Dan Graham, Homes

for America (detail),

1966-1967 (cat. no. 61)

142 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 iar > =e
sOren
Web
tele

;yi
2

te —<

y
ji ‘

ltrs
Yi
ce
coat
, ae
a
—_

av :-
Art Center College Library
1700 Lida St.
Pasadena, CA 91103

TWILL
S|
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Art Center College of Design

Library
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, Calif. 91103
Douglas Fogle

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW:

ARTISTS USING PHOTOGRAPHY
1960-1982

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Published on the occasion The Last Picture Show: Artists Library of Congress First Edition
of the exhibition The Last Using Photography, 1960-1982 Cataloging-in-Publication Data © 2003 Walker Art Center
Picture Show: Artists Using is made possible by generous All rights reserved under
Photography, 1960-1982, support from Karen and Ken Fogle, Douglas, 1964— pan-American copyright con-
curated by Douglas Fogle Heithoff, La Coleccion Jumex, The last picture show : artists ventions. No part of this book
for the Walker Art Center. Carol and Judson Bemis Jr., using photography, 1960-1982 / may be reproduced or utilized
and Harry M. Drake. Douglas Fogle.— Ist ed. in any form or by any means—
Walker Art Center p. cm. electronic or mechanical,
Minneapolis, Minnesota The exhibition catalogue is Catalogue of an exhibition including photocopying,
October 11, 2003- made possible in part by a grant held at the Walker Art Center recording, or by any informa-
January 4, 2004 from the Andrew W. Mellon Minneapolis, Minn., Oct. 2003— tion storage-and-retrieval
UCLA Hammer Museum Foundation in support of Jan. 2004; UCLA Hammer system—without permission
Los Angeles, California Walker Art Center publications. Museum Los Angeles, Calif., in writing from the Walker
February 8—May 11, 2004 Feb.—May, 2004. Art Center. Inquiries should
Museo de Arte Contemporanea Major support for Walker Art ISBN 0-935640-76-2 be addressed to: Publications
de Vigo (MARCO) Center programs is provided (alk. paper) Manager, Walker Art Center,
Vigo, Spain by the Minnesota State Arts 1. Photography, Artistic— 725 Vineland Place,
May 28-—September 19, 2004 Board through an appropria- History—20th century— Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403.
Fotomuseum Winterthur tion by the Minnesota State Exhibitions. 2. Art and
Winterthur, Switzerland Legislature, The Wallace photography—History—20th Available through
November 27, 2004— Foundation, the Doris Duke century—Exhibitions. D.A.P/Distributed Art
February 20, 2005 Charitable Foundation through I. Walker Art Center. II. Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue
Miami Art Central the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz UCLA Hammer Museum New York, NY 10013
Miami, Florida and Dance and the Doris Duke of Art and Cultural Center.
March—June, 2005 Performing Arts Endowment Ill. Title. Every reasonable attempt
Fund, The Bush Foundation, TR645.M542W354 2003 has been made to identify
Target Stores, Marshall Field’s, 770—dc22 owners of copyright. Errors
and Mervyn’s with support or omissions will be corrected
from the Target Foundation, 2003017642 in subsequent editions.
The McKnight Foundation,
General Mills Foundation, Designers
Coldwell Banker Burnet, Andrew Blauvelt and
the Institute of Museum and Chad Kloepfer
Library Services, the National Editor
Endowment for the Arts, Karen Jacobson
American Express Publications Manager
Philanthropic Program, The Lisa Middag
Regis Foundation, The Cargill Curatorial Assistant
Foundation, 3M, U.S. Bank, Alisa Eimen
and the members of the Walker
Art Center. Printed and bound in
the United Kingdom by
Butler & Tanner Ltd.
Contents

Art Center College of Design

Library
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, Calif. 91103

006 Foreword 097 Photographs of Motion 184 Notebook Excerpts, 1969 248 The Velvet Well
Kathy Halbreich Dan Graham Vito Acconci Richard Prince

007 Acknowledgments 099 The Weight of Time 185 The Austerlitz Effect: 249 Without Walls
James Lingwood Architecture, Time, Molly Nesbit
009 The Last Picture Show Photoconceptualism
Douglas Fogle 105 Art through the Pamela M. Lee 259 Glossolalia
Camera’s Eye Sarah Charlesworth and
020 Artists and Photographs Robert Smithson 195 My Files of Movie Stills Barbara Kruger
Lawrence Alloway John Baldessari
107 Misunderstandings 262 The Latest Picture
022 “Tm Not Really (A Theory of 196 Disposable Matter: Kate Bush
a Photographer” Photography) Photoconceptual
A. D. Coleman Mel Bochner Magazine Work of 267 Charles Ray
the 1960s 272 Martha Rosler
024 The Anti-Photographers 113 The Adventures of the Melanie Marino 274 Allen Ruppersberg
Nancy Foote Picture Form in the 278 Edward Ruscha
History of Photography 204 The Photographic 284 Cindy Sherman
032 “Marks of Indifference”: Jean-Francois Chevrier Activity of 290 Laurie Simmons
Aspects of Photography Postmodernism 294 Robert Smithson
in, or as, Conceptual Art 129 Hans-Peter Feldmann Douglas Crimp 298 Ger Van Elk
Jeff Wall 131 Peter Fischli and 301 Jeff Wall
David Weiss 208 Gordon Matta-Clark 302 Andy Warhol
045 Vito Acconci 136 Gilbert & George 211 Ana Mendieta 310 Robert Watts
047 Bas Jan Ader 138 Dan Graham PAVE Mario Merz 312 William Wegman
050 Giovanni Anselmo 143 Hans Haacke 214 Nasreen Mohamedi 317 James Welling
052 Eleanor Antin 146 Douglas Huebler 218 Bruce Nauman 321 Hannah Wilke
054 John Baldessari 148 Yves Klein 226 Hélio Oiticica and
058 Bernd and Hilla Becher 149 Imi Knoebel Neville d’Almeida 322 Exhibition Checklist
061 Joseph Beuys 153 Silvia Kolbowski 228 Dennis Oppenheim 330 Index
064 Mel Bochner 155 Jeff Koons 230 Giulio Paolini 333 Lenders to the Exhibition
067 Christian Boltanski 156 Barbara Kruger 232 Giuseppe Penone 334 Reproduction Credits
070 Marcel Broodthaers 158 David Lamelas 234 Adrian Piper
072 Victor Burgin 160 Louise Lawler 238 Sigmar Polke
074 Sarah Charlesworth 163 Sherrie Levine 240 Richard Prince
078 Bruce Conner 168 Sol Le Witt
080 Jan Dibbets 174 Richard Long OAA Statement
082 Valie Export Sherrie Levine
iT) Cancellation
086 Alternative Pictures: Geoffrey Batchen 245 Incorrect
Conceptual Art and the Barbara Kruger
Artistic Emancipation of 183 Notes on My
Photography in Europe Photographs, 1969-1970 246 The 8-Track Photograph
Stefan Gronert Vito Acconci Richard Prince
Foreword of the built environment, anonymous images, and the impact
of advertising and mass media.

The Last Picture Show follows in the wake of a number of recent

We are exposed daily to literally thousands of pictures. While exhibitions at the Walker Art Center that delved into the concep-
increasing numbers of these images are digital, crafted out of tual uses of photography, including Photography in Contemporary
zeros and ones before being sent electronically across the Internet German Art: 1960 to the Present (1992), Bruce Nauman (1993),
with a few clicks of the mouse, their lineage can be traced to the In the Spirit of Fluxus (1993), The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch
time-based and chemical magic of the photographic process, (1996), Peter Fischli and David Weiss: In a Restless World (1996),
invented in the early part of the nineteenth century. The relation- 2000 B.C. The Bruce Conner Story, Part IT (1999), and Zero to
ship of artists to this supple technology has been a fruitful one, Infinity: Arte Povera, 1962-1972 (2001). The Walker has also hosted
predating the moment in 1850 when Paul Delaroche first glimpsed solo photo-based exhibitions by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems
a daguerreotype and was said to have hyperbolically noted, (1994), Dawoud Bey (1995), Lorna Simpson (1999), and Catherine
“From today, painting is dead.” The intimate connection between Opie (2002). In many ways, The Last Picture Show can be seen as
the artist and the camera is even more evident today, as earlier providing a genealogical backdrop for an entire generation of
distinctions between the practices of painting and photography young artists who took up photography in the 1990s. A number of
blur. As more and more artists have incorporated photographic these then-emerging artists were presented in a 1997 exhibition at
images and processes into their practices, the ways in which we the Walker Art Center entitled Stills: Emerging Photography in the
look at, understand, and value the medium and its history have 1990s, curated by Douglas Fogle, who organized this exhibition
clearly changed as well. as well. Douglas’ curatorial talents and interests are wide-ranging;
his commitment to examining the critical and social context sur-
The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1952 rounding art makes for an unusually rich and perceptive frame of
seeks to tell one part of this evolving story as it brings together reference. Similarly, his devotion to both artists and young scholars
the works of fifty-seven artists, each of whom has exploited the creates a safe environment for them to express themselves freely
conceptual and formal properties of the medium with great and to take the risks necessary to be genuinely inventive. He has
self-awareness. In doing so, these artists defied the traditional organized this exhibition and catalogue with a thoroughness and
hierarchy that valued painting and sculpture above other media, intelligence that are hallmarks of important new scholarship. I also
introduced the performative as well as the vernacular into their appreciate Douglas’ constant concern for what serves this institu-
imagery, and advanced the chimerical qualities of the medium tion best. This exhibition, which gives concrete form to one focus
rather than its alleged capacity to capture objective truth. While of our collection as well as to our global mission, is but one exam-
the tradition of modernist fine art photography found a home ple of the public rewards of such devotion.
within established networks of galleries and museums, another
kind of photographic practice was emerging among artists who Indeed, the Walker Art Center’s own history is closely linked
identified themselves primarily as sculptors or painters. In the to that of the artists who sought to develop photography in more
early 1960s artists working within the context of contemporane- conceptual directions. In the last decade the Walker has acquired
ous artistic trends such as Conceptual Art, Process Art, and Arte works for its permanent collection by a number of these artists,
Povera began to use the medium in a rigorously experimental including Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Andreas Gursky, Sherrie
manner, eschewing the technical mastery of the fine art print. Levine, Adrian Piper, Sigmar Polke, Cindy Sherman, Thomas
They instead favored a more radically utilitarian stance that put Struth, Jeff Wall, and Andy Warhol. Happily, many of these works
photography in the service of the world of ideas rather than that are on view in this exhibition.
of images or their physical realization. As Sol Le Witt wrote in
1969 in “Sentences on Conceptual Art”: “Conceptual artists are Like any project of this magnitude and complexity, The Last
mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic Picture Show would not be possible without the very generous
cannot reach. ... When words such as painting and sculpture are contributions of those who share the Walker Art Center’s
used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent commitment to investigating the work of artists who help us make
acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist sense of the world around us. The Walker Art Center is deeply
who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limita- grateful for the financial support of Karen and Ken Heithoff;
tions... . Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the La Coleccién Jumex, Mexico City; Carol and Judson Bemis Jr.;
artist may use any form, from an expression of words, (written and Harry M. Drake.
or spoken) to physical reality, equally.”
Finally, we all are grateful for the cooperation of the artists in this
Spanning a twenty-year period, this exhibition explores for the exhibition, for the courage with which they approached their own
first time the development of conceptual trends in postwar photo- efforts, and for their support of our endeavors.
graphic practice from their first glimmerings in the 1960s in
the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Edward Ruscha, Bruce Kathy Halbreich
Nauman, and others to their culmination in the late 1970s and Director
early 1980s in the photo-based work of artists such as Sherrie
Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Each of these artists
has used the camera to frame critical investigations of issues sur-
rounding self-portraiture, the body, landscape, the architecture

6 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Acknowledgments Catherine Belloy, Marian Goodman, and Andrew Richards
at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Rosalie Benitez,
Ivy Crewdson, Barbara Gladstone, and Kelly Kyst at Barbara
Gladstone Gallery, New York; Jay Gorney and Sheri L.
I would like to extend my deep appreciation to all those who have Pasquarella at Gorney, Bravin + Lee, New York; Cornelia Grassi
helped in the conception and realization of this exhibition and and Holly Walsh at Greengrassi, London; Kim Bush and Nancy
publication. First and foremost, I want to thank the artists repre- Spector at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York;
sented in this exhibition, who have taken the medium of photog- Rhona Hoffman at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Beatrice
raphy into new and extraordinary realms of experimentation Merz and Elisabetta Salzotti at Hopefulmonster, Turin; Darcy
and imagination. Huebler and Luciano Perna; Geeta Kapur; Thomas Kellein;
Robert Gurbo at the Estate of André Kertész; Carmen Knoebel:
I am also deeply grateful to the authors represented in this publi- Sabine Knust at Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich; Frank and Patti
cation. Their contributions to this volume—whether newly com- Kolodny; Dr. Dieter Schwarz at Kunstmuseum Winterthur;
missioned or reprinted—constitute an equally important part of Michel Blanscubé, Eugenio Lopez, and Patricia Martin at La
this project, as their creative questioning has brought to the fore Coleccién Jumex; Wendy Brandow and Margo Leavin at Margo
the complexities of the various parallel histories of photography. Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; James Lingwood at Artangel,
London; Victoria Cuthbert and Sonny Fitzsimonds at Matthew
The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982 Marks Gallery, New York; Allison Card, Travis W. Choat, and
would not have been possible without the generosity and commit- Tom Heman at Metro Pictures, New York; Lisa Mark at the
ment of the many lenders to this exhibition who agreed to share Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Amy Plumb at
important works from their collections. Their names may be found Dennis Oppenheim Studio; Kim Jones at Pace/MacGill Gallery,
on page 333. We are deeply grateful for their willingness to make New York; Elia Pijollet; Beth Taylor at Rachofsky House, Dallas;
such remarkable work available to a larger viewing public. Julie Chiofolo, Lisa Overduin, and Shaun Caley Regen at Regen
Projects, Los Angeles; Wendy Chang, Liz Harris, Sachiyo
After its showing at the Walker, The Last Picture Show will Yoshimoto, and Patrick Painter at Patrick Painter Editions; Scott
travel to the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. I would Rothkopf; Mary Dean at Ruscha Studio, Los Angeles; Antonio
like to thank our colleagues at this venue, Director Ann Philbin Tucci Russo at Galleria Tucci Russo, Torre Pellice, Italy; Alan
and Chief Curator Russell Ferguson, whose commitment has Schwartzman; Shirana Shahbazi; Susanna Singer; Leslie Fritz
ensured a broader audience for this project. and Per Skarstedt at Skarstedt Fine Art, New York; Wendy
Hurlock and Richard Sorensen at the Smithsonian Institution,
Among the many individuals and organizations that helped to Washington, D.C.; Laura Bloom, Antonio Homem, Xan Price,
facilitate this project, special thanks go to Mike Bellon at Acconci and Jason Ysenberg at Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Pierpaolo
Studio, New York; Janelle Patrick at Brooke Alexander Editions; Falone, Michael Short, and Gian Enzo Sperone at Sperone
Michelle Andrews; Tim Hardacre and Ben Portis at the Art Westwater, New York and Turin; Kurt Brondo, Lisa Spellman,
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Emma Robertson at The Approach, and Mari Spirito at 303 Gallery, New York; Deepak Talwar at
London; Gabriel Catone at Art Advisory Services, New York; Talwar Gallery, New York; Helaina Blume at the Tang Teaching
Charles Guarino and Nicole Rudick at Artforum, New York; Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs,
Angelo Baldassarre; Brienne Arrington, Jen Liu, and Kim New York; Elizabeth Thomas; Leslie Tonkonow at Leslie
Schoenstadt at John Baldessari Studio, Los Angeles; Amada Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York; Ticiana Corteletti
Cruz at Bard Center for Curatorial Studies; Evelyn Bertram- and Marcia Fortes at Galerie Fortes Villaca, Sao Paulo; Greg
Neunzig; Tim Blum and Jeff Poe at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles; Burchard at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Sara Seagull
Marilena Bonomo at Galeria Bonomo, Bari, Italy; Ron Warren at Robert Watts Studio Archive, New York; Jason Duval and
at Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Jeanne Bickley at The Brant Kelly Sturhahn at Michael Werner, New York; Iain Boyd Whyte;
Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut; Julianna Hanner and Ellen Mahoney at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco; Tanja
Joanne Heyler at the Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Elstgeest at Witte de With, Rotterdam; Angela Choon, Matt
Christine Burgin and Catherine Ecclestone at Christine Burgin Siegle, and David Zwirner at David Zwirner Gallery, New York.
Gallery, New York; Chana Budgazad at Casey Kaplan, New York;
Aimee Chang; James Cohan, Elyse Goldberg, and Hannah Among the many people with whom I shared productive discus-
Israel at James Cohan Gallery, New York; Pippa Cohen; Steve sions about this material over the past two years, I am particularly
Henry and Maki Nanamori at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; indebted to Francesco Bonami, Manilow Senior Curator at the
Tommaso Corvi-Mora at Corvi-Mora, London; Adrienne Parks Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, for his early encourage-
and Laura Raicovich at Dia Art Foundation, New York; James ment of this project and his important intellectual insights, and to
Elliott and Laura Ricketts at Anthony d’Offay Ltd.; Michel Geoffrey Batchen, professor of art history at the Graduate Center
Durand-Dessert; Thomas Erben and Louky Keijsers at Thomas of the City University of New York, for the ongoing critical dia-
Erben Gallery, New York; Filippo Fossati at Esso Gallery, New logue about the history of photography that we have been
York; Sarah H. Paulson at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; having for more than fifteen years.
Ulla Wiegand at Konrad Fischer Galerie, Munich; Robert
McKeever and Hanako Williams at Gagosian Gallery, New York At the Walker Art Center I would like to thank Director Kathy
and Los Angeles; Tal Trost at Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich; Halbreich for creating an institutional environment that both
Michael Hughes at Galerie Lelong, New York; Sarah Gavlak; values the experimental and gives a new meaning to the notion
of a team; Chief Curator Richard Flood, whose door has been
open to me since the day I arrived in Minneapolis and whose
ideas and critical eye have played a crucial role in shaping this
project; Curator Philippe Vergne for his critical support, for
his gift of a title, and for providing a necessary (and oftentimes
hilarious) sounding board; Curator Joan Rothfuss for her timely
advice; Summer Curatorial Intern Natilee Harren for giving up
her summer; and Curatorial Intern Alisa Eimen, whose incredible
dedication, intellectual curiosity, and attention to detail inform
every aspect of this exhibition and publication.

In the Visual Arts Department, I would like to acknowledge

Administrative Assistants Lynn Dierks and Kate Dowling, who
deftly handled the many administrative details of the exhibition,
publication, and exhibition tour. In the Registration Department,
Registrar Gwen Bitz expertly oversaw the care and safe handling
of more than two hundred objects and heroically organized an
extremely complicated shipping schedule. For their extraordinary
installation of the works, I am indebted to Cameron Zebrun and
his entire Program Services staff, especially Phil Docken. Their
dedication to artists makes this a truly special place to work.
In the Development Department, I would like to thank Director
Christopher Stevens and his colleagues Kathryn Ross and Aaron
Mack for their unflagging efforts in making this exhibition finan-
cially possible. Thanks also go the Walker’s fiscal caretakers,
Administrative Director Ann Bitter and Finance Director Mary
Polta. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to
Director of Education Sarah Schultz and her talented public
programs staff, including Meredith Walters and Sarah Peters,
who organized the exhibition-related educational programs.

I am extremely grateful to the staff of the Walker’s Design

Department, including Design Director Andrew Blauvelt and
Senior Designer Chad Kloepfer, who were responsible for the
beautiful design of this publication. Independent editor Karen
Jacobson thoughtfully and painstakingly shaped the many texts
in this volume, while Publications Manager Lisa Middag deftly
shepherded the production of this book from its inception
to its delivery. Additional invaluable support was provided by
Photographer Cameron Wittig, who shot many of the works
reproduced in this publication, and Librarian Rosemary Furtak.

Douglas Fogle

8 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Douglas Fogle play an important role in the creation of Klein’s “leap” might be seen in contrast
the mythic aspects of Klein’s career and to another well-known photographic leap,
would be a crucial intellectual reference for captured by the lens of Henri Cartier-
The Last Picture Show the Viennese Actionists in the late 1960s Bresson in 1932. In his now-classic image
and other performance-based artists of the of a man jumping across a puddle behind
Douglas Fogle is associate curator of visual 1970s. Of course, what was not visible in the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, Cartier-
arts at the Walker Art Center and organizer of this photograph were the dozen or so stu- Bresson provided us with a clear example
the exhibition The Last Picture Show: Artists dents from the nearby judo academy who of what he called photography’s “decisive
Using Photography, 1960-1982. During his held an outstretched tarpaulin to break moment.” As he explained:
tenure at the Walker he has initiated a number the artist’s fall. Removing these individuals
of other exhibitions, including Stills: Emerging from the image through the technique of To me, photography is the simultaneous recog-
Photography in the 1990s (1997), Painting at photomontage, Klein and his colleagues nition, in a fraction of a second, of the signifi-
the Edge of the World (2001), Catherine Opie: employed the evidentiary power of photog- cance of an event as well as of a precise
Skyways and Icehouses (2002), and Julie raphy to abet a hoax. At the same time, organization of forms which give that event its
Mehretu: Drawing into Painting (2003). however, they launched a powerful iconic proper expression. I believe that, through the
marker into the network of artistic images act of living, the discovery of oneself is made
circulating at the time. The impact of this concurrently with the discovery of the world
particular image rested in its photographic around us which can mold us, but which can
There is something abominable about cameras, nature and the way in which it played with also be affected by us. A balance must be estab-
because they possess the power to invent the assumed verisimilitude of the medium. lished between these two worlds—the one
many worlds. As an artist who has been lost inside us and the one outside us. As the result
in this wilderness of mechanical reproduction If the status of this object was questionable, of a constant reciprocal process, both these
for many years, I do not know which world however, it was only partly due to the fact worlds come to form a single one. And it is this
to start with. I have seen fellow artists driven that the image was doctored in the service world that we must communicate. !
to the point of frenzy by photography. of producing a dramatic effect. Its problem-
atic character grew out of its ambiguous Cartier-Bresson’s statement appeared in
Robert Smithson, “Art through the status as an object of art or, more precisely, the 1952 edition of his large-format publi-
Camera’s Eye” as a piece of photographic art. What exactly cation The Decisive Moment, which col-
was this photographic entity? A documen- lected his best-known pictures.
In 1960 Yves Klein stood on the edge of a tation of a performance? A work of art in
precipice. More specifically, he stood on its own right? How could this object possi- In many ways, the concept of the “decisive
the roof ledge of a building in the suburbs bly be read within the context of the history moment” would come to stand in for a wide
of Paris waiting to perform a miraculous of art and, more to the point, the history array of photographic practices that were
feat. On the street below were the photog- of art photography as it existed in 1960?
raphers Harry Shunk and John Kender, Henri Cartier-Bresson; Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare,
who had been employed by Klein to docu- Paris, 1932; gelatin silver print; 22'Yi6 x 15% in.
(57.6 x 39.1 cm); The Minneapolis Institute of Arts,
ment this event. Shunk and his friend Leap into the Void (1960): A conceptual event The Alfred and Ingrid Lenz Harrison Fund
Kender collaborated with Klein in order principally embodied in a photograph by Harry Shunk
of Yves Klein leaping from a roof ledge in the Paris
to create what might arguably and para- suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses
doxically be considered to be one of the
painter’s most important works. With the
photograph Leap into the Void (1960), they

rule
produced a fictionalized photographic doc- 0
o eeanes.

ument that showed Klein making a super-

human leap onto the street below. Ina "

starkly existential act that spoke at once to

the mystical powers of the artist as well as
to his hyperbolic attitude toward his own
artistic production, this “painter of space,”
who was best known for his blue mono-
chromes and for using the body as a paint-
brush, was able to construct a dramatic
visual metaphor for his work. The end
product of this “documentary” photo shoot
was Klein’s self-published newspaper edi-
tion Dimanche, which illustrated the artist’s
writings on his Theater of the Void with this
now-legendary photograph. Disseminated
in Parisian newsstands next to copies of the
real Dimanche, this image would come to
championed by those who took a modernist in 1967 as the “dematerialization of the conquer this “wilderness” that are the sub-
view of the medium’s aesthetic autonomy, object of art,” an approach they saw as cru- ject of The Last Picture Show: Artists Using
including John Szarkowski, curator of pho- cial to a wide range of emerging art prac- Photography, 1960-1982.
tography at the Museum of Modern Art in tices in the 1960s that rejected traditional
New York. In fact, Cartier-Bresson’s photo- forms of painting and sculpture in favor Focusing on a roughly twenty-year period,
graphs would be prominently featured in of an “ultraconceptual art that emphasizes The Last Picture Show brings together pho-
Szarkowski’s exhibition The Photographer's the thinking process almost exclusively.” tographic works by fifty-seven artists who
Eye, held at MoMA in 1964, which posed Encompassing a range of practices—from had little interest in finding photography’s
the possibility of writing a “history of the elevation of the idea to the status of true essence as an art or in capturing deci-
the medium in terms of photographers’ the object to performance-based work sive moments. The artists represented
progressive awareness of characteristics that addressed the phenomenology of the in the exhibition looked at photography
and problems inherent in the medium”? body—these alternative strategies would instrumentally, as a means to an end, taking
by juxtaposing works by well-known artist- help to create what Rosalind Krauss called up the camera as a tool as they pursued a
photographers with so-called functional an “expanded field” in which the camera wide range of experimental agendas, be
works by anonymous photographers culled became another tool among many available they sculptural, performative, or even
from archives around the world. This vision for the execution of a project.* Klein’s painterly. The scope of the photographic
was, however, predicated on constructing photographic leap embodied just such an practices and the subjects that they explore
a history of photography that established approach. Neither simply performance is diverse, moving from revisionist investi-
both its consciously artistic and naive mani- nor document and far from an aesthetic gations of the legacy of the traditional
festations as aspects of an autonomous embodiment of modernist photography’s artistic genre of the landscape to visual
and coherent art form. hermetic concern with its own limits and explorations of nonsequiturs and the
conditions of possibility, this work dis- absurd to equally challenging explorations
Here we are confronted by two very differ- rupted the standard circuits of the recep- of ethnic and gender identity through the
ent leaps, resulting in two extremely diver- tion of both photography as art and the use of the masquerade in self-portraiture.
gent photographic worlds with equally traditional object of sculpture by surrepti- Whether or not these artists saw themselves
disparate histories. On the one hand, we tiously inserting itself into the flow of con- primarily as photographers (some did, and
have the aesthetic mediation of the split sumer print culture. many did not), their wide-ranging practices
between subject and object in an elabora- are linked by what at times might seem like
tion of the artist’s channeling of photogra- It is in this questionable photographic an extraphotographic impulse to launch
phy’s “decisive moment.” On the other, we object—or rather this confluence of photo- themselves into the world—or, more cor-
have a hybrid, collaborative photographic graphic and performative activity—that rectly, into a multiplicity of photographic
“event,” staged by an artist hoping to create we begin to see something of what Robert worlds of their own making.
an altogether different kind of moment, Smithson described, in the quotation that
one that perhaps signaled the emergence serves as an epigraph to this essay, as the But how, precisely, do these photographic
of a very different kind of artistic world that “abominable” power of the camera. In worlds come together to create the “last
was beginning to take form at that time. It the last forty years, we have seen the emer- picture show”? The exhibition’s title, of
is the gap between these two photographic gence of a plethora of photographic course, has been appropriated from the
worlds—the modernist aesthetic transmis- worlds as the use value and the status of 1966 Larry McMurtry novel and its 1971
sion of an authentic immediacy through the this medium has shifted many times over. film adaptation by Peter Bogdanovich,
capturing of a photographic essence and Following Smithson, then, we could point which tells the coming-of-age story of a
the conceptual construction of a staged to a moment in the 1960s when it became group of adolescents in a small Texas town
event that took up photography as a means clear that there was a new kind of “frenzy” that is dying a quiet death. This is a tale of
to an end—that interests us here. It is in the around the medium of photography within lost innocence that is symbolized by the
context of this gap that Klein’s questionable the art world and the culture at large. This closing of the town’s last movie house,
“leap” and Shunk and Kender’s equally was a historical moment that witnessed a which marks a turning point in the lives of
problematic “documentation” of that event global explosion of media and the ability to the protagonists. Perhaps our last picture
in 1960 might be seen as a useful starting disseminate images. The proliferation of show is no different. Historically, we too
point for a discussion of the proliferation of television broadcasting, satellite transmis- might be seen as having suffered our own
the uses of photography outside the then- sions, and the exponential spread of photo- cultural loss of innocence. Was our last
dominant configurations of art photogra- graphic print culture gave a new intensity picture show the moment when we could
phy in a decade that saw the slow erosion to the power of the photographic image and no longer see photographic images as
of the boundaries between artistic media. prompted its expanded use within artistic autonomous aesthetic objects? Following
practices that sought to question the con- this line of thought, was Szarkowski’s 1964
If Cartier-Bresson’s image might be ventional status of the art object. The artists exhibition The Photographer’s Eye—with its
thought of as a traditional photographic in this exhibition, including Smithson him- attempt to encompass the whole of photo-
“picture,” then what exactly was Klein’s? self, were all, as he put it, “insane enough” graphic practice, both vernacular and
It could hardly be seen as a “decisive to imagine that they could “tame this artistic, within the purview of a categorical
moment.” It is, rather, a hybrid object that wilderness created by the camera.” It is imperative of photography as an art form—
might be thought of in terms of what Lucy precisely the multiple photographic worlds the last picture show? Or was our last pic-
Lippard and John Chandler first identified created by artists in their attempts to ture show the progressive loss of our visual

10 DOUGLAS FOGLE
innocence as a result of the explosion and The Last Picture Show is in a sense an involved in Surrealism, Dada, and the other
global dissemination of images in the print attempt to write a provisional account of avant-gardes pointed this medium outside
and electronic media in the 1960s, produc- some of these “adventures” of the (photo- the realm of its own disciplinary boundaries
ing what the Situationist critic Guy Debord graphic) picture form and, in so doing, into a conceptual terra incognita that would
referred to in 1967 as the “society of the construct what Michel Foucault called a not be easily recoupable into a strictly
spectacle,” a process that would be acceler- “history of the present.”5 The artists repre- modernist narrative. One need only point
ated by the proliferation of images being sented in this exhibition challenge us to to Brassai’s photograph /nvoluntary
transmitted from the war in Vietnam? reassess Our commonly held assumptions Sculptures, published in the Surrealist jour-
of what constitutes a picture and help us nal Minotaure in 1933, which documented
The notion of the “last picture” has been acquire a deeper understanding of the Salvador Dali’s “sculptures” found in
endlessly resurrected in art historical cir- extraordinarily diverse and widespread everyday life (twisted bus tickets, strangely
cles for the better part of the last century, uses of photography in the art world today. shaped loafs of bread, and so on) or Man
from Aleksandr Rodchenko’s 1921 com- In light of this, we might take our lead from Ray’s Dust Breeding (1920), a photo-
pletion of three monochromes that he a question posed in a 1981 photograph graphic experiment conducted with Marcel
declared the “last paintings” to Daniel by Louise Lawler and ask ourselves, “Why Duchamp on the latter’s Large Glass
Buren’s “refusal” of painting in the late pictures now?” In some ways this is the (1915-1923), to understand that neither the
1960s. The picture, or the “Western underlying mantra of this exhibition. Of category of photographic Pictorialism nor
Concept of the Picture,” as Jeff Wall course, we might add an important corol- that of straight photography could contain
points out in his 1995 essay reprinted in lary to that question and ask, “What kind the radical aesthetic questioning to which
this volume, is “that tableau, that inde- of pictures?” In the end, these two ques- photography was being put to use.
pendently beautiful depiction and compo- tions are inseparable.
sition that derives from the institutionali- Dust Breeding in particular presents an
zation of perspective and dramatic figura- As even a cursory review of the diversity of interesting precursor of the use of photog-
tion at the origins of modern Western art.” practices reflected in this exhibition would raphy by artists in the 1960s. Duchamp
This conceptualization of the picture was suggest, the history of photography is allowed the lower back panel of the Large
an organizing principle for painting for itself, like any history, necessarily plural. Glass to accumulate a thick layer of dust
hundreds of years but was of course also As Geoffrey Batchen points out in his essay over a period of three months. Man Ray
highly influential as it was adopted by art in this volume, “American art photography then photographed this work, producing an
photography in the late nineteenth and was in fact continually being ruptured from image of an alien landscape that was nei-
early twentieth centuries under the rubric within [and] conceptual practices of various ther a documentation of Duchamp’s “sculp-
of Pictorialism. A number of the contribu- kinds have always been rife within the pho- ture” nor a formalist photographic exercise,
tors included in this volume in some tography community.” The same holds true but rather a hybrid object caught some-
way or other make reference to the trans- for European art photography. Numerous where between the realms of photography
formation of this received definition of the radical photographic practices by artists and sculpture, dramatically embodying
picture through the practices of artists
associated with Conceptual Art and its Man Ray; Dust Breeding, 1920; gelatin silver print; 9’/16 x 12 in. (24 x 30.5 cm); Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
aftermath. Wall, for example, suggests that
a new model of the picture emerged in the
wake of Conceptual Art’s incorporation of
the techniques of photographic reportage
into its artistic strategies. Stefan Gronert,
by contrast, focusing on the history of pho-
tography in Europe, argues that the adop-
tion of photoconceptualist practices by
artists in the 1970s paradoxically resulted
in the reemergence of the picture form in
contemporary photography. Jean-Francois
Chevyrier, in a newly translated essay of
1989, traces the circuitous development of
the picture form as employed by photogra-
phers over a century and a half, writing:
“The picture’s adventures in the history of
photography and of its artistic uses, what-
ever the period, have now led us to the
point where it has again, and more
strongly so than ever, been embraced by
the majority of contemporary photogra-
phers as a necessary, or at least sufficient,
form of (or model for) artistic production
and experience.”

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW 11

Man Ray’s contention that “photography is after Klein’s leap would publish the first of to Man Ray’s conscious lack of a consistent
not art.”© Already in 1920 then, Man Ray’s his photographic books, Tientysix Gasoline style and his use of staged settings in his
work was prompting questions whose con- Stations (1962), a work that would rigor- photographs, Nauman would turn to the
ceptual origins could be traced to the radi- ously eschew the sanctified aesthetic nature camera to create a series of works at the
cal influence of Duchamp’s Readymades of the modernist “decisive moment” in end of 1966 and into 1967 that were as
and their destabilizing effects on the status favor of the industrial, low-fi photographic much performative sculptural acts as they
of the art object.’ aesthetic of magazine and book culture. were photographs.?
Appropriately, Ruscha would comment on
The work of Man Ray and his cohort would his instrumental use of the medium in a Like much of Nauman’s other work of that
be the harbinger of a host of new photo- 1972 New York Times interview with A. D. time in sculpture and film and video, these
graphic possibilities that began to emerge Coleman (reprinted in this volume), sug- works were the products of a series of ex-
in the 1960s. The first of these new photo- gesting that photography was for him periments that investigated the space of
graphic worlds emerged from the shadow “strictly a medium to use or not use, and I the artist’s studio in relation to the concep-
of the appropriation of media images use it only when I have to. I use it to doa tual and phenomenological limits that
in Pop Art and the focus on what Donald job, which is to make a book.” Published in it imposed on sculptural practice. While
Judd termed the “specific objects” of large, affordable editions, his books relied in FlourArrangements (1966) Nauman
Minimalism, as artists turned increasingly not on the modernist fetish of the master mapped the material limits of studio prac-
to the camera in order to investigate photographic print but on their functional- tice and the physical activity of the artist
the realm of conceptual and process-based ity and conceptual strength, suggesting that by continually shaping and reshaping a
forms of practice. In 1976, in an article what was important was not so much the pile of flour on his studio floor and photo-
reprinted in this volume, Nancy Foote artistic qualities of the picture but its con- graphing it over the course of a month
would give a name to this increasingly tent and the context in which it was viewed. (one is reminded here of Man Ray’s Dust
widespread impulse, using the term “anti- Breeding), a work such as Self-Portrait as a
photographers” to describe the work of a Other artists working at the same historical Fountain from Eleven Color Photographs
number of artists (including many repre- moment would bring the camera into their (1966-1967/1970) suggested a more perfor-
sented in this exhibition) who were depend- studios in order to explore the limits of mative bodily investigation. As in all of
ent on a utilitarian attitude toward contemporary sculptural practice. Ironic- the works in this series, Nauman used the-
photography but displayed “little photo- ally, it would be a 1966 visit to a retrospec- atrical lighting and employed a profes-
graphic self-consciousness.” This new atti- tive of the work of Man Ray held at the sional photographer to construct a set of
tude toward photography’s expanded field Los Angeles County Museum of Art that situations that physically and linguistically
would come to be exemplified by artists would prompt Bruce Nauman to begin turned “things inside out to see what they
such as Edward Ruscha, who just two years experimenting with the camera.’ Drawn look like.”!0 The camera would in essence
help Nauman construct a photographic
Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966—1967/70 (under cat. no. 106) strategy that would enable him to turn the
world inside out, whether he was looking
at the plastic properties of his sculptural
materials (including his own body) or the
structure of language itself.

At the same time that Nauman was moving

a radicalized notion of sculpture into the
realm of photography, thereby blurring the
established boundaries of these media,
Giulio Paolini was experimenting in Italy
with photosensitive emulsions on stretched
canvas. As early as 1965 Paolini produced
a series of works that both physically and
intellectually took on the legacy of the tra-
ditional history of painting in terms of both
its physical materiality and its organization
of perspectival space. Rather than simply
being a commentary on this structural his-
tory of painting, the picture plane would, in
Paolini’s work, itself become a photograph.
In works such as Delfo (Delphi, 1965), for
example, he used an alternative photo-
graphic process to transfer to a rectangular
canvas an image of himself hidden behind
the wooden stretcher bars of a painting.
Calling into question both the material

12 DOUGLAS FOGLE
support of painting and the status of the the uniformity of industrial printing proce- Misunderstandings: A Theory of
painter, Delfo puts Walter Benjamin’s dures. Polke was able to transfer his interest Photography (1967-1970), reproduced in
discussion of “the work of art in the age of in the mistake into his photographic prac- this volume. Bochner, who, like Nauman,
mechanical reproduction” into a different tice by playing with the technical “disasters” began experimenting with photography in
light.!! In this case photography calls into of the developing and printing process. In 1966, had originally compiled a list of quo-
question the nearly five-hundred-year 1995 he would elaborate on the liberating tations about photography as part of an
legacy of European easel painting not by effect of photography’s malleability: “A article that he submitted to Artforum in
reproducing and disseminating images of negative is never finished. You can handle 1969 under the title “Dead Ends and
great works and thereby destroying their a negative. You can do what you want. I can Vicious Circles.” When the article was
“aura,” as suggested by Benjamin, but by play with it. Ican make with it. I can mix rejected for publication, Bochner brought
transforming the surface of a canvas itself with it. Ican choose with it.”!2 Later works together a number of these quotations
into a photosensitive emulsion that fore- pushed the boundaries of photographic to form his “theory of photography.” Pre-
grounded the material support of painting. clarity and cleanliness to the edge of visual sented on note cards in a manila envelope,
The veritable “body” of painting was intelligibility by asserting the privileged the nine photographs of handwritten
replaced by the new flesh of photography. position of the unstable and the incorrect. quotes that constitute this work were
Experimenting with the alchemy of the derived from purported sources as wide-
If Paolini would begin to use photography developing process (as well as with his own ranging as Marcel Duchamp, Mao Tse-
in the mid-1960s to call into question the personal alchemy, by developing and print- tung, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
legacy of easel painting, at the same time ing work while under the effects of hallu- The problem was, however, that three of
in Germany the painter Sigmar Polke cinogens), Polke treated photography as a these citations were fabrications by the
would begin what would become a lifelong transformative medium that was almost artist (it is still unclear which ones) slipped
obsession with the camera that would lead mystical in its ability to channel the cosmos. like a virus into the discussion of the truth
to photographic experiments with sculp- function of photographic representation.
tural forms and the alchemy of the develop- By the end of the 1960s it was becoming Was one of these false “misunderstandings”
ing and printing processes. In fact, Polke clear that these numerous experimental the assertion that “photography cannot
would turn to photography almost exclu- and conceptual uses of photography were record abstract ideas,” which Bochner cred-
sively as a medium of choice for a good part gaining both momentum and credence ited to the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Or
of the 1970s. One of his earliest endeavors within the international art world. A critical perhaps the statement, attributed to Marcel
with the camera resulted in a hilarious historical marker of the proliferation of
self-portrait photograph cum sculptural photographic practices among artists can be Giulio Paolini; De/fo (Delphi), 1965; photographic
object that goes by the title Polkes Peitsche found in an exhibition and editioned mul- screenprint on canvas; 70’ x 35'%e in.
(180 x 91 cm); collection Rosangela Cochran,
(Polke’s whip, 1968). Composed of five tiple entitled Artists and Photographs, Antigua, Guatemala
small photographic images of the artist con- organized by Multiples Gallery in New
torting his face, attached with string to a York in 1970. This boxed publication
wooden whip handle, this self-flagellating included work by nineteen artists, among
photographic object replaces the self-abuse them Mel Bochner, Jan Dibbets, Dan
of medieval penitents with satirical, self- Graham, Douglas Huebler, Sol LeWitt,
deprecating commentary on the role of the Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Dennis
artist. In Bamboostange liebt Zollstockstern Oppenheim, Edward Ruscha, Robert
(Bamboo pole loves folding ruler star, Smithson, and Andy Warhol. As Lawrence
1968-1969), Polke presents the viewer with Alloway suggested in his introductory essay
a series of sixteen black-and-white prints for this project (reprinted in this volume),
depicting a set of inexplicable and unex- while photography had been in the hands
pected scenarios constructed from everyday of artists since the nineteenth century, the
household objects that seem to invoke the exhibition and publication were trying to
strange, illogically elaborate contraptions clarify “with a new intensity the uses of pho-
of Rube Goldberg. The playfulness, humor, tography,” which were becoming more and
and experimental freedom demonstrated more diverse and ubiquitous at that time.
by works such as these would become a cru-
cial reference point for artists such as Peter While Alloway would struggle to deal with
Fischli and David Weiss later in the 1970s. the implications of the opposition that he
was describing between an instrumental
From the very beginning Polke often use of photography as documentation and
incorporated photographic elements into a kind of photography that was to be con-
his painting as a result of his fascination sidered an object of art in and of itself, he
with the dots that compose the screens used would never quite escape it. This problem
to reproduce images in commercial printing would be dramatized by a number of
processes. More importantly, he became works included in the Artists and Photo-
interested in the powerful effect of the graphs multiple, such as Mel Bochner’s
printing error, that elusive blot disrupting aptly named photographic text piece
Proust, that “photography is the product and forth across a field in a straight line “anti-monuments.” His photographs of
of complete alienation”? One would like until a visible path was worn in works these ephemeral works were later recom-
to think that the declaration ascribed to such asA Line Made By Walking, England posed into collages that took on a sculp-
Marcel Duchamp might be true—“I would (1967)—gave a new meaning to William tural presence in and of themselves.
like to see photography make people Henry Fox Talbot’s description of photog-
despise painting until something else will raphy as the “pencil of nature,” as these Architecture was an important critical con-
make photography unbearable”— as that actions themselves could be seen to be cern at this time, as can be seen in Pamela
would make a fine contribution to our dis- “writing” on the surface of the English Lee’s essay in this volume, which addresses
cussion of the last picture, but Bochner countryside. Working concurrently in Italy, the dialectical relationship between the
casts doubt on this statement just as he Anselmo would produce Entrare nell’opera camera and architecture since the inven-
casts doubt on the medium of photography (Entering the work, 1971), a photographic tion of photography. It was taken up in the
itself by presenting these photographs of emulsion on canvas that depicts the artist 1960s as a subject by Bernd and Hilla
possibly spurious statements as his theory taking another kind of walk through the Becher and Dan Graham, each of whom
of the medium. landscape. In this case we are presented undertook photographic analyses of ubiq-
with a long-range view of the artist himself uitous and banal architectural forms.
Of course Bochner, Klein, Ruscha, walking down the slopes of a volcanic While the Bechers focused on the disap-
Nauman, Paolini, and Polke were far from mountainside in rural Italy. Anselmo’s pho- pearing vernacular architecture of the
the only ones who picked up a camera at tograph is at once an existentialist state- industrial landscape, photographing struc-
this point in time. The other artists included ment about the isolation of the individual tures such as water towers, gas holders,
in The Last Picture Show continued to “mis- and an invocation of the geological forces grain elevators, and cooling towers, which
understand” this medium across a number of gravity and volcanism, as well as the they referred to as “anonymous sculp-
of different categories of artistic endeavor, physical energy that is continuously present tures,” Dan Graham would point a some-
ranging from genres traditionally found in the natural world. As he suggested, what more critical eye at the serial
in painting and photography, such as land- “energy exists beneath the most varied repetition of forms in American postwar
scape and self-portraiture, to extremely of appearances and situations.”!5 suburban tract housing in Homes for
contemporary investigations of the body America (1966-1967). Employing an ama-
and the world of media images. Photography also became a tool in the teur snapshot aesthetic, as opposed to
1960s and 1970s for a number of artists the Bechers’ more professional approach,
A number of artists in the 1960s and 1970s, who began to make investigations and Graham used his camera to call into ques-
for example, employed photography in interventions into the built environment. tion the repetitive nature of the architec-
projects that sought to radically rework If Anselmo was concerned with the natural tural forms of American suburban housing,
our understanding of the landscape. Jan forces of gravity, Robert Smithson would critically likening them to the serial nature
Dibbets, Richard Long, and Giovanni attempt in his sculptures and photographic of the “primary structures” of Minimalist
Anselmo explored the cultural legacy of the works to capture the movement of another sculpture. For Graham, both the New
landscape but adopted approaches that kind of energy—the transformative geolog- Jersey tract homes that he documented and
were far different from those found in the ical decay associated with “what the physi- Minimalist sculpture were products of a
landscape photography of Ansel Adams cist calls ‘entropy’ or ‘energy drain.’”!4 standardization that generated a particular
or Edward Weston, with their invocation Whether turning his camera on the crum- kind of alienating effect in its disconnec-
of a photographic sublime. Dibbets’ under- bling “monumental” industrial structures tion from a grounding in the social. His
standing of the landscape, for example, of suburban New Jersey in Monuments of photographic intervention tries to make
was heavily informed by the history of Passaic (1967) or on the ongoing simultane- these connections explicit.
Dutch painting, and all of his photographic ous disintegration and reconstruction of a
works in one way or another explore the small Mexican hotel in his slide lecture While the Bechers and Graham focused on
conventions of that genre. In Horizon presentation Hotel Palenque (1969), the formal and social analysis of the built
1°-10° Land (1973), he presented ten thin, Smithson would record the “ghostly photo- environment, another group of artists work-
vertical photographs of an abstracted hori- graphic remains” of the slow movement ing concurrently took another approach
zon line of the notoriously flat Dutch land- of entropy in the man-made environment.!5 to the Minimalist aesthetics of the period
scape. Progressively tilting the image to an His friend and contemporary Gordon by either constructing or documenting
eventual pitch of ten degrees, Dibbets con- Matta-Clark would also engage the camera abstracted photographic geometries. In
founds our visual expectations and, in so as an aesthetic accomplice in looking at 1966 Mel Bochner took up photography to
doing, destabilizes our vision and under- another kind of ghostly remains. In his case, begin a series of Post-Minimalist investiga-
mines the fabricated and historically loaded he would use photography to at once docu- tions into the formal nature of the system
conventions of our cultural depictions of ment and complete his “cutting” interven- of perspective. His abstracted photographic
the landscape. Richard Long, by contrast, tions into abandoned vernacular architec- distortions of the grid—the central tool of
produced photographic documents of tural forms in the urban environment. Renaissance perspective—would refocus
ephemeral sculptural and performative acts Described by Dan Graham as a “form of our attention on the system of perspective
that the artist enacted in and on the land- urban ecology,” Matta-Clark’s projects, itself rather than employing perspective as
scape. His impermanent interventions— such as Splitting (1974), provided a sculp- a tool to represent the world. Sol Le Witt
which included cutting an X-shaped swath tural attempt at a critical social analysis of would similarly take on the legacy of the
through a field of daisies and walking back vernacular architectural forms as kinds of grid in his photo books, such as the aptly

14 DOUGLAS FOGLE
named Photogrids (1978), in which he this period were the strategies of concep- collaborative work, Wurstserie (Sausage
brought together hundreds of snapshots of tually inspired artists such as Victor series, 1979), would present ten “dramatic”
readymade grids and gridlike structures in Burgin, Douglas Huebler, Martha Rosler, tableaux enacted by sausages and lunch-
the everyday environment. The serial and Allen Ruppersberg. In works such meats. Engaging a childlike sense of play
nature of these works belies their ability to as Huebler’s Variable Pieces, Burgin’s and wonder, these scenarios often turn
tell a story through the narrative juxtaposi- Performative/Narrative (1971), dark, as in the depiction of the collision of
tion of abstracted forms taken from a vari- Ruppersberg’s Seeing and Believing (1972), two “sausagemobiles” in Der Unfall (The
ety of sources, including window screens, and Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate accident). As in Nauman’s Eleven Color
air vents, manhole covers, and mosaic treat- Descriptive Systems (1974), the artists Photographs, the humor that suffuses these
ments in Islamic architecture. A similar explore the gap between the intelligibility works, while undermining the self-impor-
but more phenomenological analysis of of language and the certainty of visual tance of much contemporary art of the
Minimalist geometries in the built environ- perception. Ruppersberg’s Seeing and time, belies a critical engagement with
ment can be seen in the work of the Indian Believing, for example, presents us with a issues of language and visual perception.
artist Nasreen Mohamedi, whose mid- paradox. Six snapshots of the exteriors of
1970s photographs of abstracted architec- houses are mounted under a text that reads The body has been a primary subject for
tural forms around New Delhi trace the “seeing,” while another six snapshots of photography since its invention in the early
index of a peripatetic subject attempting the artist in a series of living rooms that nineteenth century. As we have already
to comprehend the formal complexity of may or may not be from those homes sit seen in the work of Klein and Nauman, the
urban space. As Geeta Kapur has sug- beneath a text that reads “believing.” Are 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a
gested, Mohamedi’s photographs instanti- we to believe what we see? How adequate wide variety of artistic practices that
ate a vision in which “the mobile body seeks (or inadequate, as Rosler’s title suggests) is reasserted the primacy of embodiment in
to comprehend the urban environment.”!6 the system of linguistic and visual represen- performative works that were often done
tation? Each of these works, in its own way, solely in front of the camera. Vito Acconci,
A number of artists in the 1960s and 1970s casts doubt on the transparency of this con- one of the primary innovators in this field,
became increasingly interested in the pro- fluence of language and images. completed an important series of photo-
fusion and growing power of photographic graphic works between 1969 and 1970 that
images in both our personal lives and the Staged photography—what the critic A. D. explored a series of perceptual and phe-
mass media. The influence of our cultural Coleman referred to in 1976 as photogra- nomenological tasks that the artist assigned
photographic archive can be seen in the phy’s “directorial mode”—became an himself as a way of physically embodying
work of Christian Boltanski and Hans-Peter important tool for a number of artists who vision and exploring the world around him.
Feldmann. In works such as Les 62 mem- sought to compose their very own theaters Setting himself tasks such as “jumping,
bres du Club Mickey en 1955 (The 62 of the absurd.!7 In the photographic work holding camera: 5 broad jumps along coun-
members of the Mickey Mouse Club in of Bas Jan Ader, Peter Fischli and David try path—at the end of each jump, snap
1955) of 1972, which consists of arrange- Weiss, Ger Van Elk, and William Wegman, shutter as I hit ground,” Acconci would lit-
ments of found snapshots of anonymous photography was used to construct humor- erally throw himself into his environment
people, Boltanski took a less analytical laden scenarios that are at once fantastic and record the physical perception of that
approach to the archive by attributing a and illogical. Ader’s comedic attempt to use movement with a photograph. As he sug-
poetic melancholy of lost memory to the his prone body to compose a Mondrian gested, “They were photos not of an activity
forgotten faces in family portraits and snap- painting in his work On the Road to Neo but through an activity; the activity...
shots. Feldmann, by contrast—in his series Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971) and could produce a picture.”!8
of modest book editions begun in 1968, Van Elk’s equally strange “documentation”
simply titled Bild or Bilder (Picture or of the emergence of a school of sardines Other artists working at the time—such
Pictures) or in his collection of 1970s com- from the cracks in the pavement of a high- as Charles Ray, Valie Export, and Bruce
mercial posters Sonntagsbilder (Sunday way in The Discovery of the Sardines, Conner—also used their own bodies
pictures; 1976-1977)—brought together Placerita Canyon, Newhall, California to undertake photographic experiments
banal images found in the media—air- (1971) both point to an increasingly com- in their studios or the environment. In
planes, shoes, chairs, women’s knees, cloth- mon use of set-up or staged photography Ray’s Plank Piece I-IT (1973), Export’s
ing, soccer players, landscapes—organizing for theatrical ends. Wegman’s early photo- K6orperkonfiguration (Body configuration)
them without commentary in a systematic graphic scenarios included similar investi- series, or Conner’s ANGEL (1975), the
format. His idiosyncratic archive drew on gations of perceptual nonsequiturs that artist’s body takes center stage in an arena
the wealth of everyday images that sur- were often as intellectually challenging as normally reserved for more traditional
round us. By culling photographs from the they were humorous. In Crow (1970), a materials. This expanded sense of sculp-
media environment and reorganizing them taxidermic parrot casts a strangely inappro- tural practice, with the body at its center, is
according to the logic of his own taxonomy, priate shadow, while another photograph also articulated in the earliest photographic
Feldmann reinvested them with a new kind depicts a piece of heavy steel leaning works of Gilbert & George. In the series
ofvisual narrativity that allows viewers to against the wall with the appended caption Any Port in a Storm, for example, the artists
read them in light of their personal histories. “to hide his deformity he wore special turned the camera on themselves to con-
clothing.” Later in the decade, this tech- struct sculptural photographic documents
Among the primary forces behind the pro- nique would find its way into the work of of distorted states of being, as in their works
fusion of multiple uses for photography in the Swiss duo Fischli and Weiss, whose first Staggering, Smashed, or Falling, all of 1972,
each of which was related to an altered use the camera to explore issues of gender history of Hollywood cinema. The act of
perceptual or physical state. and racial identity. In Piper’s case, for personal transformation, as the artist moves
example, the artist hand-altered a series of from one fragmented narrative scenario
At the same time that Gilbert & George black-and-white photographic self-portraits to the next, can also be seen at work in the
declared all of their work to be sculpture— of herself with a white woman, transforming Polaroid self-portraits of Andy Warhol
including their performances, which they her image through drawing into that of an dressed in drag, from around 1981. These
called “living sculptures”—the physical sub- African American man with exaggerated images descend in a direct line from the
stance of the body, as a subject and an artis- features. Piper would also add a continuous early Man Ray portrait of Marcel Duchamp
tic material, would also become a favored written monologue onto the surface of the dressed as his alter ego Rrose Sélavy. In
topic of a wide range of artists who interro- photographic image that details the deterio- each of these cases, the camera becomes a
gated both aesthetic and social issues ration of the relationship between these two transformational apparatus that allows the
regarding the status of gender. Eleanor figures, raising questions about our percep- artist to respond to the various mediated
Antin’s Carving:A Traditional Sculpture tions of the politics of ethnic difference. images of identity that bombard us in con-
(1972), for example, can be read as an early temporary consumer culture.
entry into this discussion. The 148 black- Piper’s “mythic being” was one among
and-white photographs that make up this many personas that artists at this moment In 1976, even as Nancy Foote’s provocative
work document the artist’s weight loss over would adopt in order to pose a wide- elaboration of “anti-photography” was giv-
a thirty-six-day period. Installed in a grid ranging set of questions about identity. ing a name to fifteen years of wide-ranging
format with multiple views of the artist’s This strategy of self-portraiture was alternative uses of photography, the argu-
naked body from the front, back, and sides, referred to by many critics as masquerade. ment had shifted once again as a new gen-
Antin’s work questions not only the objecti- David Lamelas’ Rock Star (Character eration of artists began building on the
fied status of women in a patriarchal cul- Appropriation) (1974) presented an early ground cleared by the photographic prac-
ture but also the conventional notion of example of this approach. In this series of tices of Nauman, Ruscha, and others.
sculpture itself. ten photographs Lamelas transformed him- In 1977 this shift would become visible in
self into a cultural icon in a kind of photo- an exhibition entitled Pictures, which was
The use of the artist’s body in the photo- graphic elaboration of boyhood air guitar organized by the art historian and critic
graphic practice of the time was closely fantasies. Cindy Sherman is perhaps the Douglas Crimp for Artists Space in
related to another use of self-portraiture in best known of the artists who have turned New York. Including the work of Troy
the service of the interrogation of identity. to this device in their work. She would fol- Brauntauch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie
Works such as Hannah Wilke’s $.O.$.— low Lamelas and Piper with her Untitled Levine, Robert Longo, and Phillip Smith,
Starification Object Series (1974-1982), Film Stills (1977-1980), which ambivalently Pictures would signal the recognition of
Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Facial Cosmetic depicted the artist in a series of stereotypi- the influence of a virulent media culture
Variations) (1972), and Adrian Piper’s cal female roles, ranging from the femme not just on photographic practice but on
Mythic Being: I/You (Her) (1974) would also fatale to the ingenue, derived from the painting and sculpture as well. Crimp’s
curatorial statement for this exhibition
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #56, 1980 (cat. no. 157) offered a telling assessment of the shifting
cultural sands of the late 1970s:

To an ever greater extent our experience is gov-

erned by pictures, pictures in newspapers and
magazines, on television and in the cinema.
Next to these pictures firsthand experience
begins to retreat, to seem more and more triv-
ial. While it once seemed that pictures had the
function of interpreting reality, it now seems
that they have usurped it. It therefore becomes
imperative to understand the picture itself, not
in order to uncover a lost reality, but to deter-
mine how a picture becomes a signifying struc-
ture of its own accord.!9

The image world to which Crimp alluded

was foreshadowed in the writings of Walter
Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in the
1920s and 1930s and later those of Marshall
McLuhan in the 1960s. It was at the very
moment that Crimp was writing, however,
that intellectuals such as Jean Baudrillard
began theorizing in publications such as
Simulations (1983) what he would term the

16 DOUGLAS FOGLE
world of the “simulacrum,” where the “Their images are purloined, stolen. In their larly Andy Warhol or even the graphic
image no longer corresponds to reality but work, the original cannot be located, it is provocateurs of the Situationist movement
becomes a kind of reality in and of itself.2° always deferred; even the self which might of the 1960s. These younger artists practic-
The generation of artists that Crimp was have generated an original is shown to be ing what might be loosely called appropria-
pointing to was interested in unpacking the itself a copy.” While the debates around the tion owed a more direct debt to the
structural mechanics of this world of simu- question of postmodernism raged through- influential photographic work of John
lation and of the picture itself. How was it out the 1980s and into the early 1990s— Baldessari, who even in the late 1960s
possible to operate in a world where the raising doubts about its significance, began to presage the coming of the so-
image had lost its truth function and reality desirability, and character—it became clear called Pictures artists in the mid-1970s.
had morphed into illusion without the mini- that a new cultural situation had emerged, In works such as A Movie: Directional Piece
mal courtesy of an acknowledgment? This to which artists were clearly responding Where People Are Looking (1972-1973),
question was hardly a new one, as even a with new aesthetic strategies. Baldessari borrowed images from the his-
cursory reading of Plato’s Republic, with its tory of film, rearranging them and re-
skeptical attitude toward the shadows of Theoretical debates aside, this newly presenting them in order to disrupt and
representation, might suggest, but it defined world of pictures would become the challenge our received notions of the syntax
nonetheless presented itself in a newly focal point for a wide range of artists, of narrative cinema.
intensified manner in the late 1970s. including Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara
Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Baldessari’s use of appropriation would set
Crimp was one of a number of authors, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and the stage for a number of younger artists in
including Abigail Solomon-Godeau and James Welling. What bound many of these the 1970s and 1980s who would come to
Hal Foster, who would become leading crit- artists together (albeit loosely) was the develop these strategies for other ends.
ical voices in the attempt to elaborate what strategy of appropriation—the “purloined” Sherrie Levine would make a head-on
would come to be called “postmodern cul- or “stolen” images that Crimp identified as assault on the male-dominated canon of art
ture.” In his 1984 essay “The Photographic the defining characteristic of postmodern history by provocatively rephotographing
Activity of Postmodernism,” (reprinted in photographic activity. The choice of bor- the works of famous male artists such as
this volume) Crimp would argue that our rowing images from the media in the late Edward Weston, Egon Schiele, and
new relationship to pictures challenges 1970s was, however, hardly a revolutionary Aleksandr Rodchenko and presenting these
“photography’s claims to originality, show- aesthetic technique, owing an enormous images as her own. In the fall of 1981, for
ing those claims for the fiction that they are, debt to avant-garde practitioners of the example, Levine would mount an exhibition
showing photography to be always a repre- 1920s and 1930s, including John Heartfield at Metro Pictures in New York in which she
sentation, always-already-seen.” He then and even Marcel Duchamp. It was also would.display After Walker Evans (1981), a
went on to point out that the artists that he impossible to overlook the impact of the suite of twenty-two rephotographed images
was discussing—Sherrie Levine, Cindy work of Robert Rauschenberg and particu- of some of the most famous works of the
Sherman, and Richard Prince—practiced a
kind of image theft in their work which Sherrie Levine; After Walker Evans: 17, 1981 (under cat. no. 85)
would come to be known as appropriation.

