Untitled (Diptych)
Artist
Carl Toth
(American, born 1947)
Date1991
MediumXerographic collage
DimensionsEach print: 11 × 30 in. (27.9 × 76.2 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineGift of Ruth Rattner, 2013
Object numberUAC6062
DescriptionPhotography is often understood — or rather, misunderstood — to be a direct reflection of objective truth — an “unmediated transcription of reality,” as photographer and collagist Carl Toth once put it. Early in his career, however, Toth began subverting this assumption by making the artifice of photography inescapable in his work: shooting what he called “parodies of snapshots,” framing his subjects in unusual ways, hand-tinting his images, and juxtaposing them in sequences depicting multiple moments in time. In order to push this postmodernist practice — of creating art objects to be looked at, rather than documentation to be looked through — to its fullest expression, Toth adopted a new medium in the early ‘80s; he didn’t so much abandon photography as take up a different sort of camera: the lowly color photocopier, which he used to create xerographic collages.Assembled from bits of found photos and graphics, arranged into mysterious scenarios and enigmatic “still lifes,” Toth’s collages are, as his former student Andrea Eis puts it, both “definitive and vague.” Detroit arts writer Vince Carducci admits it’s difficult to make a Toth collage “‘add up’ either as a coherent narrative or a coherent space.” It’s just this ambiguity, though, that make Toth’s collages so compelling. In this untitled diptych, a silhouetted figure uses a pair of binoculars to scan a spare environment built from a variety of patterned surfaces, including a mezzotinted floor and “wallpaper” that suggests a monoprint made from corrugated cardboard. Two black rectangles seem to leap and dance atop a wooden table, as if clamoring for attention. On the wall to the right hangs an artwork — a diptych within a diptych — offering a choice of two competing images tacked to sheets of plywood: a grim cinderblock lying in the dirt (two of them, actually — a diptych within a diptych within a diptych!), or a sinuous cornucopia overflowing with fruit. As of early 2019, Toth’s piece hangs in Wayne State’s Purdy-Kresge library, a place for seeking information; in that context, it’s interesting to read the piece as being about the quest for knowledge, and the choices one makes in interpreting that knowledge once it’s found.
Text by Sean Bieri
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Carl Toth was born in 1947. He studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo, receiving a BA in literature and an MFA in photography. For over 30 years Toth was an artist-in-residence and head of photography at the Cranbrook Academy of Art; his former student and personal assistant, Hamtramck photographer Chris Schneider, remembers him as an “intellectual and philosophical” man who “enjoyed blending pop culture with theory.” In 2004, Toth suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycle accident on the Cranbrook campus; short-term memory loss and other health problems resulting from the accident caused him to retire in 2007. Eight years later, Toth’s student Andrea Eis curated a retrospective of his work at Endicott College in Massachussetts. “Carl entices viewers to ponder what is ‘real’ and what is ‘image,’” Eis wrote, “and to experience the paradox of energy coursing through his still images.” His work is in the collections several institutions, including the George Eastman Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
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