Jude Broughan’s Alright
The theorizations of quantum physicists notwithstanding, we can never exist in more than one place at the same time. In choosing a given location, we reject—at least temporarily—all the others. Psychically, however, the decision is nowhere near so exclusive. The Surrealists suggested that we use a map of one city to find our way around another, but really we can do nothing else. We locate ourselves with close and constant reference to memory and imagination, interpreting our surroundings according to their examples, however faded or fantastic. Instinctively, we dress up the here and now in the colors of the remote, the past, and the never-was. One of the subjects of Alright (and a recurrent subject of Jude Broughan’s work in general) is that process of understanding one place, one time—and, by extension, one state of being—through allusion to myriad alternatives.
Jude Broughan was born and raised in New Zealand and now lives in New York, but what she attempts is more than a simple compare-and-contrast exercise between two (“new”) cultures, one bossy and bloated, the other relatively small and endearingly unassuming (see also that most modest of titles). Rather, in picturing the liminal spaces of international travel—the bleak airport lounges and battered economy seats—she portrays a neither-here-not-there condition that suggests both the free-floating anxiety of perpetual dislocation and the excitement of limitless potential. It is the traveler that Broughan pursues, not the destination. Even when the places she depicts are less blandly generic, the landscape at issue tends towards the internal and the metaphorical. The map, as Alfred Korzybsky had it, is not the territory.
The book form necessarily suggests a sequence, and a sequence tends to imply a narrative. So it is with Alright, though the “story” is at once reflexive and rhetorical, an array of atmospheres and settings rather than a sequence of acts and outcomes. In addition to the signifiers of travel, there are images of various environments, some of which might be—or could become—“home.” And, as always, there are shots of plants and food—irrepressible physical fundamentals. Life, Broughan seems to propose, is not just location, location, location, but a round of feeding and being fed, absorbing and dissipating emotional-intellectual soul food (to cite those physicists again, we are reminded that energy may never be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another). Much of the beauty of Alright resides in the transparency of its maker’s enthusiasm for sharing this vital nourishment.
Also representative of the centrality of process to Broughan’s project is the inclusion in Alright of photographs depicting sculptural works-in-progress. Interspersed with the book’s original and manipulated, found and recombined images, these further reflect on the state of unfinishedness, of becoming, as a condition with its own use-value. The desire for hermetically sealed perfection—a desire that was indulged repeatedly and extravagantly in the market boom just passed—is here gently but convincingly opposed. Why cover up the “workings” when they hold such potential fascination in and of themselves? Why aim for “resolution” when the greater service might be to construct guides to making, thinking, feeling?
—Michael Wilson