Man Ray; Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy,

c. 1920-1921; gelatin silver print; 8/2 x 6'%/e in.
(21.6 x 17.3 cm); Philadelphia Museum of Art: The
Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1957
American photographer. Levine took this ant living room ensembles that had origi- By generating what appears to be a double, it
portfolio of photographs from Evans’ con- nally been published in the New York Times might be possible to represent what the original
tribution to his 1939 book with the writer Magazine and presented them as his own, photograph or picture imagined. ... More tech-
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous without their accompanying texts. Other nological than mechanical, more a simulation
Men, a classic example of the social docu- images would soon come into his field of than an expression, the result is a photograph
mentary journalism commissioned by the vision, including highly polished commer- that’s the closest thing to the real thing. And
Farm Security Administration during the cial depictions of luxury products such as since I feel a bit more comfortable, perhaps
Great Depression. On one level, Levine’s watches and pens or the consumerist fan- more reassured around a picture that appears
simple Duchampian gesture of appropria- tasy scenarios inhabited by male and female to be truer than it really is, I find the best way
tion presented an ardent attempt to disrupt models. In works such as Untitled (three for me to make it real is to make it again, and
the liturgical flow of the modernist story men looking in the same direction) (1978), making it again is enough for me and certainly,
of art history, with its focus on the heroic Prince’s repeated acts of serial appropria- personally speaking, almost me.?2
achievements of male artists, by raising tion produced a destabilizing effect on the
questions of authorship, originality, and content of the images—what he referred to Perhaps then we are the Marlboro men of
attribution. On another level, her act of as a kind of “social science fiction” —and Prince’s untitled series of cowboys from the
appropriation was not so much a negation offered a somewhat ambivalent commen- early 1980s, liberated from our captivity in
as a Strange kind of homage to her subjects. tary on the circulatory system of the media, the world of consumer images. The “almost
Her rephotographed works were, as she with its inundating flow of fictional images. me” of Prince’s practice suggests a different
explained, “in some sense two photo- Who were these people? What were these kind of vision of America than that prof-
graphs—a photograph on top of a photo- worlds that they inhabited? These are the fered by Walker Evans, as it is on one level
graph,” which helped her “create a questions that present themselves when resolutely in denial of the humanist inten-
metaphor by layering two images, instead looking at Prince’s images. tions of that earlier body of documentary
of putting them side by side.”?! It is the photography. Nonetheless, Prince’s dou-
doubling effect produced in these works, Through its appropriative procedures, bling of the real world evokes another
their creation of doppelgangers of well- Prince’s work, like that of Levine, would vision of photography—that of Bochner’s
known images, that has given them the similarly produce a doubling of the repre- “misunderstandings,” with their implicit
power to disturb our sense of order while sentation and the real that was seen as a distrust of the truth function of the
also opening them up for another kind crucial aspect of so-called postmodern pho- medium. This was the landscape that pho-
of interpretive cathexis. tographic practice. He would comment on tography inhabited in 1982.
this aspect of his work, suggesting that
Even before Sherrie Levine turned her these photographs might be more real than We began this story in 1960 in France, the
attention to the world of art history for real, a corollary to the slogan “more human purported site of photography’s invention,
source material, Richard Prince had trained than human,” proffered by the “replicant” with a literally incredible leap into the void.
his camera on images from the realm of manufacturer Tyrrel Corporation in Ridley We end it a continent away, in America,
advertising. In 1977 he rephotographed a Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner: with the confluence of two pirated pictures
series of four commercial images of luxuri- of the American dream: Levine’s vision
of Walker Evans’ America, on the one
Richard Prince; Untitled (Cowboy), 1980-1984; Ektacolor print; 50 x 70 in. (127 x 177.8 cm); courtesy Barbara hand, and Prince’s overwrought images
Gladstone Gallery
of consumption brought to us by the likes of
Philip Morris, on the other. One might
think from looking at their works that these
artists are the ultimate purveyors of the last
picture, as they offer us the photographic
spoils of a world saturated with images.
Looking at Levine’s version of Evans’ pho-
tograph of Annie Mae Gudger or Prince’s
rephotographed “gang” of fashion models,
it is not hard to imagine precisely why
Smithson suggested that the power of the
camera was “abominable” or even why he
would go on to contend that a camera shop
would make a good setting for a horror
movie. Presumably, photography’s bound-
less ability to replicate the world was at the
center of his anxiety.

But perhaps Smithson’s discomfort was

misplaced. In the end, are Prince and
Levine any more “guilty” of appropriation
than, say, Walker Evans? Isn’t appropriat-

18 DOUGLAS FOGLE
ing the world what the camera does best? Notes Life,” in Germano Celant,
Art Povera (New York:
In effect, each of these artists has presented 1. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment Praeger, 1969), 109.
a portrait of America—Evans, a group of (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), 14. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New
sharecroppers; Levine, a series of “still-life” unpaginated. Monuments,” Artforum 4 (June 1966); reprinted
photographs of the book plate reproduc- 2. John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New in Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected
tions of Evans’ images; Prince, a fictional York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 4. Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press,
landscape composed of our collective 3. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The 1996), 10-11.
dreams of the consumer image world. The Dematerialization of Art,” in Conceptual Art: A 15. Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel
conceptual gap separating these snapshots Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and in the Yucatan,” Artforum 8 (September 1969): 31.
of America seems much smaller today Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 46. 16. Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism? (New
than it might have in 1960. Evans himself Originally published in Art International 12 Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), 78.
“rephotographed” commercial signage and (February 1968): 31-36. 17. A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode:
roadside billboards throughout his career 4. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Notes toward a Definition,” Artforum 15
and is often credited with inspiring the Field,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on (September 1976): 55-61.
development of Pop Art in the 1960s. This Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay 18. Vito Acconci, “Notes on My Photographs,
convergence makes one start to think that Press, 1983), 31-42. 1969-1970,” in Vito Acconci: Photographic Works,
the last picture might not have come yet, 5. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: 1969-1970, exh. cat. (New York: Brooke
let alone the last picture show, which today The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New Alexander, 1988), unpaginated.
seems like a distant dream. York: Vintage, 1977). 19. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” in Pictures, exh.
6. In 1937 Man Ray published a portfolio of cat. (New York: Artists Space, 1977), 3, as cited in
By the early 1980s this so-called abom- twelve of his photographs with an introduction by Anne Rorimer,*Photography/Language/Context:
inable power of the camera had come full André Breton under the title Photography Is Not Prelude to the 1980s,” inA Forest of Signs, exh.
circle to critically engage in a provocative Art. See Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary
cultural image cannibalism that was far Imagination (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 14. Art, 1989), 151.
removed from the canonical “decisive 7. Cited ibid., 12. 20. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York:
moments” of twentieth-century art photog- 8. See Neal Benezra, “Surveying Nauman,” in Semiotexte, 1983).
raphy in its modernist incarnation. The Bruce Nauman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 21. Sherrie Levine, in Jeanne Siegel, “The
irony, however, is that Levine and Prince 1994), 24. Anxiety of Influence—Head On: A Conversation
might be seen to be practicing a straighter 9. Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman (New between Sherrie Levine and Jeanne Siegel,” in
kind of photography than modernist York: Rizzoli, 1988), 14. Sherrie Levine, exh. cat. (Zurich: Kunsthalle
“straight photography” itself. Of course, 10. Willoughby Sharp, “Nauman Interview,” Arts Zirich, 1991), 15.
the subject of Levine’s and Prince’s straight Magazine 44 (March 1970): 2. 22. Richard Prince, “The Closest Thing to the
photography is the world of pictures. 11. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Real Thing” (1982), cited in Lisa Phillips, Richard
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Prince, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of
It is here then that the last picture comes Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry American Art, 1992), 28.
back into the frame of the first picture and Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-251.
Nancy Foote’s “anti-photographers” sim- 12. Paul Schimmel, “Polkography,” in Sigmar
ply become artists using the camera. The Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, exh. cat.
Last Picture Show traces this movement (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art,
through two decades of artistic practice 1995), 61.
that encouraged provocative experimenta- 13. Giovanni Anselmo, “I, The World, Things,
tion with and through the medium of pho-
tography, providing something of an Louise Lawler, Why Pictures Now, 1981 (cat. no. 78)
answer to Smithson’s anxiety. Far from
offering us a photographic apocalypse, the
artists represented in this exhibition
instead reinvigorated photography, clear-
ing ground for subsequent artists who
would explore the medium. In the twenty
years that have passed since the last work
in this exhibition was produced, two or
three generations have profited from these
conceptual engagements with the medium.
Taking up the camera as one tool among
others, these younger artists have
attempted to respond to Louise Lawler’s
question “Why pictures now?” The legacy
of the artists whose work appears in The
Last Picture Show has enabled them to
proffer a simple answer: “Why not?”
Lawrence Alloway Earthworks, for example, such as Robert ductions. Both the exhibited “object” and
Smithson’s, can sometimes be experienced the catalogue “entry” are permutations
on the spot, but not for long and not by made possible by the repeatability of the
Artists and Photographs many people. Documentation distributes photographic process.
(1970) and makes consultable the work of art that
Michael Heizer has discussed the role of
is inaccessible, in a desert, say, or
ephemeral, made of flowers. The photo- photography in relation to his own work.
Originally published in Artists and Photographs
graphic record is evidential, but it is not a Of a work in Nevada he writes: “it is being
(New York: Multiples Inc., 1970); reprinted
in Studio International 179 (April 1970): reproduction in the sense that a compact photographed throughout its disintegra-
162-164. Artists and Photographs contains an painting or a solid object can be repro- tion.”3 The run of photographs records the
exhibition catalogue with text by Lawrence duced as a legible unit. The documentary return of probability to his initial interrup-
Alloway and nineteen works by different artists. photograph is grounds for believing that tion of the landscape. He points out that
something happened. photographs are like drawings, as the basic
graphic form of his big works in the land-
Photographs used as coordinates, or as scape is recovered in aerial photography
At least since Delacroix, when the camera echoes, soundings that enable us to deduce which shows the earth’s surface as an
provided a modern technique for getting distant or past events and objects, are not inscribed plane. Related to the concise
direct images of the world (Journal, May the same as works of art in their operation. graphism of photographs is the camera’s
21, 1853), photographs have been in the Max Bense has divided art and photogra- effectiveness as an image-maker. Heizer’s
hands of artists. They were, as Delacroix phy like this: “the esthetic process in paint- own bleak landscapes, like excavation
saw, images of the world unmediated by ing is directed towards creation: the sites, Smithson’s photographing of mirrors
the conventions of painting; these were esthetic process of photography has to do in a pattern in landscapes to make a
followed, later in the 19th century, by the with transmission.” “Painting reveals itself compound play of reference levels, and
wide distribution of works of art by photo- more strongly as a ‘source’ art, and photog- Richard Long’s walks in the country with
graphic reproductions. This was defined by raphy more strongly as a ‘channel’ art.”! regular stops for documentation with a
Walter Benjamin in Marxist terms in the Dennis Oppenheim classifies photo- camera (of the view, not of the walker)
20s and celebrated later by Andre Malraux graphic documentation as a “secondary presuppose a photographic step in the
in terms of the camera’s autonomous picto- statement... after the fact,”2 the fact work process. As Oppenheim has said:
rial values. In the 20s, collages and photo- being, of course, the work out in the field. “communication outside the system of the
montage, new works of art produced by He feels restricted because “the photo- work will take the form of photographic
photography, were abundant. graph gives constant reference to the rec- documentation. ...”4
tangle. This forces any idea into the
The present exhibition/catalogue clarifies confines of pictorial illusionism.” However, Other artists in this exhibition/catalogue
with a new intensity the uses of photogra- the distinction between source art and use the camera as a tool with which to initi-
phy, in a spectrum that ranges from docu- channel art enables us to disregard the four ate ideas rather than to amplify or record
mentation to newly-minted works. Some edges as a design factor; the area of the them. Edward Ruscha is represented by
photographs are the evidence of absent photograph is simply the size of the sample Baby Cakes, one of the factual series of
works of art, other photographs constitute of information transmitted, a glimpse. photographs which began as early as 1962
themselves works of art, and still others Common to both the absent original and to with his book Twentysix Gasoline Stations.
serve as documents of documents. This last the photographic record is phototopic or This book like his later ones, is neither
area was the subject of an exhibition at the day vision, with light as the medium of per- sociological (the sample of subjects is
Kunsthalle, Bern, last year, Plans and proj- ception on the site and in the record. The arbitrary) nor formalistic (the imagery is
ects as art, a survey of diagrams, proposals, works are, after all, photographable. casual), but it is a concordance of deci-
propositions, programs, and signs of signs. sions, unmistakably esthetic, for all their
Bernar Venet’s book which is a profile of There is the possibility that documents, as deadpan candour, in the absence of other
his “exploited” documents since 1966 accumulating at present, may acquire the purposes. Similarly Bruce Nauman’s pho-
demonstrates this possibility. The different preciousness that we associate with, say, tographs of the air (sky?) over Los Angeles
usages are immense: for example, Douglas limited edition graphics. The development solidifies the channel functions of photog-
Huebler documents place not duration, of Earthwork or Street Events is resistant raphy into a source art. In such works the
whereas Dennis Oppenheim’s piece is to the possession of art as usually under- photographs are themselves an object,
sequential, a chart of time-changes. One stood and photography resists becoming an original structure projected by-the artist.
thing everybody has in common should personal property by its potentially endless The information that Nauman’s photo-
be noted: there is an anti-expertise, anti- reproduction. The fact that photographs graphs carry cannot be decoded as news of
glamorous quality about all the photo- are multiple originals, not unique originals, weather or pollution or as a lack of uniden-
graphs here. Their factual appearance is as well as one’s sense of them as evidence tified flying objects. (The information that
maintained through even the most prob- rather than as source objects, should pro- Nauman’s LAAIR does not carry, though
lematic relationships. tect their authenticity ultimately. In the it looks as if it might, is different from
present instance, in Artists & Photographs, Marcel Duchamp’s Air de Paris, 1919. That
One of the uses of photography is to pro- the contents of the catalogue are variants sample of the atmosphere is contained in
vide the coordinates of absent works of art. of the items in the exhibition, not repro- a sealed glass ampule, of which one would

20 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

have to say, this is not a piece of laboratory grammatic or simulated) and some of it approaches. The present title Artists &
equipment, etc. The artists in both cases memorial; the work process is arrested at Photographs has a verbal echo of, for
work against the reduction of the photo- different points in time. Sol Le Witt’s instance, The Painter and the Photograph
graph or the object to a channel function.) Muybridge III takes a classic image of (University of New Mexico, 1964) which
motion (successive views of a walking is a study of photography as a transmitter
Michael Kirby takes “clarity as the only nude) and encloses it to be viewed direc- of information for the use of figurative
conscious standard” in both shooting and tionally. Dan Graham’s work alludes to painters.5 The Photographic Image
developing his photographs, but the result Muybridge’s measured walking images, (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966)
is not record but source. In Pont Neuf but here it is the walkers who take rela- was divided between artists who imprinted
he uses six photographs, taken from one tional photographs of one another. The photographs in paintings or who copied
point, to provide views of the surrounding slides are then projected quickly on two photographs, less as an aid to illusion than
space: the work can, as it were, be inferred screens, compressing the original time as a play with the channel characteristics of
backwards to the converging point. Jan sequence. Robert Morris’ piece is a record the medium. (In the work of Richard
Dibbets’ work is inconceivable without of a “continuous project (altered daily).” Artschwager, Malcolm Morley, and Joseph
monocular vision (that is, a camera); his Only by photography can the temporal Raffael the subject is frequently the photo-
“perspective corrections,” whether con- route of a work of art be recorded in terms graph itself rather than what the photo-
structions built in a field or areas ploughed homologous to the original events. It graph depicts.) Paintings from the Photo
on a beach, demand one absolute view- should be stressed that it is not a question (Riverside Museum, 1969-70) combined
point to be effective. Only from that one of memorializing a favorite state, catching both realist and post-Pop usages.
point can his inversion of distance give the work’s best profile, but of following
the appearance of flat squares and posts the process. A Note on Process Abbreviation
of identical size. “Misunderstandings,”
an anthology of quotations found by Mel These artists occupy various points in Abstract painting has many ways of achiev-
Bochner (his contribution to the cata- a zone that includes Conceptual art, ing the 20th century dream of an instant,
logue), includes this: “Photography cannot Earthworks, Happenings. Conceptual art, unrevised, all-at-once art form. There
record abstract ideas,” but his piece in to the extent that it is to be thought about, has been a steady sequence of process-
the exhibition ironically and defiantly is or repeated, or enacted by others, insists abbreviation, compressing and reducing in
concerned with measurement (i.e. a form on documentation systems originated by number the stages that go to make up a
of abstraction). the artist himself. This is no less true of work of art. Staining and high-speed callig-
performance arts, such as Happenings or raphy, for instance, have a directness to
The artistic ideas and operations that need Events, which survive verbally as scenarios which figurative art has little access. One of
photographic documentation are especially or schedules and visually as photographs. the few ways is in the use of photographic
those that are modified in time. Time, in The record of one of Allan Kaprow’s images printed on silkscreens; not only is
fact, is central to photography. In the case Happenings is a form of completion. It there an immediate delivery of a grainy,
of Christo there is data on the wrapping is necessary to differentiate these uses convincing image to the canvas, as the
of a tower, some of it prospective (dia- of photographs by artists from other screen is pressed down and painted on the
back, but the screen can be used again.
Artists and Photographs, 1970; Walker Art Center
Both technique and image are immediate.
If “a print is the widow of the stone,” to
quote Robert Rauschenberg,° then a pho-
tograph is the twin of an event. Andy
Warhol’s method is the repetition of the
single image within each work, varying it by
nonchalant registering and impatient ink-
ing; Rauschenberg’s way is to cluster differ-
ent screens in each work, repeating them
only in other works.

Notes
1. Camera, 4, 1958.
2. Letter to Multiples, 1969.
3. Artforum, December, 1969.
4. Land Art, Fernsehgalerie, Berlin, 1969.
5. The catalogue includes a history of artists
using photos by Van Deren Coke.
6. Studio International, December, 1969.
Rauschenberg is referring to lithography, but in
terms of assimilating photographic impressions
the medium resembles silkscreen printing.
A. D. Coleman work and so it just culminated in this little was charred by fire. “Charred by fire?”
book here [Various Small Fires, which Ruscha laughs. “Everything gets its due,
contains sixteen images—burning pipes, right? Bruce Nauman took a copy of
“?m Not Really cigars, cigarettes, a flare, a cigarette lighter Various Small Fires and burned it cere-
a Photographer” aflame]. It’s probably one of the strangest moniously, took a picture of each page,
books—it kind of stands apart, a lot of peo- and made a big book out of it, which
(1972) ple have even mentioned to me about how is an extension of that. I think he liked
it stands apart from the others because Various Small Fires.
Originally published in the New York Times, it’s more introverted, I guess; introverted,
September 10, 1972. less appealing, probably more meaningless “Some of them look like capers,” Ruscha
than any of the other books, if you know adds. “Like Business Cards looks like
what I mean.” a caper, which it is...” Or Crackers?

“It’s a playground, is all it is,” says Ed I mention finding, in a Fourth Avenue “Crackers is a caper; Sunset Strip is a visual
Ruscha. “Photography’s just a playground used-book store, a copy of a catalog from caper; Royal Road Test, yeah . . .” This is
for me. I’m not a photographer at all.” one of his exhibitions, the cover of which a significant distinction, especially in light

Despite this disclaimer, Ruscha’s fourteen Edward Ruscha with his books, c. 1969; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
small books of photographs have found
much of their audience among people
interested in contemporary photography.
They were among the first of the new
wave of privately published photography
books; they also pioneered in the use of
photography as a basic tool of conceptual
art. Quite aside from their historical signif-
icance, these books have a consistency and
a charmingly mystifying ambiguity which
results from their very literalness. They
seem—at this admittedly early stage—
to be remarkably durable works, Ruscha’s
fear of their eventual “quaintness”
notwithstanding.

Ruscha indicates that he began working

with photographs out of “a combination
of desires.” One was to, first of all, make
a book. “I wanted to make a book of some
kind. And at the same time, I—my whole
attitude about everything came out in
this one phrase that I made up for myself,
which was ‘twenty-six gasoline stations.’
I worked on that in my mind for a long
time and I knew that title before the book
had even come about. And then, paradox-
ically, the idea of the photographs of the
gas stations came around, so it’s an idea
first—and then I kind of worked it down.
It went hand in hand with what I felt
about traveling. ...

“I just barely got my feet wet with gas sta-

tions,” he continues. “Then Ijust had a lot vfs
of other things come out. Fires have been gue]
a part of my work before too, I’ve painted
pictures of fire, and there’ve been little
things about fire in my life—not an experi-
ence, not in a negative way, there’s been
no catastrophe as far as fire goes, but the
image of fire has always been strong in my

22 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

of the slight note of dissatisfaction which Do you mean, I ask, that you can’t conceive
Ruscha applies to the term “caper.” All of a Greatest Hits of Ed Ruscha, with two
four of these books hinge on something parking lots and one swimming pool and
other than the images themselves, being three palm trees? “Well, no, I wouldn’t
thus more specific and conceptually limited say that...” He laughs.
(though also, perhaps, more accessible)
than the rest. Sunset Strip depends on its Having run out of questions and tape, we
accordion-fold format and the inclusion begin to pack up. Ruscha answers a knock
of every building on the Strip; the other at his door and admits Billy Al Bengston,
three are tied to staged events. resplendent in a bright red hat, looking—
somewhat studiedly—like a refugee from
Royal Road Test documents the results an Al Capp panel. Ruscha gives Bengston
of heaving a Royal typewriter out the win- a box of trout flies, a belated Christmas
dow of a 1963 Buick Le Sabre traveling gift. Then he inquires as to whether I like
at ninety miles per hour; it stars Ruscha anchovies and, upon receiving an affirm-
himself as Driver and singer-songwriter- ative response, gives me two tubes of
humorist Mason Williams as Thrower. anchovy paste and two cans of rolled
Williams wrote the story on which filets of anchovy with capers. He explains
Crackers—an improbable and somewhat that he hates anchovies, and had used
misogynistic narrative in stills—is based. a number of these same tins and tubes
(Ruscha, working on a Guggenheim to surround a present for his wife, who
Fellowship, recently turned this into a despises them equally.
movie titled Premium.) And Business Cards
records a business card exchange between I accept the anchovies and ask Bengston
Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston and a pres- if he considers Ruscha to be a photogra-
entation dinner in celebration thereof. pher. “Oh, sure,” Bengston replies. “He’s
a fine photographer. Ed’s made pictures
The latter book is also one of the two that don’t look like anyone else’s I’ve ever
signed editions Ruscha has published, seen.” He flashes an evil grin, and chortles.
a practice from which he has since veered
away. “I decided I don’t want anything like Of those anchovies, one tube of paste has
that. I just want to get the book out. And been sent to Van Deren Coke, author of
the books will compete with any other The Painter and the Photograph, for his col-
books on the paperback market; they'll just lection; one can of rolled filets has been
be my style of books, you know? .. . Most sent to Peter Bunnell as a contribution to
of my books should be of unlimited quan- the collection of Princeton University. The
tity. Idon’t want people to come up to me second can of filets has been reserved for
and say, ‘Boy, I’m going to save this personal consumption at some future date,
because some day it’s going to be a work and the second tube is in the brown paper
of art.’ That’s not it—you missed it...” bag Ruscha offered them in, sitting in
a cabinet outside my workroom, marked
Ruscha, who feels that he’s “just scratching “Gift of Ed Ruscha.”
the surface” with his books so far, indicates
that “It’s not only photography that inter- Now isn’t it nice to know these things?
ests me, it’s the whole production of the
books... I just use that thing [the cam-
era—he works with a Yashica, by the way],
I just pick it up like an axe when I’ve got to
chop down a tree, I pick up a camera and
go out and shoot the pictures that I have to
shoot. I never take pictures just for the tak-
ing of pictures; I’m not interested in that
at all. ’m not intrigued that much with the
medium... 1 want the end product; that’s
what I’m really interested in. It’s strictly
a medium to use or to not use, and I use
it only when I have to. [use it to do ajob,
which is to make a book. I could never go
through all my photographs I’ve taken of
different things and make a book out of it.”
Nancy Foote photography’s status in the art world climate of modernism which he himself
remains problematic. For every photogra- did much to foster. He translated the self-
pher who clamors to make it as an artist, referentiality of the modernist position
The Anti-Photographers there is an artist running a grave risk of in painting into a self-consciousness about
(1976) turning into a photographer. The level of photography for photography’s sake.
Much was made of the importance of the
absurdity to which such maneuvering can
descend is exemplified, perhaps, by the unique photographic print. Abstract for-
Originally published in Artforum 15
importance placed on the image of the sur- mal values were, as in painting, given high
(September 1976): 46-54.
roundings in which one exhibits. A gallery’s priority, heavily influencing the photog-
reputation often has as much to do with rapher’s choice of subject, as well as his
sealing the fate of a work as does the char- compositional tactics. Ironically, a medium
The distinction between art and photogra- acter of the art itself. Nowhere are such which started out as an image recorder
phy, historically fraught with anxieties, has hierarchies more clearly visible than at the and replicator came to look on itself as
ceased to be one of definition; nevertheless, galleries Castelli, where photographs are a producer of sacred objects. But the
it continues to bug us. Though the post- shown Downstairs Uptown, with the prints, strength of photographs lies in their
modernist revolution has (as in many but very much Upstairs Downtown (in the unique ability to gather, preserve and
other disciplines) eradicated traditional front parlor, that is)—if they come properly present outside information, not to “make
boundaries and brought about a tremen- introduced as conceptual art. art.” Thus the contents of a photograph
dous increase in “esthetic mobility,” are inherently extra-photographic; a fact
Oddly enough, conceptual art has never which, though not profitably reconcilable
Eleanor Antin; 100 Boots in the Market, 1971; been plagued with accusations that it with modernism, offers considerable
black-and-white picture postcard; 41 x 7 in. belongs on photography’s side of the potential of its own. The extent to which
(11.4 x 17.8 cm); courtesy Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts, New York tracks, yet the condition in which much of Stieglitz may have been unwittingly respon-
it could or would exist without photogra- sible for stifling that potential remains to
phy is open to question. Photographs are be explored elsewhere. Conceptual artists,
crucial to the exposure (if not to the mak- however, in espousing photography for
ing) of practically every manifestation of expedient recordmaking purposes, have
conceptual-type art—Earthworks, process begun to extend its ideological potential.
and narrative pieces, Body Art, etc.! Their
first function is, of course, documentation; Conceptual art’s Duchampian underpin-
but it can be argued that photography nings strip the photograph of its artistic
offers certain specific qualities and possi- pretensions, changing it from a mirror
bilities that have done much to inform into a window. What it reveals becomes
and channel artistic strategies and to nur- important, not what it is. It doesn’t matter
Eleanor Antin; 100 Boots Parking, 1971; ture the development of idea-oriented art. to conceptual art whether the photo-
black-and-white picture postcard; 41/2 x 7 in.
(11.4 x 17.8 cm); courtesy Ronald Feldman Despite its dependence on photography, graphic prints that testify to its occurrence
Fine Arts, New York however, conceptual art exhibits little pho- come from a fancy darkroom or the drug-
tographic self-consciousness, setting itself store; the view’s the same. Nor does it
apart from so-called serious photography matter if they're reproductions, thus open-
by a snapshot-like amateurism and non- ing up the whole area of publications as
chalance that would raise the hackles of possible territory for art. Seth Siegelaub
any earnest professional. In fact many has made this distinction:
conceptual artists consider it irrelevant
whether or not they take their own pic- When art does not any longer depend upon
tures. Some do it themselves, of course. its physical presence, when it becomes an
Others, Eleanor Antin, for instance, abstraction, it is not distorted and altered by
employ someone else. Photos of Body its reproduction in books. It becomes PRI-
Eleanor Antin; 100 Boots on the Road, 1971; Art, where the artist himself is the subject MARY information, while the reproduction
black-and-white picture postcard; 41% x 7 in.
(11.4 x 17.8 cm); courtesy Ronald Feldman of the picture, have to be taken by other of conventional art in books and catalogues
Fine Arts, New York people. It would be interesting to know is necessarily (distorted) “SECONDARY”
how many of such images may actually be information. When information is PRIMARY,
the work of aspiring art photographers! the catalogue can become the exhibition.2

The artistic success of these anonymous Photographers’ photographs, of course,

and technically unremarkable pictures also become “secondary” information
provides, perhaps, a clue to the root of when reproduced in books. Conceptual
photography’s difficulties. Over half a artists’ do not. In fact, the final form of the
century ago, Alfred Stieglitz conducted work may well be its publication. Robert
a massive p.r. campaign for photography’s Smithson’s Incidents of Mirror-Travel in
acceptance as art within an emerging the Yucatan, for example, documents nine

24 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

“Mirror Displacements” placed in various Mine are simply reproductions of photos. was as integral a part of the work as the
locations, photographed, then packed Thus {Twentysix Gasoline Stations| is not antics of the boots themselves.
up and moved to the next place. Smithson a book to house a collection of art photo-
published the photographs in Artforum, graphs—they are technical data like Art that does not depend, as Siegelaub
along with an extensive commentary, industrial photography.4 says, on its physical presence relies heavily
as the completed work. Ed Ruscha has on photography for its credibility. Though
4 similar attitude toward the final form Eleanor Antin’s /00 Boots series took few make the pilgrimage necessary to see
of his work and the printed reproduction the form of industrially printed postcard Earthworks firsthand, or preside over the
of photos: reproductions; certainly in this case the machinations that comprise Body Art,
production and distribution of the cards photographic reports from the front tell

Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9), 1969 (cat. no. 175)
it like it was to all the (art) world. And Instamatic, is predictably banal, and neering achievements of the buildings that
though the photographs started out as does not even show the bridge in action, make up their work, photographing them
documentation, once the act is over, they though its swiveling function is what so as to categorize types, compare similar
acquire eyewitness status, becoming, in actually grants it admission to Smithson’s formal elements, and arrange them in
a sense, the art itself. A grayish close-up repertory of “monuments.” sequences (or pseudo-sequences) that
of the teeth-marks on Vito Acconci’s arm suppress the structures’ individual char-
(Trademarks, 1970) or the barely distin- If photography makes it possible to confer acteristics in favor of what they call
guishable figure of Chris Burden sitting Readymade status on otherwise untrans- “typologies.” The conceptual precision of
in a dark boiler-room (The Visitation, portable places and deposit them in one’s their enterprise would be impossible with-
1974) is hardly the photographer’s idea oeuvre (or gallery), it also expedites the out photography because, as Carl Andre
of a masterpiece. And yet, we may ask collection of such material for later artifi- has pointed out, it allows them to equalize
ourselves, how much of such art would cation by juxtaposition, group presentation the proportions of buildings that are not
continue to be made were it not for pho- or serial publication. Bernd and Hilla the same size, for purposes of presenta-
tography’s flawless credibility record in Becher ignore the architectural or engi- tion.® The Bechers claim not to care
swearing to the truth of such occurrences?
Richard Long; A Line in the Himalayas, 1975; black-and-white photograph; dimensions variable;
Photos also allow artists to carry over courtesy the artist

Duchamp’s Readymade esthetic into the

realm of conceptual art. Richard Long
and Hamish Fulton stake artistic claim
to various sections of the landscape by
photographing it—Long according to
predetermined systems (“walking a 10-
mile line, filming every half mile out and
back, 42 shots”), Fulton by isolating cer-
tain memorable moments, also on lengthy
walks. With both artists, the act of photo-
graphing is as much a part of the work
as the resulting images. In Long’s case,
it determines the conceptual structure
of the piece; with Fulton, it enables him
to “charge” the landscape esthetically.

Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic,

in which he photographed, among other
things, a rotating railroad bridge and
dubbed it “Monument of Dislocated
Directions,” is another instance of art
status being conferred on a nonart place
by an artist’s act of selection and photog- Hamish Fulton; plate from untitled book of photographs printed by Franco Toselli, Milan, 1974; courtesy the artist

raphy. The photo itself, taken with an

Vito Acconci; Trademarks (detail), 1970; lithograph on

paper; 20% x 20% in. (51.1 x 51.3 cm); Walker Art
Center

26 NANCY FOOTE
 whether or not the resulting grids of In documenting gestures and processes, or less simultaneous whole, in the same
images are works of art; nevertheless, the photograph allows the artist to elimi- way that one would confront a painting
their relevance to current art ideas nate the problem of duration, either by or sculpture. This submergence of the
is inescapable. isolating a specific moment or by present- temporal in favor of the visual is possible
ing a linear sequence without having to only with still photographs, which punctu-
Ed Ruscha’s photographic gatherings, endure the possible monotony of a film or ate action and hand back the concept of
though deliberately trivial in subject videotape of the actual event. This absence the work edited of its durational aspects.
matter, undergo similar transformations of real time is often compensated for by Even, as in large series of photographs,
when placed between the covers of notations as to how long the process took, when it is impossible to take in the whole
his enigmatic small books. He is not the distance covered, the size of intervals, work at once, our sense of ongoing time
interested in a formal comparison of struc- number of occurrences, etc. Unlike a per- remains negligible.
tures, though Twentysix Gasoline Stations formance, theatrical or otherwise, in which
and 64 Parking Lots, when viewed the only way to see it is actually to be there If photography can eliminate the duration
together, offer provocative visual com- in person from beginning to end (likewise of process, it can also telescope distance,
mentary. But the presentation itself, with a film or video), a process piece takes on allowing one to relate isolated situations or
each image isolated on a separate page, its final public form in its documentation events that derive their conceptual strength
indicates that Ruscha’s choices stem from and is experienced by the viewer as a more from juxtaposition and comparison.
other ideas. Just what those ideas are
remains problematic. Colored People Bernd and Hilla Becher; Cooling Towers, 1972; gelatin silver prints; 60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm); courtesy
(16 color photos of cactuses) and AFew Sonnabend Gallery, New York

Palm Trees (annotated with their locations)

manage to convey an uncannily anthro-
pomorphic sense of presence which is
very amusing; but, as is often the case with
humor, the easy access which it grants
to the work is deceptive. (The same can
peda NN
be said of John Baldessari and William Vit ea Vay
Wegman, whose surface levity masks A as ii

a more complex content.)

The idea of art through selection, harking

back to Duchamp and vastly enlarged in
scope through the use of photos, is gently
parodied by Baldessari in his Choosing
series. Here photographs of the artist’s
finger pointing to one of three similar
items (green beans, chocolates, etc.) call
attention to the process involved in mak-
ing choices.

In addition to being a means of gathering

information, photography offers a number
of structural strategies which play a
greater part in the conception of many
works than they are usually given credit
for. An important, if obvious, difference
between traditional photography and
art comprised of or documented by photos
_ is the use of several pictures rather than a
single image. This immediately alters the
sort of content possible within the overall
work, offering the chance for a conceptual
complexity rarely found in a single picture.
The artist has a number of options—pho-
tos can be serial, sequential, in suites; they
can be narrative, documentary, even com-
ponents of abstractions. Usually any given
group of photos serves several of these
functions simultaneously.’
Eleanor Antin’s ubiquitous 100 Boots seem photos as records, could (though won't, by assumes they represent the passage of
ubiquitous precisely because their getting most people) be seen “in the flesh.” The time. In fact, their order is established
from place to place has been edited out. “Mirror Displacements” cannot be, any purely visually within the overall composi-
Smithson’s “Mirror Displacements” can’t more than can, say, Dennis Oppenheim’s tion, making space their primary concern.
exist as a unit except in photos, since their Parallel Stress, where the artist positioned Bernd and Hilla Becher’s use of the grid
enabling rationale was that each should his body in a V-shaped pose that con- format produces a similar disruption
occur in a different location. Thus it can formed to two different locations. The of traditional expectations; usual readings
be argued that this work’s final structure final form of this work becomes the juxta- of objects arranged in grids, with their
is photos, unlike an Earthwork in a single position of the two photographs. Much of implied serial progressions and relation-
location which, though dependent on Douglas Huebler’s work also relies on jux- ship, do not apply.
taposing isolated instances. Variable Piece
John Baldessari; Choosing (A Game for Two Players): I4 relates the facial expressions of eight Sequences do not need to progress hori-
Green Beans, 1971; color photographs; 12 %/6 x 22 % people in five different countries upon zontally; Duane Michals reverses photog-
in. (31 x 57 cm); courtesy the artist.
being told, as we learn in an accompanying raphy’s usual method of showing an
statement, that they have beautiful/spe- overall view and details of varying close-
cial/remarkable faces. (This piece, inciden- ness, gradually dispensing additional infor-
tally, was distributed in an Art & Project mation about his subject by moving farther
bulletin, another case of the art taking its and farther away. Tableaux which at first
final form as a publication.) appear to contain bizarre discrepancies
in scale reveal their true identities as the
Photographs can constitute physical as camera recedes, clarifying by degrees the
well as conceptual structure, as in the work structure of the scene. Al Sousa has also
of Jan Dibbets and Jared Bark. Both use done series which play on this idea of pho-
sequences of photos artificially juxtaposed tographic depth. He starts with a small
to produce nature-defying fantasies. object, photographs it, photographs the
Dibbets’ Dutch Mountain series, where resulting photo, etc., exhibiting them in
photos of the horizon are successively sequence together with the original object.
tipped to give the illusion of a hill, com- The resulting series shifts scale in a sort of
ment on that country’s characteristic photographic perspective as well as offering
flatness. Bark, who uses the most banal damning evidence of the inaccuracies of
form of photography imaginable—the color film, which are compounded as the
subway photo booth—collages pictures series progresses.
of various parts of his body in elaborate
series to form trees, animals, etc. In one Collecting for conceptual purposes is also
respect they are reminiscent of certain gaining appeal for photographers. Lewis
17th-century portraits by Archimboldo— Baltz’s photographs of industrial parks,
grotesqueries where faces are composed for instance, though perhaps more closely
entirely of vegetables. related to Minimalism in their frontality
and sparse geometry, converge with
If photography’s widespread acceptance Ruscha’s gas stations in their banal subject
as the currency of conceptual art has had matter and with the Bechers in their struc-
an effect on the structure of such art, it tural comparisons. And Bill Owens’
has also opened new possibilities for many Suburbia, a collection of photographs
who consider themselves primarily photog- of middle-class America, is as deliberate
raphers. The sequence-serial-narrative a social commentary as any of Hans
issue deserves further consideration in Haacke’s slumlord documentaries. Both
this respect, for photographers have been Baltz and Owens, along with numerous
jj drawing on its didactic capacities for the others, have gone in for publishing such
extra-photographic content which they collections, indicating, perhaps, that they
are increasingly interested in incorporat- are less interested in the autonomy of
ing into their work. Some manipulate the the original photograph than in its capac-
characteristics of narrative or sequence, ity to transmit ideas.
juxtaposing presentational formats that
are habitually read in certain ways (left Over the past few years, as photographers
to right, top to bottom) with photographed have experimented with conceptual tac-
information that does not necessarily tics, artists have begun to be seduced by
relate accordingly. Jan Groover’s photo- the technical capacities of the photo-
graphs of cars and trucks passing specific graphic process. Baldessari, for example,
points along streets and highways are has concentrated increasingly on the pro-
presented horizontally so that one first fessional quality of his photographs. What

28 NANCY FOOTE
Edward Ruscha; pages from A Few Palm Trees, 1971: photo-offset-printed book; 7 x 5% in. (17.8 x 14 cm); Walker Art Center

Island at Hollywood Blvd. & La Brea Ave S. W. corner of McCadden PI. & Yucca st N. W. corner of Valley Oak Dr. & Canyon Dr. N. W. corner of Canon Dr. & Park Way

Douglas Huebler; Variable Piece 14, the Netherlands, United States, Italy, France, and Germany, January 1971, 1971; courtesy Darcy Huebler

variable piece flee

(the netherlands, united states, italy, france, and germany)

eight people were photographed at the instant exactly after

each had been told: ‘you have a beautiful face', or, 'you
have a very special face', or, 'you have a remarkable face’,
or in one instance, nothing at all. the artist knew only
one person among the eight; it is not likely that he will
ever again have a personal contact with any of the others.

the eight photographs join with this statement to constitute

the form of this piece.

january, 1971 douglas huebler

was once presented in standard-sized rely upon for special effects; they also a tendency to become more professional
polaroid snapshots has begun to appear allude to the romanticism which Ansel in quality.
in larger, much slicker form. A recent Adams, for instance, seeks in his land-
strobe series recording the motion of scapes. Even in the work of such artists On the purely documentary side of things,
objects required a much higher degree as Ben Vautier, Peter Hutchinson, Jean perhaps the quintessential example of
of technical skill than the casualness of Le Gac, Bill Beckley, etc., which I have heightened attention to technical quality
his earlier work. And Hamish Fulton’s not considered in detail as its narrative is would be the elaborate photographic
photographs, extremely large in size and essentially verbal rather than visual, the records and._resulting coffee-table book
meticulously framed and matted, exploit accompanying photographs that serve that attest to Christo’s Valley Curtain.
the graininess which photographers often as punctuation to the texts have shown It’s ironic that an art whose generating
impulse was the urge to break away
Installation view with Jan Dibbets’ Little Comet—Sea 9°—81° (1973) and Big Comet 3°—60°, Sky/Sea/Sky (1973), from the collectible object (and hence
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam the gallery/collector/artbook syndrome)
might, through an obsession with the
extent and quality of its documentation,
have come full circle.

Photography obviously cannot claim

sole credit for the rise of the prevailing
ephemeral art styles; nor is it fair to say
that conceptual art is produced purely
to be photographed. It isn’t. But there
can be little doubt that photography’s
role-has extended far beyond its original
archival function, entering into dialogue
with artistic ideas in mutually reinforcing
ways. Certainly the production of imper-
manent works is encouraged by the status
accorded the photographic stand-in.
Works don’t have to locate themselves
in remote places, self-destruct in five
seconds, or cease to exist at the end of
a gesture to benefit from a photographic
after-life. Even ephemeral gallery-
installation exhibitions, a recent but ever
more common phenomenon, owe the lux-
Dennis Oppenheim; Directed Seeding, 1969; site-specific project in Finsterwolde, Holland; courtesy the artist ury of their three-week fling to the reas-
surance that there'll always be the photos.
(Walter De Maria’s gallery full of dirt,
a key installation gesture, has become
famous through its photographs.)

If photography has encouraged such

transitory indulgences, it has also, in
many cases, helped shape their character.
The extent to which the two have become
inseparable was noted by Robert Morris
in a conceptual / photographic / publication
piece of his own, where he invented three
artists and discussed their work (accompa-
nied by drawings and, of course, photos)
in Artforum. One of the “artists,” Marvin
Blaine, had dug an elaborate cave which,
though suspiciously prophetic of Alice
Aycock’s recent burrowings, he insisted
was not art and would not allow
to be photographed:

Blaine simply said that the cave was a private

thing and he was consciously removing these

80 NANCY FOOTE
 private efforts trom tiie mind as art, Whe eas for though he arranges the photos in an order, it
th way to remove the eftorts trom being taken tehaler ony to his final abstract construction and
we ait ny Others Was to have no photographic Hn 10 the subjects of the photos, Such inconsis
HAY @XVA toner, far from being intended as a criticism of
iourdon’s choices, underline the very blurriness
Neyles A the whole question and emphasize the depth
1, Viotographs are aly involved in the making Which photography can bring to such work
on many other typer on art pina Maal pain %, Vaobert Morris, “The Art of Existence: Three
ith, Vamnaras 6 Vienodtramsonmnation Wartion’s Vata’ igual Artists; Works in Process
iki, and NMauchenberg s coMages, 10 lint Anforum, January 1971, 9, W
alow Jam comcnnes here only with its dows
memary on nenational functions
2, Uimla Sheyer, ConcealAN (Sen York
1972), 9. OW
5, Mimert Smithoon, Incidentsof Mirrortraye
in the Yusatan.” Artforum, soplember 199)
i, a
4, som € LANAI Cancarning ‘VYariow omall
hires Award Masa Discus
Vubhications Antforum, Vemnuary 1905
§, Mimert Smithoon the Monuments o
Vani,” ANOTUIN December 1967, 99, 46-41
a4
6, Can Anar A None on Bernhard and Hilla
Mecha Aniforiin, Desnbyen 19772, 9, 99
4, 1n the catalogue for an exhibition of
SAAS IMA 7) Pinonwsapn (hing) phi)

(phitoyf’, Univernty of Maryland Art

Gallery, ¥a0, 2a 25,1975) Davia
Hourdon touches upon these ditinctions in
4 bylist
AU wy the
wg crs
fi 4 cnHt in ,U
the

how, We differentia A AULA

ANG A WINK, ANA OF 6 CHIN NaAtA

Dibhbes, A wauence, however, implies lincat

CAMMY, ATOR OMONA OFGEL WHI U4

echers’ work lacks, falling more in the Category

A uomMedion, Dibbes 6 even more problematic

netalation view of Waller De Maria's Munich Earth Western Carpet Mille, 1231 Warner
ftoom (894), Veiner F her Gallery, Shunict (4% 4724 CMM) courtesy Stepher Wirtz Ga ery, Sant
Jeff Wall But, for the sixties generation, art- object among all other objects in the world.
photography remained too comfortably Under the regime of depiction, that is, in
rooted in the pictorial traditions of modern the history of Western art before 1910, a
“Marks of Indifference”: art; it had an irritatingly serene, marginal work of art was an object whose validity as
Aspects of Photography existence, a way of holding itself at a dis- art was constituted by its being, or bearing,
a depiction. In the process of developing
tance from the intellectual drama of avant-
in, or as, Conceptual Art gardism while claiming a prominent, even alternative proposals for art “beyond”
(1995) definitive place within it. The younger depiction, art had to reply to the suspicion
that, without their depictive, or representa-
artists wanted to disturb that, to uproot and
radicalize the medium, and they did so with tional function, art objects were art in
Originally published in Ann Goldstein and Anne the most sophisticated means they had in name only, not in body, form, or function.!
Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object ofArt, hand at the time, the auto-critique of art Art projected itself forward bearing only its
1965-1975, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum identified with the tradition of the avant- glamorous traditional name, thereby enter-
of Contemporary Art, 1995), 247-267. garde. Their approach implied that photog- ing a troubled phase of restless searching
raphy had not yet become “avant-garde” for an alternative ground of validity. This
in 1960 or 1965, despite the epithets being phase continues, and must continue.
casually applied to it. It had not yet accom-
Preface plished the preliminary autodethronement, Photography cannot find alternatives to
or deconstruction, which the other arts had depiction, as could the other fine arts.
This essay is a sketch, an attempt to study established as fundamental to their devel- It is in the physical nature of the medium
the ways that photography occupied opment and their amour-propre. to depict things. In order to participate
Conceptual artists, the ways that photogra- in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory
phy decisively realized itself as a modernist Through that auto-critique, painting and for modernist art, photography can put
art in the experiments of the 1960s and sculpture had moved away from the prac- into-play only its own necessary condition
1970s. Conceptual art played an important tice of depiction, which had historically of being a depiction-which-constitutes-
role in the transformation of the terms and been the foundation of their social and an-object.
conditions within which established photog- aesthetic value. Although we may no
raphy defined itself and its relationships longer accept the claim that abstract art In its attempts to make visible this condi-
with other arts, a transformation which had gone “beyond” representation or tion, Conceptual art hoped to reconnect
established photography as an institutional- depiction, it is certain that such develop- the medium to the world in a new, fresh
ized modernist form evolving explicitly ments added something new to the corpus way, beyond the worn-out criteria for pho-
through the dynamics of its auto-critique. of possible artistic forms in Western tography as sheer picture-making. Several
culture. In the first half of the 1960s, important directions emerged in this
Photography’s implication with modernist Minimalism was decisive in bringing back process. In this essay I will examine only
painting and sculpture was not, of course, into sharp focus, for the first time since two. The first involves the rethinking and
developed in the 1960s; it was central to the the 1930s, the general problem of how “refunctioning” of reportage, the dominant
work and discourse of the art of the 1920s. a work of art could validate itself as an type of art-photography as it existed at the
beginning of the 1960s. The second is
Edward Ruscha; 1555 Artesia Blvd. and 6565 Fountain Ave., from Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965; related to the first, and to a certain extent
photo-offset-printed book; 7% x 5% in. (18.1 x 14.3 cm); Walker Art Center
emerges from it. This is the issue of the de-
skilling and re-skilling of the artist in a con-
text defined by the culture industry, and
made controversial by aspects of Pop art.

