions of times every second. I like the idea that something so insignificant might metamorphose into something substantial. An ephemeral phenomenon has become immaterial. Through the assemblage of these images, the subject has become a doppelganger that exists separately and has an existence long after the original exhalations have dissipated into the atmosphere. Their origin has become but a memory. Do we remember what we were feeling at the time of each breath or is our memory clouded with our passing history. Questioning might urge us to retrace the past context of that history or rather progress to the present; everybody has their impulses. 

Of Grids and indexes

The grids in Lewis’ compositions may simply provide a skeleton on which to hang the images.  However, they also reference crossword puzzles suggesting a possible meaning and may even initiate the possibility of a narrative.  In this they augment the temporal aspect of his work.  In the Muswellbrook brochure ¹ Brett Levine noted that a well-known probability calculation suggests that there is a 98.2% chance that every breath we take contains a molecule from Julius Caesar’s dying breath.

Breathing is something all animals have to do to stay alive it is the oxygen we need and in turn the oxygen only exists because plants have preceded us ingesting carbon dioxide, absorbing the carbon to build their bodies and exhaling the oxygen that makes all animal life on earth possible. The biosphere is scarily thin and oxygen is heavy enough to stay there rather than flying off into space. 

 Grids in modern art have come to suggest Non-representational spaces devoid of affect.   In Originality and other Modernist Myths, Rosalind Krauss²   described them as; anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real, they are the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree.  They borrow a flat mathematical or scientific mode and yet behind every grid lurks a symbolist story.  Mondrian himself saw religious connotations in the grid.  Agnes Martin spoke of her grids as providing a quiet space for contemplation or meditation.  Windows in Symbolist art function as grids and have an affinity with the idea of the horizon when the artist shows the horizon seen through a window doubling its reference to the boundary between material and immaterial domains implying transcendence. Think of David Caspar Friedrich, perhaps a view out the window to a distant cross on a hill or a monk on the shore. 

In 1988, I wrote a short piece for Hilarie Mais in the Biennale catalogue that year.

A grid is a traditional and effective abstract device but it is also a powerful symbol of something quite explicit. In some of these works by Hilarie Mais the lattice becomes a portcullis or a gateway.  The door is not open no does it invite entry.  The grille keeps us at bay: it may even have a chain which proclaims our exclusion more explicitly. The gate however, must always represent the option of passage even as it denies access.  One form of passage that these works specifically invoke is between the conscious domain and the unconscious mind. 

I also noted that the grid may be interpreted as self-portraiture.  In Grid II 1987, there is a shadowy human presence cast as a shadow behind the grid that becomes the entrapped presence of the artist herself.

This passage seems to have a certain resonance with the work of Lewis in this exhibition. It is clearly some sort of self- portraiture just as the breath signifies his being alive in the world.

 The work in this exhibition is fundamentally photographic. It is also performative and this has been a significant starting point for much of Lewis’ work since I first encountered it in 1984. Performance and photography both have important roots in a form of indexical realism that has interested me for most of my life as a curator. 

 I think of Marcel Duchamp and his collaboration with Man Ray in The Large Glass. When Duchamp wanted to include filters or sieves in his construction of the Bachelor’s domain in the bottom half of the Large Glass he decided to allow dust to settle on the image of the sieves and then fixed the dust.  In this way Duchamp made the images of the sieves using particles collected from the atmosphere just as sieves collect particles as their core purpose.   The material process is an index to the representation.  Man Ray documented the process with Duchamp. He also invented the Rayograph or photogram in which he placed objects onto photo sensitive paper and exposed them to light and developed the results.  The image created in this way is the ghostly trace of departed objects; they look like footprints in sand or marks that have been left in dust.   In this way, they relate to Roland Barthes description of Photographs as traces or indexical representations of the thing, he related the story of Robinson Crusoe finding Man Friday’s footprint in the sand.  This trace lets him know he is not alone on the island.  The photogram reinforces or makes explicit what is the case for all photography.  Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface.  The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.

