Bill Burke: Destrukto

This exhibition is the first devoted to Bill Burke’s Destrukto series. Also on view will be a collection of one-of-a kind maquettes and notebooks that Burke created over several decades making artist’s books. Burke’s work is visceral and immediate, but behind the action and explosions, the exotic locales, gruesome scenes, and outré material there is a rigorous examination of photographic conventions. Throughout his career Burke has continually called into question the idea that the camera is, or could ever be, a disinterested tool, objective recorder of events, or device for the scientific collection of data. Instead, he revels in the inherent subjectivity of the photographic image, making art and books with a vitality that comes from being as untidy and irreducible as the world around us.

The Destrukto photos are large color images that riff on photography’s historical use as a tool of scientific inquiry—think of Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion or Edgerton’s images showing milk droplets frozen in miniature explosions—but, there is little sense of a clinical approach in Burke’s freeze-frame photos showing the burst of glass and debris at the moment a bullet impacts an old camera or the thick spray of froth set spinning as a can of beer is shot with a high-powered rifle. If the spirit of scientific inquiry is present in these photos it is only as a comic foil, an excuse to pursue kinetic thrills, and the joy of wanton destructiveness. Burke’s choice of targets is deliberate. Cans of Spam or Campbell’s soup recall Pop art’s insouciant take on Americana, while iconoclastic images of exploding Nikons and Yashicas make Burke’s irreverence toward the conventions of the photographic medium perfectly clear.

The mayhem of the Destrukto works reminds us that photography was once an adventurous vocation. Bill Burke acknowledges that he was attracted to it because a photographer’s life seemed to be one that combined danger, freedom, and a kind of heroic creativity into a heady and glamorous mix. As he developed his aesthetic in the early seventies he learned from New Journalism, especially photographic practitioners like Robert Frank, Larry Clark, and Danny Seymour, and writers like Hunter S. Thompson. He admired work where artistry and reportage were inseparable and artists who, defying standards that had previously defined quality in their fields, dispensed with the pretense of objective distance in order to present a picture of the world that was bracing, expressive and lyrical.

From this basis Burke developed a style in which his own perceptions and subjectivity are a central part of the work, he has said that, “I came to feel that I was only entitled to report upon my own experience.” This method found its fullest expression in a series of classic books, including They Shall Cast Out Demons, Mine Fields, and I Want to Take Picture. In them Burke’s photographs share space with found imagery, advertising, product labels, film stills, letters, notes, and documents in a riotous montage that does not merely report events, but also communicates something about the place they occurred, Burke’s state-of-mind as he recorded them, and his subsequent reflections and commentary on it all. They Shall Cast Out Demons is far more than a documentary about a snake handling sect in Appalachia—it is a meditation of anthropological scope touching on religion, medicine, science, and healing and on the rituals that develop around them. Mine Fields and I Want to Take Picture, grew out of trips to report on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. They are powerful, nuanced and wide-ranging works covering Southeast Asia and the complexities of American involvement there in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The preliminary mock-ups of these books exhibited here are like a retrospective in miniature, and a context for the provocations of the Destrukto series.

For more information about this exhibition please contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email or phone: info@GHbookseller.com, 631-324-5511. You may also visit Bill Burke’s own site: binhfoto.

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