1. From Reportage to Photodocumentation

Photography entered its post-Pictorialist

phase (one might say its “post-Stieglitzian”
phase) in an exploration of the border-
territories of the utilitarian picture. In this
phase, which began around 1920; important
work was made by those who rejected the
Pictorialist enterprise and turned toward
immediacy, instantaneity, and the evanes-
cent moment of the emergence of pictorial
value out of a practice of reportage of one
kind or another. A new version of what
1555 ARTESIA BLVD, 6565 FOUNTAIN AVE
could be called the “Western Picture,”
or the “Western Concept of the Picture,”
appears in this process.

oo pe} THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

The Western Picture is, of course, that framework of the new publishing and com- the smaller, faster cameras and film stock.
tableau, that independently beautiful munications industries, and it elaborated But reportage is inherent in the nature of
depiction and composition that derives a new kind of picture, utilitarian in its the medium, and the evolution of equip-
from the institutionalization of perspective determination by editorial assignment and ment reflects this. Reportage, or the spon-
and dramatic figuration at the origins of novel in its seizure of the instantaneous, of taneous, fleeting aspect of the photographic
modern Western art, with Raphael, Diirer, the “news event” as it happened. For both image, appears simultaneously with the pic-
Bellini and the other familiar maestri. It is these reasons, it seems to have occurred to torial, tableau-like aspect at the origins of
known as a product of divine gift, high skill, a number of photographers (Paul Strand, photography; its traces can be seen in the
deep emotion, and crafty planning. It plays Walker Evans, Brassai, Henri Cartier- blurred elements of Daguerre’s first street
with the notion of the spontaneous, the Bresson) that a new art could be made scenes. Reportage evolves in the pursuit
unanticipated. The master picture-maker by means of a mimesis of these aims and of the blurred parts of pictures.
prepares everything in advance, yet trusts aspects of photography as it really existed
that all the planning in the world will lead in the world of the new culture industries. In this process, photography elaborates
only to something fresh, mobile, light and its version of the Picture, and it is the first
fascinating. The soft body of the brush, This mimesis led to transformations in new Version since the onset of modern
the way it constantly changes shape as it is the concept of the Picture that had conse- painting in the 1860s, or, possibly, since the
used, was the primary means by which the quences for the whole notion of modern emergence of abstract art, if one considers
genius of composition was placed at risk art, and that therefore stand as precondi- abstract paintings to be, in fact, pictures
at each moment, and recovered, transcen- tions for the kind of critique proposed anymore. A new version of the Picture
dent, in the shimmering surfaces of magical by the Conceptual artists after 1965. Post- implies necessarily a turning-point in the
feats of figuration. pictorialist photography is elaborated in development of modernist art. Problems
the working out of a demand that the are raised which will constitute the intellec-
Pictorialist photography was dazzled Picture make an appearance in a practice tual content of Conceptual art, or at least
by the spectacle of Western painting and which, having already largely relinquished significant aspects of that content.
attempted, to some extent, to imitate it the sensuousness of the surface, must also
in acts of pure composition. Lacking the relinquish any explicit preparatory process Alfred Stieglitz; The Flatiron Building, 1902-1903;
means to make the surface of its pictures of composition. Acts of composition are gelatin silver print; 6'”16 x 31% in. (17 x 8.3 cm);
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
unpredictable and important, the first the property of the tableau. In reportage,
phase of Pictorialism, Stieglitz’s phase, the sovereign place of composition is
emulated the fine graphic arts, re-invented retained only as a sort of dynamic of antici-
the beautiful book, set standards for patory framing, a “hunter’s consciousness,”
gorgeousness of composition, and faded. the nervous looking of a “one-eyed cat,”
Without a dialectical conception of its as Lee Friedlander put it. Every picture-
own surface, it could not achieve the kind constructing advantage accumulated over
of planned spontaneity painting had put centuries is given up to the jittery flow of
before the eyes of the world as a universal events as they unfold. The rectangle of the
norm of art. By 1920, photographers inter- viewfinder and the speed of the shutter,
ested in art had begun to look away from photography’s “window of equipment,” is
painting, even from modern painting, all that remains of the great craft-complex
toward the vernacular of their own of composition. The art-concept of photo-
medium, and toward the cinema, to dis- journalism began to force photography into
cover their own principle of spontaneity, what appears to be a modernistic dialectic.
to discover once again, for themselves, By divesting itself of the encumbrances and
that unanticipated appearance of the advantages inherited from older art forms,
Picture demanded by modern aesthetics. reportage pushes toward a discovery of
qualities apparently intrinsic to the
At this moment the art-concept of photo- medium, qualities that must necessarily
journalism appears, the notion that art can distinguish the medium from others, and
be created by imitating photojournalism. through the self-examination of which
This imitation was made necessary by the it can emerge as a modernist art on a
dialectics of avant-garde experimentation. plane with the others.
-Non-autonomous art-forms, like architec-
ture, and new phenomena such as mass This force, or pressure, is not simply social.
communications, became paradigmatic Reportage is not a photographic type
in the 1920s and 1930s because the avant- brought into existence by the requirements
gardes were so involved in a critique of the of social institutions as such, even though
autonomous work of art, so intrigued by institutions like the press played a central
the possibility of going beyond it into a part in defining photojournalism. The press
utopian revision of society and conscious- had some role in shaping the new equip-
ness. Photojournalism was created in the ment of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly

“MARKS OF INDIFFERENCE
One of the most important critiques validity as reportage per se was insufficient In this sense, there cannot be a clear
opened up in Conceptual art was that of for the most radical of purposes. What was demarcation between aestheticist formal-
art-photography’s achieved or perceived necessary was that the picture not only ism and various modes of engaged photog-
“aestheticism.” The revival of interest succeed as reportage and be socially effec- raphy. Subjectivism could become the
in the radical theories and methods of the tive, but that it succeed in putting forward foundation for radical practices in photog-
politicized and objectivistic avant-garde of a new proposition or model of the Picture. raphy just as easily as neo-factography,
the 1920s and 1930s has long been recog- Only in doing both these things simultane- and both are often present in much of the
nized as one of the most significant contri- ously could photography realize itself as work of the 1960s.
butions of the art of the 1960s, particularly a modernist art form, and participate in the
in America. Productivism, “factography,” radical and revolutionary cultural projects The peculiar, yet familiar, political ambigu-
and Bauhaus concepts were turned against of that era. In this context, rejection of a ity as art of the experimental forms in and
the apparently “depoliticized” and resub- classicizing aesthetic of the picture—in the around Conceptualism, particularly in the
jectivized art of the 1940s and 1950s. Thus, name of proletarian amateurism, for exam- context of 1968, is the result of the fusion,
we have seen that the kind of formalistic ple—must be seen as a claim to a new level or even confusion, of tropes of art-photog-
and “re-subjectivized” art-photography that of pictorial consciousness. raphy with aspects of its critique. Far from
developed around Edward Weston and being anomalous, this fusion reflects pre-
Ansel Adams on the West Coast, or Harry Thus, art-photography was compelled to cisely the inner structure of photography
Callahan and Aaron Siskind in Chicago be both anti-aestheticist and aesthetically as potentially avant-garde or even neo-
in those years (to use only American exam- significant, albeit in a new “negative” sense, avant-garde art. This implies that the new
ples) attempted to leave behind not only at the same moment. Here, it is important forms of photographic practice and experi-
any link with agit-prop, but even any con- to recognize that it was the content of the ment in the sixties and seventies did not
nection with the nervous surfaces of social avant-garde dialogue itself that was central derive exclusively from a revival of anti-
life, and to resume a stately modernist pic- in creating the demand for an aestheticism subjectivist and anti-formalist tendencies.
torialism. This work has been greeted with which was the object of critique by that Rather, the works of figures like Douglas
opprobrium from radical critics since the same avant-garde. In Theory of the Avant- Huebler, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman,
beginnings of the new debates in the 1960s. Garde (1974) Peter Burger argued that the Richard Long, or Joseph Kosuth emerge
The orthodox view is that Cold War pres- avant-garde emerged historically in a cri- from a space constituted by the already-
sures compelled socially-conscious photog- tique of the completed aestheticism of matured transformations of both types of
raphers away from the borderline forms of nineteenth-century modern art.? He sug- approach—factographic and subjectivistic,
art-photojournalism toward the more sub- gests that, around 1900, the avant-garde activist and formalist, “Marxian” and
jectivistic versions of art informel. In this generation, confronted with the social and “Kantian” —present in the work of their
process, the more explosive and problem- institutional fact of the separation between precursors in the 1940s and 1950s, in the
atic forms and concepts of radical avant- art and the other autonomous domains of intricacies of the dialectic of “reportage
gardism were driven from view, until they life felt compelled to attempt to leap over as art-photography,” as art-photography
made a return in the activistic neo-avant- that separation and reconnect high art and par excellence. The radical critiques of art-
gardism of the 1960s. There is much truth the conduct of affairs in the world in order
in this construction, but it is flawed in that to save the aesthetic dimension by tran- Andre Kertész; Meudon, 1928, 1928; gelatin
it draws too sharp a line between the meth- scending it. Biirger’s emphasis on this drive silver print; 16 7/6 x 12% in. (41.8 x 31.8 cm);
courtesy Estate of André Kertész
ods and approaches of politicized avant- to transcend Aestheticism and autonomous
gardism and those of the more subjectivistic art neglects the fact that the obsession with
and formalistic trends in art-photography. the aesthetic, now transformed into a sort
of taboo, was carried over into the center
The situation is more complex because the of every possible artistic thought or critical
possibilities for autonomous formal compo- idea developed by vanguardism. Thus, to
sition in photography were themselves a certain extent, one can invert Biirger’s
refined and brought onto the historical thesis and say that avant-garde art not only
and social agenda by the medium’s evolu- constituted a critique of Aestheticism, but
tion in the context of vanguardist art. The also re-established Aestheticism as a per-
art-concept of photojournalism is a theoret- manent issue through its intense proble-
ical formalization of the ambiguous condi- matization of it. This thesis corresponds
tion of the most problematic kind of especially closely to the situation of photo-
photograph. That photograph emerges on graphy within vanguardism. Photography
the wing, out of a photographer’s complex had no history of autonomous status per-
social engagement (his or her assignment); fected over time into an imposing institu-
it records something significant in the tion. It emerged too late for that. Its
event, in the engagement, and gains some aestheticizing thus was not, and could not
validity from that. But this validity alone is be, simply an object for an avant-gardist
only a social validity—the picture’s success critique, since it was brought into existence
as reportage per se. The entire avant-garde by that same critique.
of the 1920s and 1930s was aware that

34 JEFF WALL
photography inaugurated and occasionally criticisms animated by the attitudes of the extension of avant-garde aestheticism.
realized in Conceptual art can be seen the Student Movement and the New Left. As with the first avant-garde, post-
as both an overturning of academicized Naive as such thoughts might seem today, autonomous, “post-studio” art required its
approaches to these issues, and as an they were valuable in turning serious double legitimation—first, its legitimation
extrapolation of existing tensions inside attention toward the ways in which art- as having transcended—or at least having
that academicism, a new critical phase of photography had not yet become Art. authentically tested—the boundaries of
academicism and not simply a renunciation Until it became Art, with a big A, photo- autonomous art and having become func-
of it. Photoconceptualism was able to bring graphs could not be experienced in terms tional in some real way; and then, secondly,
new energies from the other fine arts into of the dialectic of validity which marks that this test, this new utility, result in works
the problematic of art-photojournalism, all modernist aesthetic enterprises. or forms which proposed compelling mod-
and this had tended to obscure the ways els of art as such, at the same time that they
in which it was rooted in the unresolved Paradoxically, this could only happen in seemed to dissolve, abandon, or negate it.
but well-established aesthetic issues of reverse. Photography could emerge socially I propose the following characterization of
the photography of the 1940s and 1950s. as art only at the moment when its aesthetic this process: autonomous art had reached
presuppositions seemed to be undergoing a state where it appeared that it could only
Intellectually, the stage was thus set for a withering radical critique, a critique validly be made by means of the strictest
a revival of the whole drama of reportage apparently aimed at foreclosing any further imitation of the non-autonomous. This het-
within avant-gardism. The peculiar situa- aestheticization or “artification” of the eronomy might take the form of direct criti-
tion of art-photography in the art market medium. Photoconceptualism led the way cal commentary, as with Art & Language;
at the beginning of the 1960s is another toward the complete acceptance of photog- with the production of political propa-
precondition, whose consequences are raphy as art—autonomous, bourgeois, ganda, so common in the 1970s; or with the
not simply sociological. It is almost aston- collectible art—by virtue of insisting that many varieties of “intervention” or appro-
ishing to remember that important art-pho- this medium might be privileged to be the priation practiced more recently. But, in
tographs cold be purchased for under $100 negation of that whole idea. In being that all these procedures, an autonomous work
not only in 1950 but in 1960. This suggests negation, the last barriers were broken. of art is still necessarily created. The inno-
that, despite the internal complexity of Inscribed in a new avant-gardism, and vation is that the content of the work is the
the aesthetic structure of art-photography, blended with elements of text, sculpture, validity of the model or hypothesis of non-
its moment of recognition as art in capitalist painting, or drawing, photography became autonomy it creates.
societies had not yet occurred. All the aes- the quintessential “anti-object.” As
thetic preconditions for its emergence as a the neo-avant-gardes re-examined and This complex game of mimesis has been,
major form of modernist art had come into unraveled the orthodoxies of the 1920s of course, the foundation for all the
being, but it took the new critiques and and 1930s, the boundaries of the domain “endgame” strategies within avant-gardism.
transformations of the sixties and seventies of autonomous art were unexpectedly The profusion of new forms, processes,
to actualize these socially. It could be said widened, not narrowed. In the explosion of materials and subjects which characterizes
that the very absence of a market in pho- post-autonomous models of practice which the art of the 1970s was to a great extent
tography at the moment of a rapidly boom- characterized the discourse of the seventies, stimulated by mimetic relationships
ing one for painting drew two kinds of we can detect, maybe only with hindsight, with other social production processes:
energy toward the medium.
Richard Long; England 1968, 1968; black-and-white photograph; dimensions variable; courtesy the artist
The first is a speculative and inquisitive
energy, one which circulates everywhere
things appear to be “undervalued.”
Undervaluation implies the future, oppor-
tunity, and the sudden appearance of
something forgotten. The undervalued is
a category akin to Benjaminian ones like
the “just past,” or the “recently forgotten.”

The second is a sort of negative version

of the first. In the light of the new critical
skepticism toward “high art” that began
‘to surface in the intellectual glimmerings
around Pop art and its mythologies, the lack
of interest of art marketers and collectors
marked photography with a utopian poten-
tial. Thus, the thought occurred that a pho-
tograph might be the Picture which could
not be integrated into “the regime,” the
commercial-bureaucratic-discursive order
which was rapidly becoming the object of

ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESION LISnan ii

os RPS
MARKS OF INDIFFERENCE
industrial, commercial, cinematic, etc. Art- problematics of the staged, or posed, pic- It is simultaneously agriculture, religion,
photography, as we have seen, had already ture, through new concepts of performance. urbanism, and theater, an intervention in
evolved an intricate mimetic structure, Second, the inscription of photography into a lonely, picturesque spot which becomes a
in which artists imitated photojournalists a nexus of experimental practices led to a setting completed artistically by the gesture
in order to create Pictures. This elaborate, direct but distantiated and parodic relation- and the photograph for which the gesture
mature mimetic order of production ship with the art-concept of photojournal- was enacted. Long does not photograph
brought photography to the forefront of ism. Although the work of many artists events in the process of their occurrence,
the new pseudo-heteronomy, and permit- could be discussed in this context, for the but stages an event for the benefit of a pre-
ted it to become a paradigm for all aestheti- sake of brevity I will discuss the photo- conceived photographic rendering. The
cally-critical, model-constructing thought graphic work of Richard Long and Bruce picture is presented as the subsidiary form
about art. Photoconceptualism worked out Nauman as representative of the first issue, of an act, as “photo-documentation.” It has
many of the implications of this, so much that of Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, become that, however, by means of a new
so that it may begin to seem that many of and Robert Smithson of the second. kind of photographic mise-en-sceéne. That
Conceptual art’s essential achievements are is, it exists and is legitimated as continuous
either created in the form of photographs Long’s and Nauman’s photographs docu- with the project of reportage by moving in
or are otherwise mediated by them. ment already conceived artistic gestures, precisely the opposite direction, toward a
actions, or “studio-events”—things completely designed pictorial method, an
Reportage is introverted and parodied, that stand self-consciously as conceptual, introverted masquerade that plays games
manneristically, in aspects of photoconcep- aesthetic models for states of affairs in with the inherited aesthetic proclivities of
tualism. The notion that an artistically the world, which, as such, need no longer art-photography-as-reportage. Many of the
significant photograph can any longer be appear directly in the picture. Long’s same elements, moved indoors, character-
made in a direct imitation of photojournal- England 1968 (1968) documents an action ize Nauman’s studio photographs, such
ism is rejected as having been historically or gesture, made by the artist alone, as Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966)
completed by the earlier avant-garde out in the countryside, away from the nor- or Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966-67/70).
and by the lyrical subjectivism of 1950s art- mal environs of art or performance. The photographer’s studio, and the generic
photography. The gesture of reportage Generically, his pictures are landscapes, complex of “studio photography,” was the
is withdrawn from the social field and and their mood is rather different from Pictorialist antithesis against which the
attached to a putative theatrical event. The the typologies and intentions of reportage. aesthetics of reportage were elaborated.
social field tends to be abandoned to pro- Conventional artistic landscape photogra- Nauman changes the terms. Working within
fessional photojournalism proper, as if the phy might feature a foreground motif, such the experimental framework of what was
aesthetic problems associated with depict- as a curious heap of stones or a gnarled beginning at the time to be called “per-
ing it were no longer of any consequence, tree, and counterpoint it to the rest of the formance art,” he carries out photographic
and photojournalism had entered not scene, showing it to be singular, differenti- acts of reportage whose subject-matter is
so much a postmodernist phase as a “post- ated from its surroundings, and yet existing the self-conscious, self-centered “play” tak-
aesthetic” one in which it was excluded from by means of those surroundings. In such ing place in the studios of artists who have
aesthetic evolution for a time. This, by the ways, a landscape picture can be thought moved “beyond” the modern fine arts into
way, suited the sensibilities of those political to be a report on a state of affairs, and the new hybridities. Studio photography
activists who attempted a new version of therefore be consistent with an art-concept is no longer isolated from reportage: it is
proletarian photography in the period. of reportage. Long’s walked line in the reduced analytically to coverage of what-
grass substitutes itself for the foreground ever is happening in the studio, that place
This introversion, or subjectivization, of motif. It is a gesture akin to Barnett once so rigorously controlled by precedent
reportage was manifested in two important Newman’s notion of the establishment of and formula, but which was in the process
directions. First, it brought photography a “Here” in the void of a primeval terrain. of being reinvented once more as theater,
into a new relationship with the factory, reading room, meeting place,
Bruce Nauman; Failing to Levitate in the Studio, gallery, museum, and many other things.
Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966; black-and-white photograph; 20 x 24 in.
1966-1967/1970 (under cat. no. 106) (50.8 x 60.9 cm); courtesy the artist
Nauman’s photographs, films, and videos
of this period are done in two modes or
styles. The first, that of Failing to Levitate,
is “direct,” rough, and shot in black and
white. The other is based on studio lighting
effects—multiple sources, colored gels,
emphatic contrasts—and is of course done
in color. The two styles, reduced to a set
of basic formulae and effects, are signifiers
for the new co-existence of species of
photography which had seemed ontologi-
cally separated and even opposed in
the art history of photography up to that
time. It is as if the reportage works go

36 JEFF WALL
 back to Muybridge and the sources of all the relationships between visual art and His photojournalism is at once self-
traditional concepts of photographic docu- literature. Smithson’s most important pub- portraiture—that is, performance—and
mentary, and the color pictures to the early lished works, such as “The Monuments of reportage about what was hidden and even
“gags” and jokes, to Man Ray and Moholy- Passaic,” and “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in repressed in the art he most admired. It
Nagy, to the birthplace of effects used the Yucatan” are “auto-accompaniments.” located the impulse toward self-sufficient
for their own sake. The two reigning myths Smithson the journalist-photographer and non-objective forms of art in concrete,
of photography—the one that claims accompanies Smithson the artist-experi- personal responses to real life, social
that photographs are “true” and the one menter and is able to produce a sophisti- experiences, thereby contributing to the
that claims they are not—are shown to cated apologia for his sculptural work in the new critiques of formalism which were
be grounded in the same praxis, available guise of popular entertainment. His essays so central to Conceptual art’s project.
in the same place, the studio, at that place’s do not make the Conceptualist claim to be
moment of historical transformation. works of visual art, but appear to remain Dan Graham’s involvement with the
content with being works of literature. The classical traditions of reportage is unique
These practices, or strategies, are extremely photographs included in them purport to among the artists usually identified with
common by about 1969, so common as illustrate the narrative or commentary. The Conceptual art, and his architectural photo-
to be de rigueur across the horizon of per- narratives, in turn, describe the event of graphs continue some aspects of Walker
formance art, earth art, Arte Povera, and making the photographs. “One never knew Evans’s project. In this, Graham locates
Conceptualism, and it can be said that these what side of the mirror one was on,” he his practice at the boundary of photojour-
new methodologies of photographic prac- mused in “Passaic,” as if reflecting on the nalism, participating in it, while at the
tice are the strongest factor linking together parody of photojournalism he was in the same time placing it at the service of other
the experimental forms of the period, which process of enacting. Smithson’s parody was aspects of his oeuvre. His architectural
can seem so disparate and irreconcilable. a way of dissolving, or softening, the objec- photographs provide a social grounding
tivistic and positivistic tone of Minimalism, for the structural models of intersubjective
This integration or fusion of reportage of subjectivizing it by associating its reduc- experience he elaborated in text, video,
and performance, its manneristic introver- tive formal language with intricate, drifting, performance and sculptural environmental
sion, can be seen as an implicitly parodic even delirious moods or states of mind. pieces. His works do not simply make
critique of the concepts of art-photography. reference to the larger social world in the
Smithson and Graham, in part because they The Minimalist sculptural forms to manner of photojournalism; rather they
were active as writers, were able to provide which Smithson’s texts constantly allude refer to Graham’s own other projects,
amore explicit parody of photojournalism appeared to erase the associative chain which, true to Conceptual form, are models
than Nauman or Long. of experience, the interior monologue of of the social, not depictions of it.
creativity, insisting on the pure immediacy
Photojournalism as a social institution can of the product itself, the work as such, Graham’s Homes for America (1966-67)
be defined most simply as a collaboration as “specific object.” Smithson’s exposure has taken on canonical status in this regard.
between a writer and a photographer. of what he saw as Minimalism’s emotional Here the photo-essay format so familiar
Conceptual art’s intellectualism was engen- interior depends on the return of ideas to the history of photography has been
dered by young, aspiring artists for whom of time and process, of narrative and meticulously replicated as a model of the
critical writing was an important practice enactment, of experience, memory, and institution of photojournalism. Like Walker
of self-definition. The example of Donald allusion, to the artistic forefront, against Evans at Fortune, Graham writes the text
Judd’s criticism for Arts Magazine was deci- the rhetoric of both Greenberg and Judd. and supplies the pictures to go along with it.
sive here, and essays like “Specific Objects” Homes was actually planned as an essay on
(1964) had the impact, almost, of literary Cover of Artforum, no. 1 (September 1969),
works of art. The interplay between a vet- with photography of Robert Smithson’s First Mirror Robert Smithson, The Bridge Monument Showing
Displacement, 1969 Sidewalks, 1967, from Monuments of Passaic
eran littérateur, Clement Greenberg; a (cat. no. 173)
young academic art critic, Michael Fried;
and Judd, a talented stylist, is one of the
richest episodes in the history of American
criticism, and had much to do with igniting
the idea of a written critique standing
* as a work of art. Smithson’s “The Crystal
Land,” published in Harper’s Bazaar in
1966, is an homage to Judd as a creator of
both visual and literary forms. Smithson’s
innovation, however, is to avoid the genre
of art criticism, writing a mock-travelogue
instead. He plays the part of the inquisitive,
belletristic journalist, accompanying and
interpreting his subject. He narrativizes his
account of Judd’s art, moves from critical
commentary to storytelling and re-invents
suburban architecture for an art magazine, threshold of the autonomous work, crossing constitute works like Duration Piece #5,
and could certainly stand unproblematically and recrossing it, refusing to depart from Amsterdam, Holland (1970) or Duration
on its own as such. By chance, it was never the artistic dilemma of reportage and Piece #7, Rome (1973) function as models
actually published as Graham had intended thereby establishing an aesthetic model for that verbal or written construction,
it. Thereby, it migrated to the form of a lith- of just that threshold condition. which, in the working world, causes photo-
ographic print of an apocryphal two-page graphs to be made. The more the assign-
spread.3 The print, and the original photos Huebler’s work is also engaged with creat- ment is emptied of what could normatively
included in it, do not constitute an act or ing and examining the effect photographs considered to be compelling social subject
practice of reportage so much as a model of have when they masquerade as part of matter, the more visible it is simply as
it. This model is a parody, a meticulous and some extraneous project, in which they an instance of structure, an order, and the
detached imitation whose aim is to interro- appear to be means and not ends. Unlike more clearly it can be experienced as a
gate the legitimacy (and the processes of Smithson or Graham, though, Huebler model of relationships between writing and
legitimation) of its original, and thereby makes no literary claims for the textual photography. By emptying subject matter
(and only thereby) to legitimate itself as art. part of his works, the “programs” in which from his practice of photography, Huebler
his photographs are utilized. His works recapitulates important aspects of the
The photographs included in the work approach Conceptual art per se in that they development of modernist painting.
are among Graham’s most well-known and eschew literary status and make claims only Mondrian, for example, moved away from
have established important precedents for as visual art objects. Nevertheless, his depictions of the landscape, to experimen-
his subsequent photographic work. In initi- renunciation of the literary is a language- tal patterns with only a residual depictive
ating his project in photography in terms act, an act enunciated as a manoeuvre value, to abstract works which analyze and
of a parodic model of the photo-essay, of writing. Huebler’s “pieces” involve the model relationships but do not depict or
Graham positions all his picture-making appropriation, utilization and mimesis represent them. The idea of an art which
as art in a very precise, yet very conditional, of various “systems of documentation,” provides a direct experience of situations
sense. Each photograph may be—or, must of which photography is only one. It is or relationships, not a secondary, represen-
be considered as possibly being—no more positioned within the works by a group tational one, is one of abstract art’s most
than an illustration to an essay, and there- of generically related protocols, defined powerful creations. The viewer does not
fore not an autonomous work of art. Thus, in writing, and it is strictly within these experience the “re-representation” of
they appear to satisfy, as do Smithson’s parameters that the images have meaning absent things, but the presence of a thing,
photographs, the demand for an imitation and artistic status. Where Graham and the work of art itself, with all of its
of the non-autonomous. Homes for Smithson make their works through mime- indwelling dynamism, tension and com-
America, in being both really just an essay sis and parody of the forms of photojour- plexity. The experience is more like an
on the suburbs and, as well, an artist’s print, nalism, its published product, Huebler encounter with an entity than with a mere
constituted itself explicitly as a canonical parodies the assignment, the “project” picture. The entity does not bear a depic-
instance of the new kind of anti- or enterprise that sets the whole process tion of another entity, more important than
autonomous yet autonomous work of into motion to begin with. The seemingly it; rather, it appears and is experienced
art. The photographs in it oscillate at the pointless and even trivial procedures that in the way objects and entities are experi-
enced in the emotionally-charged contexts
Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts Magazine 41 (December 1966—January 1967): 21-22 of social life.

Huebler’s mimesis of the model-construc-

tive aspects of modernist abstract art con-
tradicts, of course, the natural depictive
Armory ’66 qualities of photography. This contradic-
Not Quite What
We Had in Mind
4 ASEEL
tion is the necessary center of these works.
By making photography’s inescapable
depictive character continue even where
it has been decreed that there is nothing
of significance to depict, Huebler aims to
make visible something essential about
the medium’s nature. The artistic, creative
part of this work is obviously not the pho-
tography, the picture-making. This dis-
plays all the limited qualities identified
with photoconceptualism’s de-skilled,
amateurist sense of itself. What is creative
in these works are the written assignments >

or programs. Every element that could

make the pictures “interesting” or “good”
in terms derived from art-photography is
systematically and rigorously excluded.

38 JEFF WALL
At the same time, Huebler eliminates ally considered essential to art has been It is a commonplace to note that it was the
all conventional “literary” characteristics removed from it. Whatever the thing the appearance of photography which, as the
from his written statements. The work artist has thereby created might appear to representative of the Industrial Revolution
is comprised of these two simultaneous be, it is first and foremost that which results in the realm of the image, set the historical
negotiations, which produce a “reportage” from the absence of elements which have process of modernism in motion. Yet
without event, and a writing without narra- hitherto always been there. The reception, photography’s own historical evolution
tive, commentary, or opinion. This double if not the production, of modernist art has into modernist discourse has been deter-
negation imitates the criteria for radical been consistently formed by this phenome- mined by the fact that, unlike the older
abstract painting and sculpture, and non, and the idea of modernism as such is arts, it cannot dispense with depiction
pushes thinking about photography toward inseparable from it. The historical process and so, apparently, cannot participate
an awareness of the dialectics of its inher- of critical reflexivity derives its structure in the adventure it might be said to have
ent depictive qualities. Huebler’s works and identity from the movements possible suggested in the first place.
allow us to contemplate the condition of in, and characteristic of, the older fine
“depictivity” itself and imply that it is this arts, like painting. The drama of modern- The dilemma, then, in the process of legiti-
contradiction between the unavoidable ization, in which artists cast off the anti- mating photography as a modernist art is
process of depicting appearances, and the quated characteristics of their métiers, is that the medium has virtually no dispensa-
equally unavoidable process of making a compelling one, and has become the con- ble characteristics, the way painting, for
objects, that permits photography to ceptual model for modernism as a whole. example, does, and therefore cannot con-
become a model of an art whose subject Clement Greenberg wrote: “Certain factors form to the ethos of reductivism, so suc-
matter is the idea of art. we used to think essential to the making cinctly formulated by Greenberg in these
and experiencing of art are shown not to lines, also from “Modernist Painting”:
If. Amateurization be so by the fact that Modernist painting “What had to be exhibited was not only that
has been able to dispense with them and which was unique and irreducible in art in
Photography, like all the arts that preceded yet continue to offer the experience of art general, but also that which was unique and
it, is founded on the skill, craft, and imagi- in all its essentials.”> irreducible in each particular art. Each art
nation of its practitioners. It was, however, had to determine, through its own opera-
the fate of all the arts to become modernist Abstract and experimental art begins tions and works, the effects exclusive to
through a critique of their own legitimacy, its revolution and continues its evolution itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, nar-
in which the techniques and abilities with the rejection of depiction, of its row its area of competence, but at the same
most intimately identified with them were own history as limning and picturing, time it would make its possession of that
placed in question. The wave of reduc- and then with the deconsecration of the area all the more certain.”6
tivism that broke in the 1960s had, of institution which came to be known as
course, been gathering during the preced- Representation. Painting finds a new felos, The essence of the modernist deconstruc-
ing half-century, and it was the maturing a new identity and a new glory in being tion of painting as picture-making was not
(one could almost say, the totalizing) the site upon which this transformation realized in abstract art as such; it was real-
of that idea that brought into focus the works itself out. ized in emphasizing the distinction between
explicit possibility of a “conceptual art,”
an art whose content was none other Dan Graham; Homes for America, 1966-1967; photo-offset reproduction of layout for Arts Magazine;
than its own idea of itself, and the history 34% x 25 in. (87.6 x 63.5 cm); Walker Art Center

of such an idea’s becoming respectable.

Painters and sculptors worked their way Homes for

into this problem by scrutinizing and repu- America
D. GRAHAM

diating—if only experimentally—their

own abilities, the special capacities that had
historically distinguished them from other
people—non-artists, unskilled or untal-
ented people. This act of renunciation had
moral and utopian implications. For the
painter, a radical repudiation of complicity
with Western traditions was a powerful
“new mark of distinction in a new era of
what Nietzsche called “a revaluation of all
values.”4 Moreover, the significance of the
repudiation was almost immediately appar-
ent to people with even a passing awareness
of art, though apparent in a negative way.
“What! You don’t want things to look
three-dimensional? Ridiculous!” It is easy
to experience the fact that something usu-
the institution of the Picture and the neces- sion in the logic of reductivism. The essen- high-culture sources were circulating
sary structure of the depiction itself. It was tial reduction came on the level of skill. extensively in the various new Culture
physically possible to separate the actions Photography could be integrated into the Industries in Europe, the United States,
of the painter—those touches of the brush new radical logics by eliminating all the the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. This
which had historically always, in the West pictorial suavity and technical sophistica- transit between “high” and “low” had
at least, led to a depiction—from depiction, tion it had accumulated in the process of become the central problematic for the
and abstract art was the most conclusive its own imitation of the Great Picture. It avant-garde because it reflected so deci-
evidence for this. was possible, therefore, to test the medium sively the process of modernization of all
for its indispensable elements, without cultures. The great question was whether
Photography constitutes a depiction not abandoning depiction, by finding ways to or not art as it had emerged from the past
by the accumulation of individual marks, legitimate pictures that demonstrated the would be “modernized” by being dissolved
but by the instantaneous operation of an absence of the conventional marks of pic- into the new mass-cultural structures.
integrated mechanism. All the rays permit- torial distinction developed by the great
ted to pass through the lens form an image auteurs, from Atget to Arbus. Hovering behind all tendencies toward
immediately, and the lens, by definition, reductivism was the shadow of this great
creates a focused image at its correct focal Already by around 1955, the revalorization “reduction.” The experimentation with
length. Depiction is the only possible and reassessment of vernacular idioms of the “anaesthetic,” with “the look of non-
result of the camera system, and the kind popular culture had emerged as part of a art,” “the condition of no-art,” or with
of image formed by a lens is the only new “new objectivity,” an objectivism bred “the loss of the visual,” is in this light
image possible in photography. Thus, no by the limitations of lyrical art informel, a kind of tempting of fate. Behind the
matter how impressed photographers may the introverted and self-righteously lofty Greenbergian formulae, first elaborated
have been by the analytical rigor of mod- art forms of the 1940s and 1950s. This new in the late 1930s, lies the fear that there
ernist critical discourse, they could not critical trend had sources in high art and may be, finally, no indispensable charac-
participate in it directly in their practice high academe, as the names Jasper Johns teristics that distinguish the arts, and that
because the specificities of their medium and Piero Manzoni, Roland Barthes and art as it has come down to us is very dis-
did not permit it. This physical barrier has Leslie Fiedler, indicate. It continues a pensable indeed. Gaming with the anaes-
a lot to do with the distanced relationship fundamental project of the earlier avant- thetic was both an intellectual necessity
between painting and photography in garde—the transgression of the boundaries in the context of modernism, and at the
the era of art-photography, the first sixty between “high” and “low” art, between same time the release of social and psychic
or so years of this century. artists and the rest of the people, between energies which had a stake in the “liquida-
“art” and “life.” Although Pop art in the tion” of bourgeois “high art.” By 1960
Despite the barrier, around the middle late fifties and early sixties seemed to con- there was pleasure to be had in this experi-
of the 1960s, numerous young artists and centrate on bringing mass-culture elements mentation, a pleasure, moreover, which
art students appropriated photography, into high-culture forms, already by the had been fully sanctioned by the aggressi-
turned their attention away from auteurist 1920s the situation had become far more vity of the first avant-garde or, at least,
versions of its practice, and forcibly sub- complex and reciprocal than that, and important parts of it.
jected the medium to a full-scale immer- motifs and styles from avant-garde and

Douglas Huebler; Duration Piece #7, Rome, March 1973 (detail), 1973; 14 black-and-white photographs and statement; overall dimensions 39/4 x 32/2 in.
(99.7 x 81.9 cm) framed; courtesy Darcy Huebler

<5 ies 4 S le oe

Duration Piece #7
Rome

Fourteen photographs were made, at exact 30 second intervals, in order to document

specific changes in the relationship between two aspects of the water falling from
the rocks in one area at the base of the Fountain of Trevi.

The photographs, undesignated by the sequence in which they were made, join with
this statement to constitute the form of this work.

March, 1973 Douglas Huebler

40 JEFF WALL
Radical deconstructions therefore took aura of seriousness itself. It is this aura art is entirely unimportant in a society that
the form of searches for models of “the which becomes the target of the new wave only tolerates it. This situation affects art
anaesthetic.” Duchamp had charted this of critical play. Avant-garde art had held itself, causing it to bear the marks of indif-
territory before 1920, and his influence was the anesthetic in a place by a web of sophis- ference: there is the disturbing sense that
the decisive one for the new critical objec- ticated manoeuvres, calculated transgres- this art might just as well be different
tivisms surfacing forty years later with sive gestures, which always paused on the or might not exist at all.”7
Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Manzoni, threshold of real abandonment. Remember
John Cage, and the rest. The anaesthetic Bellmer’s pornography, Heartfield’s propa- The pure appropriation of the anaesthetic,
found its emblem in the Readymade, the ganda, Mayakovsky’s advertising. Except the imagined completion of the gesture
commodity in all its guises, forms, and for the Readymade, there was no complete of passing over into anti-art, or non-art, is
traces. Working-class, lower-middle class, mimesis or appropriation of the anaes- the act of internalization of society’s indif-
suburbanite, and underclass milieux were thetic, and it may be that the Readymade, ference to the happiness and seriousness
expertly scoured for the relevant utilitarian that thing that had indeed crossed the line, of art. It is also, therefore, an expression
images, depictions, figurations, and objects provided a sort of fulcrum upon which, of the artist’s own identification with bale-
that violated all the criteria of canonical between 1920 and 1960, everything else ful social forces. This identification may be,
modernist taste, style, and technique. could remain balanced. as always in modernism, experimental, but
Sometimes the early years of Pop art seem the experiment must be carried out in actu-
like a race to find the most perfect, meta- The unprecedented mimesis of “the condi- ality, with the risk that an “identification
physically banal image, that cipher that tion of no art” on the part of the artists with the aggressor” will really occur and be
demonstrates the ability of culture to con- of the early sixties-seems to be an instinctive so successful socially as art that it becomes
tinue when every aspect of what had been reflection of these lines from Theodor inescapable and permanent. Duchamp
known in modern art as seriousness, exper- Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which was being gingerly seemed to avoid this; Warhol
tise, and reflexiveness had been dropped. composed in that same period: “Aesthetics, perhaps did not. In not doing so, he helped
The empty, the counterfeit, the functional, or what is left of it, seems to assume tacitly make explicit some of the hidden energies
and the brutal themselves were of course that the survival of art is unproblematic. of reductivism. Warhol made his taboo-
nothing new as art in 1960, having all Central for this kind of aesthetics therefore breaking work by subjecting photography
become tropes of the avant-garde via is the question of how art survives, not to reductivist methodology, both in his
Surrealism. From the viewpoint created whether it will survive at all. This view silkscreen paintings and in his films. The
by Pop art, though, earlier treatments of has little credibility today. Aesthetics can paintings reiterated or appropriated photo-
this problem seem emphatic in their adhe- no longer rely on art as a fact. If art is to journalism and glamour photography and
rence to the Romantic idea of the trans- remain faithful to its concept, it must pass claimed that picture-making skills were of
formative power of authentic art. The over into anti-art, or it must develop a sense minor importance in making significant
anaesthetic is transformed as art, but along of self-doubt which is born of the moral pictorial art. The films extended the argu-
the fracture-line of shock. The shock gap between its continued existence and ment directly into the regime of the photo-
caused by the appearance of the anaes- mankind’s catastrophes, past and future,” graphic, and established an aesthetic of
thetic in a serious work is calmed by the and “At the present time significant modern the amateurish which tapped into New
York traditions going back via the Beats
Publicity still from John Cassavetes’ Faces (filmed 1965/released 1968); courtesy Photofest
and independents to the late 1930s and
the film experiments of James Agee and
Helen Levitt. To the tradition of independ-
ent, intimate, and naturalistic filmmaking,
as practiced by Robert Frank, John
Cassavetes, or Frederick Wiseman, Warhol
added (perhaps “subtracted” would be
the better word) the agony of reductivism.
Cassavetes fused the documentary tradition
with method acting in films like Faces
(1968), with the intention of getting close to
people. The rough photography and light-
ing drew attention to itself, but the style
signified a moral decision to forego techni-
cal finish in the name of emotional truth.
Warhol reversed this in films like Eat, Kiss,
or Sleep (all 1963), separating the picture-
style from its radical humanist content-
types, in effect using it to place people at
a peculiar distance, in a new relationship
with the spectator. Thus a methodological
model is constructed: the non-professional
or amateurist camera technique, conven-
tionally associated with anti-commercial kitsch” could be broken only by a radical of deconstructive radicalism—expressed
naturalism and existential, if not political, transformation and negation of high art. in ideas like “the conditions of no art,” and
commitment, is separated from those asso- These arguments repeat those of the earlier “every man is an artist”—could be applied
ciations and turned toward new psycho- Constructivists, Dadaists, and Surrealists to photography primarily, if not exclu-
social subjects, including a new version of almost word for word, nowhere more con- sively, through the imitation of amateur
the glamour it wanted to leave behind. In sciously than in Guy Debord’s The Society picture-making. This was no arbitrary
this process, amateurism as such becomes of the Spectacle (1967): “Art in the period decision. A popular system of photography
visible as the photographic modality or style of its dissolution, as a movement of nega- based on a minimal level of skill was insti-
which, in itself, signifies the detachment of tion in pursuit of its own transcendence tuted by George Eastman in 1888, with the
photography from three great norms of the in a historical society where history is not Kodak slogan, “you push the button; we
Western pictorial tradition—the formal, the directly lived, is at once an art of change do the rest.” In the 1960s, Jean-Luc
technical, and the one relating to the range and a pure expression of the impossibility Godard debunked his own creativity with
of subject-matter. Warhol violates all these of change. The more grandiose its the comment that “Kodak does 98 per-
norms simultaneously, as Duchamp had demands, the further from its grasp is true cent.” The means by which photography
done before him with the Readymade. self-realization. This is an art that is neces- could join and contribute to the movement
Duchamp managed to separate his work sarily avant-garde; and it is an art that is not. of the modernist autocritique was the
as an object from the dominant traditions, Its vanguard is its own disappearance.”? user-friendly mass-market gadget-camera.
but not until Warhol had the picture been The Brownie, with its small gauge roll-film
accorded the same treatment.8 Warhol’s The practical transformation of art (as and quick shutter was also, of course, the
replacement of the notion of the artist as opposed to the idea of it) implies the trans- prototype for the equipment of the
a skilled producer with that of the artist as formation of the practices of both artists photojournalist, and therefore is present,
a consumer of new picture-making gadgets and their audiences, the aim being to oblit- as a historical shadow, in the evolution of
was only the most obvious and striking erate or disable both categories into a kind art-photography as it emerged in its
enactment of what could be called a new of dialectical synthesis of them, a Schiller- dialectic with photojournalism. But the
amateurism, which marks so much of the like category of emancipated humanity process of professionalization of photogra-
art of the 1960s and earlier 1970s. which needs neither Representation nor phy led to technical transformations of
Specatorship. These ideals were an impor- small-scale cameras, which, until the more
Amateurish film and photographic images tant aspect of the movement for the trans- recent proliferation of mass-produced
and styles of course related to the docu- formation of artistry, which opened up SLRs, reinstituted an economic barrier for
mentary tradition, but their deepest the question of skill. The utopian project the amateur that became a social and cul-
resonance is with the work of actual ama- of rediscovering the roots of creativity in tural one as well. Not until the 1960s
teurs—the general population, the “peo- a spontaneity and intersubjectivity freed did we see tourists and picnickers sporting
ple.” To begin with, we must recognize a from all specialization and spectacularized Pentaxes and Nikons; before then they
conscious utopianism in this turn toward expertise combined with the actual profu- used the various Kodak or Kodak-like
the technological vernacular: Joseph sion of light consumer technologies to products, such as the Hawkeye, or the
Beuys’s slogan “every man is an artist,” legitimate a widespread “de-skilling” and Instamatic, which were little different
or Lawrence Weiner’s diffident conditions “re-skilling” of art and art education. The from a 1925-model Brownie.!0
for the realization and possession of his slogan “painting is dead” had been heard
works reflect with particular clarity the from the avant-garde since 1920; it meant Andy Warhol; K/SS, 1963; film still, black-and-white,
idealistic side of the claim that the making that it was no longer necessary to separate silent; The Andy Warhol Museum: Founding Collection
of artworks needs to be, and in fact has oneself from the people through the acqui-
become, a lot easier than it was in the past. sition of skills and sensibilities rooted in a
These artists argued that the great mass craft-guild exclusivity and secrecy; in fact,
of the people had been excluded from art it was absolutely necessary not to do so,
by social barriers and had internalized an but rather to animate with radical imagina-
identity as “untalented,” and “inartistic” tion those common techniques and abilities
and so were resentful of the high art that made available by modernity itself. First
the dominant institutions unsuccessfully among these was photography.
compelled them to venerate. This resent-
ment was the moving force of philistine The radicals’ problem with photography
mass culture and kitsch, as well as of rep- was, as we have seen, its evolution into an
ressive social and legislative attitudes art-photography. Unable to imagine any-
toward the arts. Continuation of the regime thing better, photography lapsed into an
of specialized high art intensified the alien- imitation of high art and uncritically recre-
ation of both the people and the special- ated its esoteric worlds of technique and
ized, talented artists who, as the objects “quality.” The instability of the concept of
of resentment, developed elitist antipathy art-photography, its tendency to become
toward “the rabble” and identified with the reflexive and to exist at the boundary-line
ruling classes as their only possible patrons. of the utilitarian, was muffled in the
This vicious circle of “avant-garde and process of its “artification.” The criteria

42 JEFF WALL
It is significant, then, that the mimesis Many examples of such amateurist ance, an almost sinister mimicry of the way
of amateurism began around 1966; that is, mimesis can be drawn from the corpus “people” make images of the dwellings in
at the last moment of the “Eastman era” of photoconceptualism, and it could which they are involved. Ruscha’s imper-
of amateur photography, at the moment probably be said that almost all photoc- sonation of such an Everyperson obviously
when Nikon and Polaroid were revolution- onceptualists indulged in it to some draws attention to the alienated relation-
izing it. The mimesis takes place at the degree. But one of the purest and most ships people have with their built environ-
threshold of a new technological situation, exemplary instances is the group of books ment, but his pictures do not in any way
one in which the image-producing capacity published by Edward Ruscha between stage or dramatize that alienation the
of the average citizen was about to make 1963 and 1970. way that Walker Evans did, or that Lee
a quantum leap. It is thus, historically Friedlander was doing at that moment.
speaking, really the last moment of “ama- For all the familiar reasons, Los Angeles Nor do they offer a transcendent experi-
teur photography” as such, as a social cate- was perhaps the best setting for the com- ence of a building that pierces the alien-
gory established and maintained by custom plex of reflections and crossovers between ation usually felt in life, as with Atget, for
and technique. Conceptualism turns toward Pop art, reductivism, and their mediating example. The pictures are, as reductivist
the past just as the past darts by into the middle term, mass culture, and Ruscha for works, models of our actual relations with
future; it elegizes something at the same biographical reasons may inhabit the per- their subjects, rather than dramatized
instant that it points toward the glimmering sona of the American Everyman particu- representations that transfigure those rela-
actualization of avant-garde utopianism larly easily. The photographs in Some Los tions by making it impossible for us to
through technological progress. Angeles Apartments (1965), for example, have such relations with them.
synthesize the brutalism of Pop art with
If “every man is an artist,” and that artist the low-contrast monochromaticism of the Ruscha’s books ruin the genre of the
is a photographer, he will become so also most utilitarian and perfunctory photo- “book of photographs,” that classical form
in the process in which high-resolution graphs (which could be imputed to have in which art-photography declares its
photographic equipment is released from been taken by the owners, managers, or independence. Twentysix Gasoline Stations
its cultish possession by specialists and is residents of the buildings in question). (1962) may depict the service stations along
made available to all in a cresting wave Although one or two pictures suggest some Ruscha’s route between Los Angeles and
of consumerism. The worlds of Beuys and recognition of the criteria of art-photogra- his family home in Oklahoma, but it derives
McLuhan mingle as average citizens come phy, or even architectural photography (e.g. its artistic significance from the fact that at
into possession of “professional-class” “2014 S. Beverly Glen Blvd.”), the majority a moment when “The Road” and roadside
equipment. At this moment, then, ama- seem to take pleasure in a rigorous display life had already become an auteurist cliché
teurism ceases to be a technical category; of generic lapses: improper relation of in the hands of Robert Frank’s epigones, it
it is revealed as a mobile social category lenses to subject distances, insensitivity to resolutely denies any representation of its
in which limited competence becomes time of day and quality of light, excessively theme, seeing the road as a system and an
an open field for investigation. functional cropping, with abrupt excisions economy mirrored in the structure of both
of peripheral objects, lack of attention to the pictures he took and the publication
“Great art” established the idea (or ideal) the specific character of the moment being in which they appear. Only an idiot would
of unbounded competence, the wizardry depicted—all in all a hilarious perform- take pictures of nothing but the filling
of continually-evolving talent. This ideal
became negative, or at least seriously unin- Edward Ruscha, Union, Needles, California, from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962 (cat. no. 129)
teresting, in the context of reductivism,
and the notion of limits to competence,
imposed by oppressive social relationships,
became charged with exciting implications.
It became a subversive creative act for a tal-
ented and skilled artist to. imitate a person
of limited abilities. It was a new experience,
one which ran counter to all accepted ideas
and standards of art, and was one of the last
gestures which could produce avant-gardist
shock. The mimesis signified, or expressed,
the vanishing of great traditions of Western
art into the new cultural structures estab-
lished by the mass media, credit financing,
suburbanization, and reflexive bureaucracy.
The act of renunciation required for a
skilled artist to enact this mimeses, and
UNION, NEEDLES, CALIFORNIA
construct works as models of its conse-
quences, is a scandal typical of avant-garde
desire, the desire to occupy the threshold
of the aesthetic, its vanishing-point.
stations, and the existence of a book of just tive negation of art as depiction, a negation of showing what experience is like; in that
those pictures is a kind of proof of the which, as we’ve seen, is the felos of experi- sense it provides “an experience of experi-
existence of such a person. But the person, mental, reductivist modernism. And it can ence,” and it defines this as the significance
the asocial cipher who cannot connect with still be claimed that Conceptual art actually of depiction.
the others around him, is an abstraction, a accomplished this negation. In consenting
phantom conjured up by the construction, to read the essay that takes a work of In this light, it could be said that it was pho-
the structure of the product said to be by his art’s place, spectators are presumed to tography’s role and task to turn away from
hand. The anaesthetic, the edge or bound- continue the process of their own redefini- Conceptual art, away from reductivism
ary of the artistic, emerges through the con- tion, and thus to participate in a utopian and its aggressions. Photoconceptualism
struction of this phantom producer, who is project of transformative, speculative self- was then the last moment of the pre-history
unable to avoid bringing into visibility the reinvention: an avant-garde project. of photography as art, the end of the Old
“marks of indifference” with which moder- Linguistic conceptualism takes art as close Regime, the most sustained and sophisti-
nity expresses itself in or as a “free society.” to the boundary of its own self-overcoming, cated attempt to free the medium from its
or self-dissolution, as it is likely to get, peculiar distanced relationship with artistic
Amateurism is a radical reductivist meth- leaving its audience with only the task of radicalism and from its ties to the Western
odology insofar as it is the form of an rediscovering legitimations for works of Picture. In its failure to do so, it revolution-
impersonation. In photoconceptualism, art as they had existed, and might continue ized our concept of the Picture and created
photography posits its escape from the cri- to exist. This was, and remains, a revolu- the conditions for the restoration of that
teria of art-photography through the artist’s tionary way of thinking about art, in which concept as a central category of contempo-
performance as a non-artist who, despite its right to exist is rethought in the place rary art by around 1974.
being a non-artist, is nevertheless com- or moment traditionally reserved for the
pelled to make photographs. These photo- enjoyment of art’s actual existence, in the Notes
graphs lose their status as Representations encounter with a work of art. In true mod- 1. Cf. Thierry de Duve’s discussion of nominalism,
before the eyes of their audience: they are ernist fashion it establishes the dynamic in Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s
“dull,” “boring,” and “insignificant.” Only in which the intellectual legitimation of art Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans.
by being so could they accomplish the intel- as such—that is, the philosophical content Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis:
lectual mandate of reductivism at the heart of aesthetics—is experienced as the content University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
of the enterprise of Conceptual art. The of any particular moment of enjoyment. 2. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde,
reduction of art to the condition of an intel- trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University
lectual concept of itself was an aim which But, dragging its heavy burden of depiction, of Minnesota Press, 1984).
cast doubt upon any given notion of the photography could not follow pure, or lin- 3. A variant, made as a collage, is in the Daled
sensuous experience of art. Yet the loss guistic, Conceptualism all the way to the Collection, Brussels.
of the sensuous was a state which itself had frontier. It cannot provide the experience 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ecco Homo,” in On the
to be experienced. Replacing a work with of the negation of experience, but must Genealogy ofMorals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter
a theoretical essay which could hang in its continue to provide the experience of Kaufmann and trans. Kaufmann and R. J.
place was the most direct means toward depiction, of the Picture. It is possible that Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967),
this end; it was Conceptualism’s most cele- the fundamental shock that photography 290.
brated action, a gesture of usurpation of the caused was to have provided a depiction 5. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,”
predominant position of all the intellectual which could be experienced more the way in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
organizers who controlled and defined the the visible world is experienced than had Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance,
Institution of Art. But, more importantly, ever been possible previously. A photo- 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
it was the proposal of the final and defini- graph therefore shows its subject by means University of Chicago Press, 1993). 92.
6. Ibid., 86.
Edward Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 (cat. no. 131) 7. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans.
C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1984), 464, 470.
8. Cf. de Duve’s argument that the Readymade
can/should be nominated as painting.
9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone
Books, 1994), 135 (thesis 190).
10. Robert A. Sobieszek discusses Robert
Smithson’s use of the Instamatic camera in his
essay, “Robert Smithson: Photo Works,” in
Robert Smithson: Photo Works, exh. cat. (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art
and Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1993), 16, 17 (note 24), 25 (note 61).

44 JEFF WALL
 ERA:5
od :

SUTTER AS

Vito Acconci, Jumps, 1969 (cat. no. 1)

Vito Acconci, Margins, 1969 (cat. no. 2)

46 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Bas Jan Ader, Pitfallon the Way to a New
Neo Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland, 1971
(cat. no. 4)
 Bas Jan Ader, Untitled (Tea Party),
1972 (cat. no. 5)
Right: detail

48 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Giovanni Anselmo, Lato destro
(Right side), 1970
(cat. no. 8)

50 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Giovanni Anselmo, Entrare nell’opera
(Entering the work), 1971 (cat. no. 9)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW 51

 .

