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Jim Dow at Janet Borden
Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Edward Leffingwell
Equipped with an 8-by-10 view camera and a patient regard for the history of place, Jim Dew commits his photographic practice to the clear description of the spirit of a perhaps vanishing environment through the language of its architecture. He has previously located and recorded the remarkable details of the vernacular: truck-stop pool tables, barbershops and an entire nation of baseball parks. "Establishments: Clubs, Libraries and Associations," a series begun in 1998, extends his obsessive mapping of the built American landscape. Dew was encouraged to undertake the project by the late writer and architectural preservationist Brendan Gill, and he set about gaining access to the redoubts that secure the pleasures and rituals of the elite the privileged, the professional and arguably meritorious, and the seriously connected.
The telling detail, isolated from its surroundings, attracts Dew's attention, and in this series his images, many of them contact prints, are exclusively interiors. These carefully composed chromogenic color prints describe the architectural features of paneled and marbled clubs. Long exposures of up to an hour erase any visitor who may have passed his lens. The billiard rooms, swimming pools, changing rooms and backgammon tables of the Harvard and Yale clubs, Union League and Explorers Club reveal only the furnishings of a lapidary world more often imagined than seen. If no one appears to dine in the grill rooms, or to read in the libraries, or to drink at the bars, presences are nevertheless felt. Dew venerates the verdigris and polished brass ram's head of a Bannister Decoration, Lotos Club, and marvels at the arcane red-rubber hose and chromed gauges monitoring the hot and cold blasts of the Scotch Douche, Union Club (both 2002). Reminiscent of the opulent vistas of Candida Hofer, the great expanse of the Library from the east, University Club (1998) vivifies the world of the well-heeled clients of such famed architectural firms as McKim, Mead & White and Delano & Aldrich.
Among the relentlessly masculine, high-ceilinged rooms of such clubs, a door stands open in ivory and pale blue painted paneling in Doorway, Lotos Club (2000), one of the oldest literary clubs in New York. Class distinctions are implicit in the upholstery of A Shoeshine Stand, Union League Club (2000), where amply scaled marble seats with leather cushions are provided. Combs soaking in the antiseptic waters of a metal-topped glass jar, reflected in the mirror of a bathroom at the Union Club, signal the presence of an attendant, as do the whisk brooms that hang in the changing rooms provided for the swimmers of the University Club. These are desirable, handsomely private places made public through the intervention of a spy in the house of architecture. As Dew is their witness, some things never change.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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