Zuma #23 1977

John Divola made this photograph, Zuma #23, by pointing his camera at a sunset through a vandalized building; a collision of beauty and ruin. The marks and color are, in a sense, Divola's. The spray paint he adds to the walls is a gesture of claiming space, of making and unmaking. The building's interior is covered in what looks like hasty daubs of white spray paint, almost like tears or crude polka dots. This contrasts dramatically with the smooth, glowing vista visible through the window, and this relationship between inside and outside, destruction and idyllic beauty, has got me thinking. The cool pinks and blues are so seductive; it’s like looking at a Rothko, or James Turrell, with added grit. I am reminded of Robert Smithson, who made art out of ruins. Smithson was interested in entropy; the inevitable decay of all things. Like Smithson, Divola wants us to see the world as a place of constant change, and to see beauty in unexpected places. Divola suggests that the world is always in flux, that there is no such thing as a fixed or stable image.