Aisin
tdimabacinatcahinvnierel
Agen
biogy
4 ba

te
wis
7

Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional

Sculpture, 1972 (cat. no. 10)
Right: detail

52 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW 53
John Baldessari, Choosing
(A Game for Two Players): Rhubarb, 1972
(cat. no. 12)

54 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

John Baldessari, A Movie: Directional
Piece. Where People Are Looking (with
R, VY G, Variants and Ending with Yellow),
1972-1973 (cat. no. 13)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

John Baldessari, Alignment Series:
Things in My Studio (by Height), 1975
(cat. no. 15)

56 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

John Baldessari, Embed Series: Oiled
Arm (Sinking Boat and Palms), 1974
(cat. no. 14)
Bottom: details
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Bernd and Hilla Becher,
Grain Elevators USA, 1977/1995
(cat. no. 18)
 Right:
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys,
Gas Tanks (Spherical), 1963 La rivoluzione siamo noi, 1972
(cat. no. 16) (cat. no. 20)

60 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 = 7, See WED
JOSEY BEUTS LA RIVOLUZONE GAO Nor MOvEMerE rat CORDON MODE ART AENEY NAPCU FOON DNGENTE HECeLnERG w EsePUR
Joseph Beuys, Vakuum < Masse
(Vacuum <> mass), 1970 (cat. no. 19)

62 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Joseph Beuys,
Enterprise 18.11.72, 18:5:16 Uhr
(Enterprise 11/18/72, 18:5:16 hours), 1973
(cat. no. 21)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Mel Bochner, Surface Deformation/Crumple
1967/2000 (cat. no. 23)

64 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 ——/ e Y

Mel Bochner, Crumple, 1967/1994

(cat. no. 22
Mel Bochner, Surface Dis/Tension, 1968
(cat. no. 24)

66 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Christian Boltanski,
Les habits de Francois C.
(The clothes of Francois C.), 1972
(cat. no. 25)
 |

Christian Boltanski, Les 62 membres

du Club Mickey en 1955 (The 62 members
of the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955),
1972 (cat. no. 26)
Right: detail

68 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Marcel Broodthaers, No Photographs
Allowed /Défense de photographier, 1974
(cat. no. 27)

70 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Marcel Broodthaers, La soupe de Daguerre
(The soup of Daguerre), 1974
(cat. no. 28)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 0111
IN THE MORNING, ON SITTING AT HIS DESK, HE WOULD OPEN THE FILE FOLDER. NOT YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRECEDING NARRATIVE
WHICH HIS SECRETARY HAD LEFT THERE. DURING THE DAY A CHARACTERISTIC
ACTION INVOLVED HIS TRANSFER OF A COMPLETED FILE FROM THE TOP OF HIS
DESK TO A DRAWER IN HIS DESK. IN THE EVENING, BEFORE HE LEFT, HE WOULD.
LOCK THAT DRAWER.
YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRECEDING PHOTOGRAPH

3
THE CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU MIGHT DECIDE THAT ASPECTS OF 1 ARE ANALOGOUS
TO, CORRELATE WITH, OR MAY BE PLACED IN SOME COMMON CONTEXT WITH,
ASPECTS OF 2

YOUR INFERENCES FROM 1 AND 2 ON THE BASIS OF 3

Victor Burgin, Performative/Narrative, 1971

(cat. no. 29)
Bottom and right: details

72 THE L T PICTURE SHOW

BEFORE REACHING THE DOOR HE HAD STOPPED HIS HITHERTO RAPID PROGRESS
DOWN THE DARKENED ROOM AND WAS NOW EXAMINING A FOLDER WHICH WAS
LYING ON A DESK. A YEAR LATER HIS SON WAS, AT THAT SAME DESK, TO READ
THE CONTENTS OF THAT IDENTICAL FILE WHICH HIS SECRETARY HAD THAT
MORNING DISCOVERED IN A DRAWER
YOUR KN

ME COMMON

YOUR INFERENCESFROM 1 AND 2ONTHE BASIS OF

0001
THE GIRL HAD OBVIOUSLY BEEN ABOUT TO SPEAK AS SHE HAD INTERRUPTED HER NOT YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRECEDING NARRATIVE
ACTION OF PLACING THE FOLDER UPON THE COUNTER. LATER, AT THE OFFICE.
HER EMPLOYER APPEARED TO LISTEN TO HER WHILE STARING AT THE SAME FILE
WHICH WAS NOW UPON HIS DESK. YESTERDAY HIS SON HAD SEEMED SIMILARLY
TRANSFIXED AS HE READ THOSE IDENTICAL PAPERS AT HIS HOM!
YOUR KNOWLEC fF RECEDIN TOGRAPH

NOT THE CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU MIGHT DECIDE TH:

ANALOGOUS TO, CORRELATE WITH, OR MAY BE PLACEC
TEXT WITH, ASPECTS OF 2

R INFERENCES FROM 2. ON THE BA’

 ‘sti St essaagero .

ip Moro
¢vivo 4
aR AT

Sarah Charlesworth, April 21, 1978,

from Modern History, 1978 (cat. no. 30)
Above and right: details

74 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 e edizione : Ml Hl ¢edizione
straordinaria ~ ¢bisa)ddae 0 :
* straordinaria
——————
Anno 100 N. 107 S. Adalgisa vergine Spediz. abbonamenio posile Gruspo 1/70
ui = Roma
Tl Giornale del mattino Un aumero L. 200 Giovedi 20 aprile 1978
 rare
scotch whisky

Anno 3 - Numero 95 - L. 200

a Repubblica JB
Redasione, Amminisiraione:
ar. 1/70 — ts 6.0.0. 1,
Direttore Eugenio Scalfari
On185ROMA, Plaza, Indipendonra, 1b, to,497041 telax Ga1B04005 (cae, post,
anno Ci40,000, semostrs 25.000, trimostre 1
2412Rene AD Spud
‘anno
Inabe.post
semestro
$f504/"wimostre21.500 {pasta ordinario) “= Coplo arvotrate t. 200 — Redazlone. di Mane Vio Toratt a. tel. 638525 - OS7I717 - tolex "25289
vare
f scotch whisky

i!
venerdi 21 aprile 1978
Concessionaria per ta pubbliciti: A. MANZONI & C, S.p.4., 20121 MILANO-via Agnalia 1:2

- ba)

D baer ANA

Sarah Charlesworth,
April 21, 1978,
from Modern History, 1978 (cat. no. 30)
Above and right: details

76 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Anno 103 - N. 94 - L. 200 (Arretrate 1. 400)

DELLA SERA.
= Venerdi 21 aprile 1978
- L. 200

‘mien= ibe“wemvencsE603 pet move ewan Cnsiae

"eaanan vsbones 48 TARIFVE DECLE PNIERDON! FUR LYTAKIA rah IVA 14%)
“a en reer ajaae —ae
St — Soe
Comnewes memes NRO A NO
Jonesieemere
soe) A hakawe A HORROR,
on meee tend Ne
amewees eens AMO =
Anes anew Senet peeeew KoManes C Nannon
Seveeaseeepos were» Nentwane maeremenis sevite w§
Bruce Conner, ANGEL, 1975
(cat. no. 31)
Bruce Conner, NIGHT ANGEL, 1975
(cat. no. 32)
Jan Dibbets; Big Comet 3°- 60°,
Sky/Sea/Sky, 1973; 20 color photographs;
177 x 236 in. (450 x 600 cm) overall;
Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

80 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Jan Dibbets, Horizon 1°— 10° Land, 1973
(cat. no. 34)
Valie Export, Trapez (Trapezoid), 1972
(cat. no. 38)

82 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement),
1976 (cat. no. 42)
Valie Export, Starre Identitdt
(Fixed identity), 1972 (cat. no. 37)

84 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 WIR, SWE GEFANAene
werner Serna

VAUE: :et on

Valie Export, Wir sind Gefangene

unserer Selbst (We are prisoners of
ourselves), 1972 (cat. no. 39)
Stefan Gronert artists working in the United States whose which examined photography as a social
strength “lies in their unique ability to force, was published in Paris shortly before
gather, preserve and present outside infor- the war, but the work was little known
Alternative Pictures: mation, not to ‘make art.’”5 This attitude until the publication of a revised and
Conceptual Art and the cannot be found in the work of European expanded version in 1968. By contrast, in
1937 Beaumont Newhall, curator of pho-
artists of that time. Since no genuine fine
Artistic Emancipation of art photography had existed in Europe in tography at the Museum of Modern Art
Photography in Europe the decades leading up to the emergence (MoMA) in New York, published his influ-
ential History of Photography, which has
of the Conceptual Art movement, there
was no possibility for an anti-photography been reprinted and revised many times.’
Stefan Gronert is chief curator of the graphics
to develop. For this reason the historical
department at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. He also
logic of the revolution that photoconceptu- Symptomatic for the break in the theoreti-
teaches the history of modern photography
alism brought about in the way a picture cal discussion of photography in Europe
at the University of Bonn. He has curated
could be defined (which Jeff Wall worked was the reception of what were surely the
numerous exhibitions on modern art at the
out so impressively for North American most influential twentieth-century essays
Kunstmuseum Bonn, including Thomas Struth:
art in 1995)° must be reformulated for on photography: Walter Benjamin’s “A
Strassen/Streets (1995), Drawing Now (1997,
the European situation. Short History of Photography” and “The
1999, 2001, 2003), and Great I/lusions:
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Demand—Gursky—Ruscha (1999).
A Brief Prehistory Reproduction,” published in 1931 in
French and in 1936 in German, respec-
Translated by Jeanne Haunschild.
In the United States there was, despite tively, then outlawed by the National
some internal disruptions, a continual Socialists and not republished in tandem
engagement between art and photography, until 1963. Although the late reception
so that by the early twentieth century the of Benjamin’s writings certainly promoted
Conceptual Art—a term that describes latter had become an established sphere a general interest in photography, it left
heterogeneous aesthetic approaches—and of artistic activity. European art photogra- its fine art status untouched, especially
the artistic use of the pictorial medium phy, by contrast, experienced a deep since he did not espouse photography as
of photography have certainly not evolved rupture in the 1930s. The careers of such an autonomous art form.
along parallel tracks, either historically recognized pioneers as August Sander
or methodologically. Nevertheless in the (1876-1964) and Albert Renger-Patzsch In analogy to the hindered reception
late 1960s and the 1970s there was a strong (1897-1966) were brought to an end of these texts, the artistic emancipation
affinity between these categories. Although by National Socialism. Karl Blossfeldt of photography—that is, the use of this
the use of text is often seen as a trademark (1865-1932) and Aenne Biermann utilitarian medium for artistic purposes—
of Conceptual Art,! photography also took (1898-1933) died in the 1930s and had pretty much come to an end by the
on new importance at this time. One could remained forgotten into the 1970s. second half of the 1930s in the centers
argue, in fact, that the use of photography Following a period of engagement with the of European modernism, such as Paris
by Conceptual artists effected a fundamen- Central European avant-garde, Aleksandr and especially Germany. The instrumental
tal shift in the history of the modern pic- Rodchenko (1891-1956) returned to the use of photography for propaganda pur-
ture. This comparatively unspectacular Soviet Union. There were other important poses by the totalitarian regimes of the
change differed from all of modernism’s photographers who decided to emigrate 1930s and 1940s interrupted an art histo-
previous transformations, above all, in that during World War II: André Kertész rical development whose continuation
the concept of “picture” no longer simply (1894-1985), Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), was limited almost exclusively to North
coincided with that of “painting,” but and Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) America.$ In the landmark postwar pho-
was expanded to encompass other media, to the United States; Germaine Krull tography exhibition The Family of Man
which took on the status of fine art for (1897-1985) to Brazil and Africa. Berenice (1955), organized by Edward Steichen
the first time.? Abbott exported a large proportion of for the Museum of Modern Art, the artis-
the estate of Eugéne Atget (1857-1927) tic significance of photography was almost
In contrast to Minimal Art, which came on to the United States in 1928, laying the completely sacrificed to a cold war ideo-
the scene several years earlier, Conceptual groundwork for its reception there. logical agenda, yet it would have been
Art was not a purely or specifically Amer- nearly inconceivable for a major European
ican phenomenon.3 Its emergence could Book burnings and the expulsion of museum to put on such an exhibition,
be observed more or less simultaneously intellectuals of the literary establishment even shortly after the war.?
in Europe and the United States.4 Any his- such as Walter Benjamin, Alfred Doblin,
tory of photoconceptualism in Europe Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Kurt The reinstatement of photography as
must take into account, however, that the Tucholsky, all of whom had recognized an art form in Europe was gradual and
development of photography as a pictorial the artistic significance of photography as difficult. As far as the German-speaking
medium followed a completely different early as the 1920s, sounded the final knell. countries go, Otto Steinert deserves spe-
course in Burope than it did in the United Gisele Freund’s dissertation, “La pho- cial mention; the Subjektive Photographie
States. In 1976 Nancy Foote coined the tographie en France au XIXe siécle: Essai exhibitions—which he organized in 1951,
rubric “anti-photographers” to describe de sociologie et d’esthétique” (1936), 1954-1955, and 1958 in Saarbriicken—

86 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

featured works by individual artists who totalitarian compulsion to paint realisti- Conceptual Art in Europe:
were Carrying on the experimental tradi- cally for the sake of propaganda. After Jan Dibbets’ Photography
tion of the Bauhaus and of the Deutsche the rediscovery of, and reoccupation
Werkbund’s famous Film und Foto exhibi- with, the vanishing tradition of so-called Conceptual Art fell on fertile ground in
tion of 1929.10 While the work of most classical modernism (exemplified by the Europe.2? The year 1969—that is, parallel
of the photographers in other European work of Kandinsky, Klee, and other early to the first exhibitions devoted to this work
countries, such as France,!! was more twentieth-century artists) at Documenta 1 organized by Seth Siegelaub in New York
focused on non-art areas such as photo- in 1955 and the inclusion of American post- and to Lucy Lippard’s exhibition 597.087
journalism, Steinert tried to create a link war art in Documenta 2 (1959), what was in Seattle—“became the year of its break-
to the avant-garde approaches of early by then a historical painting style continued through and acknowledgement in
modernist photography. Even though to dominate the European art discourse Europe.”2! It was above all two exhibitions
his crusade in Germany was not without until the mid-1960s.1¢ mounted almost simultaneously in the
an effect—think of photographers such spring of that year that left a lasting
as Chargesheimer (Karl-Heinz Tied in with this was the sociological study impression: Op losse schroeven at the
Hargesheimer), Peter Keetman, and that Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (subse-
Stefan Moses!?—and was supported jour- in France carried out under the revealing quently at the Museum Folkwang in
nalistically by Franz Roh (already in the title Un art moyen (1965), which also veri- Essen) and Live in Your Head: When
1920s one of the promoters of photogra- fied through empirical methods the aes- Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle
phy as art)!3 and especially by Schmoll thetic undervaluation of photography at Bern (subsequently at the Museum Haus
gen. Eisenwerth,!4 Steinert’s efforts the time.!7 Rosalind Krauss, among oth- Lange in Krefeld and the Institute of
remained largely ineffectual as far as ers, pointed out the limitation and inap- Contemporary Arts [ICA], London).
the art world was concerned. propriateness of Bourdieu’s theses insofar In addition, the exhibition Konzeption—
as he insisted that one could not even dis- Conception made a big splash in the fall
Since there were no comparable efforts cuss photography in the context of aes- of that year at the Stadtisches Museum in
in the neighboring European countries, thetic value. As cogent as Krauss’ criticism Leverkusen. In contrast, the first major
Steinert’s attempt at a broad-based tie-in of Bourdieu was in principle, she was obvi- museum exhibition in the United States to
to early modernist photography seems at ously unaware that in the mid-1960s a address Conceptualism—the Museum of
least worthy of mention. What must not discourse on the aesthetic dimension of Modern Art’s Information—did not take
be forgotten is that this occurred at a time photography was in fact not possible any- place until the following year.
when painting absolutely dominated the where in Europe.!§ There would not be
scene. In the whole of postwar Europe the any decisive change in this situation until The Amsterdam and Bern exhibitions
abstract painting that held sway was mostly the 1970s,!° namely, after Conceptual featured both pure Conceptual Art and
the gestural-expressive kind. “Peinture Art had been able to act as a catalyst for land art, and a close thematic tie between
informel”!5 was often regarded as an indi- the acceptance of the photograph as art. the two shows is documented not only by
vidualist statement of liberation from the the list of artists but also by the program-
matic comments of Harald Szeemann,
Otto Steinert; Ein-FuB-Ganger (A pedestrian), 1950; gelatin silver print; 11 9/6 x 15 % in. (28.7 x 40 cm); curator of When Attitudes Become Form.
Museum Ludwig, Cologne After differentiating his exhibition from
the 1968 Documenta 4 and stressing the
fact that the very latest developments in
art could be seen in Bern, he stated: “But
the artists in this exhibition are not object-
makers; instead they seek freedom from
the object, and thus add to its layers of
meaning the very significant dimension of
f also being a situation beyond the object... .
Many artists, including the ‘earth artists,’
MUM YZ
SS are no longer represented by works at all,
Z\
44 My,

X only by information, while the “Conceptual

tH] Artists’ are represented only by instruc-
ANAS tions for the work, which no longer needs
A me
yi to be materialized.”?

Although Szeemann later cited an

ILL) Were”
Wrce” encounter with Jan Dibbets in July 1968
as the catalyst for the exhibition’s concep-
poe / tion,?3 Dibbets and Robert Smithson were
the only artists using photography who
ee |
appear in the exhibition checklist. The
same is true of the Amsterdam exhibition;
in fact, with two exceptions, all of the tography at a West German art institu- Especially at the start of their collaboration
artists who took part in Op losse schroeven tion.29 Although Dibbets’ work from in 1959, we encounter the view that the
in Amsterdam could also be seen in Bern.”* around 1970 was represented in every sur- Bechers were using their photographs as
In any event, however, the list of partici- vey of the art of that time, from the per- documents to preserve a vanishing era and
pants in these two central exhibitions spective of the present it almost seems as thus saw themselves as caretakers of histor-
underlines my initial claim of a loose, and if it was the Bechers who were essentially ical monuments.35 This corresponds to a
in no way logical, link between Conceptual responsible for the renewed appreciation story told by Bernd Becher, repeated again
Art and photography. While in the United of the aesthetic significance of photogra- and again in the literature, of how he came
States Edward Ruscha, with his books phy. At the time, Bernd Becher attributed to the medium of photography. While Hilla
(starting in 1962), and Dan Graham, with Dibbets’ appointment in Diisseldorf to Becher had already taken part in the photo-
“Homes for America” (1966-1967), had the importance of Conceptual Art.*° This graphic documentation of the Potsdam
already published decisive “anti-photo- makes it all the more striking that the castle of Sanssouci in 1953-1954,36 Bernd—
graphic” works, the significance of photog- Bechers did not participate in Op losse a painter and graphic artist inspired by the
raphy in the context of Conceptual Art was schroeven and When Attitudes Become Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity,
not immediately apparent in Europe. Form; nor were they represented in the var- of the 1920s—was noticing how quickly
ious publications on Conceptual Art in the subject matter he was trying to draw,
What was already intimated by the Bern Europe.3! Klaus Honnef, too, in his defini- namely the industrial region of Siegerland,
and Amsterdam shows was the emergence tive survey Concept Art (1971), did not link was disappearing. Since the medium of
of Dibbets, who became a crucial figure in the Bechers to this movement (although painting was too slow and, as he had yet to
the integration of photography as an art he did Dibbets). learn, motion pictures were too fast, he
practice. His work can be directly linked to decided in 1957 to resort to the camera.37
the land art works of Richard Long, Robert In the United States, however, the Bechers’
Smithson, and Dennis Oppenheim,?> as work was specifically seen within the con- As early as 1970—in their first book,
well as to that of artists working serially, text of Conceptual Art. They were thus Anonyme Skulpturen—the Bechers spoke
such as Buren or On Kawara, and, not included in the anthologies on Conceptual of documenting: “The illustrations are
least of all, to (anti-)photographers such Art by Ursula Meyer and Lucy Lippard?2 part of a documentation of technical build-
as Ruscha. Dibbets’ “perspective correc- and also took part in the exhibition ings.”38 And at around the same time,
tions” —which carried on the tradition of Information. The Bechers, not least in another publication but also under the
seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish of all through contact with the artists at heading “Anonyme Skulpturen,” they
interiors—and his studies of light and Galerie Konrad Fischer, became wrote more emphatically: “This is about
shade were, despite their historical quota- acquainted with Sol Le Witt, Douglas objects, not motifs. The photo is only a
tions, as unpretentious as they were ele- Huebler, and Carl Andre.33 And it was substitute for an object; it is unsuitable as
mentary and were thus understandable in Andre who, early on, supported their work a picture in its customary sense.”29 In 1969
any cultural context. It is therefore not sur- journalistically in the United States. In the Bechers credited the photograph with
prising that his photographs were part of December 1972, only a few months after this documentary function and stressed the
major American exhibitions, including the Bechers’ first exhibition at the New aesthetic indifference of the resulting pic-
Siegelaub’s shows, Lippard’s 587.087, and York gallery of Ileana Sonnabend, he pub- tures when they wrote under this title for
MoMAss Information.26 There were also lished an article in Artforum under the title the mass-produced Kunst-Zeitschrift: “Our
important solo presentations of Dibbets’ “A Note on Bernhard and Hilla Becher.” camera does not produce pretty pictures,
work in Europe—in 1969-1970 at Museum His short, informative text ended with a but exact duplications that, through our
Haus Lange, Krefeld, and in 1972 at the quotation from Hilla Becher that was char- renunciation of photographic effects, turn
Venice Biennale—as well as at leading gal- acteristic of the era: “The question if this out to be relatively objective. The photo
leries: Yvon Lambert in Paris (1970) and is a work of art or not is not very interesting can optically replace its object to a certain
Konrad Fischer in Diisseldorf (1968, for us. Probably it is situated in between degree. This takes on special meaning if
1971).27 As was recognized as early as 1970, the established categories. Anyway the the object cannot be preserved.”40
Dibbets is an artist whose conceptual pro- audience which is interested in art would
gram is not so radical that it leads to what be the most open-minded and willing to With this formula the Bechers consented
Lippard described as the total dematerial- think about it.”54 to a characterization that their earlier
ization of the art object, but is first and mentor the art historian Volker Kahmen
foremost carried out in pictorial—that is, It is possible to track the change in the had assigned them on the occasion of a solo
photographic—form.28 interpretation of the artistic value of pho- exhibition entitled Anonyme Architektur
tography in the 1960s and 1970s by taking in June 1965 at the Galerie Pro in Bad
“A Certain Support”: as an example the way the Bechers’ com- Godesberg, writing, “The photo fulfills no
The Bechers’ Self-Evaluation ments on their own work varied over time. art-for-art’s-sake end; it subordinates itself
Since the Bechers did not think of them- as documentation to a way of looking at
In 1984, following the heyday of selves as theorists, and since comments and things as objectively as possible.”4! In 1973
Conceptual Art, Jan Dibbets became a texts by them are comparatively rare, this Kahmen published a survey of the history
professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, may help us to gain a different understand- of photography that was important for
where in 1976 Bernd Becher had been ing of their work. German-speaking countries. The title
named the first professor of fine art pho- alone—Fotografie als Kunst (Photography

88 STEFAN GRONERT
as art)—demonstrates the swift change and serial attitude of an archivist, the tendencies in contemporary art, Harald
that had taken place in the meantime.*2 Bechers succeeded in renewing a critical Szeemann was appointed curator of
link to modernist pictoriality. By contrast the 1972 Documenta 5, replacing Arnold
In the second half of the 1970s there was Otto Steinert’s attempt twenty years earlier Bode. While Szeemann had presented
a slight change in the Bechers’ formal to revive the experimental approach of the a loosely organized collection of divergent
style (one that was hardly noted by most early twentieth-century avant-garde while aesthetic approaches in his 1969 exhibition
observers).*3 In 1981 the couple freely obscuring history had failed. In retrospect, When Attitudes Become Form, three
acknowledged their affiliation with an aes- the Bechers also saw Conceptual Art as years later he chose a seemingly systematic
thetic discourse: “Actually the inquiry into providing them with “a certain support,” subdivision into thematic categories
the artistic value of photography should yet “without our understanding ourselves for Documenta 5. As he stressed in the
present no big problem. Photography is as conceptual artists.”47 preface to the catalogue, there were
a visual medium. Whether it is used for art three main sections, each with its own
or for something else is merely a question The Bechers’ supposedly “objective” organizing idea: “Parallel Picture
of interpretation. ... Photographs lined up photographic approach had to appear Worlds,” “Individual Mythologies,”
one after the other not only provide infor- innovative against the background of the and “Conceptual Art” (or “Idea”).>!
mation but also have an aesthetic dimen- photography that was prevalent at the
sion.”*4 The explicit announcement of a time, which was not considered “art” in Photography was represented in all three
non-aesthetic intention or an indifference the narrow sense. Their objectivity ran sections, but especially in the section
to the aesthetic dimension of their pho- completely counter to the aesthetic of the “Idea,” which was curated by Klaus Honnef
tographs is characteristic of the Bechers’ “decisive moment’”—in which the photog- and Konrad Fischer. Honnef, the theoreti-
early statements. But even though in rapher captures the elusive instant that cal mind behind this section, saw photog-
the late 1960s and the early 1970s they encapsulates the significance of an event— raphy—along with maps, drawings, and
still denied that their pictures had any whose most eminent practitioner was text—completely in terms of Conceptual
autonomous fine art status, their work was photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson.48 Art, that is, as a means of documenting an
nevertheless accorded such a status by oth- It is precisely the Bechers’ reliance on a idea.52 And in this regard he mentioned
ers, who may have been influenced by the comparative typological approach that Dibbets, but not the Bechers, in his cata-
change in the couple’s formal approach. precludes traditional formal composition; logue introduction.°3 John Baldessari,
The Bechers themselves gradually became the standard procedure thus replaces the Hamish Fulton, Douglas Huebler, Allen
aware of this fact, and this led to a change inspired recognition of the chance moment. Ruppersberg, and Edward Ruscha were
in their self-definition. In this process, the formal subject is not shown along with the Bechers.>4
eliminated but rendered anonymous
What contributed considerably to this through the establishment of very specific In the wake of this Documenta, several
development was the Bechers’ inclusion pictorial premises. The double perspective exhibitions devoted to photography took
in the group exhibitions of the period, for, of this approach—consciousness of tradi- place at European visual arts institutions,
as Hilla Becher recalled in 1995, “with the tion and engagement with the present— and European art museums also opened
advent of Conceptual Art it became possi- was aptly documented at Documenta 6, their collections to photographs. In March
ble for photography to gain acceptance where Hilla and Bernd Becher were not
as art.”45 Although the Bechers still do only represented by their own work but Sigmar Polke; Hohere Wesen befahlen: Rechte obere
not want their work to be categorized as were also lenders of the Peter Weller Ecke schwarz malen! (Higher beings command: Paint
the upper right corner black), 1969; lacquer on canvas;
Conceptual Art today, they have made (1868-1940) photographs from the years 596 x 4976 in. (150 x 125.5 cm); Museum fur neue
concessions: “And since it was then the era 1900-1920 and of the recent color photo- Kunst, Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe

of Conceptual Art, we landed, like it or graphs by Stephen Shore.*?

not, within this context. What also certainly
played a role was the fact that our work is While Dibbets was categorized as a
systematically built up, that our way of look- Conceptual artist from 1968 at the latest,
ing at things is ‘cool’ and without an artist’s the Bechers—who still resist this label—
subjective expression. ... But this kinship were not shown in Europe under the rubric
with the methodology of Conceptual Art of Conceptualism until 1972. The factor
was probably given exaggerated importance behind this was their participation in
at the time. Perhaps also because there Documenta 5.>°
was no other art movement to which they
could have assigned us.”46 Documenta 5 and Documenta 6:
Emancipation through Idea and History
Under the aegis of 1970s Conceptual
Art and employing a social documentary Documenta, which from its inception in
approach to photography that was 1955 until 2002 had always been organized
informed by the tradition of industrial by European curators, has historically
architecture and by the photography of the expressed a specifically European view
Neue Sachlichkeit, which they combined of contemporary art. After Documenta 4
in an innovative way with the impersonal in 1968 was criticized for ignoring the latest
1976 Honnef noted in his diary: “How that the process of its establishment in to mention a boost for the undeveloped
much weight did August Sander, Albert Europe as an autonomous form of visual photography market here, it holds few
Renger-Patzsch, Walker Evans, Karl art was more or less concluded. surprises for Americans.”6
Blossfeldt, Eugéne Atget, Paul Strand
(whose retrospective incidentally will soon In his 1976 exhibition proposal, the curator “My Last Painting”: Reality Strikes Back
be held at the Palais de Beaubourg in of the next Documenta, Manfred
Paris), Giséle Freund, etc., carry even ten Schneckenburger, had already underlined Tracing the history of the renewed artistic
years ago in the art world? None! Now the fact that media hierarchy was a thing emancipation of photography in Europe,
major exhibitions and fat catalogues are of the past.°° The gap that had occurred in it becomes clear that the use of this
dedicated to them.”>6 the history of photography in Europe and medium within the context of Conceptual
the suppressed knowledge of these facts, Art cannot be understood using the crite-
In addition, galleries began to emerge that however, called for more than a concentra- rion of an American anti-photographic
focused exclusively on photography. In tion on current art, and so the exhibition standpoint. For, some ten years after
Hannover the Galerie Clarissa opened its included a historical survey.®! In analogy Ruscha’s 1965 announcement—“I think
doors in 1965; it specialized in nonfigura- to the 1955 Documenta 1, in which mod- photography is dead as a fine art”©3—it was
tive, experimental photography but folded ernist painting and sculpture of the prewar in fact just beginning in Europe. Several
after three years.°’ In Milan there was period that had been defamed by the Nazis factors contributed to this transformation.
the Galleria I] Diaframma, which concen- as “degenerate” was displayed, works by Without attempting to reconstruct the art
trated on photo books. In 1970 the gallery Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot, historical context of the late 1960s,% I
“Die Brticke” opened in Vienna, followed and other nineteenth-century photogra- would like to analyze aspects of the link
a year later by the Photographers’ Gallery phers were put on view here, in proximity between Conceptual Art and photography
in London. The first German example, to works by the Bechers, Shore, and others. by taking up several exemplary cases.
Album Fotogalerie, opened in Cologne in
1972 (since 1973 it has gone by the name Historical legitimation of photography It is plain that we need to examine the
Galerie Wilde, after its founder). The as an autonomous art form, then, replaced criticism of painting that emerged in
Spectrum Photogalerie followed in an emphasis on contemporary art. No such Europe (and elsewhere) in the early 1960s,
Hannover. A year later in Aachen, Rudolf legitimation was needed in North America, which was expressed in actions and hap-
Kicken and the photographer Wilhelm where no comparable break occurred, penings, as well as in three-dimensional
Schiirmann opened Lichttropfen, which and to American audiences this historical works. Rejecting the still-dominant
after 1979 continued in Cologne under a aspect of Documenta 6 must have seemed Abstract Expressionism, which was consid-
new name. These developments reflect the rather uninteresting. The critic for the ered bourgeois and empty of content, this
emergence of an art market for photogra- Washington Post wondered at this “seem- impulse was driven especially by the efforts
phy in central Europe at that time. ingly endless and unedited history of pho- of the Fluxus artists and Joseph Beuys to
tography show, evidently one of the first expand the definition of art. Within the
The actual acceptance of photography to be mounted in a contemporary art con- framework of these many different types
by the European art world did not take text on the continent. Though it may be of artistic activity, the medium of photogra-
place until 1977. Apart from the exhibition a revelation for European audiences, not phy found its use, but predominantly as
Malerei und Photographie im Dialog
(Painting and photography in dialogue) Sigmar Polke; Gilbert and George, 1974; 2 gelatin silver prints with hand-colored application; 113/ x 9% in.
at Kunsthaus Ziirich, organized by Erika (30 x 23.8 cm) each; collection Thomas Lee and Ann Tenenbaum

Billeter, it was, of course, Documenta 6

that provided the impetus. For the first
time there was a separate photographic
section, curated by art historian Evelyn
Weiss, together with Honnef. In her intro-
duction to the catalogue, Weiss not only
stressed the differences in the historical
development of photography in Europe
and the United States but also dissociated
photography from the context of
Conceptual Art, with which it had been
linked at Documenta 5.58 Tn the detailed
essay by Honnef (who went on to organize
many important museum exhibitions on
the history of photography), the term
Conceptual Art crops up only once, in
a footnote.>? This was only one of several
indications that photography had been
liberated from what was initially the legiti-
mate framework of Conceptual Art and

90 STEFAN GRONERT
a documentary tool—that is, to transmit there were no highly developed critical phy as a physical and chemical medium by
and preserve happenings and actions— positions concerning painting, such as using multiple exposures and manipulating
rather than being used to expand the those proposed by Clement Greenberg the development of the print. He rein-
pictorial vocabulary available to artists.® in the United States, that had to be con- forced this process by overpainting several
tended with. The critique of pure painting areas of the photographs.
This is also, ultimately, true of Marcel should be mentioned, however, because
Broodthaers, who characteristically one of its indirect consequences was the Shortly after Polke made this work, Gilbert
deployed photographs to challenge our reintegration of photography into the & George were also the subject of eight
conventional underlying structure of refer- visual arts and its elevation as an art form. paintings made by Gerhard Richter based
ence, as in his Musée d’Art Moderne, on superimposed photographs. Richter’s
Département des Aigles (Museum of modern A prominent example is the 1969 painting early work from the 1960s was also quite
art, department of eagles, 1972). Although by Sigmar Polke Hohere Wesen befahlen: obviously founded on the struggle between
his ironic comments on the history of pho- Rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! (Higher painting and photography. In his paintings
tography (e.g., La soupe de Daguerre |The beings command: Paint the upper right based on enlarged black-and-white snap-
soup of Daguerre], 1974) occasionally corner black!), which commented ironi- shots by amateurs, the obvious painterly
allow us to presume differently, photog- cally on the metaphysical claims of abstract gesture of blurring the image can be seen
raphy plays only a subordinate role in painters such as Barnett Newman. Polke, as recording the lack of sharpness in the
Broodthaers’ work, subsumed under his who is known primarily as a painter, original, although it is perceived mainly
broader concern with reflecting on life also worked extensively in photography as an effect of the painting style. Many
under cover of art. and film. He began using photography of Richter’s paintings of that time were
very early, for example, in Menschenkreis derived from the picture collection he
Thus the two preeminent European artists (Circle of humankind, 1964), which incor- called Atlas, for which he had been collect-
of the late 1960s, Beuys and Broodthaers, porates portrait photos of ordinary people ing material since 1964. To the degree
did not play any significant role in emanci- into the form of a sculpture.®7 While the that Richter confronts the private and the
pating photography from its pragmatic installation of the pictures on the wall public therein, the status of Adlas also
function. And as appealing as it may seem appeals to the tradition of painting, the use fluctuates, going far beyond Aby Warburg’s
to switch the name of the medium in the of lines (in the form of the pieces of string famous image archive, the Mnemosyne
American explanatory model of “anti-pho- that connect the photographs) seems to Atlas (1929), and opening a multiple view
tography” to “anti-painting,” this is not ironize the mythical aura of the Fluxus onto what is a cross between an independ-
sufficient to explain the reemergence of artists while also alluding to the painter ent work and a material collection. Aflas
photography in Europe. The criticism Gerhard Hoehme, Polke’s former teacher had its first public exhibition in 1970.68
of Abstract Expressionist painting (or art at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, who
informe!) was not articulated as polemically was known for his integration of lines into
in Europe as it was in the United States his late works. The example of Polke’s Gerhard Richter; Woman Descending the Staircase,
and was generally conducted without refer- 1974 pictures of the “living sculptures” of 1965; oil on canvas; 79 x 51 in. (200.7 x 129.5 cm);
The Art Institute of Chicago
ence to the theoretical commentary of the Gilbert & George shows how he cleverly
artists themselves.°¢ In addition, in Europe thematized the particularities of photogra-

Arnulf Rainer; Grimassen (Automatenfotos) (Grimaces [photo booth pictures]), 1968-1969; photo booth strips
Further, there is the example of the action. If Rainer in his overpaintings favor of three-dimensional scenes set up
Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer, who incor- responded with painterly gestures to the specifically to be photographed, can be
porated his body into his art activities. motif of an existing photograph, Almeida understood in this sense: “I stopped paint-
Along with Gilbert & George, Rainer was painted in reaction to a photograph that ing in 1967... . Simultaneously I began
represented at Documenta 5 in the section had been staged for exactly this act of my ‘corrected perspective.’ ... Imake most
“Individual Mythologies, Self-Presentation, paint application. of these works with ephemeral materials:
Processes,” curated by Szeemann.% In sand, growing grass, etc. These are demon-
addition to his paintings, Rainer also These examples alone show that art that strations. I do not make them to keep,
showed twenty photographs there. In 1968 makes use of photography in no way but to photograph. The work of art is
he began to make self-portraits at an auto- defines itself as anti-painting in the sense the photo.””2
matic photo booth, using extreme, almost of a true “abandonment of the picture
surreal facial distortions that in their radi- frame.”7! This would simply be a helpless For those who, like Dibbets, worked
calness went far beyond the photos Andy recapitulation of the avant-garde aporia exclusively with photography, it was often
Warhol began making in 1963,79 manifest- of the end of painting. Instead, the medium a question not of criticizing painting, but
ing a link to Rainer’s interest in the men- of photography makes an iconoclastic criti- of reflecting on photography as a medium.
tally ill. Later he began to rework these cism of painting possible, but one that is not The resulting work differs from the self-
images with paint, and in the overpainted aimed at the picture form per se and is referential painting of the previous period
photographs shown at Documenta 5, Rainer capable of paving the way to a new alterna- in its ability to incorporate external
engaged in a productive dialogue with the tive. A 1968 statement by Dibbets, in which reality, thus allowing social problems
two pictorial media. Through the contrast he explained his rejection of painting in to be addressed.
between an expressive application of paint,
reminiscent of art brut, and a comparatively John Hilliard; Camera Recording Its Own Condition, 1971; black-and-white photographs on card mounted on
dematerialized photograph, the distinctive Plexiglas; 85 x 72 in. (216 x 183 cm); Tate Gallery, London

character of both media was thematized.

Interesting experiments combining both

painting and photography have been under-
taken not only by Polke and Rainer but also
by a lesser-known Portuguese artist, Helena
Almeida. In her series of the mid-1970s
Pintura habitada (Inhabited painting),
the theme is the status of time in the two
media. The blue paint that she illusionisti-
cally applied to black-and-white photo-
graphs of herself holding a paintbrush was
the second step in an analytical action, so
that the time difference and the difference
in the representational form of the two acts
is reflected in a picture that pretends to
show a painting process as a simultaneous

Helena Almeida; Pintura habitada (Inhabited painting)

1975; black-and-white photograph with blue acrylic
paint; 18°/8x 20 in. (47.3 x 50.8 cm); Graphische
Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Sammlung
Dr. Rolf H. Krauss

92 STEFAN GRONERT
An examination of the work of the French non-artistic use of photography. In photography) by Timm Rautert, done
artist Christian Boltanski can also make response to the so-called flood of images, between 1968 and 1974 and seldom dis-
the expansion of pictorial possibilities he consequently relativized the status of cussed in this context.’ The German pho-
through photography clearer. Boltanski’s the single image in producing open-ended tographer, who at the time was also in New
work was included in the same section of picture groups. Although the typologies York and exhibited photographs together
Documenta 5 as that of Rainer and Gilbert of the Bechers, Dibbets’ panoramas, with Walter De Maria, is worth noting not
& George, and for him, as for those artists, Giovanni Anselmo’s Documentazione di only for this reason but also for his reflec-
the portrait plays a decisive role, yet he interferenza umana nella gravitazone univer- tions on the medium, which exhibit a subtle
pursues a completely different approach. sale (Documentation of human interfer- humor. (Thus the hand held against the
The issue for him is historicity and the ence in universal gravitation, 1969), and sun in his untitled photograph of 1974
memory linked to it, which is conveyed not John Hilliard’s Camera Recording Its Own darkens the ground, which is then clearly
through objects, but essentially through Condition (1971) also present groups of recognizable once the hand is lowered.)
photographs. Although Boltanski too images, they link aspects of the photo- Rautert, a heretical student of Otto
painted at the beginning of his career, graphic tradition to the look of the “sys- Steinert, moreover proved that it was pos-
he gave it up, as did many of his contempo- tematic painting” of the same period.” sible to pursue Conceptual approaches via
raries, in the 1960s.73 Using anonymous The time sequences in, for instance, sev- traditional “subjective photography, ”
photographs, which he collected and pre- eral works by Dibbets or Almeida point which is not connected with questions of
sented in large numbers, sometimes filling in a historically somewhat different seriality or formalism.
an entire room, he neutralized the category direction, to the sequential photographs
of authorship, at the same time suggesting of movement by Eadweard Muybridge. We end here with a borderline case of
a general social relevance for his pictures Muybridge’s photos were of interest to photography’s use outside the parameters
that goes beyond their aesthetic context. the Minimalists and to Sol LeWitt’® in his of Conceptual Art. Victor Burgin—who
Above all, through his choice of the the- proto-Conceptualist phase because of in the 1970s was active not only as an influ-
matic framework for assembling the pic- their formal qualities. In contrast, artists ential art theorist but also as an artist—
tures, as well as by means of their such as Dibbets and Almeida used the was represented in the London showing
disconcerting enlargement, Boltanski gen- specific sequentiality of the photographic of When Attitudes Become Form by
erated a fictionalization of his black-and- medium to recover the narrative potential Photopath (1967). He gave the following
white snapshots that sometimes raised of the picture and thus to join the contem- description of this work: “A path along the
doubts about the authenticity of the con- plative image of aesthetic modernism to floor, portions 1 x 21 units, photographed.
text or even of the pictures. the dynamism of society’s most pervasive Photographs printed to the actual size of
pictorial medium, film. objects and prints attached to the floor so
The approach that the German artist Hans- that the images are perfectly congruent
Peter Feldmann adopted, although similar This is also the case for the series Bild- with their objects.”7 The work in question
to Boltanski’s, seems even more subversive analytische Photographie (Image-analytical is visually attractive and semantically com-
in certain respects. By deploying widely dis-
tributed photos as readymades, he dissoci- Timm Rautert; Untitled, 1974; gelatin silver prints; 8 x 5° in. (20.5 x 13.8 cm); courtesy the artist
ated himself from the idea of authorship.
His work can be understood as a critical
reflection on photography and the social
consumption of these “ideal” pictures (see
his twenty-one-part work Sonntagsbilder
[Sunday pictures], 1976-1977). Feldmann
has been very consistent in not giving any
biographical information in publications in
which his pictures appear. The anonymity
he has adopted would appear to be an
intentional rejection of the excessive indi-
vidualism still being cultivated in the 1970s
by Andy Warhol, since it was irreconcilable
with the cult of the artist-star. Despite his
proximity to Ruscha in his use of both banal
imagery and the medium of the artist’s
book, Feldmann started from a different
premise; his work was first and foremost
social criticism and not a criticism of art
photography as it was currently being estab-
lished in Europe.”

Feldmann’s media criticism can be seen

as an artistic reflection of the ordinary,
plex, having much to do with Wittgenstein’s Not until American pioneers such as 2. For an analysis of the European context, see
“Philosophical Investigations” and nothing, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore Stefan Gronert, “Die Abbildlichkeit des Bildes:
as can well be surmised, to do with Carl made it acceptable in the mid-1970s did Die mediale Reflexion der Fotografie bei
Andre’s floor sculptures.7? the mid-1980s usher in a proper photo Gerhard Richter und Jeff Wall,” in Zeitschrift fiir
boom in Europe. Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 47
Burgin’s perceptual analyses, however, (2002): 37-72.
led a bit later to semiotic analyses in a con- Color was not the sole factor responsible 3. Cf. James Meyer, ed., Minimalism (London:
frontation between picture and text, in for this rapidly increasing acceptance of Phaidon, 2000); Gregor Stemmrich, ed., Minimal
which the photo was often subordinate to photography; the availability of larger for- Art: Eine kritische Retrospektive (Dresden and
language or to social ideology .°° In this mats contributed to it as well. Although Basel: Verlag der Kunst 1995); Claude Gintz,
form of social criticism, which evidences a large formats appeared rather early in “European Conceptualism in Every Situation,”
certain proximity to the magazine works of Europe—for example, in Katharina in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,
Dan Graham, Burgin overlooked the aes- Sieverding’s F-VI (1969)—the easel-paint- 1950s—1980s, exh. cat. (Queens, N.Y.: Queens
thetic limitations that Graham had already ing-cum-photo-tableau entered the scene Museum of Art, 1999), 31-39.
recognized by the end of the 1960s. For, in connection with color starting in the 4. Gregory Battcock, introduction to [dea Art: A
in the process of privileging the text above 1980s. As early as 1978 Jeff Wall began Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973), 1.
the picture—which the Art & Language working with large-scale color photographs See also Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The
group favored by Burgin also tended to (e.g., The Destroyed Room), and from 1984, Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
do—there is the danger of a suspension, or when he had his first major exhibitions 1972 (London: Studio Vista, 1973), 8. In contrast,
even a dismissal, of the visuality of art and at the ICA in London and the Kunsthalle Jiirgen Morschel in 1970 expressed the hardly
its aesthetic dimension. Photography, how- Basel, Wall received more attention in less exaggerated view that Conceptual Art “was
ever, could link up only with quite specific Europe than in North America. In 1986 more durably established in the European art
aspects of Conceptual Art in order to find Thomas Ruff showed oversize portraits scene than in the American” (“Die Kunst nach
its way to a renewed affirmation of the pic- in Paris.®2 It is perhaps in Ruff’s work that Pop und Minimal: Die Manifestationen von Bern
ture form, which at the same time meant a we find the most obvious continuation und Amsterdam und die Folgen,” in
criticism of painting: although photography of Conceptualism, since he—in a radical Kunstjahrbuch 1, ed. Jirgen Harten et al.
tends to dematerialize the conventional inversion of the methods of his teachers [Hannover: Fackeltrager, 1970], 123).
painted image, it functions first as art. And Bernd and Hilla Becher—represents an 5. Nancy Foote, “The Anti-Photographers, ”
so, from the genesis of photography and approach in which photography is decon- Artforum 15 (September 1976): 48.
its establishment as an art form in Europe, structed using its own technical means. 6. See Jeff Wall, ““Marks of Indifference’: Aspects
an alternative pictorial form developed of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in
that could continue to evolve independ- Shortly after Ruff, other so-called Becher Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975, exh.
ently from Conceptual Art. disciples, such as Andreas Gursky and cat., ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los
Thomas Struth, took up a form of presen- Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995),
A New Scale: European Photography tation in which the photograph is given 247-267.
after Conceptual Art a prefabricated frame by the artist and 7. Giséle Freund, Photographie und biirgerliche
then directly laminated behind protective Gesellschaft; eine kunst-soziologische Studie
The gradual transformation of what is Plexiglas, thereby turning what was once (Munich: Rogner & Bernhardt, 1968); published
understood by a picture—from an apothe- a sheet of photographic paper into an in English as Photography and Society (Boston:
osis of painting (of a kind whose aesthetic object. Moreover, these artists sought a D. R. Godine, 1980); Beaumont Newhall,
and social meaning was fundamentally new post-Conceptual photographic lan- Photography, 1839-1937: A Short Critical History
called into question in the 1960s) to alter- guage, drawing on Romantic or pictorial (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937).
native picture forms (especially as repre- approaches that are often derived from the 8. See, e.g., Newhall, Photography, 1839-1937,
sented by the rediscovery of fine art painting tradition and recombining them idem, The History of Photography: From 1839 to
photography)—was considerably furthered with new digital means. In other words, the Present Day (New York: Museum of Modern
by Conceptual Art. While Jeff Wall, some- Conceptual Art’s dematerialization of the Art, 1949); Robert Doty, ed., Photography in
what arbitrarily, set the year 1974 as the art object ultimately led in photography America, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum
time when the understanding of a picture to its exact opposite. of American Art, 1974); Jonathan Green,
was changed by art photography in North American Photography:A Critical History, 1945 to
America,®! this was delayed by several Notes the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams: 1984).
years in Europe. For discussions and the stimulus these gave me, 9. On the history of photography at MoMA, see
I would like to acknowledge and thank Catharina Christopher Phillips, “The Judgement Seat of
What is striking is that this development Manchanda (New York), Dorothee Fischer and Photography,” October, no. 22 (fall 1982): 27-63.
was characterized by a widespread absti- Ulla Wiegand (Diisseldorf), Volker Kahmen 10. On his work, see Otto Steinert, exh. cat.
nence from color photography, despite (Rheinbach), Philip Ursprung (Zurich), and Jeff (Essen: Folkwang Museum, 1999).
the fact that (or perhaps because) it had Wall (Vancouver). 11. I neglect the Czech situation here, although
been available for some time and was Jindrich Styrsky’s Na jehlach técho dni (1941,
already used by amateurs. Up to then 1. Thomas Dreher, Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika 1945), Zdenék Tmej’s Abeceda (1946), and Josef
color had been encountered chiefly in the und England zwischen 1963 und 1976 (Frankfurt Sudek Fotografie (1956), all published in Prague,
picture material found in everyday life. am Main: Peter Lang, 1992). did not essentially affect the reception of

94 STEFAN GRONERT
European photography. could and should come under the heading of 29. German law did not permit the photographer
12. See Ute Eskildsen, “Subjektive Fotografie,” Conceptual Art. See Tony Godfrey, Conceptual couple to be appointed in tandem to a university
in “Subjektive Fotografie”: Images of the 50’s, exh. Art (London: Phaidon, 1998); Alexander Alberro, post. This was also the case at the Kunstakademie
cat. (Essen: Fotografische Sammlung im Museum “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977,” in Hamburg; officially only Hilla Becher was
Folkwang, 1984); J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, in Conceptual Art:A Critical Anthology, ed. named a guest lecturer there in 1972-1973.
“Subjektive Fotografie”: Der deutsche Beitrag, Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson 30. Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, “The Bechers’
1948-1963, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Institut fiir (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999): xvi-xxxvii, esp. Industrial Lexicon,” Art in America 90 (June
Auslandsbeziehungen, 1992). xxvf.; Global Conceptualism; Anne Rorimer, New 2002): 93ff.: “Pressure to offer [an appointment]
13. Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, ed., Foto-Auge: Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: built up because of Conceptual Art” (140).
76 Fotos der Zeit / Oeil et Photo: 76 photographies Thames & Hudson, 2001); Sabeth Buchmann, 31. The Bechers did, however, take part in the
de notre temps /Photo-Eye: 76 Photoes {sic] of the “Conceptual Art,” in DuMonts Begriffslexikon zur Leverkusen exhibition Konzeption—Conception
Period (Tiibingen, 1929; London: Thames & zeitgenOssischen Kunst, ed. Hubertus Butin (1969).
Hudson, 1974). (Cologne: DuMont, 2002), 49-53; Peter Osborne, 32. See Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York:
14. J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Vom Sinn der ed., Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 2002). Dutton, 1972); Lippard, Six Years.
Photographie: Texte aus den Jahren 1952-1980 21. Klaus Honnef, Concept Art (Cologne: 33. See Susanne Lange, ed., Bernd und Hilla
(Prestel: Munich, 1980). Phaidon, 1971), 25. Cf. Peter Wollen, “Global Becher: Festschrift Erasmuspreis 2002 (Munich:
15. See Susanne Anna, ed., Die Informellen: Von Conceptualism and North American Concept Schirmer & Mosel, 2002), 51ff.
Pollock bis Schumacher /The Informal Artists: Art,” in Global Conceptualism, 73-85, esp. 74. 34. Carl Andre, “A Note on Bernhard and Hilla
From Pollock to Schumacher (Ostfildern: Cantz, 22. Harald Szeemann, “Zur Ausstellung,” in Live Becher,” Artforum 11 (December 1972): 59. As
1999); Informel: Der Anfang nach dem Ende in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, exh. Hilla Becher told the present author in an inter-
(Dortmund: Museum am Ostwall, 1999). cat. (Bern: Kunsthalle, 1969), unpaginated; trans- view on July 11, 1999, Andre’s article, however,
16. See the review of the 1964 Documenta 3 in lated by Shaun Whiteside, in Arte Povera, ed. came about independently from and presumably
the major weekly newspaper Die Zeit, written by Carolyn Christoy-Bakargiev (London: Phaidon, also before the exhibition. Andre himself said
Klaus Jiirgen-Fischer: “Im Zeichen des 1999) 225. that his contribution was based on the summary
Informalismus: Auf der Documenta III kommt 23. Szeemann’s journal was excerpted in the of a conversation between Marianne Scharn
die neue Malerei zu kurz,” in Documenta: Idee catalogue for the exhibition Op losse schroeven and the Bechers. See Susanne Lange, “A
und Institution: Tendenzen, Konzepte, Materialien, and then published in full in Jean-Christophe Conversation with Carl Andre,” in Bernd und
ed. Manfred Schneckenburger (Munich: Ammann and Harald Szeemann, Von Hodler zur Hilla Becher, 56.
Bruckmann, 1983), 81-82. Antiform: Geschichte der Kunsthalle Bern (Bern: 35. Later the Bechers themselves relativized this
17. Pierre Bourdieu et al., Un art moyen: Essai Bentelli, 1970), unpaginated, and again in the function: “Preservation wasn’t the motivation.
sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris: reprint of the Bern exhibition catalogue. It’s a side effect” (cited in Rorimer, New Art,
Minuit, 1965); published in English as 24. Work by Kakis and Marisa Merz could be 281, n. 21).
Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun seen in Amsterdam but not in Bern. On the dif- 36. See Monika Steinhauser, ed., Bernd und Hilla
Whiteside (Stanford: Stanford University ference between the two exhibitions, see also Becher: Industriephotographie—im Spiegel der
Press, 1990). Harald Szeemann, “When Attitudes Become Tradition (Disseldorf: Richter, 1994), 11.
18. Rosalind Krauss, “A Note on Photography Form (Bern, 1969),” in Die Kunst der Ausstellung: 37. On the Bechers’ early career, see Wulf
and the Simulacral,” October, no. 31 (winter Eine Dokumentation dreiBig exemplarischer Herzogenrath, Distanz und Nahe, exh. cat.
1984): 59, 63. Kunstausstellungen dieses Jahrhunderts, ed. Bernd (Stuttgart: Institut fiir Auslandsbeziehungen,
19. Cf. Jean-Frangois Chevrier, “Die Abenteuer Kliiser and Katharina Hegewisch (Frankfurt: 1992): esp. 7ff.; Susanne Lange, “Von der
der Tableau-Form in der Geschichte der Insel, 1991), 212-219. Entdeckung der Formen: Zur Entwicklung des
Photographie,” in Photo-Kunst: Arbeiten aus 150 25. See Helmut Friedel, “Fernsehgalerie Gerry Werkes von Bernd und Hilla Becher,” in Bernd
Jahren, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Schum—Land Art” (Berlin, 1969), in Kliser und Hilla Becher, 11-31; on film, see Ziegler,
Stuttgart, 1989), 9-45. Whereas Rolf H. Krauss and Hegewisch, Kunst der Ausstellung, 204-211. “The Bechers’ Industrial Lexicon,” 100, 140.
moved this phenomenon back to the 1960s 26. See Lippard, Six Years, 106, 111, 178. 38. Bernhard and Hilla Becher, Anonyme
(Walter Benjamin und der neue-Blick auf die 27. See Jan Dibbets: Dutch Pavilion, exh. cat. Skulpturen: Eine Typologie technischer Bauten
Photographie [Ostfildern: Cantz, 1998]: 7), (Venice: XXXVI Biennale, 1972); Jan Dibbets: (Dusseldorf: Art-Press, 1970), unpaginated
Heinrich Klotz saw in the recognition of photog- Audio-visuelle Dokumentationen, exh. cat. (italics added by author).
raphy as art a phenomenon of a “second mod- (Krefeld: Museum Haus Lange, 1969). The exhi- 39. Bernhard and Hilla Becher, “Anonyme
ernism” (“Kunst der Gegenwart,” in Kunst der bition history shows that Dibbets took part in Skulpturen,” in Kunstjahrbuch 1, 442.
Gegenwart [Karlsruhe: Museum fiir Neue Kunst, fifteen group exhibitions in 1969, 40. Bernhard and Hilla Becher, “Anonyme
ZKM; Munich: Prestel, 1997], 20). On the diffi- 28. See Klaus Honnef, “Beschreibungen zu Skulpturen,” Kunst-Zeitung, no. 2 (January 1969):
culty photography had in being recognized as art Projekten von Jan Dibbets,” in Jan Dibbets, exh. unpaginated.
in the 1970s, see Ulrich Domrése, “Positionen cat. (Aachen: Gegenverkehr, Zentrum fiir 41. Volker Kahmen, “Die Industrieaufnahmen
kiinstlerischer Photographie in Deutschland seit aktuelle Kunst, 1970), unpaginated; E. de Wilde, Bernhard Bechers,” a flyer from the Galerie Pro,
1945,” in Positionen kiinstlerischer Photographie “Over Jan Dibbets/About Jan Dibbets,” in Jan Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1965.
in Deutschland seit 1945, ed. Ulrich Domrose Dibbets, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk 42. Volker Kahmen, Fotografie als Kunst
(Cologne: DuMont, 1997), 32ff. Museum, 1972), unpaginated. Along with Gilbert (Tubingen: Wasmuth, 1973).

20. Recent research has rightly brought attention & George, Dibbets was the sole European pho- 43. Rolf Sachsse, Hilla und Bernhard Becher: Silo
to the fact that there were also important tographer represented by photographic work in fiir Kokskohle, Zeche Hannibal (Bochum-
approaches in Latin America and Africa that Honnef, Concept Art, 50-53, 60-61. Hofstede, 1967): Das Anonyme und das Plastische
der Industriephotographie (Frankfurt: Fischer, Briicke: Ihr internationaler Weg zur Sammlung schelsen, exh. cat. (Utrecht: Hedendaagse Kunst,
1999), 46, even speaks of a “paradigm shift in Fotografis: Ein Beitrag zur Sammlungsgeschichte 1972); Gerhard Richter, Adlas, ed. Fred J ahn
the pictorial thinking and actions of the couple” der Fotografie (Passau: Dietmar Klinger, 1999); with a text by Armin Zweite, exh. cat. (Munich:
by around 1977 at the latest. Mechanismus und Ausdruck: Die Sammlung Ann Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1989).
44. Bernhard and Hilla Becher, in Armine Haase, und Jiirgen Wilde: Fotografien aus dem 20. 69. See Documenta 5, 16.65-68, 16.73-74,
Gespréche mit Ktinstlern (Cologne: Wienand, Jahrhundert, exh. cat. (Hannover: Sprengel- 16.107-109.
1981), 23. Museum; Munich: Schirmer & Mosel, 1999); 70. See Andy Warhol: Photography, exh. cat.
45. Cited in Helga Meister, “Bernd und Hilla Stuart Alexander, “Fotografische Institution und (Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle; Pittsburgh:
Becher: Die Anfange, die Schiiler,” in fotografische Praxis,” in Newe Geschichte der Andy Warhol Museum, 1999).
Diisseldorfer Avantgarden: Pers6nlichkeiten— Fotografie, ed. Michel Frizot (Cologne: 71. Laszlo Glozer, “Ausstieg aus dem Bild:
Bewegungen—Orte, ed. Arbeitsgemeinschaft 28 Konemann, 1998), 695-707. Wiederkehr der Aussenwelt,” in Westkunst:
Diisseldorfer Galerien (Dusseldorf: Richter, 58. See Evelyn Weiss, “Einfiihrung in die Abtei- ZeitgenOssische Kunst seit 1939 (Cologne:
1995), 48. lung Fotografie,” in Documenta 6, vol. 2, 7-10. DuMont, 1981): 234-238; Peter Weibel and
46. Michael Kohler, interview with Bernd und 59. Klaus Honnef, “Fotografie zwischen Christian Meyer, eds., Das Bild nach dem letzten
Hilla Becher, in Kiinstler: Kritisches Lexikon der Authentizitat und Fiktion,” in Documenta 6, vol. Bild / The Picture after the Last Picture, exh. cat.
Gegenwartskunst, ed. Lothar Romain and Detlef 2, 27, n. 93. Since 1974 Honnef has organized (Vienna: Galerie Metropol, 1991); Johannes
Bluemler (Munich: Bruckmann, 1989), 15. exhibitions at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Meinhardt, Ende der Malerei und Malerei nach
47. See Hilla and Bernd Becher, in an interview Bonn featuring the Bechers (1975), Karl dem Ende der Malerei (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1997).
with Heinz Liesbrock, “His Photos Have Blossfeldt (1976), Albert Renger-Patzsch (1977), 72. Cited in Lippard, Six Years, 59.
Something of a First Encounter,” in Stephen and Germaine Krull (1977), among others. 73. See his own account in Documenta 6, 154.
Shore: Fotografien, 1973 bis 1993, ed. Heinz 60. See Lothar Romain and Manfred 74. On the changes in Ruscha’s criticism of pho-
Liesbrock (Munich: Schirmer & Mosel, 1993), 28. Schneckenburger, “Grundlagen der Documenta tography up to the present, see Stefan Gronert,
48. See Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive 6” (March 1976), in Documenta: Idee und “Reality Is Not Totally Real’: The Dubiousness
Moment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952). Institution: Tendenzen, Konzepte, Materialien, ed. of Reality in Contemporary Photography,” in
49. See Documenta 6, exh. cat. (Kassel: P. Manfred Schneckenburger (Munich: Great Illusions: Demand—Gursky—Ruscha, exh.
Dierichs, 1977), vol. 2, 74, 82, 132. Bruckmann, 1983), 143-145. cat. (North Miami, Fla.: Museum of
50. After the Bechers’ work was shown only once 61. We can see a prototype for this in a 1973 Contemporary Art, 1999), 12-30.
(Nuremberg, 1971) in the context of Conceptual exhibition in Leverkusen organized by Lothar 75. As exemplified by the work of Josef Albers,
Art following the Leverkusen exhibition, it was Romain and Rolf Wedewer which was based on Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman, and Frank Stella,
characteristically excluded from the exhibition the same model and included even more contem- among others; see Systematic Painting, exh. cat.
Konzept Kunst, organized by Konrad Fischer and porary photographers; see Medium Fotografie. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Klaus Honnef, which took place at the 62. Jo Ann Lewis, “Soho-on-the-Fulda: Home 1966); Serial Imagery, ed. John Coplans, exh. cat.
Kunstmuseum Basel from March 18 to April 23, of the Bonapartes, the Brothers Grimm and the (Pasadena, Calif: Pasadena Art Museum, 1968).
1972, that is, immediately before Documenta 5. Avant-garde,” Washington Post, July 10, 1977. 76. On the significance of Le Witt for Conceptual
51. Harald Szeemann, in Documenta 5, exh. cat. 63. Cited in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 206. Art, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual
(Kassel: Bertelsmann, 1972), 10. 64. See Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: Art, 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of
52. See Klaus Honnef and Gisela Kaminski, American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, Administration to the Critique of Institutions,”
“Einfihrung,” ibid., 17.1-17.9. 1955-69 (London: Calmann & King, 1996); October, no. 55 (winter 1990): 136-143; on the
53. Since it was Konrad Fischer who—in collabo- Rorimer, New Art. significance of the filmic in photo sequences, see
ration with Rolf Wedewer—in Europe had first 65. Paul Wember, in the foreword to the Krefeld Dreher, Konzeptuelle Kunst, 135-136.
linked the Bechers to Conceptual Art (see the edition of the exhibition catalogue When Attitudes 77. See Timm Rautert: Bildanalytische
exhibition Konzeption—Conception, Leverkusen, Become Form (Vorstellungen nehmen Form an) Photographie, 1968-1974 (Cologne: Verlag
1969) and in addition exhibited their work in his accordingly pointed out Beuys and Fluxus as der Buchhandlung Walther K6nig, 2000).
own gallery in 1970, we can assume that the inclu- forerunners of the contemporary generation. 78. Victor Burgin, quoted in Osborne,
sion of the Bechers was due to his initiative and 66. The exceptions to this, along with the British Conceptual Art, 126.
that it was Fischer, and not Honnef, who discov- branch of Art & Language, are above all Daniel 79. See Godfrey, Conceptual Art, 203-205;
ered them. Dorothee Fischer confirmed this in Buren, Victor Burgin, and the U.S. resident Hans Osborne, Conceptual Art, 126.
an interview on January 31, 2003. Haacke. 80. Cf. Godfrey, Conceptual Art, 327; Rorimer,
54. See Documenta 5, 23.42-23.44. 67. See Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures New Art, 153; Dreher, Konzeptuelle Kunst, 78f.
55. See Medium Fotografie: Fotoarbeiten bildender Vanish, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of 81. Wall, “Marks of Indifference,’” 267.
Kiinstler von 1910 bis 1973, exh. cat. (Leverkusen: Contemporary Art, 1995). 82. See Matthias Winzen, ed., Thomas Ruff:
Stadtisches Museum Leverkusen, 1973); Kunst 68. On the paintings, see Gerhard Richter, exh. Fotografien 1979-heute (Cologne: Verlag der
aus Photographie: Was machen Kiinstler heute mit cat. (Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2001), 184, 254;
Photographie? exh. cat. (Hannover: Kunstverein Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1993), vol. 3, nos. Peter Galassi, “Gursky’s World,” in Andreas
Hannover, 1973); Combattimento per un’ imma- 379-384 (1975); Stefan Gronert, “Die Gursky, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern
gine, fotografi e pittori, exh. cat. (Turin: Galleria Abbildlichkeit des Bildes: Die mediale Reflexion Art, 2001), 27.
Civica d’Arte Moderna, 1973). der Fotografie bei Gerhard Richter und Jeff
56. Klaus Honnef, “Tagebuch,” Kunstforum Wall,” Zeitschrift fiir Asthetik und allgemeine
International 16 (1976): 273. Kunstwissenschaft 47 (2002): 37-72. On the Atlas,
57. See esp. Anna Auer, Die Wiener Galerie Die see Gerhard Richter, Atlas van de foto’s en

96 STEFAN GRONERT
Dan Graham sive phases of the expression being over- (Stanford had been right) were extended
laid (in time?). The recording of periodic by Muybridge to all types of animal (man
events represents a borderline case:
Photographs of Motion the photograph of an oscillating pendulum
included) locomotion and shown to the
public by means of another Muybridge
(1969) will produce sharp images of the two “invention”—a modified stereopticon re-
extreme positions on each side. The named, the zoogyscope. (The original stere-
“image” of periodic movement in time opticon had been invented by Roget when
Originally published in Endmoments (New York: is made evident by the fact it gives an he observed two principles: that a standing
Privately printed, 1969). impression of complete rest. man walking on the other side of a slatted
fence appeared through the slits to be in
In 1865 Jules Marey was investigating the movement and that due to the parallax: dis-
problem of accurately recording the motion parity between the images of each of the
The subject of motion through historical of a horse trotting or galloping so that the observer’s eyes as they viewed the flickering
time has been pictured paradoxically: period during which each of the horse’s feet images from slightly different perspectives
Zeno’s early Greek word picture goes: touched the ground could be established. the image had the appearance of depth: a
“Tf at each instant the flying arrow is at rest, His solution was to insert in the hollow of series of figures painted on the inside of
when does it move?” (Zeno’s object was each hoof of his subject, a rubber ball from a revolving glass cylinder which were seen
to prove that continuous motion in time which a long rubber hose led to an inked through slits in the cylinder so the figures
did not, logically, exist)—forward to Joseph pen, which in turn drew a line on a piece appeared animated was the modus vivendi
Pennell’s observation on the early photog- of paper stretched around a continuously of the device Roget perfected.)
raphic object about the time of its first rotating drum whenever the animal placed
appearance in the middle Nineteenth its foot to the ground and so increased the Muybridge mounted transparencies of
Century: “If you photograph an object pressure of the rubber ball. A registering his photographic series on a circular glass
in motion, all feeling of motion is lost.” instrument carried in the horserider’s hand plate. A second plate, of metal, was then
had four tubes inserted which led to four mounted parallel to the glass, but turning
Just as an abstraction of “subject”/ corresponding pens arranged one above on a concentric axis in the other direction.
“object” framed and measured by verbal the other. So that the length of time, in The second plate was slit at intervals, so
logic produces an equivalent illusion: par- addition to the coincidence or succession that when the two plates rotated the metal
adox; a look at the historical framework of these strokes on the registration paper plate became a shutter. An arc lamp
of motion picture photography permits showed the time elapsed and the reciprocal projected the image on a screen. Later, in
multiple reference points—suggestive relation between the lowering and the rise addition to twenty-four fixed cameras,
a(illusions)—between the mechanism of of each of the four feet of the horse. Later Muybridge used two batteries of twelve so
its appearance and what we refer to be Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by that rear views and 60-degree angle shots
objective (“reality”). ex-Governor Leland Stanford of California taken simultaneously with the front view
to prove Marey’s conclusions wrong. The by the use of an electric circuit (connected
The earliest devices made movement to Governor wagered $10,000 in support of his to a tuning fork which left graphic records
reproduce movement, done either by moy- belief that at some point all four legs were on a sheet of paper) were taken. Exact time
ing the pictures themselves, by moving their off the ground. Progress was made on the calculations could be made in relation
projected image optically, or by projecting test when a new “lightning process” in to a grid marked upon the background to
upon a mobile medium. The Laterna printing greatly reduced the exposure time relate time to motion to perspective system.
Magica, used glass slides introduced from required and also with the introduction of
the sides. From this developed the tech- drop shutters activated by strings and rub- The photographs were published, three
nique of putting a sequence of several pic- ber bands set off in succession by a string angles in series as run per page. In looking
tures on the same slide and showing them broken by the racing horse (later made at a Muybridge series: there is no fixed
in succession in a continuous motion (an electric). Soon the successful photographs point of view when a group of cameras
impression given like that of seeing through
the window of a moving car the world go Eadweard Muybridge; Pugilist Striking a Blow, from the book Animal Locomotion, c. 1887; sheet: 7% x 17 in.
by with the single inversion that the move- (18.1 x 44.5 cm); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Paul and Laurette Laessle

ment represented here by objectively real

motion is an illusory one—i.e. the subjec-
tive experience of seeing the world slide by
the window). For the next step it was neces-
sary to invert the process: to fixate the real
mobile to be reproduced as an illusion
by means of the immobile. A series of still
photos provided the means...

