David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick
‘WANDERLUST’, Wraparound magazine, Los Angeles, California,
May 2004.
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are photographers of the odd and the improbable.
They are adventurers in time and in space: inventors of the future, recreators
of the past. They currently conduct their researches and photographic ‘reconstructions’ in
a disused chapel on the banks of the River Hudson at Coxsackie in upstate New
York. It’s here that they gather together the materials and ideas from
their travels, and here through the Summer months that they sleep, eat, and
work. The interior of their studio resembles nothing less than an eighteenth-century
cabinet of curiosities or an exhibition of surrealist objets trouvés:
shamanic trophies and taxidermy from the Russian steppes rub shoulders with
cloth and bark masks from New Guinea, whilst Victorian mathematical surface
models, bell jars, and strange, undisclosed Edwardian brass ear trumpets are
arrayed in careful rows. Old, decaying photographs, solidly framed, adorn the
walls. Or so at first it seems. The authentic sits comfortably beside what
is, at closer investigation, the spurious. And the photos on the wall: are
they really as old as they look? Who are the men of the Royal Excavation Corps
who feature in so many of their works, and why is there no record of them in
any of the history books I examined?
Kahn and Selesnick were not at home when I visited their curious museum of the
absurd and the assumed, and my tour was conducted by a taciturn old lady. She
told me, a little mysteriously, that the photographers were ‘slightly better
suited for life in another time and place’. It’s a judgement with
which I’ve come to agree.
It transpired that as winter comes on Kahn and Selesnick quit New York for Europe
or warmer climes within the States: Hawaii, California, Nevada. Here their restless,
almost obsessive researches continue. Selesnick was out of contact, abroad in
Costa Rica, but I finally caught up with Kahn as he was preparing an expedition
into Death Valley.
Baring a striking resemblance to some of the figures in his photographs, he’s
a hard man to interview. He refuses to ‘explain’ the Royal Excavation
Corps and these evocative, sepia-toned panoramas seemingly from the 1930s. ‘As
you can see, they are about so many things,’ Kahn tells me bluntly. ‘There
are so many layers, and to provide one answer cancels out ten other paths of
inquiry.’ He refuses at first to either acknowledge or deny the charge
of fabrication.
‘Your earliest work, these photos that seem at first sight from the years
around the Second World War, with their themes of flight and out-of-body experience.
They make me wonder what the significance of flight is in your work?’
‘Flight is certainly important to us,’ Kahn confirms. ‘If you
can't fly to the location you dream endlessly about, then you have to create
that place in your own backyard. The spirit of the place, while warped and subverted,
is still the same. You see, we believe that traveling in the mind can reveal
as much of the inner landscape of a place as physically travelling to an actual
locale does of the outer landscape. We blur these two instincts when we shoot
Siberia in Scotland, or the Middle East in Cape Cod. A unity of mankind in all
its eccentricities. You know, it’s like William Blake’s “world
in a grain of sand”.’
‘So you do admit that these photographs are in fact usually the result
of fictional rather than actual events?’
Kahn shrugs his shoulders: ‘Really, we leave that for others to decide.
I can’t comment.’
‘But in your photographs, you are acting out your own fantasies of the
exotic, aren’t you? A Siberia peopled by shamans, or a post-apocalyptic
Scotland of the future?’
‘Well, it’s all very well talking about acting out ones fantasies
of the exotic, because that leaves out the conflicts and confrontations of the
real world. It’s sort of like [George] Bush imagining that if he could
bring down Saddam Hussein, democracy would flourish and the people would thank
him like a saviour. This form of imagining other cultures, of creating fictional
worlds for them, should never be attempted on the scale of realpolitick. This
tension lies at the root of City of Salt. Salt is necessary for life in small
amounts, and a poison in abundance. Utopias and distopias are twin realms. To
travel to one is to dream of the other. Hence the fence-sitting of Scotlandfuturebog,
which is both serious and hysterical, sweet and frightening, apocalyptic and
edenic. It attempts to defy categorical definition. Hence our problem with your
questions, and here lies your answer: more lies.’
