Review: “Sally Warren: The Press of My Hands” at Liliana Bloch Gallery, Dallas

Two years ago, a journalist writing for The Washington Post offered some tips for staying up to date with the terrible news of the world while avoiding burnout. The current state of domestic and world affairs suggests that any sane person would disregard that advice at their peril. The guidance offered is deceptively simple, if not verging on the simplistic: “Give yourself a break,” “ask for help when needed,” “take time for self-care,” “talk to your children,” “turn on screen limits,” and “view your phone in black and white.” It’s undoubtedly good advice, solidly grounded in common sense. If a particular habit makes your life miserable, you should try to break it.

There is a fly in this honey-coated ointment. Firstly, the counsel directs one how to avoid the bad news suggesting that one “kill” the messenger or radically curtail the messenger’s power. Secondly, learning how to avoid bad news — and, importantly, how to cope with it when it is constantly in your face — assumes that we can exercise the necessary distance to get out from under the doom and gloom.

Unfortunately, negotiating the everyday with a modicum of rationality — as some would have it, the essential condition of a sane existence — is to swim against the rising tide of social and political rancor and violence. We see this as clearly in the current political situation in our nation as we do in the horrific violence perpetrated on the peoples of Palestine and Ukraine, and the despair of righteous citizens suffering the war criminals currently in charge of the governments of Israel and Russia. 

Throughout this blisteringly disastrous train wreck of a decade, artists of all persuasions have sought to bear witness to the tragedies of war, injustice, and natural disasters. They have tried to make sense of the senseless, to provide a scintilla of hope to counteract despair and to remind us that we owe a debt of empathy towards our fellow human beings. The saving grace of an aesthetic proclamation that illustrates the dictum “Never forget” is quite simply its public face. For all my skepticism regarding individual-centered coping strategies that masquerade as agency, it is undeniable that any practice that can create a space for reflection and remembrance is a necessary prologue to social and political activism. We should celebrate those artists who engage in such work, without adding the stipulation that we do so because art can change the world.

Sally Warren’s body of work, The Press of My Hands, is precisely the kind of work I am arguing for. It is that rarest of art that seeks to bear witness without being overbearing or enacting virtue signaling. Warren’s art — originating in her heartfelt disbelief at the utter tragedy suffered by the Ukrainian people before the recent Russian invasion — rejects the facile hand-wringing of a liberal conscience utterly unmoored from reality. What I admire most about Warren’s work is how deftly it displaces the obvious prompts that would prick the conscience of any human being — the spectacular images of photographic documentation of war, death, and ruin — while realizing in its place something that is not so much beautiful or sublime, but rational and chilling.

What I am calling the terrifying finality projected by Warren’s work is an effect that emerges from the depth of a highly original artistic process. To begin with, Warren has selected a series of news photos documenting the civil war in Ukraine. As Warren remarks, “I intend to attend to the pictures, to find a way to affirm their content through a physical connection.” This is a striking admission; how often do we make a connection between the transmission of remote events and our corporeal existence? The entire network of virtual assault left unattended, is what eats the soul in the first place. We are rendered helpless, as our ingestion of the spectacle of death and destruction chips away at our humanity. Yes, anger rises up, but so does frustration and the sense of being overwhelmed, rendered helpless. This is a state of mind not far removed from that which Susan Sontag wrestles with in her masterful study, Regarding the Pain of Others. We rage against the distasteful voyeurism of regarding the pain of others. We struggle to extract a moral lesson from what, in Tennyson’s resonant phrase, is identified as “the dirty nurse, Experience.”*

Sontag writes, “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding — at a distance, through the medium of photography — other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.” Any number of purposes may be channeled through such images. Warren, like Sontag, intuitively grasps the duality of documentary or journalistic photography whose subject matter is war. Photographic images are a “pellet of information” and “clouds of fantasy.” They can mean anything, and therefore nothing. This is the truth of photography that Warren knows too well. The conundrum is what to do with such knowledge?

The titles of Warren’s series of works — Maidan 1 through Maidan 4, all 2023, or Homs Door and Homs Street, also 2023 — identify sites of resistance, civil war, death, and retribution. All are inkjet monoprints on mulberry paper subjected to an intensive process of manipulation. The procedure that Warren employs yields unpredictable results, so the works on display are the fruits of numerous false starts and discarded attempts. A successful image for Warren satisfies many criteria, some of which are hardly obvious. I guess that Warren demands of her art that it not only embodies Sontag’s notion of duality but also does something else: it transfigures the virtual. The “meaninglessness” of the image is neutralized through the physical affirmation of the artist’s act. Warrens explains this transformation as activated by hand smoothing the ink onto paper in the course of producing the transfer monoprint. In a move that short circuits the photograph’s ability to dull our senses to horror through the sheer repetition of an image — or more dramatically, removes the image from the maws of mechanical reproduction — Warren affirms its content by physically attending to the image. **

There is something decidedly ritualistic in Warren’s approach to image-making, and this is what separates her gloriously rich and ambiguous images from the charge of being a facile negation of content. Warren works the image; she is methodical, determined, and resolute. Her fingerprints, which can be found on many of them, attest to this. It is a further index of her passionate concern, but one that is excruciatingly modest. Indeed, the intervention of Warren’s hand is the sole subject of a small-scale monoprint, Thumbprints 1 (2023). This unassuming work should remind us of our distance from the events depicted in the source material for the works in this exhibition. It signifies that we are present and won’t let the event fade from our memory. In The Press of My Hands, Warren has masterfully created a poignant reminder that far from realizing the community of a global village, the digital images transmitted almost instantaneously from frontline to screens on the far side of the earth have never made us feel so isolated from, and ashamed of, our species. Not only that; the artist’s deliberate process used to create these images slows time, and in so doing ennobles us without dignifying the horror that is contained within.

 

Sally Warren: The Press of My Hands is on view through August 3 at Liliana Bloch Gallery, Dallas.

 

*This phrase appears as an epigraph in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: 2003. It is taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament.” The full stanza in which it appears reads:

And little Dagonet mincing with his feet,
Knight, an ye fling those rubies round my neck
In lieu of hers, I’ll hold thou hast some touch
Of music, since I care not for thy pearls.
Swine? I have wallow’d, I have wash’d — the world
Is flesh and shadow — I have had my day.
The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind
Hath foul’d me — an I wallow’d, then I wash’d —
I have had my day and my philosophies—
And thank the Lord I am King Arthur’s fool.
Swine, say ye? swine, goats, asses, rams and geese
Troop’d round a Paynim harper once, who thrumm’d
On such a wire as musically as thou
Some such fine song — but never a king’s fool.

** I liken Warren’s physical manipulation of the ink jet print to Marina Abramovíc’s methodical washing of bones in Balkan Baroque (1997). Both artistic actions allude to the care with which the dead are treated in the Abrahamic faiths prior to interment.