A time exposure of someone stationed

before a camera as he changes expression
yields a blurred picture due to the succes-
photograph the moving object in succes- Jules Marey, hearing of Muybridge’s work, invention, but the steps along its path—
sion, a set of phases being ordered. But concluded that a battery of 24 separate the analysis of motion—which first
since several cameras can’t be set up in the cameras was too dumbly discrete—making “moved” artists. Marey’s work is recalled
same place, the station point keeps chang- it difficult to relate an action. Marey had by the Futurists and most notably, by
ing. The relationship between the camera by this time been influenced in his work by Marcel Duchamp’s paintings, culminating
and moving object may be kept constant a French astronomer, Janssen, who in 1874 in Nude Descending a Staircase whose over-
by using a different camera for each phase used photography to record the positions lapping time-space was directly modeled
along the path. The releasing mechanism of Venus during its transit across the face after Marey’s superimposed series. Léger,
is dependent upon the movement of the of the sun, having invented a “photo- Moholy-Nagy and others did utilize the
object. The resulting photos are arranged graphic revolver” in which 48 instanta- motion picture (also Duchamp at a later
in two-dimensional rows on the pages so as neous shots in juxtaposition were taken date), but only as an available tool and not
to have multiple, static points of reference. around the margin edges of the negative in terms of its structural underpinnings. It
(a circular plate) as it rotated. The plate wasn’t until recently, with the “Minimalist”
There is no single, fixed point of view. The was timed to move forward at intervals, reduction of the medium to its structural
changes are positional and only involve the but remain stationary during the exposure. support in itself considered as an “object”
motion of the reader's eye (not the artist’s Marey’s improvements on this method that photography could find its own
“T”). This is unlike Renaissance perspec- began in 1882 with the invention of a subject matter.
tive where there is a linear vanishing point device with stationary plates and a move-
“inside” the image. Photography elimi- able disk shutter to record in equal time The use of the inherent transparent “flat,”
nates this dimensionality; for there is no intervals pictures of successive phases of serialized space was why I turned to the
central or climatic point (unless the figure motion of objects on black background: 35mm slide (color transparency) as art
suddenly collapses into the ground). Each when an object to be photographed “structure” in itself in a series shot in 1965
image is always in the present. No moment changes location on the plate while it is and 1966 of architectural alignments and
is created: things—moments—are suffi- moving, the phases that follow each other another series of transparent-mirror
cient unto themselves. In Mallarmé’s in time can be presented next to each other “spaces”; these were exhibited in 1966
words: “nothing shall take place except on a two-dimensional plane. The same at Finch College’s “Projected Art” (they
place.” We see and measure things only by year, Marey devised a set-up with move- dated from 1965 and 1966) and then in
related distance or in terms of ordinal able plates which closely followed “Focus On Light” in Trenton, N.J. Some
placement. What separates one moment Janssen’s “gun,” but equipped with a sight of these photographs also appeared in
(shot) from another is simple alteration in and clock movement for picking up birds black and white as “documentation” con-
the positioning of things. Each shot- in flight. A few years later a “chrono photo- tained in a two-dimensional projective
moment can be read without relation to graph” with stationary plates was installed network of schematic “information” about
the preceding or following one as they in a moveable darkroom. In consisted of land use economics, standardization and
aren’t linked. Things appear not to come a 41 feet in diameter rotating disk with serialization of buildings and buildings
from other things. Things don’t happen; a slot opening so that the disk turned ten schematically relating the appearance of
they merely replace themselves relative times a second, each exposure 1/1000 of large-scale housing “tracts” (See “Homes
to the framing edge and to each other. a second. Here the continuum is broken up for America,” Arts Magazine, December—
into separate sharp images—the recording January, 1967). This was the first published
The conventions of black and white still interrupted periodically and the resulting appearance of art construed by the reader
photography: two-dimensional objects exposure short enough to yield sharp in a mass-readable-then-disposable con-
which appear at once solid and transparent pictures. After 1890, Marey utilized a new text-document in place of the fact (neither
functioning simultaneously in two entirely serial device in which was used a strip of before the fact as a Judd or after the fact
different planes of reference (the two- a negative paper which moved by a string, as in current “Concept” art). Place in my
dimensional and the three-dimensional) wound itself continuously from spool article is decomposed into multiple and
so as one identical object it fulfills two dif- to spool and remained stationary for a overlapping points of reference—mapped
ferent functions in two contexts, an image moment during the exposure. These photo- “points of interest”—in a two-dimensional
per frame which is always in the present— graphs, however, were not suitable for pro- point to point “grid.” There is a “shell”
there being no before or after, except as jection because of the unequal distances present placed between the external
reconstructed after the fact before (as read between pictures. There was also at the “empty” material of place and the interior
by) the viewer—the image fixed and lim- time no transparent film suitable for pro- “empty” material of language; a complex,
ited to a contrast of light to be read all over jection. All that remained was the inven- interlocking network of systems whose vari-
horizontally, unlike Renaissance perspec- tion of the celluloid filmstrip and a camera ants take place as information present
tive in painting where the artist (not in the and a projector recording a projecting (and) as (like) the medium—information—
picture) was trying to re-present impres- device to provide the package continuity (in) itself.
sions by fixing (composing) for all time of images: that was “invented” by the
his exact “linear” perspective of things American packaging genius, Thomas
at a given moment, as pictorial depth is A. Edison.
equated with the time it takes the eye
to enter that depth... Ironically it wasn’t the new medium
of cinema which evolved from Edison’s

98 DAN GRAHAM
James Lingwood familiar, since his grandfather’s family had jure up an almost apocalyptic vision of
owned the entire complex as part of one an exhausted world. Oberhausen isn’t
of the oldest and largest steel companies
The Weight of Time in Germany, Hanel & Lueg. Although
so much documented as subjected to a
temporal transformation, characteristic
(2002) Smithson had made several excursions of Smithson’s penchant for dramatic men-
to quarries and mining areas as well as tal leaps in time and space, from the
distressed industrial sites in his native New prehistoric (before anything had emerged
Originally published in Field Trips: Bernd and Jersey, the journey to Oberhausen was from the primordial soup) to the post-
Hilla Becher, Robert Smithson, exh. cat. (Porto: his first prospecting visit to an industrial historic (when everything would return
Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves; site in Europe. to a similarly undifferentiated state).
Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2002), 70-79.
The rolls of film which Smithson took with The wasted landscapes Smithson found
his Instamatic refract the Oberhausen site at the edges of the Oberhausen site
through the restless lens of Smithson’s eye. matched perfectly the exhortation of one
There is no particular route or narrative of Smithson’s favourite writers T. E.
On acold December day in 1968, Bernd development within these photographs. Hulme—*Great men, go to the outside,
Becher took the German gallery owner What appears to be the first roll follows away from the Room, and wrestle with the
Konrad Fischer and the visiting American a pathway into one of the entrances to the cinders.”2 By the late 60s, Smithson was
artist Robert Smithson on a field trip. They site and includes details of trodden down already clear that his operational zone of
set off from Diisseldorf, where Fischer had grass, stone and slag, mud imprinted with preference was away from ‘the Room, at
recently opened his gallery, and headed for the tracks of heavy lorries, as well as photo- the periphery, where he could locate “the
Oberhausen, some twenty miles away, one graphs of Smithson with his fellow prospec- memory-traces of an abandoned set of
of the largest industrial complexes in the tors. The other rolls contain many more futures,” before bringing them back to
Ruhr district, itself one of the most concen- close-ups of industrial wreckage, pools the centre in the form of non-sites and dis-
trated areas of industrial production in of solidified asphalt, mounds of broken- placements, films and writings which would
Western Europe at that time. up slag, and cracked earth. Smithson kept collectively “surmount the perimeters of
close to the elemental details of the site, the old sensibility.”4
The field trip was for the benefit of though these photos are interspersed with
Smithson, who was scheduled to open his occasional glimpses through the smog of Bernd and Hilla Becher saw the
first one-person exhibition in Europe in the blast furnaces which had spewed out Oberhausen site differently. They knew
Fischer’s gallery in Andreastrasse in a cou- all the waste. The sequences of prosaic the whole Ruhr district intimately, and had
ple of weeks’ time. In the summer of 1968 black and white snapshots do more than reconnoitred every industrial complex in
Fischer had invited Smithson to show, per- describe an industrial wasteland. They con- the area, large and small. They had begun
haps as a consequence of his participation
in the groundbreaking “Minimal Art” Bernd and Hilla Becher; Bergwerk Concordia, Oberhausen, D, 1967; black-and-white photograph; 19%/ x 23% in.
exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The (50 x 60 cm); courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, New York

Hague in May 1968. Smithson accepted

the invitation and wrote back in August
“T think I would like to do an ‘indoor earth-
work’ (a non-site) based on some rock or
sand deposits in Germany—if you know of
any quarries, we could collect the material
when I get over there. Slag heaps, slate,
coal, limestone, shale or other mining areas
could be used. After I get the gallery plans,
I’ll send you my plans for the non-site ‘con-
tainers’—that hopefully you could have
fabricated before I arrive in November.
Some geological maps of German rock
“and mineral deposits would be a help. . .”!

Oberhausen was a site which Bernd and

Hilla Becher already knew well. They had
begun to work there in 1963 (photograph-
ing the blast furnaces at Gutehoffnungs-
hiitte West), and continued between 1967
and 1969, this time concentrating on the
other blast furnace, Gutehoffnungshitte
Ost. It was an area with which, for a very
different reason, Fischer was intimately

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW 19

to photograph in the mining area around of the vernacular buildings of the industrial “Entropy” was in the dining room).
Siegen, where Bernd had grown up, in the age first in their immediate region, and Smithson gave the Bechers a small non-
early 1960s and quickly formulated working then beyond. Since the end of the Second site in 1969, for which they gathered the
methods which remain essentially World War, photography in Germany had slag themselves in Oberhausen. But the
unchanged today. In the Robert Smithson turned away from the shattered landscape modus operandi of the artists could hardly
papers in the Archives of American Art, towards manipulated “subjective” worlds. have been more different. The photo-
there is a single black and white photo- The Bechers faced out again, picking up graphic tool of the Bechers was a wieldy
graphic print given to Smithson by the the disrupted (and at the time largely for- plate camera (first an old wooden plate
Bechers: a panoramic view of the industrial gotten) approach of the Neue Sachlichkeit. camera, and then a Plaubel 13/18) which
landscape of Oberhausen, with the coal Sander’s photographs of German citizens enabled them to make photographs with
mining complex Zeche Concordia in the were a revelation and Blossfeldt’s book of an exceptional degree of definition.
foreground, and Gutehoffnungshiitte Ost close-ups of plants and flowers—Urformen Smithson on the other hand used an
and West, the two huge steel-making facto- der Kunst—provided them with a precedent Instamatic camera in an apparently casual
ries, in the background. Many of the types of precise description and delineation of manner to produce small snapshots. The
of industrial buildings which were central different forms. Bechers arrived to photograph at a particu-
to the photographic project of the Bechers lar site following detailed research and they
feature in this panorama: winding-towers The terrain of the Bechers’ project was the methodically applied a pre-determined
and water towers, coal silos, cooling towers, industrial world. Both the Bechers and formal system. Smithson arrived some-
gas holders, and blast furnaces as well as Smithson shared a mutual fascination for where in a far less deliberate way, improvis-
factory buildings of many different kinds. the sites of heavy industry and an interest ing on the themes he had coursing around
This overview is reproduced on the first in a certain aesthetic ambiguity which his fertile mind. Where the Bechers saw
pages of their 1971 book Die Architektur der issued from their uses of photography. forms and structures within a working
Forder- und Wassertiirme in juxtaposition They shared many friends amongst the rap- industrial complex, Smithson sought out
to an engraving of an industrial landscape idly evolving international art milieu of the formlessness, disintegration and waste.
from 1800, a comprehensive summary of late 60s, including most notably Carl Andre
forms of buildings clustered in a heavily and Sol Le Witt, both of whom had already Oberhausen was a particularly rich seam
industrialised landscape. showed in Fischer’s gallery. They for the Bechers to mine. Though they had
exchanged works. The Bechers remember already travelled extensively through
By the time of the trip, the Bechers had giving Smithson several photographs of Northern Europe as their project began
already conceived their immensely ambi- cooling towers which apparently hung in to take shape, Oberhausen was one of the
tious, open-ended project—nothing less his bedroom (a painting by Kosuth based largest sites closest to home. They worked
than to create a quasi-encyclopedic record on a blow-up of the dictionary entry for there extensively between 1968 and 1972,
making as many visits as possible when the
Robert Smithson; from Oberhausen Photographs, 1968; black-and-white photograph; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm); weather conditions were right (essentially
Robert Smithson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. a neutral and cloudless sky—nothing could
be more different than the murky atmos-
phere in Smithson’s snaps). At the time,
they had begun to exhibit in Germany and
to find their work placed within the context
of conceptual art and they were building up
groupings of buildings for their first
book—Anonyme Skulpturen—published
in 1970. The book enabled the Bechers for
the first time to present many of the key
types in their natural history of industrial
buildings or objects. In the back of the
book, they articulate with typical concise-
ness their intentions. “In this book we show
objects predominantly instrumental in
character whose shapes are the results of
calculation and whose processes of devel-
opment are optically evident. They are
generally buildings whose anonymity is
accepted to be the style. Their peculiarities
originate not in spite of, but because of
the lack of design.’>

The objects the Bechers presented were

organised into families of forms,
sequenced to emphasise the way in which

100 JAMES LINGWOOD

different vernacular forms evolved in they are sometimes very subtle. All the the stratified steel, they look like ranges
response to different needs and developing objects in one family resemble each other, of disrupted landmass.
technologies. The categories they chose to they are similar. But they also have a
present in this first publication were lime very special individuality.”7 On the wall to the side of the containers,
kilns, cooling towers, blast furnaces, wind- Smithson installed five panels. Each panel
ing towers, water towers, gasholders, and At the same time, the sequencing of the had the same detail of the map of the
silos. The book included photographs from photographs expresses the relationship of Oberhausen site, a description of the site
Oberhausen in several of these sections, the individual variations to basic, general written by Smithson, and five photographs
amongst them portraits of many of the forms in a vernacular equivalent to the from the rolls taken on the field trip.8
individual buildings which feature in the development of different sculptural lan- Different kinds of evidence rubbed up
overview photograph of Oberhausen such guages in Medieval Europe. It may appear against each other—hard geological facts,
as the cooling towers, winding towers, that the Bechers’ work is cool, controlled photographic impressions, and carto-
water towers, and gasholders from Zeche and detached. But rarely can such apparent graphic description—in a display which
Concordia and the blast furnaces at detachment have been allied to such mirrors Smithson’s own restless mind
Gutehoffnungshiitte. enduring passion—in this case to attest to as it oscillates between microcosm and
the endless variations of vernacular indus- macrocosm, scientific specimen and
The Oberhausen “archive” gradually found trial form—and rarely can such apparent imaginative project.
its way into different families of types. The stylelessness have evolved into such a sin-
Bechers were more interested in showing gular style. Their immersion in the over- The second work Smithson exhibited in
how one form related to another in terms looked and unaestheticised landscapes of Diisseldorf in December 1968 was a lump
of form than in terms of function. But the industrial era is not based on a mental of asphalt, picked up on site and deposited
occasionally, the family of buildings on projection of time, as it is with Smithson, on the floor of the gallery without further
one particular site have also been shown but on a desire to engage the viewer in the artistic intervention and without any addi-
together, as was the case with the mentality of a particular time—the era of tional information. Asphalt is the residue
Gutehoffnungshitte site which was the heavy industrial production. from refining coal, just as slag is the by-
subject of an exhibition of photographs product of steel-making. Nothing in
at Konrad Fischer’s gallery in 1976.° Days after their joint expedition to Smithson’s previous work quite prepares
Oberhausen, Smithson’s exhibition opened us for this radical gesture, except perhaps
The first book by the Bechers already at the Galerie Konrad Fischer. He pre- the playful, provocative tone of his writing.
embodies their refined aesthetic of hard sented two works. The sculpture he had Asphalt Lump is a post-industrial ready-
facts. Each building or structure has been described to Fischer became the most made, an object of pure impurity, a black
photographed and presented in as clear, ambitious articulation of his “non-site” formless counterpoint to Duchamp’s white
as frontal, and as apparently unmediated idea to date: Non-Site (Oberhausen), 1968. shrine. No bin contained the lump, it was
a form as possible. Each seems to present In one of Smithson’s characteristically framed only by a white rectangle painted
itself directly to the camera, so that the laconic inversions, he deposited bits of on the gallery floor. It just sits there, an
character of each building is as clearly slag, the waste product from the industrial absurd specimen of solidified formlessness,
delineated as possible. They share similari- process used to produce steel, in five steel the very embodiment of entropy—that
ties, but they are never precisely the same. bins, painted white. The slag, collected on state of inert equivalence which fascinated
As Hilla Becher has stated, “You can only the field trip, filled each container like Smithson and which was the polar opposite
see the differences between the objects specimens in a geological display. At the of the Bechers’ interest in the differentia-
when they are close together, because same time, protruding from the top bar of tion of objects.

Invitation to Robert Smithson exhibition, Non-site, Galerie Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf, December 20,
Smithson had been prospecting with friends
1968—January 17, 1969, with map of Oberhausen and fellow artists in the US since the early
F AAUIEOCER ELIESF | Faerie Saad i 1960s. Usually accompanied by Nancy Holt,
id
and most often in the hinterlands of New
Jersey, Smithson made expeditions with,
amongst others, Carl Andre, Donald Judd,
? VS:
rehheller,
e Westerjiolt *
Michael Heizer, Sol Le Witt, Robert Morris
(Andre and Le Witt were also close friends
$2 Ling kanigshorn
S 5, ;
of the Bechers) as well as Virginia Dwan in
‘ purus
whose New York gallery he would present a
substantial non-site exhibition in February
1969. In one of his first non-sites (A
Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey) realised in
May 1968, Smithson juxtaposed an aerial
SOs oo MN |Kineh -7.
2 PStimmerry:
photograph of the site cut up into five sec-
tions with five bins containing mineral
AN ahas oUN
WS
‘
RodLe)y e Owns
Oy *
:
ee
~
%
Heme,
Lp SR
=
ath
Steiniephlen
Sci chte
und. Stollen. deposits from Franklin. In a text which was
DWT
qt we GB husentuitten uStahlren
* Haten Wine
i phy, seStaustulen
wee eea der Fuhy part of the work, he wrote “The map is
three times smaller than the non-site. Tours jumbled museum. Embedded in the sedi- History in New York (a site to which he
to sites are possible. The 5 outdoor sites are ment is a text that contains limits and returned in the Spiral Jetty film) to the field
not contained by any limiting parts—there- boundaries which evade the rational trips with his co-artists until, by the end
fore they are chaotic sites, regions of dis- order, and social structures which confine of 1968, he wanted to go further than the
persal, places without a Room—elusive it. In order to read the rocks, we must quasi-scientific observation and presenta-
order prevails, the substrata is disrupted become conscious of geologic time.”? tion of geologic time. He wanted not only
(see snapshot of the five shots).” to observe “geologic” time but to imitate
During this period of intense development Smithson’s interest in “geologic time” its vastness and depth: to play at being it.
from his quasi-minimal sculpture, echoes the strata of time which the great Informed by his research into land-slides,
Smithson articulated the formulation French historian Fernand Braudel avalanches and eruptions, he began
of the site/non-site dialectic in a key essay described as co-existing within the present. to make drawings of these phenomena.
published in Artforum in September 1968, Braudel articulated three different tempo- The drawings projected imaginary flows
“A Sedimentation of the Mind—Earth ral modes: the time of the individual, which of mud, asphalt, and cement on to the
Projects.” The essay foregrounds more he called “biological time,” the “social landscape and a trilogy of actions emulat-
intensively than any of Smithson’s previous time” of human cultures, their mental ing geological movements were performed
writing his obsession with structures and structures, beliefs, habits and customs, in late 1969 and early 1970. Asphalt
their inevitable collapse. “A bleached and and, finally, a much slower time of envir- Rundown was realised in a quarry outside
fractured world surrounds the artist. To onmental, climactic, and demographic Rome in the autumn of 1969 (the location
organize this mass of corrosion into pat- change which he termed “geographical of the quarry on the run-down periphery
terns, grids, and subdivisions is an time.” Smithson’s interest in “geologic of the epicentre of classical civilisation
aesthetic process that has scarcely been time” echoes this final temporal mode was particularly pleasing to Smithson),
touched . .. construction takes on the look of Braudel’s but it also exceeds it, since followed by Concrete Pour in a quarry near
of destruction; perhaps that’s why certain geologic time was too slow and too deep Chicago, and soon after a smaller scale
architects hate bulldozers and steam to take any account of humankind at all. work, Glue Pour in Vancouver.!9
shovels. They seem to turn the terrain into It stretched back to the cataclysmic move-
unfinished cities of organized wreckage... . ments of landmass and catastrophic shifts Smithson had stated in an interview: “It is
The actual disruption of the earth’s crust is in temperature which preceded any sort of interesting to take on the persona
at times very compelling, and seems signs of human life on earth. of a geologic agent where man actually
to confirm Heraclitus Fragment 124 “The becomes part of that process rather than
most beautiful world is like a heap of His fascination with the elemental facts overcoming it.”!! In taking on that per-
rubble tossed down in confusion.” And of geology had grown from this adolescent sona, he could play at escaping the con-
then later, “The strata of the Earth is a excursions to the Museum of Natural straining structures of aesthetic convention
of his time—notably the preoccupation
Robert Smithson; from Oberhausen Photographs, 1968; black-and-white photograph; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm); with the unity of the gestalt. In a letter
Robert Smithson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. from 1968 he wrote that “geologic time has
a way of diminishing ‘art history’ to a mere
trace.”!2 Similarly, following his encounter
e
with the crumbling chaos of the slate quar-
he aha ee baa,
ries in Bangor in Pennsylvania, he rejoiced
that “All boundaries and distinctions lost
their meaning in this ocean of slate and
collapsed all notions of gestalt unity. The
present fell forward and backward into
tumult of ‘de-differentiation.””!3 Smithson
was not alone in co-opting the power of
natural disaster in an assault on modernist
aesthetics. In 1967 his friend Carl Andre
had proposed to make a work of art which
was an explosion, and Walter de Maria had
earlier suggested that an earthquake was a
work of art. Smithson however pushed fur-
ther into the territory of the imagination
with projects which specifically confronted
the habitat of man—symbol of Braudel’s
social time—with the geologic time of
earth movement.

In April 1969 on a field trip with Nancy

Holt and Virginia Dwan to the Yucatan,
Smithson had initially thought to head for

102. JAMES LINGWOOD

 the famous Mayan ruins. Instead, he occur in this geological miasma, and they kind of winding tower, called coal mine
became preoccupied with a small hotel. move in the most physical way. This move- tipples, had been constructed by small-
Hotel Palenque was a site on which it was ment seems motionless, yet it crushes the scale coal-mining enterprises. Strips of
unnecessary to perform any action. It landscape of logic under glacial reveries.”!4 wood and bits of steel were fastened
already epitomised the irreversible force of together with only the most functional
entropy. From a series of colour slides Smithson’s actions in the landscape— aim in mind—to enable coal to be brought
made in 1969, Smithson eventually culminating in the vast Spiral Jetty which to the surface—and the Bechers hurried
invented a laconic travel guide (returning he realised later that same extraordinary to photograph them in all their apparent
to the mode he had deployed in his earlier fertile year—contrast vividly with the testa- frailty. These provisional wooden con-
piece of writing and photography “A Tour ment of the Bechers. Smithson’s work from structions apparently on the point of
of the Monuments of Passaic, New J ersey” this period is full of real or implied sound; collapse or abandonment mirror the
published in Artforum in December 1967) the crash of huge earth-moving machines, fragility of the simple woodshed which
which he delivered to students at the the cracking of structures, the whirring of Smithson had overloaded.
University of Utah. Rather than relocating film, the torrent of words. The world of the
his project in the remnants of an earlier Bechers’ photographs, on the other hand, On the same trip to the US, the Bechers
civilisation, he located it in the ruins of his irrespective of whether the sites in which also photographed huge steel mill com-
own. One part of the tourist hotel was in they photograph are active or obsolete, plexes in Pennsylvania and Alabama.
the process of being constructed, whilst is muted and silent. Amongst the portraits of blast furnaces
other parts of the building were already in and cooling towers, they made photographs
the process of falling apart. His drawing of Because of the formal resolution and con- of the landscape in which these sites were
the lay-out of the hotel noted areas of sistency of their work, it is tempting to call located. Perhaps inspired by the example
garbage, rubble and ruins as well as the the Bechers’ work timeless. But it is in fact of Walker Evans who had also photog-
rooms which had been finished, a dried out full of time—a time which Braudel called raphed in some of these areas, some of
swimming pool and a dance hall with a “social” but which in the case of the these photographs embody a less reserved
stuffed hawk. Bechers could be called “historic” time, description of the mentality of the age. The
in distinction to the “geologic” time of huge blast furnaces at Ensley, Alabama, for
Smithson was not, as were the Bechers, Smithson’s projections. In their books and example, are juxtaposed with a large scrap-
an observer by disposition. Standing at the exhibitions, they invite first a concentrated yard of discarded automobiles: symbols of
threshold of awesome nature was insuffi- scrutiny of their chosen objects, a medita- the quickening cycles of construction and
cient. He wanted to cross that threshold, tion on their sameness and difference, production, usefulness and uselessness at
and simulate that power himself. When form and function, and through this com- the heart of the post-war economic miracle.
invited to make a work at Kent State parative reading, a reflection on the form
University in Ohio in January 1970, he had of the society that produces them. The Smithson wanted his work to emulate the
initially proposed a mud flow. When that individual forms may be presented excised process of entropy. He wanted to play with
proved impossible, because it was too cold from context, but the Bechers remain time, to wrestle with it, to accelerate or
in Ohio in the winter for mud to flow, he acutely aware of the forces at work in the decelerate it to a point of disintegration,
rethought his project in relation to a small construction and ultimate obsolescence to quicken the collapse of the belief sys-
construction at the edge of the University of these forms. The plants begin to die the tems and structures which underpinned
campus. Photographs of destroyed human moment they cease to produce, their insta- this “historic” time. Smithson, the great
habitats had long fascinated Smithson— bility masked by their massive physical artist/entropologist of his generation pro-
houses overwhelmed by lava or mud, presence. In their inevitable fate as much jected his work into the greatest expanses
villages destroyed by earthquakes or land- as their huge scale, these buildings embody,
slides. On the Kent State campus, he again as Hilla Becher has remarked, “the mental- Robert Smithson, Hote! Palenque (detail), 1969
emulated the destructive force of nature ity” of the industrial age. (cat. no. 174)

by organising a bulldozer to load earth

onto an abandoned woodshed until the To the Bechers it was already clear in the
weight of earth had cracked the central 1960s that these structures were essentially
supporting beam. At the point at which the nomadic and had a comparatively short
central structure was destroyed, Smithson life compared with more classical or
* declared the work to be complete. Partially sacred architectural forms. Their first two
Buried Woodshed was a perfect embodi- books already presented many industrial
ment of Smithson’s equation of mental sites which had closed down, particularly
and physical de-construction. “One’s mind coal-mines no longer productive in the
and the earth are in a constant state of 1960s. They present these objects in pre-
erosion,” he wrote, “mental rivers wear cisely the same way as any others, without
away abstract banks, brain waves under- comment and without sentiment. When
mine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose they visited the United States on a long
into stones of unknowing, and conceptual working trip in 1973, they photographed
crystallisations break apart into deposits extensively throughout the coal-mining
of gritty reason. Vast moving faculties area of Pennsylvania, where a particular
of time and imagined its ultimate cooling their generation, want us not simply to see in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy
down, to the point where nothing could the very singularity of every object, but to Holt, New York University Press, New York,
be differentiated and everything would hold them, to feel their weight, and through 1979, p. 5.
be formless. them to feel the very weight of time. 4. Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, “The
Domain of the Great Bear,” Art Voices, Fall 1966.
By contrast the Bechers, his guides to the Notes Also reprinted in The Writings of Robert
Oberhausen site and our guides to a “his- 1. Unpublished letter from Robert Smithson to Smithson, op. cit., p. 26.
toric” time, have built a structure to medi- Konrad Fischer, August 9, 1968, Archives of 5. Anonyme Skulpturen, Artverlag Press,
tate on the difference of things. Theirs is a American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Disseldorf, 1970 (n.p.).
work of patient construction, as Smithson’s Washington D.C. 6. This exhibition is now in its entirety in the
is one of impatient deconstruction. In their 2. T. E. Hulme, “Cinders—A New Crex Collection at Schaffhausen. The photo-
immense photographic project, their natu- Weltanschauung,” in Speculations, London, graphs are also reproduced over 4 pages of the
ral history of industrial form, the Bechers 1936, p. 236. catalogue published by the Van Abbemuseum,
have slowed time down. It is almost as if the 3. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments Eindhoven, in 1981, pp. 38-41.
Bechers, the great artist/encyclopedists of of Passaic,” Artforum, December 1967, reprinted 7. Hilla Becher, conversation with James
Lingwood, 1995.
Bernd and Hilla Becher; Reed & Herb Coal Co., Joliett, Schuylkill County, Pa., USA, 1975, from Pennsylvania 8. Smithson had the rolls of film developed in
Coal Mine Tipples; black-and-white photograph; 16 x 12 % in. (40.4 x 30.9 cm); courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, Disseldorf for the exhibition. Twenty-five were
New York
used in the Non-Site (Oberhausen) work, now in
the Flick collection. The remaining photographs
were retained at the Galerie Konrad Fischer. A
group of 28 of these photographs subsequently
entered first a private collection in Germany and
then a private collection in the United States,
which also has a further group of three photo-
graphs. The artist’s widow, Nancy Holt,
bequeathed the negatives as well as a series of 60
10 x 8” black and white prints to the Archives of
American Art in Washington D.C.
9. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects”
in The Writings of Robert Smithson, op. cit., p. 83.
10. Concrete Pour was realised for the exhibition
“Art by Telephone” at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago, November 1 to
December 14, 1969 and Glue Pour was realised
as part of Lucy Lippard’s exhibition “955,000” at
the Vancouver Art Gallery from January 14 to
February 8, 1970.
11. Conversation with Gianni Pettena, Domus,
November 1972. Also reprinted in The Writings
of Robert Smithson, op. cit., p. 187.
12. Unpublished letter to Martin Friedman, May
30, 1968, Archives of American Art, Washington
DIG:
13. “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth
Projects,” op. cit., p. 89.
14. Ibid., p. 82.
15. Hilla Becher, conversation with James
Lingwood, 1995.

104. JAMES LINGWOOD

Robert Smithson some sculptors) can not escape the per- by enervation. The sight of rows of equip-
ilous eye of the camera. Consider the ment fills me with lassitude and longing.
thousands of 8” x 10” glossies piling up in
Art through the the galleries, waiting to be reproduced in
Lenses, light meters, filters, screens, boxes
of film, projectors, tripods, and all the rest
Camera’s Eye some newspaper or magazine. To be sure, of it makes me feel faint. A camera store
(c. 1971) there remain those half-crazed artists that
try to find hideouts for their work. Yet, the
seems a perfect setting for a horror movie.
A working title might be, Invasion ofthe
totems of art and the taboos of the camera Camera Robots; it would be based on the
Originally published in Eugenie Tsai, Robert continue to haunt them. Cyclops myth, with the camera clerk as
Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Ulysses. A camera’s eyes alludes to many
Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, Some artists are insane enough to imagine abysses. Each click would expose the clerk
1991), 88-92. they can tame this wilderness created by and his store to partial annihilation. I leave
the camera. One way is to transfer the urge the ending for readers to figure out.
to abstraction to photography and film.
There is something abominable about A camera is wild in just anybody’s hands, Nevertheless, those abysmal speculations
cameras, because they possess the power therefore one must set limits. But cameras do not keep me away from my own Kodak
to invent many worlds. As an artist who has have a life of their own. Cameras care Instamatic reflex camera. Surrounding the
been lost in this wilderness of mechanical nothing about cults or isms. They are indif- aperture is a lens-opening scale made for
reproduction for many years, I do not know ferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour determining light conditions—it carries the
which world to start with. I have seen fellow anything in sight. They are lenses of the symbols of “cloud” and “sun.” The more
artists driven to the point of frenzy by unlimited reproduction. Like mirrors they I consider them, the more they become
photography. Visits to the cults of Under- may be scorned for their power to dupli- hieroglyphics—a secret code. There are
ground filmmakers offer no relief. In the cate our individual experiences. It is not times when light readings are governed by
dark chamber of the Film Archives, my eyes hard to consider an Infinite Camera with- the cloud. Natural forces combine with
have searched in vain for the perfect film. out an ego. automatic functions to create a region of
I have disputed arcane and esoteric uses overcast grayness, an area of inarticulation,
of the camera in murky bars, and listened Somewhere between the still and movie dullness, and ambiguity. All and all light is
to vindications of the Structural Film, the camera, I postulate the Infinite Camera diminished. On the right side of the cloud
Uncontrolled Film, the Hollywood Film, (no truth value should be attached to this is the symbol of the sun. The camera thus
the Political Film, the Auteur Film, the postulation, it should be regarded as some- reminds us of that most brilliant object the
Cosmic Film, the Happy Film, the Sad thing to write about). sun—no it is not an object, but rather an
Film, and the Ordinary Film. I have even undifferentiated condition from which
made a film. But the wilderness of I am looking through a magazine called there is no escape. Photographs are the
Cameraland thickens. 35MM Photography, Spring 1971—“A results of a diminution of solar energy,
Complete Guide,” and on the inside of its and the camera is an entropic machine for
Artists suffering from a sense of unreality cover is a marvelous advertisement. It is recording gradual loss of light. No matter
suspect the camera’s eye. “There are a photograph of a still camera half sub- how dazzling the sun, there is always some-
enough shadows in my life,” declares Carl merged in polar waters. I do not know thing to hide it, therefore to cause it to be
Andre in a discussion on photography. which pole. Of course, the camera is made desired. One tends to forget this, when
“T have looked at so many photographs, in Japan—it is a Yashica. In the back- firing flashbulbs in the shadows. As Paul
I can not see them anymore,” says Michael ground of the advertisement is an iceberg. Valéry pointed out, the sun is a “brilliant
Heizer. “I would like to make an abstract “Like the Iceberg, the greatest part of error.” And I should like to add, that the
film,” says Andy Warhol. As long as cam- Yashica’s TL Electro-X is hidden beneath camera records the result of that “error.”
eras are around no artist will be free from the surface.” Now who could ask for a
bewilderment. Mel Bochner’s “Theory of more Infinite Camera than that? The cam- Above the symbols of cloud and sun on the
Photography” is called Misunderstandings. era “eliminates troublesome needles, coils, focusing index is the symbol of “infinity.”
Once in the Chateau Marmont on Sunset springs, galvanometers—all moving parts.” Once I had somebody take 400 snapshots
Boulevard, I talked to Claes Oldenburg With this in mind, one can imagine thou- of horizons in Seattle, the recording of
about his Photo Death. He said it con- sands of tourists wandering on one of the such stigmatic vistas and unreachable limits
‘cerned “shooting” pretty fashion models ice caps taking countless snapshots of snow resulted in a collection of banished bits
on atomic bomb testing grounds. drifts. Such slides could be made into a of space. Taking such photos puts the
motion picture. But as one goes deeper human eye in exile and brings on a cosmic
Physical things are transported by helio- into this magazine, the camera wilderness punishment. The measurable lengths
typy into a two-dimensional condition. grows denser. We see the “quick change of objects give comfort and certainty in the
Under red lights in a dark room worlds artist,” the Capro FL-7, the Ricoh (“You'd face of the infinite. Length tells us how
apart from our own emerge from chemicals have to buy two cameras to get these fea- long a thing is, it is a measurement of any-
and negatives. What we believed to be tures”), the Leicoflex SL (“You can hear thing from end to end. This unit leaves out
most solid and tangible becomes in the the precision”), and so it goes. Who knows width and breadth and is opposed to “short-
process slides and prints. Artists still the right camera to choose? Actually, when ness.” Art yearns to be long not short.
involved in handy craft (some painters and I walk into a camera store, I am overcome
 The comparison of narrative structure to autonomous limit within a containing the city intermingle, nature spills into the
architecture is right, insofar as both a story framework. Thus, the landscape plays the abstract frames, the containing narrative
and a building make an arrangement or an role of an “object” or “unit” that excludes of an entire civilization breaks apart to
enclosed place for living, a field of presence for breaks or interruptions. One order or view form another kind of order. A film is capa-
the mind, by which everything outside of it can is carried to its logical conclusion. On the ble of picking up the pieces.
be dismissed from concern. It functions like other hand there is the “open landscape”
the frame of a picture, to isolate what goes on which embodies multiple views, some of Let’s face it, the “human” eye is clumsy,
inside it for complete attention and realiza- which are contradictory, whose purpose is sloppy, and unintelligible when compared
tion.—quoted in Donald Sutherland, Gertrude to reveal a clash of angles and orders within to the camera’s eye. It’s no wonder we’ve
Stein: A Biography of Her Work a sense of simultaneity, this shatters any had so many demented and conflicting
predictable frame of reference. Intentional views of nature. As it turns out, ecology is
Richard Serra’s film Frame exposes the “concepts” are subverted. If the closed the latest notion of humanized nature, or
contradictions of the measured unit. landscape is a matter of faith and certainty, what used to be called “naturalism.”
The problem that once attended painting, the open landscape is a matter of skepti- Confidence in “human nature” has gone
namely locating the “framing edge,” is cism and uncertainty. Many artists involved sour, the unproblematic sense of being
parodied in this film. Measurable lengths with the landscape have developed out of human in the midst of a naive anthropo-
are reduced to a joke, and towards the abstraction which is based, for the most morphic pantheism leaves mother nature
end of the film Serra himself is caught part, on interior enclosures of sculpture wading through polluted rivers. But how
in an illusion. It has also been brought to parks. The studio and gallery are taken for human is a flood or a hurricane? Surely,
my attention that this film would not fit granted. Abstraction emerges from a psy- they are just as menacing as machines used
on the carefully constructed screen at the chological fear of nature, and a distrust of wrongly. Just when Positivist thought he
Film Archive. the organic. Cities are abstract complexes had it made, the Cartesian Spectre comes
of grids and geometries in flight from natu- back to haunt us. Michel Foucault has gone
Michael Snow’s film Wavelength could be ral forces. The primitive dread of nature so far as to say that “man” like “God” will
seen as a documentary of a single still pho- that Wilhelm Worringer put forth as the disappear as an object of our knowledge.
tograph of the ocean: the length of the wave root of abstraction has devolved into what Hopefully “objects” themselves will disap-
is in the slow zoom shot, that advances David Antin calls “affluent spirituality.” pear “specific” or otherwise. Abstraction
through a series of pulsations and color dis- Rather than turn their backs on nature, like nature is in no way reassuring. Things-
turbances. The inexhaustible ocean flux is certain artists are now confronting it with in-themselves are merely illusions.
absorbed by the infinity of the camera flux. the medium of the camera, as well as
Both wave and length are alienated from working directly with it. A few weeks ago, I read in the New York
time and space. No distances remain to be Times that Alain Resnais is working on a
measured, no points are to be connected— It appears that abstraction and nature are film that deals with a frustrated movie pro-
the ocean dries up into a photograph. It is merging in art, and that the synthesizer is ducer, who turns to fighting pollution. The
interesting to see Snow now moving into the camera. As soon as one mentions relationship between pollution and film-
the actual landscape with a delirious cam- abstraction or nature, many abstractions making strikes me as a worthwhile area
era of his own invention. and natures come to mind. The degrees of investigation. Resnais’s landscapes and
of abstraction diminish as one goes from sites have always revealed a degree of hor-
The Land Art films shot by Gerry Schum the “city” with its squares and structures ror and entrapment. In Night and Fog,
of the Fernsehgalerie in Berlin leave some- to the “country” with its plowed fields Resnais contrasts a pastoral site (shot in
thing to be desired, nevertheless they do and farm yards, until it vanishes into the technique color) of a concentration camp
indicate an attempt to deal with art in the “wilderness” with its un[ ... |frontiers. The overgrown with grass and flowers, with
landscape. Television has the power to patterns of [abstraction] order things [in] black and white photographs of horrors
dilate the “great outdoors” into sordid the world [into] countless frameworks that from its past. This suggests that each land-
frontiers full of grayness and electrical counter nature’s encroachments. We live scape, no matter how calm and lovely,
static. Vast geographies are contracted into in frameworks and are surrounded by conceals a substrata of disaster—a narra-
dim borders and incalculable sites. Schum’s frames of reference, yet nature dismantles tive that discloses “no story, no buoyancy,
“Television gallery” proliferates the results them and returns them to a state where no plot” (Jean Cayrol: Lazare parmi nous).
of Long, Flanagan, Oppenheim, Beuys, they no longer have integrity. Deeper than the ruins of concentration
Dibbets, De Maria, Heizer, and myself camps, are worlds more frightening, worlds
over unknown channels which bifurcate Today’s artist is beginning to perceive this more meaningless. The hells of geology
into dissolving terrains. process of disintegrating frameworks as a remain to be discovered. If art history is
highly developed condition. Claude Levi- a nightmare, then what is natural history?
Yet, within the range of public television Strauss has suggested we develop a new
as it exists in terms of contraction and dif- discipline called “Entropology.” The artist
fusion, each artist retains his individual and the critic should develop something
perception of order. An artist may operate similar. The buried cities of the Yucatan
in a “closed landscape.” His point of view are enormous and heterogeneous time
is then based on deliberate restrictions, he capsules, full of lost abstractions, and bro-
intends to define or plot a self-sustaining ken frameworks. There the wilderness and

106 ROBERT SMITHSON

Mel Bochner

Misunderstandings
(A Theory of Photography)
(1967-1970)
Originally published by Multiples Inc., New York,
as part of Artists and Photographs (1970).
The project consists of ten photo-offset prints
on note cards (5 x 8 in. [12.7 x 20.3 cm] each).

MLSUN DELSTAN DINGS

(A THEORY OF pHoT2GRAPHY )
msc BoOcHnzelr_
 | WOULD LIKE To 38& PHOTOGeARHY/ MAKE PEOPLE
DESPISE PRINTING UNTIL SOMETHING ZLS2 WILL
MAKI PHOTOGRAPHY VNBLARABLE.
MARCSL DUCHAMP

| WANT TO RiPnoDWe THE OBIECTS AS THEY

ALe oft RS THEY word BS LUsW IE | DID
NOT ZHIST.
TAINE

108 MEL BOCHNER

PHOTOGRAPHY CAWNOT RCRD ABSTRACT IDEAS.
ENCYCLOPLOIR §=—BRITANNICA

LT VS RIMIMBtR 700, THAT Wt Dow'T HAVE To

TRAWSLATE SucH PicTvPRES
7 IwW7o (tALUSTIC OWLS
IN OLDEN TO‘YVNOERSTAWO’
THEM, Awy MORE THAN
WL WNELO TRANSLATE PHOTOERAPHS WTO COLORED
PicTURES, ALTHOUGH BLACIK-AVO-WHITE MEN
Of PLANTS IN REALITY Would STIUITL US AS
VUWSPLAIS ABLY STRANGER AWO FRIGHTFUL.
SUPPOSIZT Wi WERE TO SAY AT THIS POUT,’
Se
‘SOML THING IS A PICTURE OWLY IN A PICTUREIM
LAWGVAGE |
LudwtG WiTTSin STs/v
 Tus. Tevet Function’ oF REVOLUTIONARY ART [5
THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF PHENOMENA INTO
ORGANIZE O FORMS.
MAD TSL- TUNG

IN MY OPINION , You CANNOT SAY YoU HAVE

THOROUGHLY SEL ANYTHIVG UNTIL YoU HAVE A
PHOTO GRAPH OF /T.

EmjLct& 204

110 MEL BOCHNER

PHOTOCLAAKY 15 THE PRODUCT OF ComPLLTE ALIENATION),
MaAancic PROUST

THE PHOTOGRAPH KILRS OPEN THE IVSTANTS WhHictl

THE OMRVSH OF TMC <Losés VP} /T DESTROYS
THLE OVENTAKING , THY OCVERLAPAING OF Time.»

MAUNICL MERLEAV “PO TY

 PHOTOG ZAPHS FROV/OS FOR A KINO OF PERCLPT]OA/
THAT 1S MEOIATEO IMWSTEAO OF DILL ECT,,,
WHAT MI6#T Bt CALLEO 'PERCEPTIOA) AT
StcOwo HAND, ’
JAmss ~. 6/850n/

112 MEL BOCHNER

Jean-Francois Chevrier To begin with, then, we have a group of of the radical upheaval wrought to our sensi-
images produced from the 1840s to 1930, bilities by this invention, perhaps analogous
which can be described as strictly photo-
The Adventures of the graphic works—that is to say, singular,
to that wrought by the discovery of oil painting
at the close of the Middle Ages. It is just as well
Picture Form in the autonomous prints resulting from a that photography is above all else a technical
twofold process of picture taking and
History of Photography developing. It is a homogeneous corpus,
process and that a fair share of the debates and
polemics surrounding it, from Baudelaire to
(1989) testifying to the development of a specific the present, would not have taken place had
art, within a sphere of competencies there not been a desire to make it into an art in
defined by the nature of a common and of itself. Talking about photography as art
This essay is a slightly abridged translation of process. The diversity of functions and was to distort the debate right from the start:
“Les aventures de la forme tableau dans I’his- interests (psychological, sociological, and it subjected a new medium to purposes, and
toire de la photographie,” originally published otherwise) that originally informed these aesthetic apriorisms, that were alien to it.
in Photo-Kunst: Arbeiten aus 150 Jahren, pictures’ creation tends to fade and be Problematizing photography anew, as Walter
exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Graphische Sammlung, supplanted by an aesthetic diversity that Benjamin has suggested we do, we must no
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and Edition Cantz, proves the hypothesis of photography longer speak of photography as art, but of art
1989), 47-81. as art—without necessarily proving that as photography. So in this issue we will only
all of the creators of these images are exceptionally refer to “art photography” and
Translated by Michael Gilson. to be considered artists. “photographers.” Photography is something
much too serious to be left in the hands of
Second, we have another set of images, photographers. We shall speak of artists using
materially very diverse this time, whose photography. Some among them also happen
It might be possible, despite the sheer commonality resides not in the photo- to be photographers.!
diversity of photographic images produced graphic image as such, but in the place
(and reproduced) since the process was occupied by that photograph, the role As we come to the end of the 1980s, these
invented, to imagine a history of photogra- played by it, in extremely variable ways, words still have currency. There is an ever-
phy—if the process itself were enough in an artistic process that is not necessarily pressing need to at last rewrite the history
of a common denominator. Any narration, defined (determined) by it. Here all bets of modern art and “restore to photography
any reconstruction, would have to be pre- are off as to the artistic nature of photogra- the crucial role it has played.” It is also
ceded by an enormous job of conceptual phy, but all of the creators represented time to break with a certain narrow-
and methodological framing, so as to must be considered artists, insofar as they minded and timid view of “photography
distinguish and articulate radically hetero- have manifested themselves as such. as art,” especially in light of the recent
geneous—both socially (or anthropologi- More than two periods, there are two manifestations of so-called creative pho-
cally) and aesthetically—uses and approaches, two points of view, that can be tography, which, increasingly, resembles
production. The insufficiency of the distinguished, and they are largely in oppo- a developing “cottage industry of art”—
process as common denominator, how- sition. Rather than seek some historical flourishing to a great extent but of little
ever, would soon become apparent, and (or historicist) form of reconciliation, by real consequence—compared with the
its necessity would be reduced to being dint of differentiations and rectifications, other specialties practiced by professional
purely instrumental in value. we should seek to understand that opposi- photographers in traditional fields (e.g.,
tion. By “understand,” I mean to analyze journalism, fashion, advertising, illustra-
Luckily, even in this anniversary year, and explain it, but also to locate it in a tion). As Jean Clair warned, “photography
neither the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart nor broader, more contemporary context than is something much too serious to be left in
I, as guest curator, is called upon to imag- did the dated debates that cast it ina the hands of photographers”—or in those
ine such a history. The museum’s very mostly ideological light, to the detriment of of the medium’s agents of cultural dissemi-
function, as well as the starting point rep- artistic and historical fact. The opposition nation, in an age when demagoguery and
resented by the two recently acquired col- between photographers (or photographer- opportunism have largely supplanted the
lections, restricts our study to two fairly artists who produce photographic works) indifference so vigorously denounced in
tightly circumscribed areas: images consid- and artists using photography is, to us, a the past. Lastly, without denying or reject-
ered as works (or, potentially, as aesthetic legacy of the 1970s. But that legacy has ing the historical accumulation of images
documents), on the one hand, and artistic been transformed—at the hands of artists that have value as works (or masterworks,
uses of the recording process (or, poten- themselves, who use it in particular ways. even) that may devolve upon us, it now
tially, of preexisting images), on the other. appears more practical—if one is to favor
Indeed, the avenues for exploration In 1973 Jean Clair, then editor-in-chief of interactions among the arts (which have
afforded by the collections of Rolf Mayer Lart vivant, wrote in a special issue of the always nourished photographic creation)
(from Fox Talbot to Man Ray) and Rolf magazine on photography: over the production of legitimate works
H. Krauss (artists having made use of pho- (legitimized by the canonizing effect of
tography in the 1970s) are by themselves The entire history of modern art remains to be history)—to consider the medium as a tool
sufficiently distinct as to be termed written, because none ofthe existing histories for artistic expression rather than make
heterogeneous. restores to photography the crucial role it has it into an “art in and of itself.”
played. ... No history has yet been written
Clair cited Benjamin as early as 1973, and Objecthood,” which denounced the the- models. It will also become clear that the
the reference is crucial to more recent criti- atricality of Minimalist sculpture, appeared eternal debate about the merits of photog-
cal and theoretical thinking, especially in in Artforum in 1967.3 It had come in raphy, to which Clair alluded, has been
the United States, that repudiates the insti- response to Robert Morris’ “Notes on “distorted” in many other ways than that
tutional framing of photographic culture as Sculpture,” published a year earlier in the which he exposed, and that the debate
autonomous, constructed according to the same journal, which used the radical is further distorted every time a historical
model of “modernist” specificity, and the anti-illusionism of the three-dimensional interpretation (or dogma) hinders, or
concomitant application, based on that object to assert the spatial value, which he underestimates, the interplay of models
model, of traditional art historical criteria believed was variable, of the new “unitary” used by artists and every time such inter-
of aesthetic (read formalist) evaluation and forms of Minimalism. “The better new pretation seeks to ascribe specificity more
genealogical derivation. Without necessar- work,” Morris remarked, “takes relation- to the medium than to artistic procedures.
ily adhering to the myriad theories devel- ships out of the work and makes them a
oped around the concepts of “loss of the function of space, light, and the viewer’s
original” (associated with the destruction field of vision. ... One is more aware than As we arrive at the end of the 1980s, the
of the traditional “aura” of the work of art, before that he himself is establishing rela- overly rigid antinomies of the preceding
as analyzed by Benjamin), “deconstruc- tionships as he apprehends the object decade have, of course, failed to miracu-
tion,” 29 6 “simulation,” “appropriation,” and from various positions and under varying lously vanish. In 1976, in a special Artforum
the like, we can acknowledge that “talking conditions of light and space.”4 issue on photography, Nancy Foote’s essay
about photography as art” is indeed “to “The Anti-Photographers” examined
distort the debate right from the start” and All this is dated. So-called Conceptual the uses of photography in the various
to subject “a new medium to purposes, and Art came about in that context. And if, Conceptual-type approaches to art:
aesthetic apriorisms, that [are] alien to it.” around 1970, photography, as used by the “Earthworks, process and narrative pieces,
Conceptualists, broke the mirror of paint- Body Art, etc.” The piece included a
We cannot, however, subscribe fully to ing—or, rather, of the picture—and prominent pull-quote: “For every photog-
an analysis that dates from the early 1970s, allowed a privileged observer such as rapher who clamors to make it as an artist,
because in hindsight we understand the Clair to reject the “aesthetic apriorisms” there is an artist running a grave risk of
historical context of that analysis and to which it had been submitted, the evolu- turning into a photographer.”> Although
so are led to modify it substantially. It tion of artistic exploration and experimen- a number of eclectic, consensual conver-
was only with the emergence of the tation has, since then, largely restored gences of opinion suggested that some rec-
Conceptualist approaches of the late 1960s the model that had previously been over- onciliation was in the offing, the divisions
that the opposition between artists using turned. Many artists, having assimilated created by market forces persist, as Foote
photography and photographers became the Conceptualists’ explorations to varying so caustically made clear. It is also true that
explicit. Clair’s condemnation of an alien- degrees, have reused the painterly model an art critic, today as well as in the past,
ation (or reduction) of photography to and use photography, quite consciously will not hesitate for long if given the choice
“art” must be understood in this context. and systematically, to produce works that between an artist who exhibits a reflective,
Photography had been detached from the stand alone and exist as “photographic procedural, exploratory approach and
painterly model and again placed in the paintings.” Thus we can no longer say that, a photographer (displaying varying
service of information, as a medium. With among artists who make use of photogra- degrees of talent) who is content to create
the challenging in the late 1960s of the phy, there are some who “happen to be” variations on the heritage of painterly
very notion of an artwork, and the shift photographers. Chance has nothing (or photographic) culture.
in focus to idea and process, it was under- to do with it.
standable that reference to the painterly At the same time, it is possible today,
subject and the paradigm of the picture And yet it is these photographer-artists where it was impossible ten years ago,
as an autonomous form should lose the who stand apart, more than ever, from pro- to measure the boundaries, at once sym-
ascendancy they had enjoyed since the ear- fessional photographers (for whom they metrical and complementary, of the two
liest days of modern art, when Baudelaire, are often still mistaken), who can facilitate antithetical systems. One can differentiate
in the Salon de 1846, asserted the superior- our rewriting of the history of “photogra- between, on the one hand, the dangers of
ity of a painted picture over sculpture as phy as art” by enabling us to consider it conceptual predetermination, which exces-
a three-dimensional object submitted to not only in the light of the modernist pre- sively constrains or limits the potential
variations in point of view: “A picture... cept of the aesthetic summation of the for experimentation, and, on the other, the
is only what it wants to be; there is no way medium’s specific characteristics but reduction of that potential to an interplay
of looking at it than on its own terms. according to other criteria as well. These of stylistic digressions and of transgressions
Painting has but one point of view; it is criteria allow us to account for, on the one that are part of an ordered, normative
exclusive and absolute.”2 In the United hand, the multitude of cultural interactions reference grid.
States the reaction against the dominant that have opened up the very definition
model of the picture form was even more of art since the advent of photography as Here we find a plethora of works by
animated because of the ascendancy of a new technical process and, on the other, auteurist photographers who can be
the modernist theory forged by Clement the many procedures for using the medium grouped under a tradition of “creative”
Greenberg and his formalist circle. that have been devised by artists using photography, of which Otto Steinert in
Michael Fried’s essay “Art and extremely varied (or even hybridized) Europe (with his notion of Subjective

