“Painting is directed by the heart through the eye. Photography is directed by the mind through the eye. . . . Someday heart and mind will become one, that is, an all-embracing and economical medium will enable us to realize all our desires instantly.” –Man Ray, 1950
In the center of the floor is a two-faced pillar, three phscolograms high, of alternating images of nudes and complex spiky polyhedrons–herpes, papilloma, and AIDS viruses. The nudes, which one would think should be appealing, are distant and almost clinical; the viruses, which should be gruesome, are bright and lively. (In two images–the male nude with its moving penis and the AIDS virus with its depths within depths–the three-dimensionality is so pronounced that it approaches animation.) The piece was originally titled Robert Mapplethorpe/The Nineties; now it’s The Politics of Pleasure/The Nineties. Either way, the pleasure is disturbingly qualified.
Sandor started out in sculpture–she got her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1975. But ever since, her work has been moving slowly away from physical sculpture to what she calls “virtual sculpture.”
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Looking back, you can see elements of (Art)n in Sandor’s first public work, the 1976 The Money House, commissioned for the lobby of Citizen’s Savings and Loan Association in San Francisco. During her School of the Art Institute days, she and her adviser Jim Zanzi had collected old neon signs and speculated on their artistic possibilities. To symbolize the S and L, she made a simple neon outline of a house with dollar and cent signs inside. Three-dimensional and ethereal, colorful and cheeky, it raised a fuss but stayed in the lobby–and paved the way for her to do more neon work on the art-business frontier.
The first and simplest form of this technique was the use of the old-time stereopticon, which employed two photographs of the same scene taken from slightly different points of view set side by side in a viewer, so that each eye would see its own version and the brain would put them together into a seemingly three-dimensional view.
The collaborators on this first piece also included Gary Justis and Randy Johnson (sculpture), Mark Resch (video), Gina Uhlmann and Jerry August (photography), and Tom Cvetkovich and Steven Smith (holography). “We were determined that summer [1983] to get it done by fall,” recalls Zanzi. “It was one of the most intense, spectacular things I was ever involved with.” Uhlmann agrees: “A lot of that time is just a blur of exposing film and sleeping at the loft. It was over on Desplaines Avenue–a great big raw-as-they-come loft. In the summer, when it was 110 degrees outside, it was 180 degrees inside the big camera.” (August had supervised the camera’s construction.) Every hour or so, when one exposure had been finished and the next was ready to start, “Somebody had to be there to move things and adjust the exposure” so that the correct perspectives would be photographed through the barrier screen. “It was exciting, doing something no one had done before. We were literally making history.”
