S K E E TM c A U L E Y-B I O

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS:

GRANTS AND AWARDS:

Polaroid Artist Support Grant: Polaroid Corporation

THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE, ROBERT L. PINCUS: "For all of the art history that McAuley's photographs reference, and echo seductively, that isn't the only concern rumbling through these pictures. In other series, the divide between cultural realities and appearances have clearly intrigued him. . . More recently, he has played up the ways nature is made artificial, in dramatically large pictures of tiny trees (bonsai) and miniature stonescapes (suiseki). As the artist puts it, commenting on the bonsai and the history of Eastern thought that surrounds the phenomenon, 'What appears to be is not what is.' This point relates to views of golf landscapes, too. . . . The standards of beauty for golf courses turn native vegetation into a nonentity, something outside the proverbial garden gates."

ART ISSUES, DAVE HICKEY: "There is a long Anglo-American tradition of rendering Mother Nature as a seductive Oedipal ingenue, and, at first glance, Skeet McAuley's glamorous landscape photographs of glamorously landscaped golf courses very closely approximate its flashiest contemporary manifestations. In content and format these images do, in fact, portray the earth as a 'grand horizontal' laid out in lascivious purity, inviting violation - and they do so with so much authority that, in an uncritical context, they could easily pass as top-of-the-line, soft-core landscape photography of the Arizona Highways variety. . .

I would suggest, however, that this contextual anomaly speaks less to the nature of McAuley's photographs than it does to our unspoken assumptions about the 'function' of photographic nature. Because, on second glance, there is a peculiar recursiveness to these images, an undeniably incestuous, Warholian tang to their seductive flavor - like the taste of a chicken omelet or the ambiance of a Jeff Koons Hummei figure or the pun in Fanny Hill. As a result, any beholder who confronts them in a context that insists upon a serious response is going to sense their lack of innocence. Clearly, there are feedback-loops in place, issues of cause and consequence are being confounded, and gradually the beholder is teased into a realization that McAuley's photographs function less as 'pictures of nature' than as pictures of 'Nature' already rendered pictorial - as pictures of nature precooked, as it were, into a golfer's simulacrum of the landscape sublime.

In other words, we recognize in this context the extent to which a contemporary golf course is already an image of the second order - a landscape sculpture that mimics a painting in the landscape tradition. So McAuley's landscape photographs of landscape sculptures made from landscape paintings almost of necessity speak to us less of nature than of the ways that our culture chooses to deal with it, to subordinate it to the pictorial geometry of our imperial gaze, infected with our cultural memories of Eden. . .

Skeet McAuley's photographs manage to present us with visual evidence of the consequences of this geometric imperialism, and of our denial of the perceptual rift that will always exist between the fact of the land and the tradition of the landscape - the slippage between the way the land lies and the way we look at it. In doing so, these images suggest the damage we do to nature by aesthetizing it in the manner of Jack Nicklaus or Ansel Adams. By making an Eden of nature, which never was Edenic, nor ever will be, we impose the metaphysics of Euclidean order on physical things and places as contingent, as rough, and as irregular as we are ourselves."