114 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

Photography) and Minor White in the artists—the brush stroke being replaced than any proximity. But we may also define
United States (as a disciple of Alfred by a text.” Boltanski, who at the time was a minimum common ground to justify and
Stieglitz) were the key postwar exponents.° working on his Images modéles series, impose a rapprochement among them for
This output can also be assimilated (either specified his wish that, on the contrary, an our purposes, and it is precisely that
alternatively or simultaneously) to a individual photograph should “exist, sepa- quality—their singularity—that prevents
painterly model updated by integration rate from the others, on its own terms.”8 us from grouping them together as a move-
of techniques and effects borrowed from ment or “school.” But it is not a singularity
the theater and from advertising. In the In recent years a number of artists, notably of isolation in precious idiosyncrasies, nor
1976 issue of Artforum cited above, the Americans, have continued—in very one that is reducible to any of the conven-
New York critic A. D. Coleman analyzed systematic fashion or from a “critical” per- ient categories used to describe the excep-
the resurgence of Pictorialism in American spective—to work with snapshots and com tional or the unorthodox.
photography of the late 1960s, exemplified mon spaces, as had Boltanski and, earlier,
by the pioneering imagery of Duane Andy Warhol. But it would appear that in These artists are not eccentric or “origi-
Michals and Les Krims. He proposed the most cases, once the fascination with the nal.” They are historical actors construct-
term “directorial mode” to describe this initial discoveries wears off (I am thinking ing a project while simultaneously
attitude, which favored fiction over record- here of Cindy Sherman and Richard experimenting with its potential. This is
ing and invention and fantasy over respect Prince, among others), the submission and where the specificity of their explorations
for the possibilities inherent in the reduction of the act of seeing to verbal is manifest, and whence it can sustainably
medium. He denounced the purism of analysis (the equivalent of the simulacrum resist ideological (or mercantile) agendas
the modernists, who had initially rejected and simulation theory, incidentally) are and the encroachment of dogmas. No
Pictorialism, as institutionalist dogma.7 now stronger than ever, to the point where doubt it is too early to say whether such
Coleman attempted to forge a sort of alter- the effectiveness of the “critic’s” voice is projects can be considered as major (we
native aesthetics, in reaction against what exhausted, practically automatically, by might even question the relevance of the
he saw as “official realism,” the canonical the very process of the “critic” expounding idea in a critical endeavor that lacks the
genesis of which had been written (and upon his or her premises. proper historical perspective). They have
rewritten) over a period of thirty years already pushed past the boundaries to
by Beaumont Newhall, author of the The Mayer collection, which ends at the which the majority of contemporary artis-
Museum of Modern Art’s famous History 1930s, contains no examples of so-called tic attitudes, when expressed through a
of Photography. Not unexpectedly, though, creative photography or of Neo- process that includes photography, restrict
what was still merely an alternative avenue Pictorialism, the two movements having themselves. The developmental thrust
in 1976 has since become a dominant emerged after World War I. The Krauss of these projects is not obsession (as the
current in the new specialized institutions. collection clearly reveals the ambiguities subjective power of variation); it is not sys-
Coleman’s “directorial mode” has not noted by Boltanski, though the Neo- tematic (the authoritarian and static organ-
endured as a term, but the concepts Conceptualist and post-Pop currents in ization of diversity); nor is it the exercise
of “staged photography” and the “manu- American photography of the 1980s are not of availability (worship of chance and cele-
factured image” have become the secret represented. It was not necessary for the bration of found objects). It is not brico-
passages to a new formalism that cele- purposes of this exhibition to include the lage (the arrangement of leftovers) or the
brates the specificity of the medium trend spearheaded by Steinert or the multi- pursuit of critical efficacy (a series of
by taking stock of its transgressions. ple avatars of Neo-Pictorialism, which has actions taken within a cultural system).
no lack of defenders. The principal goal, The last two attitudes have recently found
On the conceptual side we find, in recent however, was to state as clearly as possible favor over the others in the context of post-
production as well as that of the 1970s, from what positioning (as well as choices modern strategies. They seem, however,
multiple examples of the occultation or and biases) in contemporary art (and to be increasingly subject to the law of pro-
blurring of the aesthetic and emotional strictly contemporary art) sets of images duction and rapid obsolescence of artistic
content of the “image as an image,” in the and works like those amassed by Mayer objects and “ideas” as merchandise. A
name of the primacy of idea and theory and Krauss can be articulated, if not linked. project, by contrast, implies formulation
that too often stems from an “artistic” The works of five artists—John Coplans, over time and—if objects are manufac-
apriorism. Christian Boltanski commented Bill Henson, Craigie Horsfield, Suzanne tured, as they are in this case—the produc-
_on this in a 1975 essay. After noting the Lafont, and Jeff Wall—delineate that posi- tion of durable works.
freedom that the “photographer painters” tioning, outside of any theoretical homoge-
had brought to photography—precisely nizing, via their irreducible singularity. These five artists adhere to a traditional
because, as painters, they could more easily definition of the artwork as artifact, distin-
step away from the “domination of paint- Working in the United States (New York, guishable from other made objects (both
ing”—he added: “But the photographer to be precise), Australia, Great Britain, mechanical and artisanal) by its “artistic”
painters have only rarely attempted to use France, and Canada, these artists— value and its value as an “object of
photography alone, in and of itself; they schooled in different ways and living in thought” (to borrow Hannah Arendt’s
have almost always used it in conjunction similarly differing contexts—have until term). They have inherited and trans-
with text, either greatly enlarged or ina now had few opportunities to meet and formed the picture-form model on which
sequence, to distinguish themselves from exchange ideas. We may sense the differ- were erected, first, the hierarchy of the fine
photographers and show themselves as ences between them more immediately arts and then, starting in the second half

THE ADVENTURES OF THE PICTURE FORM IN THE HISTORY OF Pt

of the nineteenth century, individual up for us, we can reconsider the contribu- Rieg] by way of Max Dvorak) on David
modernist projects. In so doing, they have tions of the nineteenth and early twentieth Octavius Hill (1802-1867), whom the
already set their sights, if you will, beyond centuries. By way of conclusion, however, Pictorialists had rediscovered around the
the image as the simple result of an experi- after our perusal of the Mayer and Krauss turn of the twentieth century. The study
ence of vision (photography as a way of collections, we must return to the present, therefore proceeded from an interest
seeing) or as a more or less systematic and to do so, we have chosen to present recently expressed in an “old master” by
deciphering of the world—regardless of a number of artists conducting similar, con- photographers who claimed for themselves
how successful one or the other conception tiguous explorations in very specific con- a new status as artists. It also validated the
proves to be. But they have also assimilated texts, spaces, and cities. Having posited research direction taken by Beaumont
the propositions of the 1960s: the prob- and explored the idea of singularity in the Newhall, which would eventually lead to
lematizing of the body and space, of opening of the exhibition (and of this the 1937 publication of The History of
context and perception. They produce essay), we can again question the relevance Photography, a work that earned canonical
object-images and explore both the space of the notions of artistic communities and status in its expanded edition of 1949 and
in which these images are perceived and centers. Dusseldorf, Paris, and Vancouver was subsequently updated many times.
photographic perception itself. appear more interesting in this regard than If we consider that the book’s initial incar-
New York, London, or Rotterdam, to nation was as the catalogue of a 1937
Their images are not mere prints—mobile, name some other active centers. exhibition held at the Museum of Modern
manipulable sheets that are framed and Art—founded eight years previously
mounted on a wall for the duration of an according to the principles of Bauhaus—
exhibition and go back into their boxes We see clearly that the history of photogra- we only have to recall the importance and
afterward. They are designed and pro- phy, from its origins to the present day, specificities of photographic creation in
duced for the wall, summoning a con- cannot be viewed as linear, as continuous, Europe (especially Germany) and the
frontational experience on the part of the as a simple progression. With the 1970s United States of the 1920s, as apprehended
spectator that sharply contrasts with the came a break—and I am here adopting the and interpreted by Newhall, to locate the
habitual processes of appropriation and “self-interested” point of view of the con- privileged position of this author and the
projection whereby photographic images temporary art critic, who necessarily tends effectiveness of his message. The mod-
are normally received and “consumed.” to see the past through the mirror of his ernist view of photography as a specific
The restitution of the picture form (to commitments. This back-and-forth motion art form came together in the collision of
which the art of the 1960s and 1970s, it from the present to the past is in fact an actuality and an ordered set of historical
will be recalled, was largely opposed) has inevitable—it is only more or less acknowl- proofs. “Pure,” or “straight,” photography,
the primary aim of restoring the distance edged. The history of any art form, insofar explicitly disengaged from Pictorialism
to the object-image necessary for the con- as it is constructed by those who tell it and by Paul Strand and practiced by a growing
frontational experience, but implies no according to their interests, must proceed number of artists (e.g., Edward Weston,
nostalgia for painting and no specifically by successive stages of interpretation (and Ansel Adams), appeared at once as the
“reactionary” impulse. The frontality of the retrospection). Thus, as seen in the Mayer culmination of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession
picture hung on or affixed to the wall and collection, the history of photography from (which had disengaged photographic art
its autonomy as an object are not sufficient its beginnings to 1930 was written accord- from an overly narrow naturalist aesthetic,
as finalities. It is not a matter of elevating ing to specific interests that appeared in derived from functional practices) and
the photographic image to the place and (or were at least framed in) historical as the summation of trends that had
rank of the painting. It is about using the terms at the end of that very period. Our appeared, more or less naively, since the
picture form to reactivate a thinking based own interests are different. But we can medium’s infancy.
on fragments, openness, and contradiction, assert their difference all the more clearly
not the utopia of a comprehensive or sys- because we have been able to see it more Riegl’s strongly Hegelian idea of
tematic order. There is a return to classical clearly. And, to return to the nineteenth Kunstwollen, or “artistic urge,” was taken
compositional forms, along with borrow- century, before coming back to the current up by Newhall, who used it to posit that
ings from the history of modern and pre- period by way of the 1970s, which is the the history of photography proceeded first
modern painting, but that movement is goal of this essay, we must again proceed from the necessary invention of an artistic
mediatized by the use of extra-painterly via an intermediary stage—which, inciden- tool, to be followed by the development,
models, heterogeneous with canonical art tally, is itself a subject for interpretation no less necessary, of a style in conformity
history—models from sculpture, the cin- on our part. with that tool.? Such development is
ema, or philosophical analysis. autonomous and removed from external
During the 1930s, beginning in the socioeconomic factors; it proceeds across
These five artists enable us to take up a German-speaking countries, and later culturally heterogeneous production regis-
critical position with respect to the nor- in the United States, photography began ters. According to this model, Pictorialism,
malizing sociocultural structures of “con- to be studied as an emerging art form, as the assimilation of photography into
temporary art” and of “photography.” as a historical articulation of corpora of the fine arts and the subjection of the
They afford us a vantage point from which images that could be ascribed to authors recording technique to painterly para-
to reassess the works and propositions (or artists). The first monograph devoted digms, represents a point of crisis in the
of their predecessors. By following the to a photographer was that written in 1932 culmination of a style. The crisis was
avenues of interpretation that they open by Heinrich Schwarz (a disciple of Alois already evident, however, in the earliest

116 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

coherent experimentation with the emer- The key transition between the two peri- creation was also, and above all, associ-
gent art form (e.g., writings about Hill), ods was the perfecting of instant expo- ated with the cinema. At the same time,
because it was constituent of the struggle sures, along with the invention and coming though, three important factors were con-
for independence seen in the view of the into widespread use of portable cameras, verging: the advent of the first “talkies”
history of photography as the affirmation which brought photography within reach and the consolidation of the film industry;
of a new aesthetics in conformity with of virtually anyone, whereupon it became the development of photography as a key
specific technical means. The best contem- a tool for the automatic recording and component of the mass print media (from
porary photographers—those who have storage of events, great and small, in pub- which most photographer-artists retreated,
opted for pure or direct photography— lic and private life. From then on, the in such large numbers that the so-called
have a single (but considerable) advantage medium multiplied not only the number creative photography that emerged in the
over their predecessors: they can do con- of descriptive points of view of the world postwar years is still defined essentially
sciously (read explicitly or systematically) but also the number of events in social life by that rupture); and the institutionalized
what their forebears had had the chance worthy of visual description. The compartmentalization of the arts into their
to discover by situating themselves in the Surrealists coined the term “objective respective fields of competency, against
current of history. chance” to describe this radical challeng- a backdrop of modernist theory that before
ing of the interpretive intentionality that long would neglect the experimental merits
This model had an advantage: it was traditionally undergirded any descriptive of interactions between art forms. During
extremely cogent. Today, armed with the endeavor. It is particularly significant that the 1930s these factors combined to cause
conclusions of more recent studies (of it was precisely at this moment of widening the liquidation (accelerated by World War
nineteenth-century France, for instance), of the potential of recording (both techno- II) of the experimental culture that had
we view it as concomitant with the reemer- logically and socially speaking), and even flourished in the earliest years of the cen-
gence in the 1920s (especially in Germany more precisely at the moment that the tury and that photography and cinema had
and the United States) of the question of cinema came into being, that the so-called jointly embraced in the 1920s. Film und
Realism, or Naturalism (the two terms Pictorialist photographers turned, as no Foto, especially, was an apotheosis, signal-
having often been almost interchangeable), group before them ever had, to painting ing the end of an era; the Newhall exhibi-
which had marked the first golden age (as well as traditional artisanal techniques tion was by then already engaged in
of photographic creation around 1850, of image production, such as printmaking) latter-day, distant, institutional analysis
in France and Great Britain. In the years as a model. In so doing, they ascribed to of a movement that had run its course.
between these two periods, however, the the photographic print the quality of an
question had been largely ignored, so autonomous object—one that could not In an open letter published in 1934,
much so that Newhall himself never clearly be reduced to the simple data recorded, Moholy-Nagy, commenting on the decline
posited the relationship and was to remain or to the “picture” as a neutral, transpar- of so-called independent cinema, wrote:
for many years extremely ill informed ent medium for the transmission of visual “Yesterday there were still crowds of pio-
about French photography of the 1800s. information. Moreover, this value of neers in all countries; to-day the whole
He preferred the “Naturalist” British tradi- autonomy, derived from the painterly tra- field is made a desert, mown bare....
tion, which in his eyes had reached its dition (and the hegemony of the picture The industry carefully stamped out any-
apogee in the work of P. H. Emerson at the form in Western visual culture since the thing which was even suggestive of pioneer
close of the nineteenth century. What had Renaissance) is the main appeal of effort.”!0 And it would appear that, right
been “illusion” (albeit an “exact” one, con- Pictorialism in its most ambitious, overt up to the end of the 1960s and the explo-
ferred by mechanical precision) for the expression: the Photo-Secession move- sion of “attitude” and “concept” art, the
public of the nineteenth century became, ment of Stieglitz’s circle. It took this tradi- role played by the majority of that experi-
in the 1920s, exploration and transforma- tional act of secession, borrowed from mental culture’s mediators in the history
tion of the act of seeing. Where the debates Central Europe, for Pictorialism to move of modern art has been largely forgotten.
of Gustave Courbet’s time and the “return away from overly nostalgic (or reac- Particularly revealing are the many omis-
to nature” (in response to the idealism tionary) references to painting and, via sions by Newhall in the 1949 edition of The
of the “Ecole” and Romantic subjectivism) an open interplay of models, toward the History of Photography, which stemmed
were centered on the artistic value and modernist aesthetic of Paul Strand. from more than just a certain chauvinism.
legitimacy of mechanical precision, the These have barely been rectified in the
photographers of the 1920s, in their associ- At the turn of the twentieth century, then, years since: even in the most recent edi-
“ation with avant-gardist movements (e.g., the Photo-Secession marked the turning tion, Marcel Duchamp is worthy of inclu-
Constructivism), believed in experimental point for the integration of photography sion only as having drawn inspiration for
usage of the recording process, which into the development of modern art, cen- his Nude Descending a Staircase from
should lead not only to an increase in the tered around the visual arts (painting and Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs.
visual information presented but also to sculpture). Three decades or so later, for The omissions are so constricting as to
a widening of the potential of vision itself. the organizers of the famous 1929 Film be repeated and amplified in the treatment
In doing so, artists of the period revisited, und Foto event in Stuttgart (including of more recent periods—artists such as
often unwittingly, the explorations of the Lazsl6 Moholy-Nagy), and later for Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol,
medium’s earliest experimenters (for Beaumont Newhall (who for the 1937 for example, are not even mentioned in
example, producing prints directly, without MoMA exhibition paired film screenings the current edition.
employing optics). with photographic prints), photographic

THE ADVENTURES OF THE PICTURE f

The history of photography that we have Francis Wey, a friend of Courbet’s, writing from a blind love of nature and nothing but
inherited, as written since the 1930s, is in the inaugural issue of the magazine La nature; he takes a simple study for a com-
therefore constructed along an axis, which Lumiere in 1851, took up the defense of position. A glistening marsh, teeming with
is that oscillation between one well-defined photography, his aim was not to establish damp grasses and dappled with luminous
period, the 1920s, and another, the 1850s. the intrinsic merits of a new art form, but patches, a rugged tree-trunk, a cottage with
In one, the focus was on visual research to predict the regenerative and liberating a flowery thatch, in short a little scrap of
through direct (straight) and experimental effects on traditional art (painting) of a nature, becomes a sufficient and perfect
photography; in the other, artists had “pure, faithful technique for reproducing picture in his loving eyes.”!3
sought to transform an illusionist tradition nature.” The technique, Wey insisted, had
via descriptive realism. If we consider the already transformed public taste, and so Ten years later, in 1868, by which time
circle described by that axis, we can system- would also transform art. “This is the seed Impressionism had succeeded the
atically shed light on and trace, to their of a revolution against the system of sten- Barbizon School, another writer/art critic,
current positions, the “vanishing lines” cillers [poncifs], to the benefit of reality... . Emile Zola, described trends in modern
drawn on that circle: the work of singular it would seem already that the public, more landscape painting in very similar (but this
artists who used photography without desirous of truth, is growing less demand- time positive) terms. Where Baudelaire
being “photographers” (Duchamp, of ing in terms of preconceived ideas of style criticized Rousseau’s canvases for their
course, but also Edvard Munch, Egon and beauty, and displaying curiosity toward “absence of construction” (“all the charm
Schiele, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, the Italian the cult of the real.”!2 which he can put into this fragment torn
Futurists, René Magritte, and others— from our planet is not always enough to
all systematically ignored by Newhall); the Under cover of this issue of the effects, make us forget the absence of construction
proximity of the cinema (more important whether positive (in the view of authors in his pictures”), Zola pitted the freedom
than ever since the discovery of the close- such as Wey) or negative (according to of the Naturalist’s observation of nature
up); photomontage; the scientific model the opponents of realism in art, like against the constraints of the architectonic
(in analytical-type approaches and serial Baudelaire), and the uses, whether legiti- ideal in classical landscape painting: “The
work); and the logic of experimentation mate or not, of the technique of “reproduc- paysagistes composed landscapes like one
itself, as a type of game, seen in optical tion” (a debate that, as mentioned, hinges puts up a building. ... There is not the
processes or the reuse of existing images. on a highly flexible view of the very notion slightest concern for truth and life. There
The issue of realism, which lies at the cen- of realism), the earliest successes of is only the desire for grandeur, a majestic
ter of the circle, would thus appear in a photography speak to an analytical, experi- architectural ideal.”!4 And this was in fact
new light, and the excessively rigid opposi- mental approach adopted by informed how, starting from experimentation with
tions of the 1970s, to which I referred in amateurs, which effectively took advantage the very means of the new technique of
the opening pages of this essay, would have of the painterly traditions of the period. “reproduction,” photographic creation also
no other raison d’étre except the symmetri- Indeed, the very criticisms leveled at pho- asserted itself, in the domain of landscape
cal conformities of the art market and tographic realism, and the limits imposed painting more than any other, by default.
the “photography milieu.” upon it, paradoxically proved the effective- By default of “construction,” by giving
ness of that experimentation. Baudelaire, itself the freedom authorized by the
In the nineteenth century the question for instance, writing in the Salon de 1859, “study,” as an auxiliary exercise (applied
of realism in photography, excessively con- denounced his contemporaries’ adherence to a minor genre, moreover), by acknowl-
ditioned by the art versus industry debate to the “silly cult of . . nature” fostered by edging, in accordance with Baudelaire’s
(for proof one need only see Baudelaire’s photography. Yet when he assailed the wish, that it had to avoid the pure specula-
famous repudiation of “industry . . . invad- “modern school of landscape-painters” tions of the imagination and that the
ing the territories of art” in his Salon de for the same fault, he indirectly pointed to domain of huge historical compositions—
1859 essay),!! truly emerged only in the exactly what the photographers of the time which still dominated the official hierarchy
wake of the aesthetic squabbling touched were doing with their research: “Thus they of painting—was off limits.15
off by the work of Courbet. At the time, open a window, and the whole space con-
theory and practice were located and con- tained in the rectangle of that window— In the nineteenth century the dialectic
stituted according to a set of differences, trees, sky and house—assumes for them between the study and the finished paint-
or antinomies, that had to do more with the value of a ready-made poem. Some of ing thus opened up the first area of experi-
iconography than with form. Realism was them go even further. In their eyes a study mentation for a type of photographic
a reaction against Idealism and is a picture. M. Francais shows us a tree— creation that cast flexibility and the frag-
Romanticism, founded in philosophical an enormous, ancient tree, it is true—and mentation of vision against the ordered
and political ideologies (positivism and he says to us, ‘Behold a landscape.” Later, stability of architectonic composition; this
anarchism) rather than in any clearly elab- commenting on a landscape painting by occurred simultaneously with the develop-
orated aesthetic tenet. Indeed, Realism’s Théodore Rousseau, Baudelaire explained ment in painting of the “pure” landscape
main defenders, such as Champfleury, how the picturesque aspect of a piece, or (removed from its documentary function)
distanced themselves from the term as fragment, of nature had supplanted the as the rarefied crucible of modern art.
soon as it gained currency as a label. For imaginary order of composition, which But just as the value of the study relates
realism, in reality, is imperceptible; it can- traditionally formed the foundation of a to the finished painting, so the experience
not be defined in and of itself. The same picture’s autonomy: “And then he falls into of fragmentation, when expressed more
was true of photography at the time. When that famous modern fault which is born strongly (in the twentieth century, at the

118 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

same time as the logic of experimenta- In breaking with the classic (and classiciz- will—all of the centrifugal drifts of subjec-
tion), could only lead to a new “construc- ing) idea of beauty as conformity with gen- tivity, when the goal was to “mobilize”
tivism.” It can be said, schematically, that eral, universal standards—a break them. The picture could no longer be that
the photographer of the nineteenth cen- symbolized by the focus on notions of “the “form of pacification” that Lacan spoke
tury cut out a window in the world spread picturesque” and “the sublime”—the nine- of (in response to the “pacifying function
out before him like a spectacle, and his teenth century, following from the already of the ideal Me”), in which one finds the
gaze then examined and explored in depth “romantic” eighteenth, had doubtless fiction of an imaginary totality (antici-
the portion of space so isolated. The world pushed the performances of description to pated based on the subject’s being and
was a vast tableau that he studied piece the limit, represented by Realism’s initial becoming), which resolves ahead of time
by piece, analyzed, examined, and “repro- rupture with the illusionist tradition. No and reveals the turbulence of impulses.!9
duced” (as with painting). The oft-evoked less a commentator than Baudelaire cor- When photomontage, conversely, sought
opposition at the time between the “pic- rectly sensed this when he exclaimed: “I to welcome that turbulence and give it
turesque” (or poetic) effect and objective would rather return to the diorama, whose its true shape, photography itself, as the
description remained secondary to the brutal and enormous magic has the power setting of an imaginary identity (and the
overall quest for illusion (and to the evalu- to impose a genuine illusion upon me! standardization of a vision limited to
ative criterion stemming therefrom). I would rather go to the theatre and feast recognition) had to be contested. In 1921
my eyes on the scenery, in which I find Raoul Hausmann published a manifesto
By the 1920s that quest had not completely my dearest dreams artistically expressed, entitled “We Are Not Photographers,”
lost currency, and it was to reemerge dur- and tragically concentrated! These things, which included the declaration: “Creative
ing the 1930s and 1940s: consider the because they are false, are infinitely closer vision is the configuration of the tensions
evolution of Ansel Adams, from his first to truth; whereas the majority of our and distensions of the essential relation-
studies and close-ups, systematically landscape-painters are liars, precisely ships of a body, whether man, beast, plant,
favored in Stieglitz’s exhibition of 1936, because they have neglected to lie.”!8 stone, machine, part or entity, large or
to the grandiose views of Yosemite from But, seen in hindsight, in the light of small: it is never the center, coldly and
the 1940s, with their spectacular effects, later developments (and not through mechanically seen.”29 Any attempt
unintentional caricatures of the works of Baudelaire’s eyes), the same nineteenth at restoring order to representation (the
the great landscape artists of the American century not only retained the essential famous “return to order” of the 1920s)
West of the previous century.!6 The the- value of the illusionist criterion (i.e., as a and returning to the picture-as-spectacle
atrical model of illusionist composition, standard, a direction, and a framework for now had to contend with the relativism of
however, lost its primacy, and the vision, according to the model of the pic- points of view. Photography had shattered
metaphor of the picture was no longer ture as spectacle); it also, and especially, once and for all the sumptuous “tableau
so easily applied to the spectacle of the sought (or perhaps invented), within pho- de la nature” that Cézanne still dreamt of.
world. The era of the “great scenes of tographic objectivity, harmony between a
nature”!7 seemed at an end. patient, attentive subjectivity and a depic- Today we simultaneously consider the
tion of nature brought back to its primitive whole and the details (“part or entity,”
The “thing seen” and the image fragment scale (prior to any cultural ordering) and to use Hausmann’s terms), the composi-
became autonomous realities (disengaged simultaneously conveyed in minutest tion and the fragment. We now know that
from the relationship to the scenographic detail. It was that very harmony that was a composition is a construction, and that
tableau that defines the study); they shattered in the twentieth century, and construction is “ruin in reverse” (in Robert
required a new mode of construction that the consequences were quite different Smithson’s view). We can still accept, with
could reveal the secret, invisible, abstract indeed from those of the initial break with a certain delight, a view of nature in black
structure of the world that resides in the the classical standards of beauty. and white—even though no painter since
internal arrangement of things rather than Gerhard Richter has executed such a
in their “composition” (1.e., the way they That harmony was shattered not because view—because we can better accept the
combine outwardly). By dint of wanting to photographers were no longer pursuing miniaturization of vision than the miniatur-
penetrate the details of “things” (the word it, but, paradoxically, because they were ization of the painterly gesture. We accept
had never before carried so much weight), more aware and systematic in their pursuit photographic reduction, because we know
the gaze turned upon itself, toward its and because they had to contend with that it is usually temporary and instrumen-
own constitution. Contemplative order, opposing forces, with inequities, with tal. We accept that photographers play at
founded on objective proof or on the quick decisions and what one might term being painters, because we know very well
power of illusion, was exploded; a new precipitations of vision (brought on by that they are not. We accept photogra-
subjectivity sought to articulate itself the mechanical nature of the recording phers’ large-scale views, because we know
around the power of the camera lens and process) that tended to destroy the model that they have not been “composed,” but
its “microscopic revelations” (to take up whereby a picture would be composed, “cut out.” These are perhaps remem-
an expression used by Ansel Adams in unified. In trying to seize the continuity brances of painting. Yet we believe, with
1934). The infinite was no longer that of the world (and the subject-object rela- some satisfaction (and pride), that this
indefinitely extended continuity symbol- tionship) in a fragmentary condensation must be how nature herself remembers
ized by the vanishing point on the horizon; or in metaphorical objectivity, as Edward painting. We accept the large-scale views
its new definition was a multiplication Weston did, photographers were already of a landscape, because they are discreet
of points of view. setting in motion—*provoking,” if you (and discontinuous )—because any

THE TURE FORM

IN THE HISTORY F PHOTOGRAPHY
THE ADVENTURES Of
photographic composition remains a frag- long as it is used as a tool for lyricism, and medium. Because it produced simple docu-
ment of the world. And we tend to prefer for responding as spontaneously as possi- ments and not autonomous works, it neces-
the work of photographers, as it tradition- ble to the attractions and surprises of sarily referred the spectator (gazer) to the
ally presents itself, in the form of a small, vision. Newhall, and the majority of histori- idea, action, and process developed by the
manipulable print, over that of painters ans of photography after him, did not hold artist. An image was no longer offered,
(the Photorealists, for instance, who have to this line of interpretation, not only either in or of itself, for the public’s enjoy-
sought to transfer the precision of the pho- because they did not perceive it (with the ment, or for its freedom of perception
tographic fragment onto the picture plane, possible exception of John Szarkowski) but or interpretation; rather it was produced
transposing onto it the glazed surface of also because it was untenable. Nor has any so that the public might, through it, redis-
the mechanical image)—because the print photographer since those I mention held to cover and reconstitute an approach, an
brings us back to the moment of discovery, it: neither Robert Frank (too romantic) nor experiment (in the scientific sense), a pro-
the first glance, the barely assured captur- Lee Friedlander (too systematic) nor Garry cedure, or a system. Douglas Huebler, for
ing, the moment when a singularity Winogrand nor Robert Adams (their fields example, who was the first artist to employ
discreetly breaks free, isolating itself. of exploration being too restricted) nor, photography in a Conceptual project,
a fortiori, any European. The photogra- beginning in 1968, created “well-made”
There is a persistent difficulty, however. phers of today who consider themselves images, “in the sense that they were techni-
If one accepts the flexibility of photo- and manifest themselves as artists—taking cally perfect,” but specified that “their
graphic vision as the culmination of a long into consideration the public spaces in beauty proceeds from the strategy that
process begun at the same time as the which they exhibit—can no longer merely I use, which is to liberate things present in
medium, that flexibility has failed to elimi- “take” pictures; they must cause them to the world from the weight and pressure of
nate the haunting question of the picture, exist, concretely, give them the weight and their specificity: I devise systems that allow
as form (or model for autonomy) and even gravity, within an actualized perceptual me to subject things to a model of thought.
as spectacle (or illusion), as has been men- space, of an “object of thought.” They do In my work on duration, for instance, every
tioned several times in this essay. The crite- not necessarily have to “make” (in the event—even the most unexpected—occurs
rion of “vision,” liberating as it may have sense of manufacture) them—much less in conformity with the system I have previ-
been, has produced as many “stencils” leave their trademarks on them—but they ously set up. And the result can sometimes
(poncifs) as it has “good pictures” since the must, before producing them, plan how be quite beautiful, because it is arbitrary
1920s. It authorized the “autobiographical” they will be, where they will be situated, and because I have not chosen it to become
blending of formalism and pseudolyricism into what narrative they will be integrated. a plastic object.”2!
that characterizes a large part of so-called They can no longer deny, or pretend to
creative photography (alongside what I deny, that the image is a reification of An approach like Huebletr’s posited a
have chosen to term “Neo-Pictorialism’”). recorded vision and cannot be directly model founded on play (there can be many
It replaced the realist “cult of nature” transmitted. They know that it is the image players) and freedom. Two main purposes
denounced by Baudelaire with a roman- in its actuality that constitutes “the thing guided this attitude: assign to the artistic
tic—and no less naive—faith in the spon- seen”—as much as, and perhaps more experience the value of the generality of
taneity of the gaze as a quasi-miraculous than, the contrary proposition. Finally, the concept (even if the specific production
source of “good pictures” or as an inspired a relative cultural marginalization, which of each piece demands specific aesthetic
manipulation of the visible world. A chatty for the earliest experimenters became in choices) and thus open up, to the experi-
rhetoric emerged beginning in the 1920s; the end a situation conducive to research, ence of man in the world, a field of “possi-
found objects, surprise, and strangeness were must itself be desired and reconstructed bilities” without adding any new objects
common terms. Nevertheless, the evolu- as a form of retreat, and this is extremely to those already existing.?? The Conceptual
tion of the picture (beyond illusionism and problematic. It is highly unlikely that cre- artists refused to produce specific objects
within the search for abstractions) begins ators such as Stieglitz or Weston, who by because these necessarily would be labeled
to resemble a new effort at “realism,” in their own examples nourished a sort of according to preexisting aesthetic cate-
terms of the painted object and the “con- mystical image of the photographer-artist, gories. For Joseph Kosuth, the only rele-
crete” experiences that it generates (in the can still serve as models. vant question was that of art in general—
sphere of perception as well as in those of or, put another way, that of the generic
expression or speculation). Small wonder definition of art. Huebler, meanwhile,
that photographer-artists increasingly were For many artists at the close of the 1960s, declared that “art has limited our experi-
not content to produce simple prints as the value of the autonomous work, as the ence of the world by introducing cate-
“documents of vision.” necessary finality of an artistic project, gories.” “Beauty” must therefore be
seemed to lie in the exchange value of the arbitrary, as the Dadaists had already imag-
After the quasi-encyclopedic inventory reified process. That finality had to be dis- ined it—more so, I should point out, than
conducted by Eugene Atget at the turn continued, or placed in parentheses, so the Surrealists, despite Lautréamont and
of the twentieth century, via all of the that the truth of the process of experimen- Breton’s infamous “Beau comme... ”
inherited genres and beyond, auteurs such tation and research could be got at. Art For in this case there was not a reliance
as Walker Evans, André Kertész, and the had to resemble life—as action and trans- on chance as subjective revelation, but—
young Henri Cartier-Bresson did provide formation, expression and communication. much more than that—an exploration,
proof of the great flexibility offered by the Photography became extremely useful as similar to that of Musil, of generality as the
new mechanical method of recording as a recording technique and an information suspension of preexisting definitions and

120 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

“particularities,” and a widening of the pos- while, sought—in an essentially nonviolent Operation” (subtitled “Self-Portrait for
sible. “All Tam doing with my concepts is manner, as nonaggressively as possible—to Lee Friedlander”) articulated precisely the
pointing out the world, directing attention “integrate the whole world” into his work two principal interests that characterized
in a certain direction—without constraints and located his action with respect to a nat- the artistic uses of photography from the
and without pushing,” Huebler continued. ural totality (including the data of urban end of the 1960s and into the next decade,
“T do not mean to ‘seize’ the world; nor do life). Acconci, while initially mistrustful which we have already detected in Huebler
I wish to impose the weight of my impulses of overly subjective expression, took the and Acconci: analysis of perception and
on it. I want to give the spectator/conceiver reverse route, having chosen to describe representation, on the one hand, which
the means to think independently; to fill in his surroundings according to the move- grafts a reflection on language as a sym-
the frame of the concept, if you will, by him- ments of his body (within a given time bolic process onto the phenomenological
or herself.”23 Working from a conceptual period) and to restrict his primary field issues surrounding Minimalism, and exper-
predetermination and a “system” laid down of experience to the interrelationships imentation with the body and imaginary
as the (arbitrary) framework for an action, between the body and space, which were identity, on the other. These two interests
Huebler conducted experiments (one conceived of as two “system|[s] of possible dovetail very often, for example, among
could even call them campaigns) of picture- movements.”24 artists concerned with the issue of space
taking, the results of which sustain a com- and, more specifically, the contemporary
parison with the street pictures produced In this regard, Acconci was another artist environment. A reciprocal metaphoriza-
around the same period by other American whose work (probably even more so than tion emerges between the body and lan-
artists: photographers such as Friedlander Huebler’s) has affinities with the contem- guage with respect to the larger question
or Winogrand. The main difference lay in porary explorations (albeit begun earlier) of identity (subdivided into the linguistic,
Huebler’s consistent use of language as his of Friedlander and Winogrand. The latter psychological, and sociological spheres,
primary tool for formalizing the experiment was doubtless the greatest street artist of seen as proceeding from conceptual desig-
(and, in that regard, his approach was the 1960s; his capturing of the gestures nation/naming, acknowledgment or trans-
not unlike that that of Robert Barry or and intersecting trajectories of urban cho- formation of the self, and membership in
Lawrence Weiner). reography was freer and more just than society or distinction therefrom). Many
William Klein’s. The former was paid artists—some Conceptualist, some less
A very similar attitude—and, often, the homage in 1970 by Ugo Mulas, who noted so—began to treat words and utterances as
same street-bound source material—is to in the second of his Verifiche (the first had physical beings, as things inscribed in the
be found in the earliest artistic and photo- been devoted to Niépce): “It seems to me environment (which, in return, took on the
graphic output of another American that, until Friedlander, there had never quality of a mental space )—and, as such,
artist, Vito Acconci, who had initially cho- been a photographer so aware of what is transportable (e.g., inscriptions or lighted
sen poetry (the evolution from poet to implied in a photographic operation; who signs in the white cube spaces of galleries,
photographer-artist was fairly common sensed the extent to which the photogra- or on the picture/screen). Others explored
at the time; a good European example pher can be ‘inside,’ in the camera or in the body, considering its workings as if they
is Jochen Gerz). For Acconci, as for the action, physically, I should say, to such were a language, and these artists, more
Huebler, the specific experience of photo- an extent that he can invest a picture with than those who came before them, needed
graphic vision was predetermined by con- all of the ambiguities characteristic of first- photography to do so.
ceptual choices that call upon the value of person narrative.”25 At the same time, in
abstract designation afforded by language. Vancouver, Ian Wallace had begun apply- For instance, the Viennese artist Arnulf
Acconci too considered his photographic ing New York school conceptual models Rainer (to cite a creator who appears to
work as an “activity” that deployed and to the urban iconography established by be at odds with American Conceptualism)
produced a model, according to explicit Friedlander in the early 1960s, for wrote in 1978: “The language of the body,
rules and coordinates. For these artists, Friedlander had emerged in the tradition as it exists in all animal societies, has been
the use of language (as the medium of the of Walker Evans but, importantly, had accounted for only by the art of dance. In
“general”) and the experience of the urban brought to photography the aesthetics of the fine arts, it was used indirectly, in a sec-
environment constituted the necessary sup- collage, which had recently been revived ondary manner, in the representation of
position and exploration of a public space in “the art of assemblage” (to take up the human figures. In our day, such a language,
antagonistic to the private (or intimate) description used by William Seitz when as spontaneous as it is primitive, is attrac-
context of the traditional artistic experi- he curated the famous MoMA exhibition tive even to ethnologists.” Rainer, who
ence, symbolized by the closed studio. But of 1961). is generally associated with an expression-
Acconci, unlike Huebler, conceived his ist tradition, recalled his first experiments:
actions in the environment as activities of In his unfinished series of Verifiche, “Tn 1951 I undertook for the first time
the body, physically placing himself in pub- produced between 1970 and 1972, near to conceptualize this entire problem.
lic spaces. In fact his later research essen- the end of his life, Mulas revisited, analyti- I attempted to record the motions of a
tially developed, by a feedback effect, at cally and systematically, the same reflec- hand at work, operating in the fashion of
the more restricted level of experiments tion on photography (i.e., its material and a motor.” He continued: “Certainly one
on his own body, leading to what was even- symbolic constituents) that countless pho- could have interpreted my didactic work
tually termed Body Art (other practition- tographers before him, beginning with as a pure and simple negation of the body
ers of the time included Bruce Nauman Niépce, had already conducted in practice, as such.”26 The same doubt might well have
and Dennis Oppenheim). Huebler, mean- less systematically. His “Photographic been expressed by Klaus Rinke in regard

HE ADVENTURES OF THE fF
to his photographic work of the 1970s, photography the most—Giulio Paolini, those of Sigmar Polke) as well as more
especially when contrasted with his earliest of course, but also Giuseppe Penone singular artists like Jiirgen Klauke chose
self-portraits, taken in Greece in 1960. and Luciano Fabro (not to mention to go the way of provocation (more or less
Michelangelo Pistoletto, associated above expected and more or less programmed,
In reality, these 1970s artists’ photographic all with Pop Art). And Harald Szeemann, along a clownish, parodic line that reached
approach to the body owed as much to a in the “Personal Mythologies” section of back to Dadaism), Gerz articulated his cri-
mechanistic, analytical tradition common the 1972 Documenta, somewhat ambigu- tique of art and the media (“Caution: Art
to modern dance and photography (going ously equated Beuys and Merz with the corrupts,” he famously warned in 1968)
back to Schlemmer’s ballets) as to mytho- voluntarily minor expressions of younger according to a strategy of dissociation that
logical residue in industrial society. This artists such as Christian Boltanski and was simultaneously more conceptual and
is strongly evident in the work of Rebecca Jean Le Gac, who clearly did not proceed more ambiguous. Dissociation between
Horn, particularly in a 1974 piece in the from the same ambitions. Indeed, for those words and images, between myth and
Krauss collection entitled Mechanischer artists (as their later research would con- quotidian triviality, so as to explore and
Korperfacher. In Rinke’s work the potential firm) the traditional model of myth, as reveal not the world and its objects as a
of ritual is reconstituted in the geometry a collective representation of a society pseudo-exteriority, nor even the visible,
of space and the regularity of time, meas- founded on the sacred, had been largely but the gaps between images, the space for
ured by reiterated gestures and decom- transformed—devalued, even—by the new interplay, and the invisible parts of the too
posed movements. In the art of Barbara quotidian “mythology” of the petite bour- tightly knit fabric of representations.”?
and Michael Leisgen, the body is a tool for geoisie, which since the work of Roland
exploring and interpreting shapes/signs Barthes was suspected of having produced At any rate, what emerges from these cul-
inscribed in natural space, a technique for an antihistorical naturalization of cultural tural shifts and these debates about pho-
the mimetic revelation of “the language of phenomena. Their “personal” mythologies tography as a paradigm for the modern
nature.” The process is analogous to dance, could not help but be fragmentary, allusive, imagination (which are not unlike those
which through formalization of physical and “anecdotal” (to use Le Gac’s descrip- of the nineteenth century concerning art
expression and the geometricization of ges- tion); they could generate only lacunary, and industry) is a vision of a surprisingly
tures and movements “allows the expres- ironic narratives—liittle “captions,” not unstable art form that, removed from the
sion of an inner-outer equilibrium; that is unlike those appearing under photos. They tradition founded on the autonomy of the
to say, a discourse on the correspondences could not leave photography behind any work, necessarily recorded and transmitted
between man and nature.”?7 Outside the more than they could banish the common contemporary cultural interests, philosoph-
German tradition, the clearest expression spaces of verbal communication. ical and scientific models, et cetera, more
of this redefinition of the ritual hermeneu- directly (and, doubtless, more naively)
tics of nature by the physical and photo- In hindsight, if we can still find some rele- than art had ever done before. The very
graphic inscription of a geometrical scheme vance in the notion of “personal mytholo- notion of “model” (as previously seen with
is to be found in the work of England’s gies,” we must also admit that it means Huebler and Acconci) was stronger and
Richard Long—more precisely in the para- something completely different depending more open than ever, since it no longer
digmatic summation of all his artistic on the cultural (and national) context in designated only examples (even less rules
explorations, the 1967 work A Line Made which it manifests itself. If we consider the or canons) drawn from art history, but any
by Walking.?8 same generation of artists, born around schema/framework, thought process, or
1940 (Rinke was born in 1939, and experimental approach potentially avail-
Here I must make a brief digression in Boltanski in 1944), the French followed able to the artist via any cultural activity.
order to prove my point in a backhanded the route of doubt, and their use of photog- It was natural that this should then lead to
manner. It is significant that the majority raphy was informed by an attraction to surprising encounters and “curious” cross-
of artists who, in the 1960s, had ambitiously a cause and an object of that doubt. The breedings of very free (unsettling, accord-
delved into the realm of mythology, with Germans, conversely, were nourished by ing to the art “categories” rejected by
a strong physical involvement, such as the presence of Beuys and, through him, Huebler) forms of experience and expres-
Joseph Beuys and Mario Merz, used pho- the persistent Romantic tradition; they sion, on the one hand, and extremely rigid
tography either very little (Beuys) or not used more “violent” humor (or at least a systematizations, on the other. Thus we
at all, or only exceptionally (Merz), having more structured violence, compliant with had artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher—
rejected painting and the picture form: the standards of painterly provocation) to using an approach resembling industrial
they preferred direct exploration of materi- express themselves both with photography archaeology—adapting photography, as
als (especially organic), energies (or and against it—that is, when it did not a mechanical tool for documentary repro-
forces), and symbolic or archetypal forms, serve, more serenely, an analytical, con- duction, to a typological analysis model the
eschewing a form of imagery considered structive approach (seen, for example, likes of which no one had dared construct
cold, distant, and simplistic (because of in the work of Rinke, Horn, and the even in the heyday of the classification of
its miniaturizing effect). Within the main- Leisgens). Still, it was up to Jochen Gerz natural species throughout the entire nine-
stream of Arte Povera, as posited in to locate a sort of passage—or, better, a no- teenth century. It bears mentioning that
Germano Celant’s 1969 book, the most man’s-land—between the two territories, the Bechers had conceived of their project
analytical artists (for whom the problem by demonstrating that doubt was already and defined their method as far back as the
ofvision, and its relativity, remained a part of German Romanticism. And, while late 1950s—well before the emergence of
key concern) were the ones who used a number of Beuys’s disciples (and, today, the Minimalist, Conceptualist, Systematic,

122 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

and other approaches to which they were of allegorical mannerism (in the illustrated the image. This is probably best exempli-
assimilated during the 1970s (in the wake inventory of optical transformation and fied by the 1982 canvas Lager.*!
of Carl Andre’s famous 1972 article about displacement processes produced by the
them in Artforum). This proves the argu- vagaries of the recording process). When In comparison to that of Warhol, the work
ment that photography, because of the systematically harnessed to a physical expe- of the most conceptual and analytical
exacting nature of its documentary func- rience in space, sequential analysis—as a artists of the 1960s and 1970s was neither
tion, could itself acquire the quality of first-person experience of a process of cog- as relevant nor as effective with respect
model, as long as its practitioners sought nition—finally acquired the expressive or to the question of reproduction, and to
to restore its functions as “testimonial” descriptive value of an autonomous image the play between repetition and difference
(to use the Bechers’ term) and a source (a singular one, even). Acconci, Rinke, apparent in the redundancy of media-
of historical knowledge. and the Leisgens thus show affinities generated imagery and information. It was
with Richard Long, but also with Bruce up to other artists to extend the Warholian
If we consider the genesis of the Bechers’ Nauman and his “action images” (e.g., the attitude: Richter, of course, but also
work (which lay more in a singular decision famous Self-Portrait as a Fountain) and with Boltanski, albeit in a minor mode (as he
than in the internal evolution of avant- Hamish Fulton, whose captioned “views” himself acknowledged).*2 Both found, in
garde art, as in the New York view), it is revisit, in picture format, the tradition of media-derived imagery as well as in family
easier to see how the interest in invisible plate illustrations in books. photo albums, invaluable and powerful
structures, or patterns, that characterized stereotypes and, in so doing, that general-
the modernist realism of the 1920s (and Concept and “activity” (the term is more ized aesthetic to which they chose to adapt
sometimes imparted a mystical inflection) accurate than “attitude”) art of the 1970s (via deflected reproduction or differential
was, by the 1960s, as much transformed as was characterized as much by a sort of repetition) rather than resisting it. After
replaced by a new penchant for serial and experimentational bulimia as by a desire initially abandoning painting and the pic-
sequential devices. This had already been for formal simplification and reserve in ture form for a logic of stock taking and
part of nineteenth-century scientific exper- response to the accumulative aesthetic accumulation, Boltanski, as I noted earlier,
iments using photography, principally of collage and assemblage as well as to the revived the paradigm of painterly composi-
in the fields of astronomical observation proliferation of words and images pro- tion—and thus the picture—when he
and the physiological analysis of bodies duced by the media and disseminated into asserted the beauty of amateur photo-
in motion, exemplified by the work of the environment. The notion of informa- graphs. Richter, meanwhile, had started
Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules tion was thus central by this time. Huebler, from the same appreciation: “I do not
Marey. Thus it was not surprising that for instance, noted in a 1971 interview how mean,” he said, “to attack anything at all.
Muybridge should become, around 1970, repetition (or redundancy) of information The most seemingly banal pictures are on
a key historical reference for contemporary was a fundamental, constitutive aspect of the contrary the richest... . A snapshot,
American artists (a 1973 essay by Hollis culture and the social fabric.3° The nature when one conforms to it, becomes an
Frampton in Artforum comes to mind). and the potential of differences conse- extremely powerful factor. ... The family
The division of movement visualized by quently emerged as questions of social photo, with everyone well portrayed in the
Muybridge constituted an intermediate identity, of public representation or expres- center of the image, is literally overflowing
solution—an intermediation, if you will— sion—as much as or more than perceptual with life.”33
between the snapshot and the cinematic and formal distinctions. In the early 1960s,
illusion of movement. More generally, prior to the Conceptual Art movement, I should add at this juncture that Jochen
series emerged as the exemplary format Andy Warhol had already experimented Gerz was probably the one who most
for any analytical process, whatever the with processes of differentiation (or modu- strongly refuted Richter’s ideas, proceed-
subject—a shape, a gesture, a narrative sit- lation) through repetition, on images bor- ing from the observations that “the media
uation—whereas a single photograph was rowed from the media—images that had do not allow reality to be communicated
merely the flat, documentary reconstitu- therefore been reproduced thousands of or reproduced” and that images are
tion of the analytical experience, employed times before he made use of them. But “the wall of visibility encircling the non-
only casually by the artist as a quick, con- where the variations that eventually experienced.”34 Gerz thus sought to break
venient, and efficient means of verifying appeared in the media’s reproductions this rigidity of images (while exposing it)
a conceptual hypothesis. were fundamentally “imperceptible” (or by creating between them an interplay
at least, strictly secondary), Warhol used of gaps and a “blurring,” introducing a
Conversely, as long as the artistic experi- repetition precisely to explore variations “shifted” language, whereas Richter cre-
mentation follows the scientific method in the prototype image; the difference ated the blurring in the images themselves,
closely enough, the means of verification engendered by such repetition (or repro- during their transposition to the canvas.
becomes a determining factor in that duction) could now be apparent and create Yet despite this difference, both re-created
experimentation, to the point that it simul- an event. After Warhol, Sigmar Polke in in this way the effects of distancing and of
taneously becomes an object of analysis turn used the procedure to great effect, annihilation of the represented object pre-
(without, I should clarify, once again considering the transposing of a photo- viously exploited by the German Romantic
becoming the finality of the experimenta- graph onto canvas as a phenomenon of painters. And while Gerz seemed to reject
tion). This is particularly palpable in the reproduction—and one must insist on the painterly solution proposed by Richter,
work of Rinke and even more so in that the meaning “re-production,” that is, the the latter, in his refusal in turn to restrict
of John Hilliard, where it produces a sort actualization of the dramatic value of his explorations to performances of
painted photography and in his return symbols. Following this line takes us to the Lastly, with Boyd Webb and Ger Van Elk,
to abstraction and his vigorous insistence mimetic fictions of Cindy Sherman, which, and to a lesser degree in the work of Jan
on being viewed as distinct from the more than staged self-portraits, are cre- Groover—but also that of Wall and
American Photorealists, was also saying ations and re-creations of characters. Horsfield—the picture form recovers its
that all solutions were necessarily tempo- traditional authority, as a principle for the
rary and fragmentary, lest they lead to With her Untitled Film Stills, produced arrangement, within the rigid framework
positivist dogmatism or an agenda of starting in 1977, Sherman announced the of a “composition,” of a fable or complex
collective “salvation.”35 turn of the next decade, insofar as she figure. In Van Elk, this composition is dou-
applied the logic of performance, photo- bled, or self-contradicting, in its own mise-
Through this dialectic of difference and graphic “activities,” and image-actions— en-scéne (as, for example, in the 1975
repetition (articulated around reproduc- and, to a lesser extent, that of so-called Symmetrical Landscape series) and can
tion), with its gaps and reversals, we are narrative art—to imagery of the cinema undergo the most extreme optical distor-
led back to the crux of the debates about and the media, by ascribing to each image tions, with the shape of the picture itself
art around 1970: the general question of in the series an autonomous value. The changing. But in all these cases we are a
identity. And of the identity of art itself. shift, in the next stage of her work, to color long way from an analytical approach. The
Or, put another way, what is art, generi- and a larger format validated the revival artifices of painterly and dramatic fiction
cally, as opposed to what is a painting, a of the picture form in photographic exper- have again come together in the salient
sculpture, and so on? But also, what is an imentation (after all the analytical proce- realm of the picture. Yet again in the his-
artist? Who is the “I” that claims the status dures that had been experimented with tory of art, the realm of the picture (as a
of artist? Never before had artists been since the late 1960s), and this occurred at world of fiction), with its inequities and
so “exhibited” to the public, as actors (in the very same time as the so-called return its extravagances, has revived itself. At the
performance art), or gone so far as to imi- to representation in painting. In actuality, same time, an exponent of landscape pho-
tate the artwork itself or, more precisely, just as the figurative never left painting tography such as Robert Adams, with the
to become it, by exposing (in the form of after the advent of abstraction—it had, series Los Angeles Spring, can continue
“living sculptures”—e.g., Gilbert & on the contrary, changed enough, at the to describe and celebrate the world as a
George) what it can be and the ways in same time as abstraction, to render their (faraway) picture, while telling us that it
which it can “appear” (in the sense that usual opposition problematic—the picture no longer has the edifying appeal it had in
an actor “appears” in a play). And never model has never stopped informing the the nineteenth century—it is now a ruined,
before in the history of artists using pho- artistic uses of photography, but it has fragmentary totality.
tography (despite a longstanding tradition been largely transformed and adapted.
of staged self-portraits) had they been We have seen how Hamish Fulton recon-
so engaged in games and simulacra (with stituted the picture form in referencing From our vantage point at the conclusion
varying degrees of seriousness and risk) plates from books. The same is true of of the 1980s, the renewal and diversity
of imaginary changes in identity, age, or several artists who used words and images of photographic creation in the Western
gender (e.g., Lucas Samaras, Urs Liithi) together, such as Victor Burgin and, world are clearly informed by two comple-
and even of cadaveric likeness (Rainer, more recently, Barbara Kruger. mentary phenomena: on one hand, the
especially). The effects of doubles and convergence, at last made possible, of his-
doubling (of which William Wegman was Sequential analysis—narrative fiction tories of photographic works (as seen, for
the “master” and Man Ray the obedient akin to a cinema sequence (see John example, in the Mayer collection) and
pet) can be considered according to the Hilliard as well as Mac Adams) also sig- histories of the artistic uses of the medium
same logic, and resonate in other ways naled divisions in the image itself (never (e.g., the Krauss collection) and, on the
when contrasted with all of the variations mind the division of images). The least other, the function of articulation, concilia-
of the period on reproduction as the cov- satisfying solution proved to be that of tion, and—pun intended—mediation per-
ering and masking of the model, on dupli- multiple images within the same frame, formed by photography, more than ever,
cation as the signaling of difference proceeding from the simple addition of between the sphere of the media (or its
(Wegman, with his famous Crow/Parrot documents, especially when this is con- representations) and the traditional repre-
of 1970), and on the shadow and the trasted with the efficacy of a Rinke mon- sentational culture of the fine arts, which
reflection in a mirror as paradigms of the tage or one of Gilbert & George’s giant maintains its relevance (including through
doppelganger (going back to German grids. Processes of analytical repetition its representations in the media) in the
Romantic literature). The very fact that and differentiation acquire far more face of the many attacks it has weathered
so many artists of the time chose to work persuasiveness when they generate a real from this or that avant-garde. It is useful
as couples (Gilbert & George, Ulay- extension of forms and figures into the to observe and describe these two phenom-
Abramovic, the Leisgens, Bernhard and exhibition space, as in the work of Jan ena, avoiding as much as possible any
Anna Blume, to name only those who Dibbets and in some pieces by Michael impulse to critical appreciation.
appear in the work itself as couple and Snow, like 1971’s Of aLadder, where the
doubled author) thus takes on particular succession of cinematic frames becomes The first phenomenon obviates and fills in
significance. The fictions of Michele Zaza, a simultaneous deployment of perceptual the historical hiatus described at the begin-
built around the parental dyad, reintro- fragments. John Coplans has recently ning of this essay, and only by noting the
duce into this context the perspective of explored exactly this avenue in his latest most recent creative developments can we
family legends populated by mythological work on the figuration of his own body. appreciate just how effectively it does so.

