Exhibition: Constance DeJong, Time’s Wander

Constance DeJong wrote to me that “time is different kinds. . . light years and microns for example” and I would posit that they are different because our bodily selves are a rather inelastic measure. It is hard to expand, to become ethereal—and then to, in the next breath, be pulverized.

The cultural critic Rebecca Solnit wrote a very good book about Edweard Muybridge some years back in which she tells the story of how the railroad, and then the camera, collapsed our sense of space and time from the heliocentric to the mechanistic. This shoe might have been a size too small from the jump but the reduction was notably self-centering.

Robert Smithson was interested in his work as an artist being seen outside the frame of historical time, mise well clock time, so he invested in, and wrote about, geological time. He essentially laid a bigger map on top of the one that centered the human. He spoke in a language of artifacts, ruins, and landforms, imagining himself as a lost civilization of one.

DeJong is also exploring an expanded timeframe, but this new group of objects has more in common with art historian Kaja Silverman’s notion of the photographer-as-receiver—the act of picturing being one of attending to and amplifying the terms of time and space situating the subject—than with Smithson’s hubris.

But she is not a photographer per se, though there is some photography involved. Instead of relying on the readily agreed upon—if somewhat truncated—reality the camera offers up, the works in this show picture a greatly expanded sense of the everyday: an air full of fields, particles, and wave forms, a nocturnal now inundated with the cosmic past, shadows drawn across time as well as space. But like photographs, they are units of observation. They resonate because they, like us, are a curious metric for romancing such an extraordinary expanse.

It is said that Spiritualism caught fire in the late 19th Century Euro-American psyche in part because the telegraph had recently been invented. This new technology not only made communication possible across great distances but also forced ordinary people to contend with the ways that its arrival redescribed the very terms of the world around them. And the fact that impossibilities were becoming actualities inevitably begot more occult curiosities. In any case, the air was full of energy, and they, in turn, were less the individuated beings they had known themselves to be than they were conductors entangled in great webs of forces in a world both far larger and far denser than it had been before. As DeJong’s pictures remind us, these realities still, a century later, have a habit of slipping from view. There is real pleasure, and real strangeness, in the way her work brings the vibrancy of matter clearly to mind.

—Lucas Blalock

Constance DeJong (b. 1944, Cleveland, OH; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist, writer, and performer who produces fiction, language, and image-based work for performance and theater, audio and video installations. DeJong has twice collaborated with Tony Oursler on live performances; was a collaborator on Super Vision with The Builders Association & dbox in 2005; and was the librettist for the opera Satyagraha with composer Philip Glass in 1979. Her first book, Modern Love (1977), was reissued by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse in 2017. She has exhibited and performed both locally and internationally at venues including Artists Space, New York, NY; The Kitchen, New York, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Dia Art Foundation, New York, NY; The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; and Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany. In 2021, a solo survey exhibition of the artist’s work was held at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College in New York, NY. Her work is in the public collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.