THERE

Just over two minutes long, THERE enfolds key components of Peter Downsbrough’s multiform practice: the visual vocabulary, formal strategies, and enduring themes found in his books, sculptures, architectural interventions (room pieces and wall pieces), photographs, postcards, and many of his other videos. The work also emblematizes the fluidity of Downsbrough’s process, which is evident not only in the ease with which the basic elements of his art—straight lines and uniformly lettered words—migrate from one medium to another in endless recombination, but also in the frequent incorporation of completed works, such as drawings and photographs, into subsequent projects, like books or videos.

THERE begins in silence with a black screen. Two seconds in, the whooshing sound of traffic is heard, and a Word String, four one-syllable words (THERE, SET, THE, AS)—small, white, Helvetica, all in caps and in various orientations, including mirror image and vertical—pop up near the top, bottom, and sides of the frame, respectively. There is little time to reflect on what if anything the words mean in relation to one another or in what order they are meant to be read, for they disappear as suddenly and unexpectedly as they appeared, one by one, as if by the flip of a switch, and the sound cuts off abruptly. By this point (the twelve-second mark), the video has revealed itself as suspenseful—a sort of thriller—and viewers have snapped to attention.

What follows is the first of two films-within-the-film, shot in color at two busy traffic intersections in Brussels. These moving-image scenes, silent and running 12 and 14 seconds, respectively, were captured with a stationary camera and bear formal hallmarks of Downsbrough’s still photographs—most notably, the latter’s vertically divided frames. The color videos bracket a briskly-paced, achronological sequence of twenty-three black-and-white still images selected from photographs Downsbrough took of transportation corridors (mostly streets, but also riversides, a canal, a train station, an airport, and a small, empty parking lot) in cities. Four of the first six frames in the sequence, including two black screens, each carry a word that, in order of presentation, contributes to the phrase PLACE AS TIME AND. (These same words, minus AND, are reversed in the video’s final still.) The appearance of AND on a black screen is accompanied by the cheerful beep of a horn heard over the sound of traffic, as if joyfully heralding the forthcoming flow of images. Ten frames further on, another black screen among the stills bears the words AND (top center), UNTIL (right center), and THEN (mirror image, bottom center). Read as a phrase, the words provide a temporal bridge between the preceding and following images, which are shown in silence until a final burst of traffic noise breaks through toward the end.

Watching the full sequence of black-and-white stills approximates the experience of paging quickly through a book of Downbrough’s photographs, which also include occasional overlays of ambiguous words like the verbs in THERE that also function as nouns (place, set, time) and prepositions with dual meanings (as, signifying both while and like).** All the images, including those in the work’s color-film sections, are divided by at least one vertical element—typically, a piece of municipal furniture or infrastructure such as a lamppost, parking meter, traffic median, etc.—more or less centered in the camera’s view. This formal device, a Downsbrough trademark, tends to blur distinctions between abstraction and representation and between two- and three-dimensional space, as brilliantly attested in THERE, which offers moments of astonishment in this regard.

The work’s time-based nature facilitates such moments. In a short series of split-screen shots, for example, the moving-image half, a Brussels street scene from the 2010s vacates the frame together with a pedestrian who walks out of it, ceding its place to a full-frame black-and-white still of a1970s New York street. Thus begins the sequence of twenty-three black-and-white stills, which, unified in their urban focus and formal consistency, document slices of the modern world on the move through time. The locations shown in the photographs and the dates they were taken are fairly easy to guess from the automobiles, architecture, and clothing on view. The details are richly informative.

It’s worth restating here that every film is a series of still images that the viewer’s perceptions connect. This is as true for THERE, with each of its black-and-white still images remaining on screen for between one and three seconds, as it is for standard films with an average speed of twenty-four frames per second. The difference lies in the effort required for the brain to make those connections. Downsbrough doesn’t make the viewer’s work easy, but he keeps it interesting, for THERE seems to be above all else a record of the artist’s movement through and attention to the world, and to his positions in time and place. The film closes as it opens, with the title centered on a white screen. Over fifty years ago, Downsbrough famously diagrammed the word there as a way of highlighting the here contained within it. Thus, by a sleight of semantics, he made plain the interconnectedness of, say, this place and that one, creating a sign rich in cultural and geopolitical inferences.* Of course, here and there function not only as adverbs indicating location but also as exclamatory interjections. It’s possible, then, that the title’s final appearance can be read as a kind of sign-off, something along the lines of, “There, make of this what you will,” a provocative challenge that runs tacitly through Downsbrough’s entire oeuvre.

*The diagram was printed in Downsbrough’s first published book, Notes on Location, written in 1969, and is included in autobiography, his last, published in 2025. **For the record, THERE contains nine different words, five of which occur at least twice. AS and THERE each occur three times.

written by Sarah McFadden