BRUCE CHARLESWORTH
EDDIE GLOVE
EDDIE GLOVE is the first of three markedly different photo-novellas and is the most reliant on photographs to create a narrative. This fifty-image work took four years to complete, starting in 1976 when the artist was 26. It was first shown in 1980 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Castelli Graphics in New York. In 1981, it was featured in the New Museum exhibition Persona.
Eddie Glove evokes a noir film of the 1940s in its single-source lighting and mood, but no detective or clear-cut crime is involved – just a man who falls into traps wherever he goes. The structure resembles a film in its serialized progression, and most of the individual images could serve as the most heightened moment in a scene from a film.
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Eddie Glove was preceded by two black-and-white student films, The Audition and Jimmy Paradise, which set the stage for this surrogate movie and further formal and conceptual approaches to narrative in various media. Charlesworth has also cited the picaresque aspect of 100 Boots by Eleanor Antin as a significant influence on the genesis of this early work.