Things Fall Apart

by Beth E. Wilson, March 29, 2007

How can something as familiar and reassuring as a suburban split-level home seem suddenly strange, even dangerous?
Try hoisting it several hundred feet off the ground, and then allow gravity to pull it inexorably (and quite precipitously) back to earth. That’s essentially the process involved in Peter Garfield’s photographic series “Mobile Homes,” currently on view at MASS MoCA in an exhibition titled “Unhinged.”

Garfield’s grainy, washed-out color photographs elide two of the major tropes in contemporary photography—the documentary application of the medium, and the stage-managed “set-up” photograph. Artists of this latter tendency, from Jeff Wall to Gregory Crewdson to Thomas Demand, either construct or choreograph scenes explicitly so that they may be photographed, often to pseudocinematic effect. Here, Garfield stages the event that he documents, at great trouble and expense, by acquiring abandoned houses, and then airlifting them by helicopter over an empty field. The house is dropped, photographed as it plummets, and then crashes to the ground. The largest remnants are then hoisted again, for a second (and sometimes third) go at the process.
Through this inspired deconstruction, the ultimate emblem of safety and security—the home—is revealed as transitory, unstable, and utterly contingent as it disintegrates before our eyes. Not coincidentally, Garfield (who before this had been making abstract paintings) was propelled to make this series in response to the weird public euphoria that greeted the end of the first Gulf War. Called out of the hermetic mode of his abstract studio work, he began to engage life outside, in this case the disintegration of post-World War II America, or, as the artist puts it, “how the residue of fifties morality that provides some structure, security, can also be seen as producing some sort of national neurosis.”