John Divola incorporated 1970s performance art into his photographs, straddling the line between witness and participant. When he came across a vacant home on Zuma Beach in Malibu, he was drawn to the crumbling structure’s ocean-view windows. Over repeated visits he began to appreciate the subtle changes wrought by others—empty beer cans or remnants of an indoor campfire—altering the site himself by spray-painting various surfaces. He switched from black-and-white to color film to photograph the interplay of his mark making in the abandoned space with the changing ocean backdrop. For Divola, his intervention and documentation are integrally linked: “My acts, my painting, my photographing, my considering, are part of, not separate from, this process of evolution and change.”