124 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

(The choice of contemporary artists for Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “pure” primary sidestepped the complementary culs-de-sac
the present exhibition, of course, is meant colors triptych), showing how and why of abstract lyricism and positivist imperson-
to point the way to a positive evolution.) the finality of the autonomous work of ality. While the latter hindrance essentially
Already, though, this is sufficient evidence art—bereft of any role in practical, daily affected American photography (notable
to suggest that something beyond “mod- life—would (or should) be abandoned exceptions include auteurs such as Robert
ernism” is at issue. One might also note by artists once the mimetic tradition of Adams and William Eggleston), the former
the unique situation experienced by the painting had been exhausted. Since that made for a more proximate risk, as it was
contemporary photographer, whereby prophecy (a better term would be “pro- that of Subjective Photography, as advo-
potentially the entire corpus of photo- grammatical wish”), the picture has unceas- cated by Otto Steinert, which in Europe
graphic images produced in the history of ingly transformed and reconstituted itself; was seen as the most comprehensive frame-
modern art is available—in raw, uncatego- the “last picture” has continued to reap- work for the “creative” photography of the
rized form—for purposes of reference or pear, either as it was in the beginning or postwar era, opposed to the objectivity of
as tools for possible reflection (which, it in a new light, and the photographic image the 1920s as well as to the trends toward
must be said, has nothing to do with how today provides it with some of its surest social, political, and humanitarian commit-
eclectic an artist’s tastes and aesthetic valu- content, for better and for worse. By ment. Importantly, Subjective Photography
ations are). The second phenomenon is “worse” I mean, as mentioned earlier, the had developed against the backdrop of
highly ambiguous. At the very moment that multiplication of “Neo-Pictorialist” apings the Cold War and the U.S.-supported eco-
it confers upon the photographic image a of ancient or modern painting, wherein nomic and democratic “reconstruction” of
new place in our visual culture and, in so auteurist photography confirms its vocation Germany. It had a dual function: in stand-
doing, generates a wealth of fascinating as a midrange art form by blindly fulfilling ing against totalitarian oppression and
explorations by artists, it also provides the the mediator role mentioned above. collectivist standardization, it had to assert
culture industry with a new tool and tends individual freedom and demonstrate the
to reinforce the categorization of photog- The Diisseldorf-, Paris-, and Vancouver- individual’s capacity for expression, but it
raphy as a “midrange” art form at the based artists presented here all work more also had to remove the potential for a new
mercy of the demagogic manipulations or less systematically (and exclusively) in consensus among the divisions engendered
of the entertainment technocracy. the tradition of the descriptive picture; it by the war. Thus it could not but reject any
can even be said that most of them espouse form of description that was overly func-
The picture’s adventures in the history of the tradition of description as picture. They tional and impersonal (cf. Albert Renger-
photography and of its artistic uses, what- are wary of an overly fragmented and sub- Patzsch) or excessively sociological (August
ever the period, have now led us to the jective vision, which remains the hallmark Sander). And, in partaking of the experi-
point where it has again, and more strongly of much of so-called creative photography mental abstractifying logic of the 1920s,
so than ever, been embraced by the major- (also called “independent” not so long it fit into a historical continuity of “mod-
ity of contemporary photographers as a ago). They do not mean to reject artifice ern” photography, opposed to Pictorialist
necessary, or at least sufficient, form of and fiction—quite the opposite is true—but archaisms. In so doing, it gave rise to a
(or model for) artistic production and they refuse to be their “authors,” preferring purist aesthetic in line with a subjectivity
experience. This is increasingly true in the instead to “find,” recognize, and reveal effectively abstracted from its historical
sociocultural context of “contemporary them in preexisting visual material, be it determinations, as is natural for a culture
art,” that is to say, in reaction to (or seced- objective or imaginary, part of the order of industry centered on the purely ideological
ing from) the principles and habits fol- things in the world or that of images (which, assertion of the individual (so as to better
lowed in the various loci of the medium’s by the way, appear also as things in the direct and control that individual’s experi-
functional application, such as documenta- world). All this is already sufficient justifi- ence). The Bechers opened up exactly this
tion (and documentary aestheticization), cation for bringing them together. But they type of completely other, contrary avenue.
illustration, entertainment, and so on. work in contexts as well as historical and At the risk of disavowing the true lyrical
The traditional visual arts (painting and cultural settings that are very different, and quality still permitted in this context (and
sculpture but also printmaking), mean- it is through those differences that we may exemplified by a scant few works produced
while, have long since lost or pushed away, explore their shared options, as well as their in Steinert’s circle, such as the earliest
in part because of photography, their more or less shared ones. images by Christer Stromholm [alias
potential for functional application—but Christen Christian] and Peter Keetman),
regretfully so, it would seem, judging from With the exception of Lothar Baumgarten, the Bechers reintroduced photography into
the Productivist and Bauhaus episodes, the Diisseldorf artists—Andreas Gursky, contemporary art, as a tool for historical
as well as all of the current trends toward Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth— testimony and analysis, by strictly adapting
decorative art and the production of enter- all studied under Bernd Becher at the their method—with room for improvisation
tainments. Unless it exploits the remnants Kunstakademie (where Klaus Rinke and reduced as much as possible—to the very
of these historical episodes or adapts Gerhard Richter both taught). From Bernd nature of the objects they had chosen to
itself to new trends, photography is bound and Hilla Becher they learned the example study. The many successes and the diversity
to follow the same path (and lead to the of athorough, analytical, serial approach, of explorations by their disciples today
same regrets). In 1921, swept up in the aimed at precision—and, even better, a pre- demonstrate the extent to which the
utopian ideal of the Soviet Revolution, cise, descriptive rendering. By freely revisit- method may be adapted and transformed,
Nicolai Tarabukin posited the era of “the ing, via that example, the Realist and Neue for example, when applied to contemporary
last painting” (which happened to be Sachlichkeit models of the 1920s, they objects or to living beings.

THE ADVENTURES OF THE PICTURE FORM IN THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Thomas Struth, in his series of urban later developing, through a semiological photographs to archival images, or frag-
scenes and architectural portraits, is faith- approach to the image, a critical reflection ments one of these images after the fashion
ful to the method but considerably relaxes on the environment as a structure of com- of the detailed views of a painting repro-
the tenet of typological comparison, via munication, subjective isolation, and cul- duced in a book, or when Stan Douglas
the empathic flexibility of a gaze that is tural segregation—the second generation juxtaposes his TV spots in color with
attentive to the diversity of cultural (and took advantage of the vernacular models images in black-and-white and adds a
anthropological) situations reflected in so constituted and set itself considerably script, like so many false cues, the docu-
the environment. Thomas Ruff, by con- apart from the Neo-Conceptual (and espe- mentary role of photography melds with
trast, after his early descriptions of interi- cially “Neo-Pop”) leanings that had a heterogeneous reality that is open to
ors (which are veritable X rays of a certain emerged in the meantime in the United an “off-screen” space (or a countershot)
private, kitsch, petit bourgeois culture), States (mainly in New York). The interest that gives it its “visibility’—that is, form
has limited his discourse as a portraitist to in media representations and a theoretical (sequential, narrative, fragmentary) and
rigorous stock taking of the programmed corpus centered on the “contextual” analy- dialectical value, but also (especially in
traits of physiognomic singularity, demon- sis of artistic culture form the common Arden), a rhythmic tonality and an imme-
strating how that programming stems as ground for a meeting (more than an diate emotional resonance. In the context
much from historical generic conventions exchange) of the two “schools.” But if one of the widespread exchange of signs of
(going back to portraiture of the German compares, for example, the images of communication, the work of art retains,
Renaissance) as from the standards of a Richard Prince with those of Ken Lum, the or rediscovers, its function of differentia-
social identity conditioned by technical differences are blatantly evident—so much tion and public expression.
reproduction. Andreas Gursky, at the so that the Vancouver artists, in the end,
other end of the spectrum of possibilities appear to be much closer to European atti- The Vancouver artists have heeded the
unlocked by the Bechers, strays as far from tudes (and to the Dusseldorf circle, among lesson of the “deconstruction” approaches,
the method as does Ruff, extending the others) than to New York trends. which proceed from the principle that
precision of documentary description all things are already “constructed,” and
toward the clarity of lyrical transposition. By confining his definition of his activity poorly so, as rigid representations, reifica-
Baumgarten, for his part, though for a to the recycling of consumer imagery, with tions, processes that run counter to the
variety of reasons he cannot be assimilated an empathic rather than an analytical or modernist optimism for which new repre-
to this group of photographers (and can critical gaze, and taking a serial approach sentations had to be constructed. But they
doubtless be more spontaneously com- whose goal is limited to creating voluntarily have also measured the rhetorical closure
pared with Hamish Fulton), finds in his ludicrous interpretive effects, Richard of these processes. In Two or Three Things
memoirs of travel the “exotic” component Prince has reduced the register of artistic That I Know about Her (1971), Jean-Luc
that has always been a part of photographic production (i.e., emptied it of all construc- Godard’s off-screen voice asks: “Why all
objectivity since the nineteenth century. tive operations) to that of imaginary con- these signs around us that end up making
As long as one understands that exoticism sumption. When a “gazer,” removed from me doubt language and submerge me in
in the same manner as Victor Segalen—as the privileged space of the museum, looks meanings, drowning reality instead of
a perception of difference and an “aesthet- at a billboard and again finds (re-cognizes) extracting it from the imaginary?” Without
ics of diversity”—for it is “not that kalei- the shape or ready-made picture that responding directly (i.e., by a strictly politi-
doscopic vision of the tourist or of the Prince himself had found, the circular play cal engagement), the Vancouver artists,
mediocre spectator, but the forceful and of “recognitions” has at last produced a who have moved beyond the conceptual/
curious reaction to a shock felt by someone pure simulacrum, stripped of all semblance analytical attitude that informed their ini-
of strong individuality in response to some of originality and difference. The produc- tial training, now seek to construct semio-
object whose distance from oneself he tivists’ utopia of “art into life” is realized logical, poetic realism beyond the surfeit of
alone can perceive and savor.”3° by the mutual annihilation of the two. The “meanings” Godard spoke of (even though
Vancouver artists, in contrast, have they continue to nourish it by rhetorical
In Vancouver, as in Dtisseldorf, artists retained a constructivist attitude (even if inflation of a certain critical didacticism).
using photography today form another they are not entirely immune to dandyist, They have also—Roy Arden’s work is
fairly homogeneous group. A shared learn- faux fin-de-siécle indulgings in stereotypes, proof enough—heeded Allan Sekula, who
ing experience under the same teachers which perfectly describes Prince). Lum warns in “The Traffic in Photographs”
(Jan Wallace and later Jeff Wall) and the produces his own images, and in setting (originally a lecture given in 1981 in, coin-
isolating context of a remote city lacking his portraits next to huge logos, he is not cidentally, Vancouver): “Just as money is
any tradition of cultural cosmopolitanism attempting to undo the specific likeness the universal gauge of exchange value,
(in spite of its multiracial demographic) of the model (by a contagious oversimplifi- uniting all the world goods in a single sys-
promote a communitarian attitude. But cation of signage), nor does he seek to tem of transactions, so photographs are
these artists have constructed their identi- invalidate the realist effect of the mimetic imagined to reduce all sights to relations
ties much more via their transformation of image. His goal is to bring to the image a of formal equivalence. Here, I think, lies
models for artistic and theoretical activities “contradiction,” a visual counterweight one major aspect of the origins of the per-
imported from the United States. Where and an ornamental (or musical) counter- vasive formalism that haunts the visual arts
the earlier generation (Wallace and Wall) point, thereby enhancing its eloquence, of the bourgeois epoch. Formalism collects
was initially located within the Post- its gravity, and its realism. Similarly, when all the world’s images in a single esthetic
Minimalist/Conceptualist movement— Roy Arden affixes his monochromatic emporium, torn from all the contingencies

126 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

of origin, meaning and use.”37 But Lum, Garnell, and Milovanoff also chose to certain vagueness and ambiguity, because it
Arden, and Douglas, like Wall, regardless explore closed, nostalgic, or comical worlds exhibits too many surfaces at once. It is in vain
of the value of historical interpretation (e.g., the vestigial palaces of Italian aristoc- that the sculptor forces himself to take up a
they wish to ascribe to their work, are also, racy, the disordered buildings and ruined unique paint [sic] of view, for the spectator who
and primarily, defined as producers of aes- landscapes of petit bourgeois intimacy, or moves around the figure can choose a hundred
thetic occurrences, which act upon forms the kitsch temples of mass consumption), different points of view, except for the right one,
(those of information, but also those of art and Tosani worked with collections of and it often happens that a chance trick of the
history) and transform them. This is why fetishized artisanal artifacts. And they did light, an effect of the lamp, may discover a
their realism is a “formalism,” as was that so in the complete absence of provocation beauty which is not at all the one the artist had
of the early 1920s, as is that of the Bechers, or even parodic intention—merely in in mind” (“The Salon of 1846: XVI: Why
to which one may readily apply Barthes’ response to a need to reinvent a sort of Sculpture Is Tiresome,” in Charles Baudelaire,
definition of structuralist activity (1963) objective, “common” lyricism. Art in Paris, 1845-1862: Salons and Other
as the search for intelligibility through Exhibitions, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne
processes of dissection and articulation.38 In the end, it is that need (which cannot [London: Phaidon, 1965], 111).
as yet be considered a project or, even less, 3. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,”
The French artists too paid attention to a “program” which constitutes the most Artforum 5 (June 1967); reprinted in Art and
the issue raised by Godard (rather, it was secure meeting ground for the French Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago:
an exclamation and warning from someone photographers and the Diisseldorf group. University of Chicago Press, 1998).
who had heard what Lacan had to say It should not be expected to lead to a 4. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” pt. 2,
about the real, the imaginary, and the sym- widening of perception, as the experi- Artforum 5 (October 1966); reprinted in Robert
bolic), and it would seem more so than to menters of “new vision” had hoped in the Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The
Sekula, for their work seems to indicate at 1920s (when the memory of that idea Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.:
once a firm concern for “realism” and a seems to produce only conventional, cita- MIT Press, 1993). Part 1 of the article had previ-
remarkable indifference to history. Where tional effects), but we should at least know ously appeared in the February 1966 issue
Ruff, in his indulgence of simulacra, is the how to recognize in it, more modestly, of Artforum.
most cynical of the artists shown, the the principle of paying proper attention 5. Nancy Foote, “The Anti-Photographers,”
French (Patrick Faigenbaum, Jean-Louis to things, in the irreducible gap that sepa- Artforum 15 (September 1976): 46-54.
Garnell, Christian Milovanoff, and Patrick rates seeing and saying, the visible and the 6. See Jean-Francois Chevrier, “Linvention de
Tosani) are the most obviously “formalist” speakable, the present and the possible. la photographie créative et la politique des
(in the sense that Sekula might employ). That the macrophotographic reproduction auteurs,” in L art en Europe: Les années décisives,
In truth, this apparent and often explicit of a drum (Tosani) or the description (and 1945-1953 (Geneva: Skira; Saint-Etienne;
retreat is in itself a historical occurrence. concomitant restitution) of the sceno- France: Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne,
It comes from their extreme mistrust of graphic structures that condition the expe- 1987), 252-261.
the myriad overly virtuous discourses and rience of urban life (Struth) should provide 7. A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode,”
commitments to “the right causes,” the comparable, if not analogous, tableaux of Artforum 15 (September 1976): 55-71; reprinted
leftist clichés, the didactic (and often our cultural geography (Géographies is the in Light Readings: APhotography Critic’s Writings,
opportunist) naiveté of all art that calls title of the Tosani images)—this is a daily 1968-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press,
itself “critical,” the semiological guerilla occurrence in the visual arts, alien to the 1979), 246-257.
skirmishes. There are few countries in order of discourse. Just as the rapproche- 8. Christian Boltanski, interviewed by Jacques
which political ideologies had such a ment of Faigenbaum’s staged portraits and Clayssen in Identités / Identifications, exh. cat.
destructive effect on art culture around Ruff’s sign effigies—via the dialectical, (Bordeaux: Entrepot Lainé, 1976), 23-25.
1970. And in the domain of photography, ornamental compositions of Lum—proba- 9. See Beaumont Newhall, “Cinquante ans
there is only one in which an auteurist jour- bly stems from the “formal equivalency” histoire de la photographie,” Cahiers de la
nalistic tradition (aided in this case by the of photography but cannot, at any rate, be photographie, no. 3 (1981): 5-9.
prestige, and self-interested guidance, of expected to sketch out, much less predict, 10. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “An Open Letter to
Cartier-Bresson) has sustained so durable the constitution of a universal language— the Film Industry and to All Who Are Interested
a compromise between the provision of even if one wished to ground the latter in in the Evolution of the Good Film,” Sight and
information, humanitarian values, and pure (perfectly interchangeable) simulacra. Sound 3 (spring 1934): 56-57.
resolutely individualist expression. When For the mere onset of a difference—as 11. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859: I.
that compromise emerged, in all of its discreet, discontinuous, or fragmentary as The Modern Public and Photography,” in Art in
archaism, and all the best efforts proved it may be—will always ensure that a gap Paris, 1845-1862, 154.
powerless before the inexorable develop- exists in the picture. 12. Francis Wey, “De influence de héliogra-
ment of the culture industry, models for phie sur les beaux-arts,” Lumiere, no. |
“creative” photography found room to Notes (February 1951); reprinted in “Du bon usage
expand into the space thus liberated. The 1. Jean Clair, “Linconscient de la vue,” de la photographie,” Photo-poche, no. 27 (1987):
artists under consideration here could not, Chroniques de l'art vivant, no. 44 (November 57-71.
and cannot, but stand apart from these 1973): 6. 13. Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859: VIII.
movements—it was either that or retreat 2. Baudelaire wrote in the same paragraph, Landscape,” in Art in Paris, 1845-1862, 194ff.
into their studios, as Tosani freely admitted regarding sculpture: “Though as brutal and posi- 14. Emile Zola, “Mon Salon (1868): Les paysa-
to doing.*? This is why Faigenbaum, tive as nature herself, it has at the same time a gistes,” Evénement illustré, | June 1868.

THE ADVENTURES
15. Discussing the legitimacy of F Holland Day’s 29. See the interview with Jochen Gerz in Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and
historical “stagings,” Commandant Puyo wrote, Suzanne Pagé and Bernard Ceysson, Jochen Design, 1984), 99.
in the annual publication of the Photo Club de Gerz: Les piéces (Paris: Musée d’art moderne 38. Roland Barthes, “Structuralist Activity,”
Paris, 1901: “History, religious or profane, is a de la Ville de Paris; Musée d’art et d’industrie in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard
domain forbidden to the photographer. . .. One de Saint-Etienne, 1975), 4-8. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
thing is certain: to say that photography is a real- 30. Huebler stated in a conversation with Donald 1972), 213-220. Originally published as Essais
ist process is not saying enough. Its domain is Burgy in October 1971: “One of the things that critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964).
even more limited: it is not realism, it is mod- holds a culture together is redundancy of infor- 39. Patrick Tosani, interviewed by Jean-Francois
ernism, nothing more.” mation. You say the same prayers over again, the Chevrier, in Une autre objectivité /Another
16. See Jean-Frangois Chevrier and Sylviane same stories. You go to the same meetings and Objectivity (Milan: Idea Books, 1989), 211-216.
de Decker Heftler, “Stieglitz, Ansel Adams,” meet people saying the same things. . . . That
Photographies, no. 4 (April 1984): 100-105. kind of redundancy is precisely what forms the
17. The expression in the original French, “les cultural base” (in Lippard, Six Years, 252).
grandes scénes de la nature,” refers to the title 31. Polke has said of this work: “Lager is not
of an anthology of literary texts published by painting. It is a reproduction. It is something that
Hachette Editions of Paris in 1872, which is cannot even be painted. ... I used the narrative
widely distributed in French schools. form as well as the objective form of photogra-
18. Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859: VIII. phy, as the reproduction of a tragedy” (interview
Landscape,” in Art in Paris, 1845-1862, 202-203. with Bice Curiger in Art Press, April 1985).
19. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, “The 32. Boltanski himself has said: “Perhaps I am in
Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the tradition of Warhol, but with me there is a
the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” desire to do cutesy, silly stuff. For the past few
in Ecrits:A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan years, I’ve tried to work with ‘sweet,’ family-type
(New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7. themes, for all audiences—intimism as a reaction
20. Raoul Hausmann, “Wir sind nicht die against ‘hard’ paintings, against the importance
Photographen” (1921), reprinted in Zeitschrift of art. That also has to do with my temperament;
fiir Dichtung, Musik und Malerei, no. 1 (1959), I have nothing of the heroic side of Warhol” (in
excerpted (French translation) in Courrier Dada Facade, no. 1 [1975], reprinted in Christian
(1958) and reprinted in Michel Giroud, Raoul Boltanski and Bernard Blisténe, Boltanski (Paris:
Hausmann (Paris: Chéne, 1975), 32. Musée national d’art moderne, 1984], 112).
21. Douglas Huebler, interviewed by Irmeline 33. Gerhard Richter, interviewed by Irmeline
Lebeer, Chroniques de lVart vivant, no. 38 (April Lebeer, in Chroniques de l'art vivant, no. 36
1973): 20-23. (February 1973): 15-16.
22. Ibid. This is essentially a restating of 34. Jochen Gerz: “The blur is the expression of
Huebler’s famous 1969 statement: “The world the highest realism of which I am capable... .
is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do My work is not about the real, nor about repre-
not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to sentation, but at best a sabotaged restitution—
state the existence of things in terms of time they are pieces of evidence that do not betray
and/or place” (cited in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: what happened but protect it. Between the real
The Dematerialization of the Art Object [New and its representation there is a no-man’s-land.
York: Praeger, 1973], 74). My work is located in that zone” (in Pagé and
23. Huebler, interviewed by Irmeline Lebeer. Ceysson, Jochen Gerz, n. 31).
24. Vito Acconci, “Notebook Excerpts, 1969,” 35. Richter, interviewed by Irmeline Lebeer, n.
in Vito Acconci: Photographic Works, 35: “The Photorealists. . . They seem to believe
1969-1970 (New York: Brooke Alexander, in what they're doing. They’ve found their salva-
1988), unpaginated. tion once and for all; they can do Photorealism
25. Ugo Mulas, “Lopération photographique until the end of their days. I cannot, for my part,
(Autoportrait pour Lee Friedlander),” text and believe in it to that point. There is no longer any
illustrations reprinted in Ugo Mulas, fotografo, salvation possible. That would require a general
1928-1973, exh. cat. (Geneva: Musée Rath; consensus. Everyone under the same banner.
Zurich: Kunsthaus Zirich, 1984). Only Hitler has managed that in our time.”
26. Arnulf Rainer, 1978 Venice Biennale cata- 36. Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism:
An
logue, reprinted in Art Press, special issue on Aesthetics of Diversity, ed. and trans. Yaé] Rachel
Vienna (1984): 49. Schlick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
27. Barbara and Michael Leisgen, interviewed 2002), 21; originally published as Essai sur l’exo-
by Jacques Clayssen in Identités/Identifications, tisme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1978).
51-54. 37. Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,”
28. See Rudi Fuchs, Richard Long (New York: Art Journal 41 (spring 1981): 15-24, reprinted
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; London: in Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain:
Thames and Hudson, 1986). Essays and Photo Works, 1973-1983 (Halifax:

128 JEAN-FRANCOIS CHEVRIER

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Sonntagsbilder
(Sunday pictures), 1976-1977 (cat. no. 56)
Hans-Peter Feldmann, Bilder (Pictures),
1968-1973 (cat. no. 43-55)

130 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Der Brand
von Uster (The fire of Uster), 1979
(under cat. no. 57)
 Ang
Sonyen

Sone
in

Peter Fischli and David Weiss,

Im Teppichladen (In the carpet shop), 1979
(under cat. no. 57)

132 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Modeschau
(Fashion show), 1979 (under cat. no. 57)
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Moonraker,
1979 (under cat. no. 57)

134 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 7itanic,
1979 (under cat. no. 57)
136 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Left:
Gilbert & George, Raining Gin, 1973 Gilbert & George, Dead Boards #5, 1976
(cat. no. 59) (cat. no. 60)
Dan Graham, Homes for America,
1966-1967 (cat. no. 61)
Above and right: details

38. = THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 (ULL

I
xd uy

rT

ee
=
eS

guise

Dan Graham, Homes

for America,
1966-1967 (cat. no. 61)
Above and right: details

140 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

— See , aR
ae
Dan Graham, Homes for America (detail),
1966-1967 (cat. no. 61)

142 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 Peg
ee
ieeo ee

we
~~,
32

Hans Haacke, Cast Ice: Freezing and

Melting, January 3,4,5... 1969, 1969
(cat. no. 63)
 eg ee Pe ee ed
patel rch Vee ‘a

Hans Haacke, Spray of Ithaca Falls: Freezing

and Melting on Rope, February. 7,8,9...
1969, 1969 (cat. no. 64)

144 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Hans Haacke, Live Airborne System,
November 30, 1968, 1968
(cat. no. 62)
Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #99,
Israel, July 1973, 1973 (cat. no. 66)

146 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 Variable Piece #101
West Germany

On December 17, 1972 a photograph was made of Bernd Becher at the instant

almost exactly after he had been asked to “look like" a priest, a criminal,

a lover, an old man, a policeman, an artist, “Bernd Becher," a philosopher,

@ spy and a nice guy ,.,in that order,

To make it almost impossible for Becher to remember his own "faces" more

than two months were allowed to pass before prints of the photographs

were sent to him; the photographs were numbered differently from the

original sequence and Becher was asked to make the “correct” associations

with the given verbal terms,

His choices were:

1 Bernd Becher 6 Policeman
2 Nice Guy Priest

3 Spy Philosopher
4% Old Man 9 Criminal
5 Artist 10 Lover

Ten photographs and this statement join together to constitute the final

form of this piece,

, an he
March, 1973 Douglas” Haetler

Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #101,

West Germany, March 1973, 1973
(cat. no. 67)
 "YVES KLEIN PRESENTE : NUMERO FESTIVAL D’ART .
| LE DIMANCHE 27 NOVEMBRE
UNIQUE D’AVANT-GARDE
1960 NOVEMBRE - DECEMBRE 1960

Dimanche
SEANCE DE 0 HEURE A 24 HEURES
| le Révoluation lle journal
al cam
bblleae
continue
seul jour
27 NOVEMBRE
0,35 NF (35 fr) Aigerie 020 NF (90 fn) oe= Tuutiee
Bape cme sy 2 ptt9m 3
Marne 22 ta + Male >

UN HOMME DANS LESPACE |

THEATRE
E thisitre se cherche depuis
DU VIDE de son ¢ thodtre de la mt
toujours ; il se cherebe tle pipe pintitdlart « La Soirte
* puis le début perdu
Lo grand theitre, est Eden
wn fait; Himportant ext </esablr
ACTUALITE Le Tehecoslovaaniie Burin orén
‘ute bonne fois nos positions sta~
uy thealze synthetique | les per-
tiques, chacun d'une manibre fae
ANS le cadre des rePrésentations théatrales du Fea- sotinages de xa pec, < Romeo’
iB) Uval d'Art d@'Avant-Garde de povembre-decembre | ot Julietta +, ctwent des macht
dividuelle et non plus personnelio 1980, Jal decidé de Presenter Une ultime forme de nine funtnstiques ot internates. qui
dans. Vunivers. Deputs longtemps theatre collectif qwest un dinuinehe pour toot le monde. | dvohiatent sur la ie Menclinint
din Jwhhonve parkour que te fue les aeteUt yer contig dh=
aus Ie polotre,... Je _n’on conmus, | Je nab pis voolu me Hoviter & une matings ou A une wuient lo txt. AmphithGatrott
pas d/aitre wusourd’hul !Je tens soiree
monitait ren pléeetics lucuniques
A dire musa cs Jo mis acteur, En preésentant le dimanche 27 novembre 1460, de de dix misutes, coupten de" dise
Jo mils fe compostteur, Tarcht- | O heure a 24 heures, je preseme done une journée de féte, eusions »leg Meenswous Falsaent
Teste, le srw pteur. © Je, ueos- uo veritable spectacle du vide. au point culminzet de mes partie dyidethment du pcogram
dire Set de Lion mbjecte- theorles, Cependant, n'importe quel autre jonr fe be semaine nie. Ce ql Yambnorn a declan
ra satis? s--quy celd » délie cre aurait Pu Cire atlssi utilise souvent A son qat Jat
hurlé de > ee sortew Ge mane, commaridaly, d'avine s sepre=
Ta varide ‘owe crrtaioeinent Je xouhalte quien oe jate la joie ef fe merveiiicus gantations, quill drut cL sips
Juste. Pua yerquant, je repéete Fegnent, que Personne n'alt te trae ef que Loos. acteurs- porter: Lew Lomntes onuts pott-
peut-tire anais consclehr, sPeotatrurs, couscienis comme incwhecients aussi de cette Fig Main en SvsuTc manioee, lng
Bley consciens d'aveir atteint le Eleantesaue manifestation, passent une bonne journce, paves
droit de te dire : et voll que,
Pout mo} comine pour tous, lf Qe chacun aille dedans comme dchors cireule, bonne, Ting. phondgraphen div s Lae
n'y w plus rion i faire: le then Femme od rexte tranauilio, Maris de ta Tony ¥3Cto
try offiese),atujourd’nut. c'est Jean Cueto, want ar
KGS» Ot Jy @ sats 9 Hem €ftoo { ‘Tottt cr ane je public aujurd'hut dans ce journal ext beaux pheinpntiswe
Hyeront tout se que Van veut | antérteue a ta Presentation de ce jour historique pour te
Dien que joe sols» es meme | inéitre
tout © que fon me yout pas que
Le thedire doit etre ou doit tout av moins tenter de
*
sols 9 tf Jiattetindtat-méme
piw <étre» Gu tout up devente rapidement Ip plaisie d etre, de vivre; de passer TC veralt top, Hinx de citer Jot
Mauls, que Yon ne sy de merveitin®s moments, ef fe comprendre chaque jour foaten tee tentative: qui ong 4
trompe pas > ii ve sxpit pas de » mileos le bel aujourd’how (alte pour sortie ae In conve
tnol quand: je dit Je, mol. mon, Tout co que je public dans ce journal ont ce ni
tlon, de optique aprise. de
ete Stapes Jusau'a ce Jour gloricux de realisme et de yerite
Yacudémisme, Bap. io duynainn
a specticle deh oprésentation
Cle parce que Vesprit, dans lo Uvatre dex operations de cette conception du thédtre UGA tele denplsels, qobUG da atte
‘dagnelJe rh ee we -ceprl ate Jo BrBPase Hest Bay sulenuean daville, Paxis, mals avast | ole, Je cro que presque teat 9
‘velllement, Stabile’et Ja campagne. te desert, Ix montagne, Ir cle) meme. et tont he fait, Jusqu’d Jacques Poliert
un esprit, classique, ane de tai Vanivers meme, pouraual pay? 1 dany Ko) mie. en eine de la
wucun carnotére diavant-narde av pide do Tardiny ces temps ey
cette avant-garde qu:, elle. viell- ale sats due (oul va fonctonier tres bien inévitablement lend, qui fait ontendre dea, voix
Ut al vite, de gemdration en sé= Hau “lous, qbectotenre,. neseers, machinistes, directeurs ot sur la acenn ob trals pannenux-
nenttion. autres, éeruzis pont la pour tout door et
Mon art n/spparticndra pus 2 Je Wiens a cemercier fel M Jacaues Volieri, directo toute ymbomice | (Son Idée dal
Pépoque, pas plus que Tart de du Festival @Art d'Avant-Garde, poor son enthousiasme, learn cat de faire vivre et price
tous Jes grands clasciques n' ea me ProPosant de Presenter etite manifestation « le di- ten: SEe0F8.)
‘wppazteny aux époques ob Ds ca! Mmauechy 27 novembre > Bravo | Suchet sanie
weil, paree ae je Cherche ayan’
tout, comme eux, & créer dans Rote tout cela mt existe, amis atten
ications cette «. transpa- tion: Yaveriy bien 1” teeteur
fence 5, ce ©Vide » incommense- mon muvre Uvateale 3! rhen
rable dus lequel vit lesprit per. opiolumant ret A yo\E _Avre
pianent et absolu delived de tin~ da youk synonyme de + Rea apwlayaky, realise extrémix lune quelconque de enit direc
tes dimensfors t wontatian » ou de + Spentacie Tait couhatt in mort wffer- Uons Ou recherdhee eaut,- pew
Non, jo tu thy Jaipee pag pret
Dimportants oborsheury qui, Wvovetdetrnltive de Vacteur qui dre, aves celles WAbtonin Ar
dre A mon propre jet en’ pyrianr
bus, ont ee Wavust-garde. com, 80t JOUET sm Iort ex scéne. te tat, qui sentale ventt. ewque fe
aujourd'iu) d'un thésitre dp vid tne ‘Tafrort, ‘pac cxomple, vou. Préoirseuy Dada Vokbtangot en~ Propose aujouriitg }
avec uit tel avant-pcopos orguctl- lotend thentradiney Je theiktre forma Je publio done vow sate diny, Attant, con
Jeux, eocentrique et méme va- Elvreipott revait du inohodres ab tbMitre, pendant deux Heures «Grande» dy
niteox sans dolite on apparence > me. de la théhtraté dang in ie any In seul by le de tes ba geinnr net Inetuae)}
thon thédtre prendya. une valeur quotidienne, pensiy -— este eaufermer.“tont Cet dy Verbe qui cu a déronté tant
Aauversele dang ta mesure mbme
od mee compagnons connaltront
mieux ma perinte que motméme
Je ne la cannaln car sly vont
parole vénemene fweuh partie, datl- «{ jongtempa. Pour mma part Je
ne sais quiume chose, e’bat
% qu'at cor
Le peintre de I'espace se jette dans le vide !
dog millicrs, 28 x ont dus Verbe. et Ie ¥
{irs de {ols alors que mot le
deux fole « Gtr »pone deux tors
« Verbe +pli « Dieu», en tot
fuis welll, shy points qul. 9 on Jey nabdite
‘pow, iene, olen co mitts Le_monachiome_gul_ ext auisi champion do jvde, celniuro noi
dire: Jo «-Verbe » dao! ta Ia levitation dycamique? (aver ov sinstat, ev yique ale sa’ vis)
nforMe s'est Pas ¢ Parole =
Jo me sends Gte bien compte ck méme abbartlendée U oretend sire on mesure Walley reloiedsn bientds duns Iexnace ton revere gmfotherkea »we
ue le mie préente, tout seul, en sculblure aérostatinve compote de Mille at un Ballons bleus qui. e= 3957. ¢esfolt abe un
rivant ces Nenes avec ee gui Sa arvotition dene be ciel de Salat-Gormain-dei-Prés voxr ce plus jawels reveniy |
somblerult Une arte tle complex>
Oy phe fort, Je dgnale & cox * “8 Liberer tabel dy tack 4 64 longlemss @ AvlounT bul: fe poinkee. de
qu aeralent “wste aveuyties <4 adh Mt, Pah ale espace 201 alle ymnnt dans Ferpice peer prindre, mais itdoll y alter san iru cha
maladroité pour me don;
cythine ! her fe ce Alotcen avlon, Alen. prrathuie~ey én Knee ie pilee ake :
Tuvaritege d’attaquer men exe
Pération. du mot qu! ext bles Et ya mon oy West pe Fores tndlyhboclle. autbusars)) <a "vn: mal; Wide aire camchle de laction, x
facile de m'entminer @ is défalte une < recberche »-,qle ext mon Yies
muig iy vette arte de défalte que sillaigo. Tle cot Bx itatitere enauie CYAN Seca
sont leg veillex des granics vio- do Ja vitase statin Gunthytivendne ‘ uit leoelotre do Vorpace Je ne suis par un pelntre atistraih, mal au caniedite
tolens définitives pour ceux qut A laquelle Jo me Propalee sur Hovrati Ko renliate. Sevens honnaies, poor wrindre Ueypace, | ma Yoh de me rendre
onbent dans ie grand jeu ek place do Vinmantéelel| atten place, dant cot espace mone &
savent Wexpaver tion encore. Je tens & bien pr
Tat me contre ma vocation elder qu fe ne die yma on par x
de <¢ peinice >, ey pertant av
ant dis mon o» Creat bien
Japon pow y yivee Taventure pls bea parce me c'est inu
ule» (Non, Je < Geet ainsl S$ ‘hedtae
ree, eee
to sen wWhé), o> personny ne e
nsibilitét pure
Jude et Arts martlany sociens
de méme Jal tutte contre ma
woation < dihoinme de thé ‘ue co ne soit pas alma »| Pour
tre +; mais précisément, Je Jucw quel? Puree que. péeisiment
par fa pratique physique wt spi
Tittelle dew Kate. s'est constitue Cray + clnasique petit sal Mages (ot, du plus, wus Wallon. —youtotr quite
malgné moi, my forntaticn dans “ per urs 7 avoir "er pour In duree de la repre —faire rembourace } x :
cutte discipline de Vart qu'est ie * iment pays chacun Jeur entree. seittation. EES nee
Uhiédtre, d'une maniére imprevi- gases chiro Debetrent dans lu 9 Cette mesure de sdeuritd gs selldement & sm dive ri “snr
aisle, nats tout aussi profitable Aina, Gres vite on en arrive SPARS DNS nésossalre, alii de vou protéger © pendans
et profunie, sinon peut-étre plus au thédtre mms acteur, cans de Le rideau ext byes, Dn mally cContte vousméme, on priseiee MPCRUCIO. Merch »
eheore, que niinporte quelle au- COT, sas scéne, ond spectatour Mtuminee. OF ce spectacle parvcullérement n
tre. Bix présentant ce qui sult, Diug rien que le créatour soud/ D8 que ia aulin ost pleine, uy Gangereux, d'un point de vu Ausaiige un group
Yobelé ik une nécessité profonde, qut n’est va par personne, excepté| hotime x» présaiw: sur la seine, affectif pur 1 Shatnetredadvancurs pir
Jags en réaliste plein de gros la présence de personne et le devant le ridean toujours bates = dans Ia exile et. systen:
bon sens. Jaime Moliére et Sha- thédtre-aspectacl’ commence } ok déclare fa regrets
ou oxprimons
kespeure parce que. dans leur a au person: d'avaice Ment, rangSmneNt apis thurang, tes paraig.
uvre. se trouve cette transpa- Lieuteur vit m Géation : a! « Mosdaines, Mesainurd on 24 pourraient supporter detteain tareeeomene fOuK ae
rence du vide qui me faseine, fon dee:eftconstonees ca a0lr gl ptichuindes et balitonnece
Pour toi « theitre > n'est pas L'ESPACE, LUI-MEME. @ SUITEEN PAGE 2) vous alions
enchatner étre cucin
contrainta de avant le jeve
A’ yor ‘ jes prions
ptlane aimetioneny ay
aimablement dedewee
utes @ SUITE EN PAGE 2

Yves Klein, Dimanche, 1960

(cat. no. 68)

148 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 ¥
rps

Imi Knoebel, Aussenprojektion

(Exterior projection), 1971
(under cat. no. 69)
Imi Knoebel, Sternenhimmel (Starry sky),
1974 (under cat. no. 71)

STURE SHOW
Imi Knoebel; Abstrakte Projektion
(Abstract projection) (detail), 1969; gelatin
silver print; 12 ¥8 x 7 7% in. (30.5 x 20 cm);
courtesy the artist
Imi Knoebel, /nnenprojektion
(Interior projection), 1969
(under cat. no. 69)

F
2 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
 THE MAIDENS BLISi.

Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure 1, 1982

(cat. no. 72)
Bottom: details
Silvia Kolbowski,
Model Pleasure 1 (details), 1982
(cat. no. 72)

154 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Jeff Koons, The New Jeff Koons, 1981
(cat. no. 73)
Barbara Kruger, Untitled
(Your comfort is my silence), 1981
(cat. no. 74)

156 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Barbara Kruger, Untitled
(You are not yourself), 1982
(cat. no. 75)
David Lamelas, Rock Star Right:
(Character Appropriation) (detail), 1974 David Lamelas, The Violent Tapes of 1975,
(cat. no. 76) 1975 (cat. no. 77)

158 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

cn HE
Louise Lawler, Why Pictures Now, 1981
(cat. no. 78)

160 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Louise Lawler, Portrait (Parrot), 1982
(cat. no. 81)
Louise Lawler, Arranged by Donald
Marron, Susan Brundage, Cheryl Biship at
Paine Webber, Inc., 1982 (cat. no. 80)

162 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 3, 1981
(under cat. no. 85)
Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 5, 1981
(under cat. no. 85)
1981 (under cat. no. 85)
i a
PHAN
ntnte myn

Sherrie Levine, After Walker E vans: 18,

a
if ie i
5 ae
ee

ately uy Lite
a

th
a
ti
Hu
ihHy
Tan

:
4 ie Pa
bat
in
itn “is
UHHty

HHH
th!
Mn
a
nT i! i a
1

su rth
HEteat! Hh
Sherrie Levine, Untitled (President: 5), 1979
(cat. no. 84)

166 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Sherrie Levine, Untitled (President: 2), 1979
(cat. no. 82)
Sol LeWitt, Brick Wall, 1977
(under cat. no. 86)

168 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

: 4 ey “
OK BF be
Sol Le Witt, Photogrids, 1978
(under cat. no. 87)

170 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 y Oioet
of

Ke)
RG
ee

Rees as Fatet
rtsearse ses
Rasesnss a,

HAAS
s wy =

. Nee EPS
Ror

iv:

+ 2 ete
Cet
Ja
StL
areb

heb
i
%e
ent
—-
—_

20>
otc

os
*

Teme.
mete

A Eee
0230 BRS e
aes

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Sol LeWitt, Autobiography, 1980
(cat. no. 88)

172 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Following page:
Richard Long, A Line Made By Walking,
England, 1967 (cat. no. 90)
< zi Z = < O
LL LL (aa)> = x <Z O
ENGLAND 1967
ENGLAND 1967
 A SCULPTURE LEFT BY THE TIDE
CORNWALL ENGLAND 1970

Previous page: Richard Long,A Sculpture Left by the Tide,

Richard Long, England, 1967 (cat. no. 89) Cornwall, 1970 (cat. no. 91)

176 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Geoffrey Batchen photographic document, a type of photo- Cancellations is noncommittal (unaes-
~ graph also being deployed around this thetic) and yet true to the dusty look of
same time by many other artists: Bernd the Southwest. The titles are also drab and
Cancellation and Hilla Becher (Cooling Towers series, noncommittal (for example, Mobile Home
from the late 1950s on), Edward Ruscha of 1974 or Tank of 1975). But what is very
Geoffrey Batchen teaches the history of (Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, committed, almost frighteningly so, are
photography at CUNY Graduate Center and other publications), lan Burn the prominent lines gouged into each and
in New York. His most recent book is Each (Photographic Mirror series, 1967-1968), every image surface.
Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History Hans Haacke (Shapolsky et al., 1971),
(MIT Press, 2001). Lewis Baltz (New Industrial Park series, As with the work of Barrow’s peers, both
1974), Martha Rosler (The Bowery in Two the serial nature of these gouges and the
Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974), and process of their making are central to their
Sol LeWitt (Brick Wall series, 1977), to effects, for their look and feel are no acci-
There is a certain history that could be told name only a few. Although each of these dent. In fact, they took a bit of practice
about the course of American art photog- projects was driven by different ambitions, to get right. After some earlier experi-
raphy between 1960 and 1985. Sometime they shared a desire to shift attention from ments with thirty-five-millimeter film,
after World War II, so this story goes, a the content of the image to the process of during which Barrow found that the scale
rupture took place between a modernist making or arranging it, from the subject of of scratch to image looked wrong, he had
tradition stressing the production of fine the photograph to the manner of its enun- taken to using a medium-format camera
photographic prints and a more conceptual ciation. They also exploited photography’s and its 2 44-by-3 4-inch negative. With
use of the medium, championed by artists capacity for seriality and multiple repro- this larger celluloid surface, the cancella-
who identified themselves primarily as duction as well as for the presentation of tion lines seemed to work much more
sculptors or painters. The outside came affectless visual information. For a number effectively. He used, of all things, an ice
marauding across photography’s border, of reasons, all of these attributes had pick to cut into the backing side of the
bringing with it new ways of thinking that become important to art practice in the negative. Or, if the resulting mark wasn’t
changed everything. It’s a history that con- late 1960s and early 1970s. jagged enough for his liking, he took to
veniently suits the myopia of the present, the emulsion with the end of a straightened
offering us a romantic clash of outsiders Barrow’s decision to explore this genre was paper clip. To ensure a certain degree of
and insiders, conceptually inclined artists a particularly self-conscious one, given his arbitrariness in the resulting marks, he first
and mere photographers, even as it traces training in the early 1960s at the Institute placed his negatives onto a dark surface so
an ideal genealogy for the work of Cindy of Design in Chicago under Aaron Siskind, that their image was not easily seen as he
Sherman and other now-prominent photo a training that, despite its grounding in worked. Sometimes, in his eagerness, he
artists. But what if we score a big X through interdisciplinary Bauhaus principles, accidentally scored right through the nega-
this version of photography’s story, ruining emphasized a mastery of fine photographic tive. It’s a nice irony (not lost on Barrow
its pristine surface, even if not quite eras- printing technique.* Barrow had gone on himself) that he then had to consult a book
ing it altogether? What would we see then? to work at Eastman House in Rochester, by Adams, doyen of the fine print tradition,
Well, for a start, seeing itself becomes a thereby becoming familiar with the to work out how to print from a warped
little more complicated. Having emulated nation’s major collection of historic photo- and damaged negative.
the gesture that gives photographer graphs. So the Cancellations came out
Thomas Barrow’s 1974 Cancellations series of a very photographic set of interests and The idea for the series was prompted by
its name, we might now be forced to recog- knowledges. They also address a tradi- Barrow’s encounter in about 1967 with an
nize, for example, that American art tional photographic subject, the American etching of a coffee-grinder image canceled
photography was in fact continually being landscape, but without any of the national- by Marcel Duchamp, who had arranged for
ruptured from within, that conceptual ist heroics associated with the work of, for three parallel lines to be scored through its
practices of various kinds have always example, America’s best-known photogra- metal matrix. The print was being offered
been rife within the photography commu- pher, Ansel Adams. Most of Barrow’s as a (presumably unauthorized) “restrike”
nity, and that inside and outside, art and images seem to be of nothing in particular, for $7.50. Barrow didn’t buy it, but he did
photography, have never been as distin- capturing a seemingly arbitrary array of buy (or at least steal) the gesture. It’s one
guishable as some might like to imagine. suburban grunge and decay rather than that obviously comes out of a long-standing
grand natural landmarks. His views were printmaking tradition, in which lines
Let’s take Barrow’s work as an example. nevertheless carefully chosen, providing scored through the matrix ensure that
The Cancellations series began only after him with large expanses of unobstructed a series is indeed limited to a certain, pre-
he moved from Rochester, New York, to continuous tone and a scattering of vertical ordained number of prints. The artist
Albuquerque, New Mexico, in late 1972. and diagonal elements to work against. certifies this limit by performing one final
The work was initially based on photo- Barrow gave the final prints a brown tint creative act, disfiguring the original matrix
graphs taken in and around Albuquerque, (to differentiate them from his earlier using the same drawing or intaglio tech-
usually views of nondescript suburban sites Pink Stuff and Pink Dualities series, the nique that produced its signifying capacity
populated by decaying buildings, commer- choice of this color being his reaction to in the first place. The artist, giver of artistic
the pink shirts and charcoal suits popular life, makes the sign of death over the body
cial signs, or cars up on bricks. The style
of image is a deadpan version of the in the 1950s). The brown color of the of that same art. It’s interesting that the
matrix is not always destroyed by this ing may have been unclear (even to him), But this reference to vernacular photo-
process, but is merely re-marked, branded but the gesture of self-mutilation still signi- graphic practice and Pop appropriation
as obsolete, as something whose use-by fies like a slap in the viewer’s face. It hurts fails to encompass the full ramifications of
date has now passed. This allows for the to look at it. Barrow’s action in the Cancellations. He
possibility of a restrike, like the one offered didn’t just write on the surface of his prints;
to Barrow. The restrike is a certification So it is with Barrow’s Cancellations, espe- he desecrated the negative itself. His Xs
of a matrix’s obsolescence but also a refu- cially if you happen to love photography. are therefore right in the photographic
tation of it; it wants to have it both ways, They seem to be saying “no” to photogra- print, part of its grain, as photographic
to be, and also not to be, part of the series phy as a whole, or at least to a certain as any other element in the picture plane.
(to be a print and to be its repressed other, understanding of photographic art. But this They show up as white scratches, like puck-
to be both but neither). The end result is is too kind. They set out to kill that photog- ered scars on otherwise healthy skin. They
a piece of contraband, a bootleg, an image raphy—and not in a nice way either. don’t cover over anything, and you don’t
that has escaped the control of its author. Barrow’s ice pick carved deep into the body see anything through them (they’re not
It refers back to its unmarked sibling, but of the photograph, literally as well as sym- revelatory in that sense). Before all else,
it’s also a new thing, a renegade art object bolically seeking its disembowelment. In the X marks remind us of the matrix from
in its own right. For Barrow, Duchamp’s that context, the gesture could equally be which the print was taken, the negative—
canceled print was itself a desirable ready- traced back to the X struck by Aleksandr that unseen, forgotten element of the
made, complete with chance markings Rodchenko through a visual sampling of photographic process, that denizen of the
by the artist made all the more arbitrary what he perceived to be his enemy (por- darkroom. Barrow brought photography’s
by their lack of artistic intention (even traits of the capitalist ruling class and cut- means of production, the relationship of
as random operations). tings from its press) for the cover design negative and positive, into the light. He (it-
of an issue of LEF magazine published in erally) drew attention to the surface of his
Duchamp politely used three parallel lines 1925. Barrow himself remembers buying print, to the flat, continuous plane of that
to cancel his image, but Barrow adopted a copy of Jay Martin’s 1970 biography of surface and thus to the once-parallel planes
a more loaded iconography for his series. author Nathanael West and seeing among of negative and paper when each was
AnX strongly implies the force of the ges- its illustrations a manuscript page from placed in an enlarger to enact photogra-
ture that made it; we feel the weight of this The Day of the Locust through which West phy’s magical coming into being. Siskind’s
deliberated violence in all its ironic symme- had penciled a big X. But he might as easily photography stresses a flatness of field that
try, as if it is our own skin that has been have been thinking of the crosses com- facilitates the abstract look of his found
slashed. X means no; actually it means NO! monly used to indicate unusable images graffiti and weathered walls. Barrow had
In 1970 the murderer Charles Manson cut on a commercial photographer’s contact it both ways, maintaining the camera pho-
an X into his forehead to indicate that he sheet. British artist Richard Hamilton had, tograph’s perspectival depth while insisting
was an outcast, or just to protest his incar- by 1965, already made a series of silkscreen on breaking that illusion with his rough
ceration, or perhaps to indicate that he was prints from a selection of just such excised scratches. We are asked to look beyond
indeed an angel of death. The exact mean- sheets and titled it My Marilyn. these scratches, into the picture, and then
out again, up to the picture’s surface, and
Thomas Barrow; Horizon Rib, 1974, from the Cancellations series; thus back to the plane of the paper itself.
toned gelatin silver print; 9% xX 13¥2 in. (23.5 x 34.3 cm); courtesy the artist By this means, the photograph is declared
to be both image and object, orchestrated
picture and physical thing. Equally, we
are made very aware of the process of our
looking at it (that normally passive act is
turned into a self-reflexive activity).

The Cancellations series also offers its

viewer an intensely historical understanding
of photography. As Barrow well knew,
William Henry Fox Talbot had invented
a cliché-verre process as early as 1834.4 This
involved etching a design by applying a nee-
dle’s point to smoked and varnished glass
and then making a photographic contact
print from the resulting matrix. In the first-
ever photographs, then, drawing, etching,
and photography were all combined in a
single visual enterprise. By taking the pho-
tographic negative as his darkened matrix,
Barrow conjured photography’s multimedia
beginnings as a means to signal its mono-
medium ends. One print in the series,

178 GEOFFREY BATCHEN

Homage to Paula (1974), makes this explicit. the year before).7 A subsequent article of Conceptual Art movement (or is it that
The title is a reference to Alfred Stieglitz’s the same name stressed his twenty-three photography influenced Conceptual Art?).°
Paula, or Sun Rays, Berlin, taken in about chosen artists’ “commitment to the physical And indeed, as it so happened, the showing
1889. Following the composition of the object,” a commitment that Bunnell of Photography into Sculpture at MoMA
Stieglitz image, Barrow’s camera captured claimed “exploits the properties unique to briefly overlapped (for three days) with the
an ensemble of his own earlier work raked photography itself.” Nevertheless he also museum’s installation of Information, its
by strong, diagonal stripes of light and conceded that three-dimensional works by first overview of the emerging Conceptual
shade. He then scratched three lines across featured artists such as Californians Robert moment. Photography was featured promi-
his negative against the slant of the light Heinecken and Jerry McMillan made it nently in this exhibition too (work by the
diagonals, effectively crossing out the pic- hard to sustain this residual formalist claim, Bechers and Ruscha was shown), as well
ture. The work acknowledges Stieglitz’s precisely because in the presence of their in the pages of its catalogue.!0
historical importance while simultaneously work, it is “exceedingly difficult to state just
rejecting both the fine print tradition and what the [photographic] medium is.”8 Most Bunnell sent Barrow a copy of the
the revelatory type of photographic practice of the twenty-three artists chosen for this Information catalogue, but many of its
for which he stands. In 1974 such a rejec- exhibition came from the West Coast of ideas—in particular its critique of media
tion was tantamount to an institutional cri- North America, from Los Angeles to purity—were already taken for granted
tique, the institution in question being the Vancouver. Bunnell explained this regional in the photographic circles in which this
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New focus in terms of a reaction against the artist moved. Barrow was part of the so-
York and its effort, through curator John documentary approach associated with an called Rochester Group, which also
Szarkowski, to define photography in terms earlier generation of Californian photogra- included photographers Alice Andrews,
of purity and essence. phers, led by Weston. But he also traced Robert Fichter, Betty Hahn, Harold Jones,
a renewed interest in the materiality of the Roger Mertin, Bea Nettles, and Keith
In his 1964 exhibition The Photographer's photographic medium back to photogra- Smith and curators Nathan Lyons and
Eye, Szarkowski had organized his chosen phy’s earliest manifestations—for example, Robert Sobieszek. Each of these artists
photographs in terms of what he saw as to those cased daguerreotype photo-objects and curators was interested in contesting
“photographers’ progressive awareness that rest heavily in one’s hand and have to the conventions of straight photography,
of characteristics and problems that have be manipulated into visibility each time adopting a range of practices—from mak-
seemed inherent in the medium.”5 they are examined—and to such formative ing artist’s books to inscribing their pic-
Although informed by the formalist art crit- twentieth-century art phenomena as tures with text—in order to achieve this
icism of Clement Greenberg, Szarkowski Constructivism and Pop (both of which end.!! To their number might be added
was also repeating a notion of the photo- refused to recognize a hierarchy between figures such as Les Krims, who was teach-
graph inherited from several generations photography and other media). But, as a ing photography in nearby Buffalo. It is
of influential photographers. Figures such number of more recent exhibitions have of perhaps greatest interest to this exhibi-
as Ansel Adams, who started making pho- made clear, the major influence on photo- tion that the State University of New York
tographs in the late 1920s, believed “that graphic artists of this period was the at Buffalo is where Cindy Sherman went
the greatest aesthetic beauty, the fullest
power of expression, the real worth of the Thomas Barrow; Homage to Paula, 1974, from the Cancellations series;
toned gelatin silver print, 9% X 13%¢6 in. (23.5 x 34.5 cm); courtesy the artist
medium lies in its pure form.”® Opposing
the hybrid, decorative surfaces of a still-
popular Pictorialism in favor of a hermetic
modernist tradition established by Stieglitz
and Edward Weston, the f-64 group, to
which Adams belonged, advocated a type
of photography in which there was no
manipulation, cropping, or retouching of
the photographic print; only so-called
straight photography was thought to have
“Teal worth.” Szarkowski and MoMA
tended to favor this aesthetic attitude, as
did, to take one other example, Beaumont
Newhall in his series of books on the his-
tory of photography.

