Uta Barth | ArtForum
View of “Uta Barth,” 2023. Foreground, left wall: . . . and of time (AOT 2), 2000. Foreground, right wall: Untitled (and of time . . . 5), 2000.
By Kathryn Scanlan
“Peripheral Vision,” a forty-year retrospective of photographer Uta Barth’s work at the Getty Center, included selections from thirteen phases of the artist’s career, beginning with her early experimentations as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and concluding with “. . . from dawn to dusk,” 2022, a yearlong study of the Getty’s facade, commissioned by the museum, to commemorate its twentieth anniversary. The exhibition’s title underlines Barth’s enduring interest in the act of looking and refers us to the mechanics of human vision: We have a relatively small focal area—the point of fixation—surrounded by a large, blurred peripheral field. (Objects and surroundings in this nebulous zone tend to be familiar, nonthreatening—no need to examine them too closely.) Barth’s lifelong project seems to be all about the point of fixation: what we choose to focus on, what we don’t, and why. The intensity of gaze in some of her self-portraits from the 1980s operates like an interrogator’s spotlight: a violent force by which Barth, who has described herself as “incredibly photo-phobic,” is trapped, pinned, or blinded.