With the diligence of a seasoned stalker, Catherine Yass uses her camera to capture the Royal Sovereign lighthouse—a unique structure perched above the English Channel—from every angle. The resulting 12-minute, 42-second film takes an aesthetic, rather than a documentary, approach. This nearly silent work—there’s an underlying hum on the soundtrack, and the occasional gurgle of water near the end—does little to explain the lighthouse’s history, its current use, or its mechanics. Instead, Yass visually interrogates it, documenting her singular subject down low and up high; the film itself was made by shooting from a boat, a helicopter, and underwater, with the help of scuba teams. (In a side gallery are accompanying light-box installations, in which Yass used two different photographic exposures of the lighthouse and blue-colored filters.) At intervals, the camera swoops down to focus momentarily on the roiling ocean and then back up to the lighthouse—but upside down this time, as if suspended from space. The effect is marvelous, akin to the perspective skewering of certain of Gerhard Richter’s seascapes; as for Yass’s tactic of obsessively prodding her inanimate subject, it is somewhat reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s documentation of the statue of Liberty in 2009’s Static.
The work succeeds due to the high production quality and cinematography that renders the bizarre architecture of the lighthouse as if it were a sculptural object worthy of such deliberate attention; it’s a beautiful, at times unnerving, document that goes well beyond any “now we’re right side up, now we’re upside down” chicanery. When the camera goes beneath the water’s surface, it’s barely able to capture the massive column that supports the lighthouse; the film becomes a swirl of disruption and water bubbles, an abstraction and obfuscation. Perhaps it’s the underlying irony of Yass’s film: If a lighthouse’s purpose is to safely guide ships, here the viewer instead ends up lost, barely able to see.
Catherine Yass's "Lighthouse" is on view at Galerie Lelong on 528 West 16th Street through March 17, 2012.
This article will appear in the April 2012 issue of Modern Painters magazine.