And many ofPine Flat’s filmed scenarios seem to follow closely from Lock-
hart’s enigmatic family images, with pairs and trios of children playing in both,
or with the snapshots of herself or her family members with back to camera
now taken up in episodes ofPine Flatlike“Bus”or“Snowy Hill”.Itisasifan
initial analogy first occurred to the artist around the issue of pose–the fact that
these enigmatic (failed?) snapshots of family members seen from behind created
a correspondence with the situation of the viewer’s orientation toward the im-
age, with both viewer and photographed subject gazing toward a distant hori-
zon, like the unfathomable vista of the enigma of the past itself. Both viewer
and viewed were positioned similarly in relation to that unknown scene, and to
a kind of thus infinitely deferred desire.And then it is as if this initial analogy
inspired Lockhart to seek out another series of affinities,“attuning”her earlier
cinematic photographs or the current images from thePine Flatproject to
these auratic images from her own past.
Attunement, I want to claim, has become Lockhart’s overriding artistic con-
cern. More“aural”than visual, Lockhart’s strategies of“attunement”expand
the literal obsolescence of the analog into what we might call a conceptual strat-
egy of analogy. To“attune”something requires two forms; it can never be a
solitary endeavor. Attunement is the attempt to bring forms close, to have them
“rhyme”. It is a word we could use to understand Lockhart’s insistent linkage of
terms we normally perceive as oppositions, rhyming in her work document and
fiction, past and present, viewer and viewed, subject and object, self and other–
until the opposition will no longer hold. Attunement is a desiring and emotive
mode; it is the form of Lockhart’s disorienting version of“receiving”, the way in
which even while intensely manipulating her images, she makes space for the
world outside. It is an action modeled on the workings of memory itself, the
affinities through which desire can be displaced from past to present and vice
versa. It is a device through which we might finally begin to understand that
commonplace of the criticism of Lockhart’s work that sees it as an uncanny com-
bination of both distance and affect, of“objective”photography or“structural”
film and the emotions–a combination that, moreover, Lockhart seems to signal
precisely in the connotations of her project’s titlePine Flat.
This is because attunement, Lockhart has shown, can come from strangely
readymade conventions, and unlikely, perhaps alienating places. It can emerge
from practices of mass culture, Hollywood for example: Witness her photo-
graph of actor Ben Gazzara (Ben Gazzara, Los Angeles, California, March,
), photographed in close-up, gazing almost longingly into the camera,
head resting on his hands and on a pillow while he lies in bed. Evidently, the
photograph of the aging actor was taken on a film set, for Lockhart has paired it
with a second image of a young woman in exactly the same pose. This is Gaz-
zara’s“stand-in”during shooting, as Lockhart’s title informs us:Emilie Halpern,
128 George Baker