Art Review : Pippin Determined to Invent the Camera All Over Again

Most people are wary in the presence of a camera precisely because a camera is a seeing machine: It lives to watch us, to catch us, to trap us in its gaze.

But what if the walls, too, had eyes, along with the car parked across the street, your mattress, your shoes and the stall of your shower? Steven Pippin has turned a washing machine into a pinhole camera, converted a bathtub into an instrument to record his naked body and rigged a toilet on the London-to-Brighton train to take pictures, by lining the bowl with photo-sensitive paper and adding developer and fixer with successive flushes.

However tongue-in-cheek, his work at Regen Projects breeds suspicion--not of people but of things. Things are never neutral in this British artist’s world; they are sly and greedy.

If Pippin’s bizarrely spectacular objects are alienated from their former functions, their creator is alienated from (or oblivious to) the history of photography. He is an anachronism looking forward to the 19th Century, perfect in the role of Louis Daguerre’s ingenious but perverse younger brother, determined to invent the camera all over again.

Pippin’s persona is an important part of this ongoing project. His discreet wardrobe and furtive activities are revealed in film and video documentations typically shown alongside his photos. The latter are almost always images of the artist, as in the 1987 “Self-Portrait With Photo Booth.”

This 67-foot-by-27-foot, black-and-white print was made with a photo booth transformed into a pinhole camera. The artist affixed a wooden panel over a doorway usually covered only with a curtain, and lined the opposite wall with a huge sheet of photo paper. Outside the booth, for the duration of the 20-minute exposure, Pippin faced the makeshift aperture, standing perfectly still.

The blurred image that resulted reveals a figure in a dark jacket, his hands held primly at his sides. Though the artist is indeed present, his body seems to mark an absence, like the chalk lines left behind at the scene of a crime. The photograph discloses that Pippin is an invisible man, a spy, a cipher.

In a similarly ghoulish vein, a 1993 series of toilet bowl images are so fuzzy, splotchy and stained, due to the incessant motion of the train in which they were made, they look like evidence of some unspeakable act. This time, however, Pippin, in the guise of victim/victimizer, has vanished entirely.

His latest, somewhat different project is a mural-sized photographic negative that records a bleak stretch of desert. Taken with a beaten-up trailer-cum-pinhole camera, which is parked outside the gallery, the image makes a bid for the familiar kind of artistry Pippin has so far eschewed. More riveting than its Antonioni-like moodiness are the tire tracks the trailer has left behind in the sand. Here, the image becomes a record of the apparatus of its making, suggesting that things are not only sly and greedy, but solipsistic, too.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through May 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.