A description of Sharon Lockhart's new film, Teatro Amazonas [Paramount Studios, June 3], sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. A forty-minute film of an audience in a theater in Brazil, with no camera movement and no editing, may be a wonderful conceptual idea, but how exciting could it be. But the film in no way tedious.

Teatro Amazonas starts abruptly with a wide shot of a rather ornate theater, every seat filled, and the sound of Becky Allen's minimalist coral composition enveloping both the Amazonas and Paramount theaters until it fades to the sound of the audience. The piece is in essence a mirror with its nexus being a 35mm strip of celluloid. Viewers sit and stare at a minimally shifting filmic dot pattern, those in the film confront something even less dramatic: a film camera running footage.

Lockhart's work is often put in the category of new forms of documentary practice and her stylization invites that classification. As Teatro Amazonas exhibits both difference and similarity across cultures, it offers some of what documentary is known for. But the work centers more on the process, taking theory as its object rather than those at whom the camera points. Documentary, from Jacob Riis on, has always focused on social responsibility, has always centered on advocacy. In Lockhart's work these concerns are, at best, kept on the periphery.

Lockhart’s still work from Brazil, “Interview Locations/Family Photos” (Blum & Poe June 2 – 30) exhibits this even more clearly. This work is shown in groupings: usually one, very detailed black and white image (interview location) surrounded by various re-photographed prints taken from the snapshot collections of those who occupied the space. The locations while empty of people, display the evidence of human activity: well worn floors, hammocks hung out of the way, bags of belongings, audio tape players, and even a car battery--presumably to power anything that requires electricity. In some, the walls are papered with magazine pages that display a variety of consumable goods and possibly vacation spots, all of this inviting comparison to the work of Walker Evans. But the work, perhaps as cold and formal as Evans', contains little of the sentimentality he employed to prop up a liberal agenda.

In 1999, Lockhart traveled in the Manaus area with two anthropologists. The work in this show comes from an expedition down the Rio Aripaunã that was originally to be a study of the role of women in the rubber industry, but turned out to be a survey of the region's declining population. The people were interviewed by the anthropologist, and afterwards Lockhart photographed the site. She also made copies of their snapshots.

The display of this work--the un-peopled locations grouped with copied snaps--is more akin to crime scene photography than documentary. Even the quality of the copied photographs, the scratches, the faded colors, can remind us of missing persons cases featured on local news broadcasts. And while these personal images do give us insight into the lives of the people, their overt fetishization (framed individually in simple black frames and six-ply mat board) and the sparse arrangement in the gallery (mostly white space with only two groupings) tends to erase the personal indicescontained within the frame. The work seems more about the process of looking and categorization than the people of Manaus.

If we have to classify Lockhart's work, through her stylization and subject matter, we can place her under the umbrella of documentary. The pretext is the people of Manaus, an area little known in dominate culture. But it is in the subtext, the unveiling of practice, that her work really shines. And while it's an old debate, it's a debate that cannot be dismissed.

Ken Marchionno, Los Angeles ©2001

“Teatro Amazonas,” Art Papers, Atlanta, Georgia, October/November, 2001