A Review of Robert Voit’s “New Trees” exhibit at Amador Gallery, NYC.
When looking at Robert Voit’s photographs of cell phone towers impersonating trees, you’re seeing the result of a debate: “Should this structure be where it is?” The answer is unfortunately very simple: “It doesn’t matter. They’re already there.”
Why make a cell phone tower look like a tree? Why go the extra step and learn about the surrounding palms in order to replicate them? What is inherently uncomfortable about a cell phone tower in your backyard that forces cell phone corporations to disguise their Frankensteins in the hopes that you won’t notice or care enough to cause a fuss?
Surrounded by remains
One of the methods of infiltration is mimicry. Better to be seen as the same than to be seen otherwise. It is better to fit in than to stand out. Everything about Voit’s subject refers back to this premise, and yet, nothing about Voit’s subjects succeeds in cloaking itself. It is true, some towers actually look like trees, some surprisingly so. However, all stand out as mutated anomalies. None of the trees truly “fit in.” Every one is a Disney-fied replica of its neighbor.
So close…
Others, however, barely made the effort to get along quietly. So out of place are some of these freaks, I wonder why the phone companies even made the effort to dress them up in the first place. Could it be creative necessity, an irresistible urge to see “what if?” Or do these trees mask a repressed guilt on the part of the corporations that put them there: “We know these towers are blights on our natural environment. Couldn’t you just ignore them, and us, for a while?”
What’s interesting is that the photographs themselves are anything but blights. They are truly picturesque, as tautological as that may sound. They are beautiful and serene. They evoke all that is lazy and placid in a manufactured Sunday afternoon. To look down the wall at a row of Voit’s images is to be enticed by perfection in the form of manipulation. Everything is intentional, even Big Sky is set up to be just right.
Made to look like its neighbors?
And yet, isn’t that the joke of it all? In every photograph the subject is presented front and center. There is no avoiding the thing. Still, however, these “new trees” as Voit has dubbed them, go somewhat unnoticed. By photographing these “trees” in their “native” environment Voit has captured not only the serenity of the climate, but also the invisibility of the monstrous subject itself.
So then, is the joke on us? Have the corporations succeeded when it is so obvious they have failed? What happens when a subject so in your face, can remain so well disguised?
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When I pass those trees, I wonder… if there were just towers would I notice them? I’m kind of used to towers, we see them all the time, even in remote areas. But these funny tower trees, in general, stand out to me more because they’re so strange. Then again, give it a generation and I wonder….
Have you actually seen some of these in real life? I don’t think I ever have?
I can’t help but think that these things came about as a way of softening the effect of some corporation being like, “Sorry dude. I know this is your property, but what if we made it look like a tree?” And then that someone was like, “Well… how much like a tree?” And then the corporation guy is like, “That depends. How tall are you?”