‘You mention President Bush: there’s definitely a political subtext
in your most recent series, The City of Salt?’
‘Yes, City of Salt is very much done as a criticism of the current regime.
But that isn't the only thing it’s about. We were trying to make art that
is at once serious and hilarious, spiritual and political, shallow and deep.
We’ve always wanted to walk the fine edge between these polarities. It
bugs people who don’t get our work, sure, but that’s our way.’ Kahn
laughs, acknowledging the irony: ‘We don't like categories, and yet we
make art about them.’
‘Humour is clearly an important feature in your work. I'd be interested
in hearing more about that.’
Kahn answers this with a smile: ‘That’s a tall order. How do you
explain a joke? Either you get it or you don't. But yes, definitely, we don’t
mean to be taken too seriously. Thought it’s funny too when people do,
or when they’re not sure quite what to make of us, or our work.’
‘Early in your partnership with Selesnick you both painted as well as made
photographs. What has the influence of painting been on your photography?’
‘Paintings have always been as big if not a bigger influence on our photos
than photography's own history. Our compositions have always been very planned
out. Small drawings are made for even the most casual-looking photos. These were
the same little sketches we made when we painted, there is really no difference.
Our photos claim a large debt to painters such as Stanley Spencer, William Blake,
Casper David Friedrich, Henri Rousseau, Archimboldo, Georgio di Chirico and Andrea
Mantegna, among others. Early historical expedition and travel photography, specifically
what we absorbed since our youth from National Geographics from the 1920s and
30s and which I own so many of, they were also influential. And the early experiments
in colour photography. But rarely the work of any well-known photographers.’
‘And why have you now largely abandoned painting?’
‘We quit painting because it didn’t allow us to wander, at least
not in the manner that we were painting. We love the big expeditions of history,
stories of men like Livingstone and Shakleton, tales of daring adventurers and
colonial mischief-makers. That’s what we grew up with. We both adore and
mock the instincts behind those stories, but live constantly in a fantasy world
of our characters’ explorations. We found that, having traveled a lot as
children back and forth to Europe, we both retained in our memories the mysterious
places we’d visited. As I child, in my backyard in New Jersey, I’d
recreate the strange stone alignments I’d seen in Wiltshire and Ireland.
And then when I met Richard [Selesnick] at Art College, these shared memories
became part of the plots of our photo dramas. We attempted to recreate that sense
of age and enigma in the landscape that we didn’t often find in this country,
but which we both remembered from our earlier experiences in Europe.’
‘And that has influenced you ever since?’
‘Definitely. But our need to create ever the more fantastic fantasies of
fictitious expeditions lead us to undertake ever grander expeditions ourselves.
Climbing peaks in Devon, the Highlands of Scotland, the isles of the Hebrides,
western Ireland, the Alps. These places were all stand-ins for Siberia. And Death
Valley and the sand hills of Cape Cod were the simulacrum of the Near East. We
never like to go to where our dreams of exploration are actually meant to be.
Something feels wrong about that. A is never, ever, B.’
‘And how do your ideas for the photos develop?’
‘Firstly we need to come up with sketches. Literally we draw out what we
imagine the distant place would be, and then create it out of an alien landscape.
We rarely alter the landscape very much afterwards, its just a matter of getting
the 360 degree, panoramic sense of a place, and then pushing the props and the
costumes over the top to create the frisson that makes the work transportative.’
‘Transportation is one of the keys to your work, isn’t it? The idea
of the Shaman, of the power to connect with something that might have been, to
recreate a record of something that could, or should, have existed in another
time or place?’
‘Our desire to understand the miraculous, out of body flights and time
travel, and the exploits of remote viewers, it all feeds our huge curiosity,
of how and why. Mystery is at the heart of all of our work, even if at the surface
it seems to be about absurdity and humor. Perhaps that is a crux, so we don’t
have to go so deep and confront some of the scarier issues by being totally serious.
But still, it’s our way and whatever it is, we need the humor to drill
deeper into the mysteries that most interest us. But in the end one searches
in vain for an answer. There is no answer. There’s only the search.’
©
David Boyd Haycock