Entering Allan Sekula’s recent exhibition, one is confronted with a group of seemingly disparate, large Cibachrome prints, some diptychs, some single images: a Russian trawler, the Guggenheim Bilbao, a woman standing on a chair, a country road with a wheat pasted ad—possibly for phone sex—on a roadside sign. This work, one part of a three-part project titled “TITANIC’s wake,” is as complicated as anything to date. It reads like a puzzle with no image on the box as a guide. Once the pieces start to fit, the larger issues become clear. “TITANIC’s wake,” is socially critical on a global scale. It references a variety of inspiration: from literature, to economic theory, to art history and even Sekula’s own production. Moving through the work while reading Sekula’s lyrical statement (provided at the reception desk), we can start to decode the semiologic and metaphoric language embedded in these images.

The exhibition begins with a bucolic rural scene in Saché, early morning light, with a fisherman’s hut prominently placed near the center of the frame. This is followed by a diptych on the Guggenheim Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry, and spectacularly fashioned out of titanium. The first half of the diptych centers on the building itself, built on the site of a bankrupt shipyard and designed to mimic a fish or ship like shape. The second half shifts to the right of the museum, focusing on a seemingly abandoned building, perhaps a remnant of the mentioned shipyard. And this, perhaps, is an indication that hiring an expensive architect to produce a monument with an extremely expensive metal leaves little for the gentrification of the surrounding area. And placing this diptych alongside the fisherman’s hut, brackets the museum in the absurdity of class stratification, and points to the erasure of working reality.

These relationships continue to emerge, double back upon themselves, and inform meaning in much the same way. Included in this installation are two works not considered part of TITANIC’s wake but intricately wed to the project: Waiting for Tear Gas, a projection piece that follows the flow of the Seattle protests of the WTO, and Dear Bill Gates, a humorous, yet quite pointed piece. Commissioned by the Henry Gallery in Seattle, Sekula swam out to Bill Gates’ home to photograph it from the water. What we see is a triptych: Gates’ home, the artist (head bobbing in the water, Gates’ house in the background), and a small leisure craft, all taken from water level. Next to this is a letter to Gates referencing his purchase of Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks. The Titanic went down just south of the Grand Banks, and if we read back into the triptych we see the artist place himself in direct identification with those disenfranchised from the safety of the lifeboats, those mostly assigned to steerage.

Sekula demands a lot of his viewers. His references rely on the audience’s ability to put together various and somewhat obscure cultural indices to see the larger picture of a complicated world. While you can appreciate his production without all this work, you would be missing a lot if you didn’t try. And perhaps that is the most basic message: you have to do the work.

Ken Marchionno, Los Angeles ©2001

“Titanic’s wake, Alan Sekula,” Art Papers, Atlanta, Georgia, March/April, 2001