Lyle Ashton Harris The Watering Hole I, III, VIII, and IX 1996

B 1965 New York, New York, USA Four of nine chromogenic color prints
Each: 35 ½ × 29 in. (90.2 × 73.7 cm)
Gift of Agnes Gund. 2013

A set of nine large-scale chromogenic Duraflex prints—each one presenting an array of snapshots,
clipped images, and Post-it Notes mounted on fake-wood paneling, and some of them also featuring
smeared, spattered, or letter-stenciled paint—Lyle Ashton Harris’s Watering Hole is an insistently
photographic work. And for a certain type of spectator, what it provides in the way of punctum—that
compositional detail that, according to Roland Barthes, strikes a photograph’s viewer as ineluctably
“poignant”—is wholly bound up with its means for eliciting what Barthes calls studium, the modicum
of “polite interest” that we bestow on the photograph in recognition of the cultural cues it proffers.
After all, if one is savvy enough to discern The Watering Hole’s engagement with sexualized serial
murder—in particular, the instances thereof perpetrated by Jeffrey Dahmer in Ohio and Wisconsin
from 1978 to 1991—then to be “pricked” or “wounded” (to use Barthes’s terms in relation to the
punctum) by Dahmer victim David Thomas’s eyes as they peer up at one from the snapshot
incorporated in the bottom half of The Watering Hole III is to experience as punctum one of the very
compositional elements that likely alerted one to the work’s engagement with murder in the first
place, and thus attracted one’s attention in the form of studium.
The intensity of this interrelation is heightened, of course, when the punctum comprises
an image of Dahmer himself. There he is, for instance, at the lower left of The Watering Hole I,
his apparent rough-trade quality confirmed by the fact that this is his police booking photo. Would
that image function as punctum for me (the punctum is always personal; there is no way I can keep
myself out of this) were I not aware that he was the notorious killer? Would it achieve this effect
had I not always recognized that he was exactly the type of man I would gladly have accompanied
home from the bar, doubtless only to have ended up as gobbets in his fridge? (Indeed, Harris himself
effectively figures this fate within the work, the torn fragments from his early whiteface self-portraits
that appear in The Watering Hole V and The Watering Hole VI eerily recalling the severed heads
and bleached skulls that law-enforcement officials recovered from Dahmer’s apartment.) And
did I not find him so terrifyingly alluring (for he is—or was—a serial killer), would I be so thrilled
by the vulnerability he exhibits in the not one but two images of him in The Watering Hole VIII
and The Watering Hole IX, passed out drunk on his army barracks bed? Because these, too,
manifest to me as puncta, though their potency as such—and that of the other instances cited
here as well—is mitigated somewhat by the feature of the work that imbues the whole with
its distinctive exquisite tension.
I am referring to the frame that encloses each of The Watering Hole’s nine constituent panels
(Jacques Derrida having thoroughly problematized the distinction between the frame and the
artwork “proper”)—or, more precisely, to the glass that encases them. Perceptible in reproduction
only through the reflections that glint from its surface, this heavy, high-gloss sheathing appears
when the work is viewed in person like a vitreous glaze organic to the alternately rust- and red-tinged
prints themselves. At once connoting the bloodshed that the prints commemorate and deflecting
our gaze from the details of the horror, this crimson sheen renders that horror as distantiated
spectacle, making it safe for perusal . . . by viewers like me.

Phillip Brian Harper

236 237
Lyle Ashton Harris The Watering Hole I, III, VIII, and IX 1996
B 1965 New York, New York, USA Four of nine chromogenic color prints
Each: 35 ½ × 29 in. (90.2 × 73.7 cm)
Gift of Agnes Gund. 2013

A set of nine large-scale chromogenic Duraflex prints—each one presenting an array of snapshots,
clipped images, and Post-it Notes mounted on fake-wood paneling, and some of them also featuring
smeared, spattered, or letter-stenciled paint—Lyle Ashton Harris’s Watering Hole is an insistently
photographic work. And for a certain type of spectator, what it provides in the way of punctum—that
compositional detail that, according to Roland Barthes, strikes a photograph’s viewer as ineluctably
“poignant”—is wholly bound up with its means for eliciting what Barthes calls studium, the modicum
of “polite interest” that we bestow on the photograph in recognition of the cultural cues it proffers.
After all, if one is savvy enough to discern The Watering Hole’s engagement with sexualized serial
murder—in particular, the instances thereof perpetrated by Jeffrey Dahmer in Ohio and Wisconsin
from 1978 to 1991—then to be “pricked” or “wounded” (to use Barthes’s terms in relation to the
punctum) by Dahmer victim David Thomas’s eyes as they peer up at one from the snapshot
incorporated in the bottom half of The Watering Hole III is to experience as punctum one of the very
compositional elements that likely alerted one to the work’s engagement with murder in the first
place, and thus attracted one’s attention in the form of studium.
The intensity of this interrelation is heightened, of course, when the punctum comprises
an image of Dahmer himself. There he is, for instance, at the lower left of The Watering Hole I,
his apparent rough-trade quality confirmed by the fact that this is his police booking photo. Would
that image function as punctum for me (the punctum is always personal; there is no way I can keep
myself out of this) were I not aware that he was the notorious killer? Would it achieve this effect
had I not always recognized that he was exactly the type of man I would gladly have accompanied
home from the bar, doubtless only to have ended up as gobbets in his fridge? (Indeed, Harris himself
effectively figures this fate within the work, the torn fragments from his early whiteface self-portraits
that appear in The Watering Hole V and The Watering Hole VI eerily recalling the severed heads
and bleached skulls that law-enforcement officials recovered from Dahmer’s apartment.) And
did I not find him so terrifyingly alluring (for he is—or was—a serial killer), would I be so thrilled
by the vulnerability he exhibits in the not one but two images of him in The Watering Hole VIII
and The Watering Hole IX, passed out drunk on his army barracks bed? Because these, too,
manifest to me as puncta, though their potency as such—and that of the other instances cited
here as well—is mitigated somewhat by the feature of the work that imbues the whole with
its distinctive exquisite tension.
I am referring to the frame that encloses each of The Watering Hole’s nine constituent panels
(Jacques Derrida having thoroughly problematized the distinction between the frame and the
artwork “proper”)—or, more precisely, to the glass that encases them. Perceptible in reproduction
only through the reflections that glint from its surface, this heavy, high-gloss sheathing appears
when the work is viewed in person like a vitreous glaze organic to the alternately rust- and red-tinged
prints themselves. At once connoting the bloodshed that the prints commemorate and deflecting
our gaze from the details of the horror, this crimson sheen renders that horror as distantiated
spectacle, making it safe for perusal . . . by viewers like me.

Phillip Brian Harper

236 237