Haruki Murakami’s latest best-seller, 1Q84, opens with the protagonist, Aomame, listening to Leoš Janácek’s Sinfonietta in a taxi on Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway. She’s late and the car is stuck in an epic traffic jam. Out of the blue, the driver suggests that Aomame escape the gridlock via the emergency staircase. “Please remember,” he says, as she prepares to leave his cab, “things are not always what they seem.” Descending the secret stairs, Murakami’s heroine unsuspectingly steps into another dimension, governed by mercurial Little People. 1Q84 is almost like 1984, the year she has just left behind, but not quite: Two moons hang in the sky; normality has tipped over.
Likewise, Anne Hardy’s large-scale photographs—which she’ll show this month in her hometown of London at the Maureen Paley Gallery—present interiors that could almost be real: gymnasiums strewn with confetti after an end-of-year party, club entrances decorated with pagan chalk drawings, snooker clubs without a single baize table in sight. Although every picture manifests a rigorous internal organization, they all elude the normative logic of reality, as if offering a glimpse into a parallel world. Hardy is an avid reader, and literature, more than the visual arts, has informed her practice. The catalogue of her recent survey show at Vienna’s Secession is packed with excerpts from novels by the likes of J.G. Ballard, Tom McCarthy—and Murakami. “I think it’s that space that’s created,” she tells me when I visit her Bethnal Green studio. From a book, she says, “you get quite a lot, but you don’t get everything, and you have to involve yourself in a different way.”
Hardy creates environments to be explored by the mind. A key proponent of “constructed photography,” she builds in her studio film set–like installations that last just long enough for her to photograph them. Once the picture is taken, she destroys the assemblage. Hardy’s work exists only as a flat surface, yet her production is fundamentally sculptural, concerned with such issues as balance, composition, and objects’ physical properties. (Curator Francesco Manacorda recently dubbed her practice “two-dimensional sculpture.”)
The process is painstakingly slow; Hardy produces just three to four images a year. When asked how she usually begins, she replies, “It’s been very different for different works, but there’s something which is like a starting point. Sometimes that might be a type of architecture; sometimes it might be a color; sometimes it could be certain materials or objects.”
For Close Range, 2006, a photograph of a claustrophobic den dominated by rudimentary shooting targets, the inspiration was the texture of a welded corner in Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s 1977 volume of archival images, Evidence. The rugged metal accretion became in Hardy’s hands expanded foam, painted black. She worked in other narrative elements, including the story of a playground in Poland set inside a former factory—perhaps alluded to in her photograph by the bright orange coat hanger. Hardy follows her nose: One found object leads to the next, progressively generating a situation not always fully planned at the outset. “One analogy for such a working process,” photography curator Charlotte Cotton has written of Hardy’s method, “is that of the novelist who develops a character to the point that they seem to take on an independent existence.”
The result is intrinsically narrative. To look at these images is to stand on the threshold of a fantastic space that simultaneously calls for recognition and defies it. Prime, 2009, depicts what could be the garden shed of a highly organized tinkerer. Dozens of cardboard cylinders are stacked in precise arrangements, metal propellers hang on the wall, and shredded paper litters every nook and cranny. Individually, the items are familiar, but once assembled, the situation they conjure up resists straightforward interpretation. The tubes vaguely suggest dynamite sticks, bringing to mind the hideout of a fireworks enthusiast—or an aesthetically minded bomb maker. “It’s not about fantasy,” Hardy says. “It’s about how odd reality is.” The mundane surrealism that pervades her production is very much in tune with the one permeating Murakami’s every line. Both bodies of work function as a fun house mirror, sending the world a disturbing image of itself. “We have an obsession with the clean, the tidy, the perfect surface,” Hardy continues. “But really that’s just like a veneer, covering up the spaces where everything happens underneath.”
Hardy’s work is routinely compared to Thomas Demand’s and Jeff Wall’s. With the former, it shares environments constructed to be shot; and with both, a meticulous sense of composition. Yet Hardy feels little affinity with other contemporary photographers, mentioning instead the installation-art heavyweights Gregor Schneider and Mike Nelson. “In my photographs, I am very interested in how the image can take you into this other space. But at the same time, you can’t step into it physically nor fully understand it,” she says. “It’s like in a book, you read the words but you build so much of the narrative up in your imagination.” The artist sets up scenarios but it’s up to her viewers to bring them to life, to wonder what kind of person could have casually thrown the plaits of artificial hair on the plastic chairs in Incidence, 2009—and, crucially, why. As Cotton says in her book The Photograph as Contemporary Art, “One of the great uses of tableau photography is as a format that can carry intense but ambiguous drama that is then shaped by the viewer’s own train of thoughts.”
Since graduating in 2000 from the Royal College of Art in London with a master’s degree in photography, Hardy has worked in a rather secretive manner. But in recent years she has shifted and is now increasingly opening up her creative process. Mirrors have started to crop up in her images as a way “to draw attention to the illusion,” she says. Suite, 2012, is a case in point. The picture shows an old-fashioned disco’s back wall, decorated with painted foliage. A large round mirror, reflecting a stage, tripods, and hanging microphones, occupies the center of the image. “I started to use mirrors because I got interested in how the photograph could contain more than one space,” Hardy explains. This inclusion not only demonstrates her technical virtuosity,
it also adds a layer of complexity to the beholder-artwork relationship. In previous pieces, viewers were invited to suspend disbelief, to become the artist’s accomplice. With her use of mirrors, this dynamic no longer fully remains. Looking at Suite, I should be able to see myself by the microphones; but I’m absent, denied access to an interior I’m obviously encouraged to enter. Suspended in limbo.
“We went to see Anne in her studio at a point when she was really thinking about whether it was advisable or possible to be more public about the process of making her work,” recalls Jenni Lomax, director of the Camden Arts Centre, in London, who invited Hardy to accept a residency there in 2011. On selected days while on-site, Hardy invited visitors to take a peek at the environment she was setting up for her monumental piece Rift, 2011—a first. The artist also began to introduce into her images the list of words she compiles while attempting to nail a title. In Script, 2012, a multicolored wall is covered with graffiti declaring, “slide, slip, slither, slap, sleep, system, organization, collapse.” Says Hardy of the collection of words: “They became like a found object for me in a way.” As an image, Script evokes a screenwriters’ hangout (an impression reinforced by the VHS cassettes and loose tape, presumably hanging from the ceiling outside the frame). As a list, the words create a snapshot of Hardy’s mindscape, reminiscent of the effect left by Carl Andre’s concrete poetry. Does she feel her production is becoming more self-referential? “Not more self-referential but more about using the materials that I generate during the process of making a work,” Hardy muses. “Behind each image, there are an awful lot of other things that have been made that relate to and create the space in that work. I’ve started to pay attention to and use more of this other stuff.”
To see images, click on the slideshow.
This article was published in the April 2013 issue of Modern Painters.