Krauss makes the point that; The power of the photograph is as an index and not a schematic or symbolic representation. She quotes Andre Bazin: ³  ‘Painting is after all, an inferior way of making likenesses, an ersatz of the process of reproduction. Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation… The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy or distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction: it is the model’.

Lewis has noted that the minute particles of matter from water vapour to other bodily traces that constitute the cloud of breath are captured as Photons, a substitution that is part of the indexical nature of photography and particularly at the amazing speeds when the image is caught using flash that exists for a bare 1/20,000 of a second.  

 Anthony Bond, AOM

Freelance writer and curator

¹ Brett Levine, Exhibition catalogue, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre-Henry Lewis Breathing –November 2023

² Rosalind Krauss The originality of the Avant –Garde and other modernist myths.  MIT Press paperback edition 1986  isbn 0-262-61046-9.

3 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Berkeley, University Press. 1967 p14

In and ex: Henry Lewis’s Breathing

Breath. We hold it. We qualify and describe it. But we seldom see it, and even more frequently – except in the most extreme cases – think about it. But breathing is integral to our lives. We do it unconsciously, or at least autonomically, or, in certain instances, it can be mapped, programmed, and repeated mechanically. It maps time, from our first breath to last, dying breath. Yet the outcome, breath, is far less significant than its process, breathing. We’re concerned should it not happen, but indifferent to its manifestations.

Henry Lewis begs to differ. Across thousands of images, he has tracked this generally invisible process. Photographed the remainder (invisible, rather than indivisible) to shine a light on what all too often occurs within and simultaneously out of view.

Being aware of our “being” always seems to be a revelation, as in the quixotic amusement of “seeing one’s breath.” But variation is where Lewis sees, captures, and chronicles value. We may not breathe in the same way, or other influences may impact how we do. And in chronicling the variations within and between his own breathing, Lewis highlights how little we understand or engage with the ubiquity and fragility of the process. At its simplest, we lack the capacity to understand not the process, but its products. A well-known probability calculation suggests that there is a 98.2% chance that every breath contains a molecule from Julius Caesar’s dying breath. Here this potential is simply isolated at 1/20,000th of a second.

So, when Lewis documents the differences and repetitions of this singularly universal process, he calls into question the significance of variation. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze invited us to think of these minute variations closely, suggesting that only a thing or things that are alike can differ, and only in their differences do they truly become alike.

Lewis’s works push this assertion toward its logical conclusion. By beginning with a universal, autonomic, experience, then capturing its unpredictability again and again, Lewis constructs his metaphor for what seems identical but is its own opposite at precisely the same time. Yes, every image captures breathing, but each captures its own unique breath. That they’re all Lewis’s only unifies them both on their surface (him) and in their subject, but none could or can ever be identical.

To make this distinction more visible, Lewis uses the metaphor of the crossword puzzle. Squares within a square, the puzzle’s variations seem internal: clues; language; blank and black spaces. Each guide us toward a solution. But just as we scratch out an incorrect answer, Lewis invites us to see how that which seems persistent, or predictable, is anything but. Yet what makes these works most alluring, and truly transformative, is how we’re able to see, find, and experience both difference and familiarity within every frame. It is not so much that it mirrors viewers’ breaths as it is that we all breathe; it is not so much that perhaps we could find words to describe a single image, but that we might find it within ourselves to look closely enough to see variation revealed. The one with more darkness; the one that seems fuller; the one that seems frozen in time, left to hang in the air.

This duality, between the works’ solidity and the effervescence and impermanence of what they capture, is one of Lewis’s recurring themes. As he remarked in an interview on his earlier x-ray works, where he described how technology brought what might have formally been invisible to the fore, “We are dealing with the concept of transferal…although this realm is very much in existence, everywhere around us like climbing into space.” The space we are invited into here may very much be personal, private, and but for the intersections of technology, imperceptible, but within each fragment and each frame, each singular image creating its own unique manifestation of the same, we find shared understandings, shared values, shared perceptions, and shared experiences. While we may lack the capacity to put what we see into words, we can rest well assured in its simple, universal, and endless meaning: breathing.

Brett Levine October,2023

“Brett M. Levine is an independent curator and writer currently living and working in the U.S.”