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Scott Mutter: Manipulating Reality
| Article
# : |
19523 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
1,586 Words |
| Author
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Catharine Reeve
Boston writer-photographer Catharine Reeve is coauthor of The
New Photography (Prentice Hall, 1984; Da Capo, 1987). She is a
contributing editor to Camera and Darkroom Photography
Magazine and writes frequently on photography. |
In the photographic world of Scott Mutter, trees grow naturally out of parquet tiles, a solitary swan glides across a marble floor, and a Corinthian column crowns the world famous Standard Oil buildings of Chicago. It's truth with a twist, black-and-white images so real that they cause viewers to do a double take. It affirms an old proverb: Things often aren't what they seem.
Mutter's photomontages confirm another truth too: Quite incongruous elements often find a compatible home when carefully, thoughtfully combined. Those two words--care and thought--form the backbone of Mutter's art. With a talent for combining interesting ideas and the technical skill of a surgeon, the Chicago artist superimposes, burns, dodges, masks, and manipulates individual photographs into a new reality. In the process, he's sending forth a timely, though perhaps unintentional, message for the nineties: that seemingly worlds-apart ideas can coexist in harmonious and meaningful relationships.
Scott Mutter is a thinker--"working with ideas is what I like to do," he says--but putting thought into art was never his goal. His fascination is history; he has a master's degree in Chinese studies and can read, write, and speak Chinese. "My interest is in understanding a culture and how it moves through time, how it got to be where it is," he says. "I am not interested in how it looks now."
He wasn't interested in photography either, until he decided that it was necessary to take a firsthand look at the land he had studied for so many years. He signed up for a course in filmmaking at his alma mater, the University of Illinois in Urbana, with plans to translate his passion for China into a film. He also enrolled in a still photography class, hoping to learn the fundamentals of the medium and get some pointers on what to photograph during his China sojourn. The latter course bored him, but the filmmaking class changed his vision and his life.
This course taught him about the work of the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. In a book, Eisenstein discussed the visual qualities of Japanese characters and their influence on his composition. The Japanese written language, Mutter knew, was derived from the Chinese language. It had never occurred to him that composition and montage in art could bear a close relationship to the Chinese characters he had studied for so many years.
"In Chinese, the writing of a phrase is a visualization, and characters are layered to
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