Installation view, William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories, David Zwirner, New York, March 9 – April 24, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner — Installation view, *William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories*, David Zwirner, New York, March 9 – April 24, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner

Text by Trevor Bishai

One may think that photography and sculpture have little in common. Photography certainly has less distant neighbors: painting and film, for example, and sculpture does too, with ceramics and architecture. But at William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories, on show at David Zwirner from March 9 to April 24, the two media are brought into close dialogue, providing striking results.

If one were to choose works of photography to pair with minimalist sculpture, Eggleston’s may not seem like the obvious choice, for there are plenty of photographers whose work attends to the abstract: Edward Weston and Aaron Siskind, to name a few. But Eggleston’s photographs share a unique closeness to certain tenets of abstraction that are emulated in McCracken’s work.

William Eggleston, Untitled, c. 1973-1978 © Eggleston Artistic Trust, Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner — William Eggleston, *Untitled*, c. 1973-1978 © Eggleston Artistic Trust, Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

Firstly, there is the question of visual content. Much of Eggleston’s later work, from the ‘70s and ‘80s, is characterized by its ordinary subject matter. Rather than searching for inspiration in the visually unique, or capturing a “decisive moment” as Cartier-Bresson did, Eggleston used his camera to portray what many in America wouldn’t give a second look: gas stations, storefronts, old, run-down buildings, parking lots overgrown with weeds. And instead of crafting images containing narrative or drama, as photography has time and again, he showcases things which we wouldn’t necessarily ascribe much cultural or symbolic relevance to. Eggleston has been heralded as one of the foremost documentarians of suburban American culture, but he did this by photographing trash cans and old tires, not iconic scenes or places. In this way, Eggleston is a reductionist in terms of his visual content, lowering his criteria for what has the potential to be visually interesting.

John McCracken, Untitled (Red Plank), 1976 © The Estate of John McCracken, Courtesy The Estate of John McCracken and David Zwirner — John McCracken, *Untitled (Red Plank)*, 1976 © The Estate of John McCracken, Courtesy The Estate of John McCracken and David Zwirner

In a similar way, McCracken’s sculptures begin with conventionally uninteresting subject material: incredibly simple forms devoid of detail or flourish. In the ‘60s and 70s, McCracken and his contemporaries embraced the abstract, but took a step even further to find a kind of “pure form” which eradicated any forms or features that were non-essential to the subject. McCracken’s work, composed of bright, satiny monochromatic planks which lean against the wall, and similarly varnished blocks sitting on pedestals, adopt the simplest forms imaginable in sculpture. In the built environment, there are few things more ordinary than a rectangular block or plank, and in the landscapes of suburban America, there are few things more ordinary than a gas station or a decaying sidewalk. Accordingly, McCracken and Eggleston’s shared proclivity for using commonplace subject matter in their respective crafts makes their artistry and visual eloquence stand out.

Although both artists make use of unremarkable content, the pieces themselves are the least bit mundane. The objects we see on Eggleston’s prints aren’t themselves particularly interesting, but the photographs are executed in a dazzling, almost thrilling fashion. Similarly, McCracken’s planks are merely blank, monochromatic pieces of plywood and fiberglass, but they jump out at the viewer with striking boldness, a visual audacity, of sorts. And it is no question that in both artists’ work, color is responsible for these effects. Shot on Kodachrome, Eggleston’s images contain incredibly bright and saturated colors, adding a distinct vividness to the everyday built environment. And McCracken paints and varnishes his sculptures with the utmost intensity and precision, so that they are not merely dull planks, but brilliantly shining objects. Even the black plank, Silver, 2006 shines with a remarkable satin, livening the object with the same finish of its more colorful counterparts.

It is here, in their use of color, where the two artists’ work seem to be the most in conversation. True Stories has carefully placed each artist’s work in spatial relation to the other in a way that sets up a visual dialogue rooted in color. The sculptures and photographs share bright reds and deep blacks, and are oriented in a way that makes McCracken’s works feel like three-dimensional extensions of Eggleston’s photographs. In his own words, McCracken’s shiny aesthetic was inspired in part by the car culture of the West Coast, as he once called automobiles “mobile color chips.” When we are prompted with an abstract reference to a distinctive style such as this, Eggleston’s photographs, several of which actually depict cars, provide the perfect complement, grounding McCracken’s aesthetic in a more representational form.

True Stories thus showcases two artists who begin with the mundane and achieve brilliance—quite literally—through their use of color. In pointing his camera towards things we would otherwise ignore, Eggleston prompts us to examine the intricacies and elaborateness of our everyday visual environment, doing in photography what abstract art does in general. In forcing us to find nuance and meaning in what may appear to be the most basic or uninteresting objects, both Eggleston and McCracken embrace the abstract in their own way, and do so with distinctively American style.