No institution is a monolith, however, and

there were exhibitions held at MoMA in
this period that did present another point
of view. In 1970 curator Peter Bunnell
organized an exhibition there entitled
Photography into Sculpture (based on one
of Bunnell’s essays in Art in America from
to art school from 1972 and where, after Ellen II (1970), for example, or Broccoli The refusal of Hahn’s work to signify (or,
abandoning painting, she began making (1972)—don’t give much away. at least, to signify clearly either as “photog-
her now-famous performative photo- raphy” or as “art”) itself becomes signifi-
graphs. I would prefer to maintain my Without knowing anything more, one cant when seen in context. Like Barrow,
focus where it is, however, on this senses a resistance in Hahn’s work to the she comes from the first generation of
relatively neglected older generation demand to make photographic art, at least American artists who gained master’s
of American photo artists and the can- as that demand was framed by institutional degrees in their field (perhaps this explains
celed history of photography that their circles at that time. No fine prints, no aes- the heightened level of their historical
work embodies. thetic subject matter, no artistic preten- consciousness). From 1958 through 1966
sions (they’re not even “untitled,” thereby she studied under Henry Holmes Smith at
Not that this history is by any means homo- declining the opportunity to self-declare Indiana University (Fichter went to school
geneous. For instance, where Barrow took as “conceptual” art). Hahn’s stitching is there too).!3 Smith had fallen under the
an ice pick to photography, Betty Hahn similarly enigmatic, simply following and influence of Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy in 1937,
simply gave it the needle. And that differ- accentuating certain features already pres- when the European émigré had invited
ence (like all difference) is instructive in ent in her photographs. In Mejo, Passport him to teach at the New Bauhaus. Smith
itself. Between 1970 and 1973 Hahn made Photo (1971), the stitching repeats a series brought this Bauhaus, anything-goes,
a distinctive series of gum bichromate of horizontal lines in a woman’s shirt, experimental sensibility to his teaching at
prints on cotton. These began as thirty- adding red, yellow, blue, and green high- Indiana, and Hahn readily adapted it to
five-millimeter or 120 roll film negatives lights to an otherwise monochrome image. her own photographic practice. She began
and were then enlarged onto graphic arts But Hahn chose to emphasize quite differ- working with the gum bichromate process
film before being contact-printed onto ent elements in Road and Rainbow (1971). in 1965, as part of a design class she was
either unbleached or colored cotton There she added double yellow lines to the taking. It’s a relatively simple process but
rectangles. They were then embellished center of her eponymous road but also provides unpredictable results. Basically,
in various ways through the addition of solidly filled in the side of a barn with mul- you mix an orange, sugarlike substance
colored embroidery thread.!? The subjects tiple white threads and sketched in a car- (potassium dichromate) with a given water-
of these images are self-consciously vari- toon version of a rainbow in arched color and a glue (gum arabic) and then
ous, including portraits (some taken as consecutive colors. In both cases the weave brush the resulting solution onto paper.
snapshots, others from official passport of the brown cloth has become part of the Talbot’s earliest photogenic drawings, inci-
pictures), landscapes, gardens, architec- picture, resulting in a pixilated, textured dentally, were also brushed on, thereby
ture, television images, fruits, and vegeta- image, like those seen in paintings (this is merging painting and photography in a sin-
bles. The colors of Hahn’s images are a photography embedded right in the grain gle act of representation. Hahn’s pictures
equally varied, from lampblack to orange of its support). were made in a similar fashion, and similar
to green. The undemonstrative titles— too was the slowness of their development
and the paucity of the detail retained, so
Betty Hahn; Road and Rainbow, 1971; gum bichromate on embroidered fabric; 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm); the process was suitable only for contact
courtesy the artist
printing from large negatives. But it
allowed images to be applied to all sorts of
surfaces and was open to creative manipu-
lations, including the choice of color of the
final image, as in woodcut printing. No
one was using the gum process much in the
1960s, so Hahn was forced to search out
and translate the original essays of French
pictorial photographer Robert Demachy
from the 1890s. It was his gum bichromate
formula that she ended up using in her
work, in a sense coating her paper with a
liquid version of photographic history.
Smith sent one of Hahn’s earliest efforts to
Robert Heinecken in Los Angeles, and he
sent back one of his own experimental
prints. This connection to the West Coast
scene (in effect, a counter to the perceived
hegemony of the New York art world)
remained a constant feature of the
Rochester Group’s outlook.

In about 1970 Hahn began applying her

gum bichromate solution to scraps of fabric
that happened to be in her studio, left over

GEOFFREY BATCHEN
from a dress she was making. This choice Buddhism. She was first exposed to this work often continued to convey high art
of material was prompted by two telling philosophy through an essay by photogra- values; the ordinary was transformed and
encounters. In 1964 she had seen the work pher Minor White published in Aperture transcended through its incorporation into
of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol magazine and has read books and maga- an obviously artistic taxonomic system.
in an exhibition at Indiana University’s art zines dedicated to Zen ever since (Zen
gallery and was impressed by their obvious and the Art of Archery has been a constant Hahn’s snapshot pictures were also trans-
contempt for media boundaries and their source of inspiration). Zen stresses the formed, but into something even more
interest in popular culture. But she was importance of everyday life, finding spiri- ordinary than before—a domestic, femi-
also, after she arrived in Rochester in 1967, tual potential in the most ordinary objects nine craft object. The loss of the original
a frequent visitor to Eastman House. and experiences. In photographic terms, image’s detail in its gum bichromate mani
There she was transfixed by an album she there was nothing more ordinary than the festation significantly reduced its pictorial
saw exhibited in one of the museum’s glass snapshot. It’s a genre about conformity— content (she was really working here with
cases, an album whose cover featured a one person’s looks much the same as every- no more than a photographic residue),
brown portrait of Queen Victoria printed one else’s. But it’s also a genre peculiar to shifting the work’s content from image to
on silk (perhaps using the Van Dyke photography. And despite its odd combina- medium, from picture to process. But this
process). This particular photograph, an tion of media, Hahn’s is an intensely process came not from the conventions
example of a common vernacular genre photographic series. of high art but from vernacular practice
in the nineteenth century (often featuring (women’s practice at that). Hahn made
wedding pictures on pillow slips and that The ordinary was a common rhetorical (and the act of making is quite important
kind of thing), reminded Hahn of the trope in the art of this period. The subjects here; it’s foregrounded in your experience
embroidered American album quilts that of the work of Ruscha and the Bechers, of the work) a banal photographic image
she had herself admired and collected. So for example, were also self-consciously and then penetrated it with her needle,
she began making her own photographic ordinary (whether parking lots or water puncturing it over and over again, dragging
album pages on cotton. And, from the very towers), as were the photographs produced colored threads in her wake, mocking her
first one, she also took up her needle and by, among others, Hollis Frampton, Dan own medium’s artistic aspirations with
added embroidered natural-color embell- Graham, and Bruce Nauman (Hilton her playful stitches and seemingly arbitrary
ishments with a simple in-and-out stitch. Kramer disparagingly but accurately highlights. There’s an affectionate humor
From the artist’s point of view, there was described Nauman’s images as “photo- in this work (you find something of that
a high rate of failure in these photographic graphs of no photographic interest”).!4 same ironic humor in the work of Ruscha
samplers, and she rejected many of the fin- But these artists’ obsessive repetition of and John Baldessari from around this time
ished products (perhaps, then, they are not near-identical subjects was presented in too, perhaps a common response to the
quite as arbitrary as they first appear). a format self-consciously tied to a minimal cloying seriousness and self-importance
Initially they were exhibited unframed— aesthetic. This meant that the finished of prevailing modernist rhetoric). The end
these were photographs you could touch—
but they came back to her so dirty (in one Betty Hahn; Broccoli, 1972; gum bichromate on embroidered fabric; 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm);
instance she had to scrub the edges clean courtesy the artist

with a toothbrush) that she took to framing

them behind glass.

Hahn’s decisions about process and mate-

rial were obviously informed by the aspira-
tions of the women’s movement and by
her interest in feminine creative traditions
(even by a shared heritage of domestic
labor). But this doesn’t entirely explain her
choice of images. She deliberately adopted
the everyday aesthetic of the snapshot for
her work, shooting her own portraits and
scenes (these, significantly, are mostly not
“found” images, but were instead precon-
ceived to suit the artist’s vision of her total
series—among other things, she wanted a
good range of picture types). This choice of
aesthetic represented a calculated riposte
to the fine print tradition in photography
and its purist pretensions (the decision to
photograph vegetables was, for example,
a parodic response to the revered peppers
and eggplants of Edward Weston). But
it also suited Hahn’s own interest in Zen
result is a studied indifference to art process, see Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography
photography’s established conventions, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), and Larry J.
a refusal to conform, but also an unruly Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry
regurgitation of the medium’s own Fox Talbot (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
forgotten history. University Press, 2000).
5. John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye
The work of Barrow and Hahn (it’s too (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966),
easy to characterize that work in terms of unpaginated.
masculine and feminine attributes, but you 6. John Paul Edwards, “Camera Craft” (March
can understand the temptation) represents 1935), in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography:
an important moment in American art Essays and Images (New York: Museum of
photography. For this is work that looks Modern Art, 1980), 251.
back to photography’s hybrid past and for- 7. Peter Bunnell, “Photography as Sculpture and
ward to an equally hybrid future, and in Prints,” Art in America 57 (September—October
the process it offers a take-no-prisoners 1969): 51-61. Bunnell’s exhibition Photography
critique of the fine print fetishism then pre- into Sculpture was shown at the Museum of
vailing in art photography circles. But it Modern Art in New York, April 8—July 5, 1970,
also offers a critique of any more recent and then traveled to eight additional venues.
art history that would too simply separate 8. See Peter Bunnell, “Photography into
inside from outside, and art from photog- Sculpture,” in Degrees of Guidance: Essays on
raphy. In keeping with the work itself, a Twentieth-Century American Photography
canceled account of this moment would (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
have to place such boundaries under era- 163-167. For an overview of California photog-
sure. It would have to recognize both their raphy in this period, see Louise Katzman,
historical reality and their rhetorical arti- Photography in California, 1945-1980 (New York:
fice, crossing out these boundaries even Hudson Hills Press in association with the San
while leaving them in place, reproducing Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1984).
them to an extent but only as a way to 9. See, for example, Charles Desmarais, Proof:
penetrate their self-certainty and thereby Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980
render them entirely permeable. (Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Art Museum,
1992), and Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer,
Notes Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975
Thanks go to Thomas Barrow, Betty Hahn, and (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art;
Peter Bunnell for talking to me about their work Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
in preparation for this essay. 10. See Kynaston McShine, ed., Information
1. For a more extensive discussion of Barrow’s (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970).
work and career, see Kathleen McCarthy Gauss, The exhibition ran from July 2 through
Inventories and Transformations: The Photographs September 20, 1970.
of Thomas Barrow (Albuquerque: Published for 11. For just one example of these various prac-
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by the tices, see Robert Sobieszek, Robert Fichter:
University of New Mexico Press, 1986). Photography and Other Questions (Albuquerque:
2. For a history of this institution and its incor- University of New Mexico Press, 1983).
poration of Bauhaus strategies, see Abigail 12. See the catalogue entries prepared by
Solomon-Godeau, “The Armed Vision Michele Penhall for Steve Yates, Betty Hahn:
Disarmed: Radical Formalism from Weapon Photography or Maybe Not (Albuquerque:
to Style” (1983), in Photography at the Dock: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).
Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and 13. A whole history could be written on the
Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota influence of teaching on photographic art
Press, 1991), 52-84, 291-294, and David Travis, practice in the United States, a history in
Elizabeth Siegel, and Keith Davis, eds., Taken which Smith, Barrow, and Hahn would all
by Design: Photographs from the Institute of be prominent figures.
Design, 1937-1971 (Chicago: Art Institute 14. Hilton Kramer, “In Footsteps of Duchamp,”
of Chicago, 2002). New York Times, March 30, 1973. I have bor-
3. See the curators’ essays in William Jenkins, rowed Kramer’s description from MaryJo Marks,
The Extended Document (Rochester, N.Y.: “Ordinary Pictures and Everyday Language:
International Museum of Photography at Photography and Text in 1960s American Art”
George Eastman House, 1975), and Van Deren (Ph.D. diss., CUNY Graduate Center, New
Coke, The Markers (San Francisco: San York, 2003).
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1981).
4. For accounts of Talbot’s use of the cliché-verre

182 GEOFFREY BATCHEN

Vito Acconci tion—all of them could be documented be exhausted, so that the body no longer
later, and hence made public. Once they existed, so that the body drifted out of the
Notes on My Photographs, were documented, either through words
or photographs, they could be shown on
body and into the environment. So maybe
this wasn’t exhaustion at all: rather, the
1969-1970 the walls of a gallery or museum; but the body existed only as it blended into the
documents were only souvenirs, after the
(1988) fact, whose proper place was in the pages
environment—the body was growing up,
out of privacy and becoming public.
of a book or magazine. These photo-
Originally published in Vito Acconci: graphic pieces, on the other hand, were After these pieces, that sent me out into
Photographic Work, 1969-1970, exh. cat. first-hand information: their only existence my environment, I chose to go back into
(New York: Brooke Alexander, 1988), was as photographs—the activity of a pho- my “self.” The next pieces set up occasions
unpaginated. tograph wasn’t an end in itself, the activity in which I could concentrate on myself—
was performed only to cause a photograph. I brought stress from an outside world
I wonder if, in the back of my mind, there into my person, so that that person could
wasn’t the urge to prove myself as an artist 2 change and develop. The shift of focus,
These were some of the first pieces I did prove myself a serious artist, make my from outside to inside, reveals that I was
in an art context. Before that, my work had place in the art-world: in order to do this, afraid of being lost in space, lost out in the
been poetry: the aim was to confine words I had to make a picture, since a picture was world, I had to come back home, I had to—
to a page, to use that page as a container what a gallery and museum was meant to in the language ofthat time, the language
for words—inside that container, that trap, hold (all the while, of course, I was claim- of the 60’s—“find myself.” But of course
the words could move up against a barrier ing that I was denying that standard, the career of my work might have been
(the margin) and be beaten back into their rejecting it, Iwas claiming that my work different: I might have chosen to look more
cell (the page). But the words moved on couldn’t, shouldn’t, have the finished qual- closely at the world outside me, I might
their own: some of their connotations ity of a photograph, my work was an event have chosen to travel further through it—
moved faster, farther, than others, out of and a process that couldn’t, shouldn’t, be I could have looked at that world as a field
my control. I had to let them go on without stilled by a camera and hung up ona for behavior, rather than at myself as an
me; what I could do was to follow their gallery wall—all the while I was claiming instrument of behavior. It turned out that,
direction, off the page and out into the that my work was meant to subvert the clo- years later—now, in 1988—I am concen-
world—the last poems functioned as meas- sure of museum and gallery). These photo- trating on the environment as a place for
ures of that world, marginal notes to the graphic pieces, then, might have been the activity, other people’s activity rather than
world considered as an illustration. Once first steps in taming, domesticating, an my own; whereas the early photographs
I headed toward the world, I was in an art agent whose proper method should have put me into the street and the park, my
context, a field that (as far as I and other been that of a wanderer. recent pieces make a place in the street
members of my generation saw it) had no (a town square for public meeting), my
life of its own, no prescriptions of its own, These pieces were ways to put my work recent pieces make a park (an enclave in
no inherent characteristics of its own, a (put myself) up on the wall; these pieces the middle of a city that functions as the
field that existed only as it imported from were ways to push myself up against the model of an alternative world, a utopia).
other fields in the world. My first pieces, wall. On the one hand, they were a way I arrived at those places through a process
in an art context, were ways to get myself to make something like a landscape, a of exercising “me,” a process of expanding
off the page and into real space. These mural, a backdrop as if on a stage or ina an “I”: first “I” with “me,” then “I” with
photographic pieces were ways to, literally, movie; on the other hand, they were a way “him” or “her,” then “I” with “you,”
throw myself into my environment. They to drive myself into a dead-end position. then a place where my voice can speak to
were photos not of an activity, but through “them,” then a place where my voice might
an activity; the activity (once I planted a These pieces need to be seen all together; bring “you” together, then a place that
camera in the instrument of that activity— these pieces had to be done all together, “you” could make, and now a place where
once I, simply, held a camera in my hands) quickly, in a short time period. There “we” might be. The early photographs sug-
could produce a picture. probably should have been more of them: gest that I might have side-stepped this
the scheme they imply demanded exercis- process, taken a short-cut directly into the
These were my first pieces, in an art ing every part of my body, every activity street and the park. But then those places
context, that had a place in a gallery or my body could do—there should have been might have remained stilled, as if in a pho-
museum. The last pieces I did, in a poetry an exhaustion of bodily activities, a drain- tograph; or they might have been distant
context, were “poetry events”: the occasion ing of behavior. On the other hand, there places, as if in a movie, places held up in
was a poetry reading—I used props (an might already be too many; or maybe it has front of the eye, places that could be only
audio recorder, the walls of the room or to seem that way, it has to seem as if there’s desired. Maybe I had to stop photograph-
the chairs in that room)—the attempt just too much—it has to appear as if ’m ing so that I could learn to touch.
was not to read from a page but to read the grasping at straws, I have to keep searching
room. The first pieces I did, in an art con- for possible activities, for more and more
text, were activities in the street, activities activities, I have to find activities that
that only I knew I was performing; some of almost don’t exist. It was as if there was
these were keyed into a performance situa- so much activity so that the body could
Vito Acconci somewhere between my action and the
photographs. (I would have wanted to
bring about more physical change either
Notebook Excerpts, 1969 in myself or in the environment; connec-
(1969) tion as corruption.)

Reasons to move: performing as adhering

Originally published in Vito Acconci: to terms. I can adhere to the terms of my
Photographic Work, 1969-1970, exh. cat. body make the space adhere to the terms
(New York: Brooke Alexander, 1988), of my body (the space takes my shape—
unpaginated. place as body).

Camera used as storage: it allows me to

keep seeing (the photographs will show me
what I couldn’t see while performing the
action). Once my place is set, I can exercise
my body, move my body around that place
(a place that, in turn, is exercised by my
body’s movement).

Ways to be in space (ways to consider that):

“Tam here”—“I” is different from
“here”—“I” has to go “here”—“I have to
go here”—I have to keep going to where
I am (directing myself to where I am—
where I am is directed by my body). Vito Acconci; Fall, 1969; photograph, chalk, chalkboard spray on foam-core panels; 39 x 39 in. (99 x 99 cm);
courtesy Brooke Alexander, New York

Where I am (my position when I take the

photographs)—where I might be (the
landscape photographed: where I am when
I point in that direction)—my body as a
system of possible movements transmitted
from my body to the environment (the
environment as a system of possible move-
ments transmitted from the environment
to my body).

Reasons to move: once the camera shows

me something as far as my eye can see,
I can move to make that something nearer,
more accessible.

Contrast with poetry: rather than move

toward a point (the page), I can be that
point (the landscape is seen in relation
to me); rather than move in one direction
(toward the page), I can move freely (the
landscape adjusts to me).

Once the body is in place, I can move to

another place—the place is seen as
entered, disturbed, by the body disturbing
itself{—drift of my body into the environ-
ment results in, is equivalent to, drift of
the environment itself.

The real activity of these pieces—connect-

ing my body with its surroundings—occurs

184 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Pamela M. Lee likewise bears witness to temporal succes- cramped, claustrophobic space, like so
sion. Buildings, after all, grow progressively many academic offices everywhere, no
ruinous in time. They index historical doubt contains many such documents. For
The Austerlitz Effect: passage—of exhaustion and use—just the protagonist, photographs and build-
Architecture, Time, as a body registers its age. ings are deeply intertwined, thematizing
the relationship between time and space.
Photoconceptualism In his scholarly obsession with what he
calls “the architectural style of the capital- Even so, the relationship is not quite what
Pamela M. Lee is an associate professor of ist era” and the “family resemblance” it seems. As the received wisdom would
art history at Stanford University. She is the among all of its buildings, Austerlitz have it, photography is an art of time. It
author of Object to Be Destroyed: The Work demonstrates a profound sensitivity not captures singular moments in the ebb and
of Gordon Matta-Clark (MIT Press, 2000) and only to the historicity of such buildings flow of duration—“decisive moments,”
Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the but also to how that history unfolds rela- as Henri Cartier-Bresson famously put it—
1960s (MIT Press, forthcoming). tive to its economic exigencies.? Critical and its media are likewise regarded as
to his understanding of architecture, how- fugitive, ephemeral. By contrast, the mas-
ever, is that this engagement is largely siveness of buildings—and the slow, steady
mediated through the lens of photography. labor required of their construction—
From the outset my main concern was the Persistently accompanied by an “old serves to shore up an art of immanence
shape and self-contained nature of discrete Ensign with telescopic bellows,” Austerlitz or place. But Austerlitz’s photography
things, the curve of banisters on a staircase, amasses hundreds of pictures of buildings complicates this model, nuances its terms.
the molding of a stone arch over a gateway. ... in the course of his wanderings, as if this His ever-expanding archive attests to the
In my photographic work I was always espe- encyclopedic record might restore in the proliferation and serialization of the pho-
cially entranced . . . by the moment when the present some shadowed recollection of the tographic image in the environment, while
shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of past. In one of many snapshots scattered his fixation on the pastness of buildings
nothing on the exposed paper, as memories throughout the book, we get a brief dramatizes the loss of place in time.
do in the middle of the night, darkening again glimpse of Austerlitz’s study, and that
if you try to cling to them.
Michael Brandon Jones, illustration from W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
W..G. Sebald, Austerlitz!

In W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) the

namesake of the book’s title is a man
whose historical identity has been obliter-
ated through the trauma of war. Sent to
Wales as a child in 1939, Austerlitz is a fig-
ure without family or country, place or
home. Little wonder, then, that architec-
ture exerts such a peculiar fascination on
his historical imaginary: it is through his
scholarly relationship to architecture that
he seems to consolidate his lost genealogi-
cal bearings. In Sebald’s devastating
allegory of historical loss, a nameless inter-
locutor meets our antihero in 1967 and
from then on serendipitously encounters
him at a variety of sites throughout
Europe. Train stations once heralded for
their technological marvels, the faded bars
of formerly grand hotels, libraries quiet
with gathering dust: all conjure their own
haunted memories. For Austerlitz, archi-
tecture makes material a conflicted tempo-
rality, a kind of push-pull tension between
that which endures and that which falls
apart, the solid and intransigent versus the
transitory and fleeting. While architecture
has long been described as an art for the
“ages”—the sheer weightiness of its struc-
tures projecting an air of permanence
and stability—its very capacity to endure
This triangulation among architecture, Austerlitz effect may help us to gain insight seemingly countless iterations of the same
photography, and temporality produces into the structural and thematic logic of photographic format. We note too a
what I call the “Austerlitz effect,” which much photoconceptual work. dogged insistence on the subject of archi-
provides a useful means to approach the tecture, typically classed as industrial or
photoconceptualism of the 1960s and As much as this work distills a question vernacular. We see the proliferation of sub-
1970s. Here we find that architecture tells about the relationship among artistic media urban tract homes; an endless horizon of
us as much about the historical status of in the 1960s and 1970s, it also allows us to disused factories and warehouses; the
photography as photography tells us about speculate on the moment of photography’s unblinking sprawl of motels, gas stations,
the historical status of architecture. This “historical” closure. In this moment—our and parking lots. Pace Austerlitz, we con-
is amoment when the ephemeral images own moment—the relationship to time and front the architecture of late capitalism,
of photography become progressively spa- place through the photograph would itself a field of dumb structures with little or
tialized and a culture in which the notion seem displaced by the burgeoning impact nothing to recommend them aesthetically.
of place—as metonymically represented of digital media. Perhaps the seeming out-
by architecture—is progressively temporal- modedness of the traditional photograph How might we characterize this phenome-
ized. In this historical encounter between stages a problematic about the stability of non?3 In an important essay on Conceptual
photography and architecture, the roles place, a place that might appear wholly Art, Benjamin Buchloh argued that the pre-
traditionally assigned each medium begin unsettled from the concrete materiality of sentational strategies of Edward Ruscha
to blur, are even inverted. One can trace everyday life. How to reclaim that place for and Dan Graham coincide with the repre-
this effect at work in the imaging of indus- representation is the question a subsequent sentation of the architectural vernacular.
trial edifices by Bernd and Hilla Becher, generation of artists will inherit from pho- In Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset
in the photo books of vernacular architec- toconceptualism. It is Austerlitz’s example Strip (1966) and Graham’s “Homes for
ture of Edward Ruscha, in the “Nonsites” that will pave the way. America” (1966-1967), two works to which
and tourist pictures of Robert Smithson, we-will return in due course, the cheapness
and in the crushed photographic collages of mass-produced media (as in Ruscha’s
of Gordon Matta-Clark, among many To get there, we need to account for the offset photo books) is equated with the
other examples. These works are roughly role of photography and architecture expediency of mass-produced housing. For
contemporaneous with the historical within Conceptual Art, as well as the lat- Buchloh, this equivalence between form
moment when Austerlitz is encountered ter’s relation to the history of photography and content underscores “the absence of
on one of his architectural wanderings. more generally. Surveying the annals of a developed artistic reflection on the prob-
Given the parallels between this charac- photoconceptualism, one is struck by the lematic of the contemporary publics.”4
ter’s interest in the “family resemblance” work’s studied amateurism and its serial- By “problematic” he is referring in part to
among the buildings of the capitalist era ized modes of production and display: the increasingly precarious status of public
and the concerns of these artists, the magazine articles, cheaply printed books, discourse as shaped by both the media
environment (as represented by the photo-
Nicéphore Niépce; View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826; heliograph; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm);
graphs) and the architectural environment.
Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin Buchloh’s argument is unassailable in
stressing the critical intertwining of photo-
graphic media with that which it represents.
I will embroider upon this reading in
describing how the relationship between
architecture and photography participates
in another genealogy, one whose relation-
ship to time is the Austerlitz effect.

In order to do so, we need to acknowledge

that photography has engaged the world
of architecture from its very inception. Why
this may be the case has been typically justi-
fied through considerations of process. A
truism in the photographic literature holds
that architecture keeps ready company with
photography for a simple, seemingly unim-
peachable reason: buildings don’t move.
The immobility of architecture, to follow
this story, lends itself easily to the photo-
graphic medium, which in its early days
demanded exposure times of six to eight
hours. This argument hardly bears contra-
diction on a practical level—most buildings
(but not all, as we shall see) don’t move—

186 PAMELAM, LEE

but it’s a conceit whose understanding of the fleeting time of the image. Not only notion, the distribution of visual informa-
both media is organized around a method- is this so because one of the first examples tion assumed a progressively spatial force
ological impasse. In such formulations, of photography happened to be of an in that decade, “ungrounded” as those
photographic vision is understood as trans- architectural subject. More to the point, images were by the historical emergence
parent, whereas architecture is treated as the representation of that building as both of new technologies. Such developments
opaque. The implicit hierarchy that obtains materially immanent and transient is not would include the impact of television and
from this reading suggests that photogra- unlike the spatio-temporal behavior of other forms of mass media, the computer
phy dominates architecture, which is photographs themselves, which at once and cybernetic revolutions of the informa-
regarded as ancillary to—and uninflected attempt to ground or situate a place in per- tion age, the speed of automation, and the
by—the medium that represents it.5 petuity and necessarily register a sense introduction of Portapak video systems.§
of historical loss in the process of doing so. Occupying the other side of the spatio-
But recent accounts in the history of archi- temporal spectrum—if contiguous with
tecture take up modernist architecture’s This idea finds a historically specific articu- such developments in the world of
photographic underpinnings, arguing that lation in the photoconceptualism of the images—we could also point to the histori-
an architect such as Mies van der Rohe 1960s, work that departs radically from the cal conditions of architecture as temporally
internalized photographic considerations “straight” photography of architecture in accelerating and repeating in the postwar
in his designs.® Such readings open onto at least two ways: first, in its criticality and era. On the one hand, the leveling force
the possibility of architecture’s deeply dia- consciousness of such conditions as histori- of urban development schemes quickened
logical encounter with photography, one cal and, secondly, in its eschewal of aes- the temporal passage of industrial and
that we might argue is foundational to the thetic conventions typically associated with urban architecture into ruin or disposabil-
medium itself. Take, for instance, the early fine art photography. Indeed, the 1960s saw ity.? On the other, the concomitant explo-
photographic experiments of Nicéphore the values of time (and the attendant cate- sion of building in the form of suburban
Niépce (1765-1833), who would come to gories of space) undergo a pronounced tract homes, strip malls, housing projects,
devise a strange cocktail of silver salts, shift within the culture. As I have argued and other ready-made architectural types
lavender oil, and bitumen of Judea. In elsewhere with respect to art, conceptions in the 1960s reveals, dialectically, the struc-
combining this silver chemistry with pewter of temporality are subject to both an acute ture of repetition that underwrites the
plates, Niépce produced what may well acceleration and repetition in that decade, very process of construction.
be the first “true” photograph, a view onto in part a function of new media and com-
a building from his window at Le Gras. munication technologies and the ideologies Photoconceptualism appeals to this history
that supported their introduction and elab- in various ways. Under the sign of tempo-
It may seem odd to ascribe aesthetic or con- oration in turn.? While I cannot unpack rality, we observe that the semantics of
ceptual motivations to this picture, which this reading fully here, it will suffice to say such practices (the subject of architecture)
are taken as incidental to Niépce’s technical that such modalities of time—recursive and converges seamlessly with its visual semi-
considerations. Yet when we look at this endlessly pacing—are confirmed in the otics in the photographic medium.
photograph, we confront an image at once visual arts in diverse ways. The logic of both
palpable and obscure, in which architecture acceleration and repetition is emblematic
alternately emerges from and is submerged to many of the practices of photoconceptu- Bernd and Hilla Becher; Wasserturme (Water towers),
into the murk. In the picture’s registration alism. And it’s no accident that these issues 1972; gelatin silver prints mounted on paperboard;
15% x 11% in. (39.7 x 29.8 cm); Walker Art Center,
of temporal drift—the way light scans archi- are addressed through the trope of archi- Justin Smith Purchase Fund, 1996
tectural surfaces or acts as ground to the tecture, which will serve as a figure of his-
lengthening shadows throughout the day— torical displacement and dislocation.
we see how architecture gives support to
the passing of things. Time bears its fleeting Earlier I described this mode of address
impress against the seeming intransigence in terms of the spatialization of the image
of buildings. By the same token, the picture and the temporalization of the environ-
lays bare a historical and conceptual para- ment in the 1960s. To expand on this
dox. Insofar as architecture has convention-
ally been understood as the “first” or Dan Graham, Homes for America (detail), 1966-1967,
“mother” art, here its representation coin- (cat. no. 61)

cides with the inaugural status of this pho-

tograph. Yet standing at the moment of
the medium’s historical origin—its founda-
tion—the building nevertheless self-
inscribes an image of historical passing,
of things on the way.

With Niépce we could say that architecture

serves as the allegorical ground of the pho-
tographic medium, even as it uncovers the
photograph’s very groundlessness through
 and outside of its immediate ‘here-and- less images, as if each site had long been
Among the strategies that characterize now’ context it is useless, designed to be purged of labor’s imperatives.
photoconceptualism, serialization stands thrown away.”!? Importantly, the repeti-
as the most critical in its relationship to tion of those buildings in time, ever repeat- Two observations are invariably made
temporality. Through the repetition of a ing, corresponds to their serial deployment about the Bechers’ practice. The first
motif, operation, or system—by working relative to the space of the image. claim dwells upon the structures depicted.
to expose durational shifts in an object or Calling their works “typologies,” they
process over time—serialization may well There are perhaps no more committed acknowledge the archaeological dimen-
be the motor of Conceptual Art. But as practitioners of the Austerlitz effect than sions of their project, recording the mor-
theorists from the modern to the postmod- the German photographers Bernd and phologies of outmoded (or progressively
ern have also noted, serialization is the first Hilla Becher, who have been making seri- obsolete) industrial edifices. That gesture
principle of the photographic medium.!° alized images of industrial structures of archiving buildings that can no longer
Photoconceptualism, as such, would seem throughout Europe and the United States accommodate the demands of contempo-
especially suited to address the subject of since 1959. Surveying the exhausted topoi rary production underscores that these
postwar architecture. In Graham’s canoni- of industry in the form of coal bunkers, structures are very much on the way out.
cal “Homes for America,” for instance, water towers, lime kilns, blast furnaces, Like Austerlitz’s photographs of European
the image of the suburban home, serialized grain silos, winding towers, gas tanks, buildings, which function as supplements
like so many Minimalist cubes in space, and pitheads, the Bechers have produced of a kind to a lost personal history, the
finds its graphic displacement on a page “typologies” of these structures in an Bechers’ typologies attest to a loss of space
layout, itself intended to be serialized in unerringly consistent format. These elo- by the workers who once inhabited them.
the form of a magazine.!! Graham attested quent black-and-white photographs, usu- Critically, this spatial displacement is the-
to the mobilization of place through that ally displayed in a grid formation, present matized through a temporal displacement.
home’s serialization: “His home isn’t really a frontal view of each object, bathed in an “Many of these structures are disappear-
possessable in the old sense...” he said even light and drained of radical contrast. ing,” the photographers stated, “all the
of the new suburban home “owner,” “it They are devoid of human actors as well. time they are being dismantled or rusting
wasn’t designed to ‘last for generations’ No workers are represented in these count- and crumbling away. Our main problem is
a fight against time. This is our first priority
Sol LeWitt, Photogrids, 1978 (under cat. no. 87) but there are other points to be considered.
... But the main factor is time.”!3

This preoccupation with the temporality

of buildings finds marked correspondence
in the historical gesture the photographs
also stage. Indeed, the second claim voiced
repeatedly about the Bechers’ project is
that the work pays homage to the photog-
raphers of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New
Objectivity, most famously, August Sander.
In his People of the Twentieth Century,
Sander produced a systematic typology of
seven strata of German citizenry before the
war—artisans, laborers, technicians, aristo-
crats, and so on—some whose traditional
livelihood was threatened by the incur-
sions of industry and modernization. The
Bechers’ classificatory effort is almost
always seen in this light, at least in formal
terms. Far less considered in their implicit
nod to this earlier photographic moment
is the historical problematic such a prac-
tice raises.

When we compare the Bechers’ practice

to the work of other Conceptual artists,
however, we recognize that theirs is not a
unique strategy in its conjunction of archi-
tecture, photography, and temporality.
Consider, for instance, Sol LeWitt’s book
project Photogrids (1978), which appeared
somewhat later than the inaugural moment

188 PAMELAM.LEE
of Conceptual Art. Given LeWitt’s forma- tural form repeated endlessly throughout At this juncture dimensions of site enter
tive role in that movement, however—not the environment. into our consideration, the specific charac-
to mention his longstanding appreciation ter of postwar American architecture in
of serial procedures of photography— particular. If the Bechers tracked the dis-
we could productively submit this body Some remarks from an interview with appearing structures of modernist industry
of work to the same line of questioning Edward Ruscha on his photographic book across Europe (and some parts of the
raised by the Bechers’ photographs.!4 Every Building on the Sunset Strip: United States), Ruscha attended to the
acutely transient, throwaway character of
In Photogrids, one confronts double Siri Engberg: Are you still photographing the 1960s California environment, giving
spreads of gridded snapshots, nine pictures Sunset Boulevard? concrete form to the notion of “time
of the same motif on each page. Le Witt’s as a property.” Revisiting the Sunset Strip
typological imperative, however, is ulti- Edward Ruscha: Mmmm-hmmm. I do it about today, one confronts changes wrought
mately of a more personal nature than that every, on average, two to three years. on the environment so vast that one is
of the Bechers, as suggested by the title of hard pressed to enumerate the specific
a subsequent, if similar, photographic book SE: And the photographs are for your own use, differences in site between the past and
project, Autobiography (1980). Photogrids your own personal chronicle? the present. That vernacular architecture
grew out of the artist’s extensive travels. is linked to the rhetoric of time in Ruscha’s
In producing his well-known wall drawings ER: Yeah, I just put them in a lab and salt books, however, finds a specific metonym
around the world, LeWitt would repeatedly them away. I just feel like sometime in the in the structures he chose to represent.
come across grids in each location, how- future I'll be able to do something with them, His first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations
ever different each city or site. “No matter but I don’t know. (1963), recorded with a surveyor’s banality
where one looks in an urban setting,” he filling stations on Route 66 from Los
observed, “there are grids to be seen.”!5 SE: An L.A. time capsule? Angeles to Oklahoma City, while his
That the subject of architecture occupies Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles
so much space here is hardly accidental ER: Yeah, I have a belief in this idea of the (1967) provides blank-faced testimony to
to the form of the book. The serializing time capsule. I like that very much. ... Time, one of the city’s most coveted forms of
impulse of the photographic grid—the as a property, seems important to me. You may urban property. In both of these works, as
sense that it could repeat, go on and on— not see it in all my work, but it is, I guess.!6 well as in Every Building on the Sunset Strip,
underscores its very expansion into the Ruscha offered an Angeleno’s perspective
environment, as demonstrated further by Ruscha is speaking retrospectively about on the Austerlitz effect. While photogra-
the proliferation of the grid within archi- Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), phy becomes spatial and place becomes
tectural space. an accordion-fold publication that, true temporal with Austerlitz and the Bechers,
to its name, pictures every last club, hotel, Ruscha’s gesture is to account for that
As one such demonstration of this conceit, liquor store, apartment, and so forth on sense of passing, of transience, in the space
consider two pages of Photogrids featuring that most famously trafficked Los Angeles traversed by the automobile. Like the
the manhole cover as their principal motif. thoroughfare. Appealing to the legendary worker absent from the Bechers’ photo-
In serializing this ubiquitous and abject debasements of the area, the publication graphs, the car is, for the most part, an out-
architectural form—abject because associ- also makes two critical moves in the photo-
ated with the world of the sewer—LeWitt graphic strategies of Conceptual Art. For Edward Ruscha; image from Thirtyfour Parking Lots
attends closely and repeatedly to its visual one, as Buchloh has argued, its mode of in Los Angeles, 1967; photo-offset-printed book;
10% x 8 in. (26 x 20.3 cm); Walker Art Center
operations. Through the process of multi- distribution and presentation departed
plying this motif via the grid, we parse the radically from any postwar tradition of
subtle and not so subtle differences of either fine art or documentary photogra-
this peculiar species of urban architecture. phy and so likewise separated itself from
LeWitt’s gesture is to reveal difference straight photography’s representation of
within repetition through a predetermined buildings. As I noted earlier, Buchloh has
formal system. However distinctive the suggested that this work’s “deadpan” and
overall character of the covers, their inter- “laconic” imaging of vernacular architec-
nal organization is nevertheless contiguous ture invokes art’s encounter with issues
with their photographic representation. of the public and mass culture and does so
Those covers, in other words, are gridded in such a way that its thematic and formal
covers: more often than not, their surfaces operations are interwoven. Ruscha added
are regularized by the meeting of perpen- his two cents to the mix when he described
diculars and squared geometries, not the production of such work through the
unlike the layout of the page upon which notion of a time capsule. Like the Bechers’
they are set. Here the studied repetition notion of typology, Ruscha’s architectural
of the grid articulates a critical dimension time capsule is also an archaeological
of the Austerlitz effect. The photograph, motif, something to be unearthed in his
in its serial and spatial expansion as media, photographic archive.
mirrors the temporalization of architec-
of-camera presence, and the accelerating Conceptual orientation insisted upon the earthwork like Spiral Jetty only through
vista it provides is not unlike the “third material embeddedness of a work’s rela- photographs, but this notion is more than
window” Paul Virilio described relative tionship to place, to site. No doubt this just practical or experiential. In Smithson’s
to that afforded by the windshield.!7 The consideration of site was a function of “Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,”
windshield serves as a framing device emerging critiques of art’s institutional published in Artforum in 1967, twenty-four
whose images incessantly change in time and public status. But it would be wrong pictures of a trip to that fabled town are
through the traversal of space; unlike the to suggest that this engagement with site— parodically described through the art
perspectival window of Renaissance paint- and architecture along with it—upheld historical conventions of the monument.
ing, the window becomes a moving picture. these conditions as an article of faith. On Smithson’s photographic idyll is composed
The serial nature of Every Building on the contrary, both Robert Smithson and of various “unidentified monuments”—
the Sunset Strip appeals to the mobility Gordon Matta-Clark reflected critically a parking lot, a storage tank, a manhole,
of this image as it is produced by the car. upon the terms by which site was itself a pumping derrick. Thus the work betrays
The car, in other words, both literally and coordinated and then rendered obsolete, an obsession with the industrial landscape
metaphorically drives the temporal conditioned as those places were by the informed by the status of its “monu-
organization of the image. It is both a new forces of industry. In their best-known ments”—testaments to history, distant
form of architecture and a secret medium. site-specific projects—such as Smithson’s events, cultural memory. These monu-
Spiral Jetty (1970), his enormous coil of ments, though, are not built for the
In turn, that urban surround is itself satu- land on the Great Salt Lake, or Matta- ages. They are to be neither glorified nor
rated with photographic images, each more Clark’s Splitting (1974), a bland suburban preserved, and the photographs that
spectacular than the next. For if there is home sliced in two—both artists exhibited document this less than grand tour are
one form of “architecture” that prolifer- a pronounced understanding of the way in equally mundane. Instead, such pictures,
ates on the Sunset Strip—or that has which architecture is temporally contin- which strangely recall Austerlitz’s own
maintained its privileged status on that gent. For Smithson, place and architecture photographic souvenirs, speak to the
street—tt is the billboard, the monumen- were bound to the laws of entropy and increasingly tenuous character of place
talization of the advertisement to architec- thus invariably fell into ruin; for Matta- in the postwar moment.
tural scale. Those gargantuan pictures of Clark, the ideologies of progress that
bodies and commodities and various popu- attended modernist building programs Another such example of Smithson’s
lar events remain largely removed from underwrote the alternating processes entropically figured site came in the form
Ruscha’s photographic scene, but we of construction and destruction in the of one of the most banal photographic
know they’re there. Their off-site if unim- postwar American environment. activities, the slide show. A presentational
peachable presence tells us something format used with increasing frequency in
else about the ambiguous status of place Indeed, their photography maintains the late 1960s, the slide projection repre-
at this moment: that place, we could say, that architecture too is always elsewhere. sented the literal expansion of the photo-
is always already elsewhere. Smithson’s affectless snapshots of architec- graph into architectural space.!9 With Hotel
tural ruin reveal that the experience of Palenque (1969), Smithson exploited a tech-
architecture or site is largely (sometimes nique linked less to the rarefied world of
We might extrapolate this fixation with exclusively) mediated by the pictures and the museum than to the dread rituals of
architecture in the photoconceptualism geological specimens alleged to “docu- middle-class domesticity or the boredom
of the 1960s and 1970s to a preoccupation ment” them—a dialectical relationship that of the lecture hall. Consisting of thirty-one
with site more generally. In contrast to he called the “Site” and the “Nonsite.”!8 chromogenic slides (126 format), it reveals
high modernism’s emphasis on the auton- We understand this idea implicitly in a crumbling, decidedly unglamorous hotel
omy of the work of art, artists of a acknowledging that most of us know an occupied by Smithson, Nancy Holt, and

Edward Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (detail), 1966 (cat. no. 131)

ees™ah
EI
os 62Moms.

190 PAMELA M. LEE

Virginia Dwan on a trip to the Yucatan and the spatializing agendas of the of tourism: think the comfort of the dark-
Peninsula in 1969. From a hapless pile Austerlitz effect. Pulling between the ened living room with its projections of
of bricks to a degraded wall to a roofless forces of the entropic and the constructive, faraway lands, say, or the classroom and
suite of rooms to a weedy, overgrown lot, Smithson’s vision of architecture continu- its washed-out images of masterpieces
the slides picture the hotel from a variety ously flips between the possibility of its from the Louvre. The slide lecture col-
of perspectives, each more banal than the loss and the potential for its immanence lapses literal distance through projecting
next. As with so much of Smithson’s work, and so underscores the repetitive tempo- images to environmental (if virtual) scale.
however, those perspectives, dissolute and rality to which processes of building are
multiple as they may seem, are organized subjected. As Smithson droned in the talk Smithson’s notion of site was drawn
around an equally split formulation of accompanying the images: “You can see upon heavily in the work of Gordon Matta-
time. As Robert Sobieszek has written that instead ofjust tearing it down all at Clark. This is as true for Matta-Clark’s
of the work, “at the time the hotel itself once, they tear it down partially so you’re photographs as for his site-specific proj-
was caught between the seemingly equal not deprived of the complete wreckage ects, whether the collaged analogues to his
forces of slow disintegration and periodic situation. It’s not often that you see build- building cuts or in his representation of
construction.”20 ings both being ripped down and built up space that fell between the architectonic,
at the same time.”2! But his “lecture” also as in the social and artistic collaboration
Presented in the context of a slide lecture, evokes images of the simultaneously near known as “Anarchitecture.”2? Such pictures
Hotel Palenque confirms both the temporal and far, of mundane spaces and the spaces are treated primarily as so many transpar-
ent records of his now-destroyed site
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974 (cat. no. 93) works. As I have written on Matta-Clark’s
“self effacing documents,” however, these
images share in the larger suspicion around
the alleged neutrality of the photographic
document within Conceptual Art. Both the
formal and thematic sensibilities of Matta-
Clark’s photographs display a certain can-
niness about photography’s convergence
with the medium of architecture; indeed,
the artist acknowledged “the need to avoid
purely photographic documentation. ”?3

Take, for example, any number of Matta-

Clark’s montaged works. Here photo-
graphic fragments are sutured together
to represent the disorienting perspectives
of his building cuts: site lines are rendered
impossible, perspective is radicalized,
traditional figure-ground relationships are
overturned. On one level, these pictures
seem to literalize the vertiginous experi-
ence of those phenomenal spaces. “Which
way is up?” many implicitly seem to ask,
providing little useful information to
those who seek to rationalize such spaces.

In turn we could argue that Matta-Clark’s

site works literalize the temporal proscrip-
tions of the photographic. The serializa-
tion and presentation of the photographic
image—and the cut associated with its
expansion into the medium of film—
is metonymically expressed by the building
cut, whose experience unfolds in time
like a series of radically distinct snapshots.
Matta-Clark’s collaged images dramatize
the endless multiplicity of perspectives
that his architecture affords: both are
organized around the idea that they can
be equally manipulated through the notion
of structural framing. “I like the idea that
the sacred photo framing process is displacement or, more to the point, sense
equally ‘violatable’”” he once suggested, That architecture might be on the move of alienation, may be thematic. We are
“and I think that’s partly a carryover in these pictures prompts the question: stared down by a towering figure of global
from the way I deal with structures to Where to go? Where are we to locate capital, the architecture of exchange value
the way that I deal with photography.”2* architecture’s pictorial representation or “general equivalence.”
now? The Austerlitz effect underscores
Matta-Clark’s site projects represented the historical liminality of such representa- Perhaps this displacement is not only the-
a provisional—indeed precarious— tions—liminal because conditioned by new matic but also structural to the logic of the
gesture into the timeliness and untimeli- critical relationships to space and time. building’s representation. Perhaps it is so
ness of modernist building programs, We might see the fallout of these conditions keenly felt because Gursky’s digital manip-
whose effects were writ large across both today in the imaging of global networks ulations are so thoroughly internalized to
the blighted landscape of New York and and their technologies, and the sense of the image—to the seamless, monolithic
the suburban wastelands of New Jersey. time that results from these quickening visage it presents—that the subject matter
Like Smithson’s reading of architecture forms of communication. of general equivalence corresponds to the
and entropy, his works depend upon an means of the image’s production. Through
intractable dialectic of construction and The work of Andreas Gursky, one of many the totalizing reach of the pixel, and its
destruction, endless novelty and unceasing well-known artists who studied with the capacity to be equalized and erased at the
outmodedness. In Matta-Clark’s contribu- Bechers at the Diisseldorf Art Academy, same time, history and its texture have
tion to the “Anarchitecture” project—a provides a case in point. Gursky’s visual been evacuated, literally glossed over in
casual collaboration of artists who worked records of banks and commodities trading the disturbingly pristine, airless surface of
together in early SoHo—architecture was floors represent the opposite extreme of Gursky’s photograph. Where once, follow-
sometimes literally on the move. A picture the Bechers’ photographic spectrum, not ing Austerlitz, the temporal conditions of
of an entire hotel transported—dragged by only in terms of his subject matter, which architecture told us something about the
a truck in Hayward, Wisconsin—serves as takes little interest in the industrial out- spatiality of the photograph and vice versa,
a concrete reminder of the very mobility moded, but in his pronounced use of digital here the digital image collapses both into
of place. In the work of both Smithson and technology. Consider his spectacular pic- one pictorial register. Austerlitz’s interest
Matta-Clark, an acute fascination with ture of Norman Foster’s equally spectacu- in the “architectural style of the capitalist
architectural dejecta, most often wrought lar Hong Kong and Shanghai National era” finds its most insidious, because most
by shifts in industry, attests to a deep Bank, a glinting nocturnal monument. The seductive, extreme here. The image seems
awareness of the temporalization of the picture is outsize in scale, as most Gurskys strangely unmoored from the space—
built environment. are, and it imparts a vast sense of displace- and time—that it ostensibly represents.
ment from the scene it depicts. That
Yet it would be wrong to stop here, too
Gordon Matta-Clark; Anarchitecture: Home Moving, 1974; gelatin silver print; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm); courtesy pessimistic and too shortsighted. For might
the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York
there be a way in which this new visuality
offers the potential for critical appropria-
tion? And what role might architecture
play in this scenario? It is telling that
another contemporary response to the
Austerlitz effect likewise makes use of
advanced digital media. And it is telling
as well that the artist who made this image
was also schooled by the Bechers. In
Thomas Ruff’s series Night Pictures, the
very question of distance and time raised
by such imaging technologies points to
the subject of architecture.

Ruff is best known for his vastly scaled col-

ored portraits from the 1980s and 1990s,
in which we encounter the human face as
a kind of hybrid photographic genre, both
anthropological type and panoramic land-
scape. Here every last bump, blemish,
and hair is exposed to visual consumption,
if through the unerringly smooth surfaces
of the digitally manipulated C-print.
To a lesser degree, Ruff has also taken
up the subject of architecture. As with
his Dusseldorf peers Gursky and Candida

192 PAMELA M. LEE

HOfer, his engagements lie not in the suggests, the images themselves may register the mobilization of place while
industrial and suburban edifices favored well be the result of far more proximate simultaneously grounding it. And by
by the photoconceptualist generation considerations. acknowledging photography’s critical rela-
but in the signature aesthetic style of the tionship to architecture, it brings home
newly emergent architectural celebrity. Ruff’s Nacht 5 I (1992) presents a night the material exigencies of place, however
(In Ruff’s case, those architects would scene of Dusseldorf veiled in the brackish seemingly transient or on the way.
be the Swiss studio of Herzog and de shades of the green screen. Several win-
Meuron.) With the Night Pictures, how- dows provide acid highlights against a Notes
ever, we see Ruff presenting a different murky depth of field, while the building For Christine Mehring.
take on the Austerlitz effect than that itself appears to radiate. Glowing green, 1. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (New York: Random
seen in Gursky’s bank image, one with the structure is nonetheless rendered House, 2001), 77.
far-reaching political implications. strangely anonymous: it is devoid of identi- 2. Ibid., 33.
fying features or spatializing cues that 3. The most important account is in Benjamin
In 1991, when the first Gulf War broke would give context to this nocturnal image. H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962-1969:
out, Ruff was struck by a new kind of pic- Paradoxically, this virtual anonymity is at From the Aesthetics of Administration to the
ture he saw on television: the green-screen once historically concrete and specific. It is Critique of Institutions,” October, no. 55 (winter
picture of military night vision beamed specific to the historic moment and place 1990): 119. For a different reading that nonethe-
nightly by CNN and other global media at which Ruff was working and specific rel- less takes up photoconceptualism’s de-skilling
networks. Those ghostly and disembodied ative to the visual datum then—and more operations, see Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of
images, too often described through the recently—circulating in the image stream. Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as,
rhetoric of video games, concealed bound- There is a material dimension to this work Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering the Object of
less destruction under cover of darkness. that may well be lacking in Gursky’s photo- Art, 1965-1975, exh. cat., ed. Ann Goldstein and
As Ruff recalled: “It was like TV to the graphs. It shores up a sense of place and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles: Museum of
third power. First you’re looking at pic- time, even if by attesting to the mythic Contemporary Art, 1995), 247-267.
tures from a region you've never been to, disappearance of such conditions in the 4. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962-1969,” 119.
secondly, it’s nighttime and you can still digital image. 5. See, e.g., Terry Riley, “Architecture as
see; and thirdly, you’re witnessing actions Subject,” in Architecture without Shadow, ed.
you'd never experience in everyday life.” What emerges from this view is a certain Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa,
Ruff describes a recent iteration of the return to Austerlitz’s preoccupations, 2000), 12.
Austerlitz effect: the globalization of the to his haunted relationship to architecture 6. Among others, this is in part the subject of
image resulting from a very different kind and the photograph and his even more Claire Zimmerman’s recent research on Mies
of war than the one that so gravely affected haunting attitudes toward history and time. van der Rohe and the Barcelona Pavilion.
Austerlitz as a child. That vast distance Architecture, following Austerlitz, served Populist writers on architecture are quick to
brought close to hand through visual repre- to index a sense of historical dislocation; speak of the inadequacy of photographs to
sentation is understood in necessarily ideo- perhaps now it reveals to us a set of represent the experience of architecture and so
logical terms. “The war took place in the recently emerging historical conditions—
Gulf region,” Ruff said, “but it was actually a sense of displacement in geopolitical Andreas Gursky; Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, 1994;
about our oil in the West—our fuel inter- terms. The pictorial representation of chromogenic color print; 89 x 69 5/6 in. (226 x 176 cm);
courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
ests. The military decisions were taken architecture, from photoconceptualism
here in Western Europe and the United to the present, bears witness to this phe-
States. That’s why I declared Dusseldorf nomenon. In the best work it attempts to
a war zone and started looking at the city
with a starlight system.”25 Thomas Ruff; Nacht 5 /, 1992; chromogenic color print;
50136 x 536 in. (20 x 21 cm); courtesy David
Zwirner, New York
In the Night Pictures, Ruff made use of
a spectral technology associated with both
military and private surveillance. And he
At =ROIS RAR 4)!
did so to comment on a radically new wh aves
9
vision of place—and, by extension, archi-
tecture. Instead of training his gaze on the
Persian Gulf, however, he took on the art
historically charged site of Diisseldorf as
his subject, in the process dramatizing
how the seeming distance traversed by the
new image is always a matter close to
home. Not only are the consequences of
such images experienced locally (one’s
daily habitus in Diisseldorf is ultimately
inseparable from a war happening else-
where, for example), but as his statement
shore up the same division between architecture Of the countless critical texts on the Bechers, see
and photography in conventional photographic Thierry de Duve, “Bernd et Hilla Becher ou la
accounts. See, e.g., Witold Rybezynski, The Look photographie monumentaire,” Cahiers du Musée
of Architecture ({New York]: New York Public National d’Art Moderne 39 (spring 1992):
Library; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 118-130.
13-16. 14, LeWitt was the author of the canonical
7. This is the subject of my forthcoming book Conceptual documents “Sentences on
Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Conceptual Art” (1967) and “Paragraphs on
to be published by MIT Press. Two previously Conceptual Art” (1969), reprinted in Sol LeWitt:
published chapters that articulate this problem- Critical Writings, ed. Adachiara Zevi (Rome:
atic are “Ultramoderne: How George Kubler Libri di AEIUO, 1994), 78-82, 88-90.
Stole the Time in 60s Art,” Grey Room 2 (spring 15. Sol LeWitt, cited in Sol LeWitt, exh. cat., ed.
2001): 46-77, and “Bridget Riley’s Eye/Body Alicia Legg (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
Problem,” October 98 (fall 2001): 27-46. The lat- 1978), 158.
ter essay in particular speaks to the ways in which 16. Siri Engberg, “The Weather of Prints: An
the image is spatialized or rendered three-dimen- Interview with Edward Ruscha,” Art on Paper 4
sional in the new media culture of the 1960s. (November—December 1999): 73.
8. Among many other examples, the 1960s 17. Virilio makes similar arguments in, among
marked the beginning of the so-called computer many texts, The Aesthetics of Disappearance
race, which would dramatize the new cultural (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 65.
attitude toward time in critical respects. For 18. On Smithson’s photographic practice, see
instance, IBM introduced its first transistorized Robert A. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Photo
computer in 1959, and its development of “main- Works (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
frame” systems offered the seeming potential of Museum of Art; Santa Fe: University of New
virtually instantaneous data processing and what Mexico Press, 1993).
would come to be known as “real time” systems 19. For instance, an exhibition called Projected
networking. Likewise, we could point to the Art appeared at Finch College in November
introduction of automation technologies in the 1966, including the work of Dan Graham
workforce as threatening the time of labor pro- among others.
duction: in the 1960s the speed of machines, so 20. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson, 36.
it was (and is) argued, would radically offset the 21. Ibid., 116.
productivity of the worker. 22. On Matta-Clark and the temporality of the
9. I should note that such schemes took on an built environment, see my Object to Be Destroyed:
institutional or bureaucratic dimension in the The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge:
1960s; indeed, in the United States, the MIT Press, 2001).
Department of Housing and Urban 23. Ibid., 217.
Development (HUD) was granted cabinet-level 24. Ibid.
status in 1965. 25. Thomas Ruff, cited in Moure, Architecture
10. Such documents would include, respectively, without Shadow, 86.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,” in //wminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-252; and
Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-
garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-garde and
Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1985), 151-172.
11. Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” in
Rock My Religion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993),
14—21. It is important to note here that Arts
Magazine published a version of the work in
1966-1967 but, contrary to Graham’s wishes,
without its photographs of homes. Graham had
shown these images as slide projections in 1966,
predating, as we shall see, Robert Smithson’s
use of the carousel projector.
12. Ibid., 21.
13. Bernd and Hilla Becher, interviewed
by Lynda Morris, in Bernd and Hilla Becher
(London: Arts Council, 1973), unpaginated.

194 PAMELA M. LEE

John Baldessari K A bargain always must be struck between
knife, kiss what is available in movie stills and the
My Files of Movie Stills L
concerns I have at the moment—I don’t
order the stills, Imust choose from the
lifeless, letter, light, looking (watching), menu. Also, one will read from this a
Originally published in John R. Lane and John laughing rather hopeless desire to make words and
Caldwell, Carnegie International (Pittsburgh: images interchangeable—yet it is that
Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, 1985), 91. M futility that engrosses me. Lastly, I think
money, music, males (+ 1 female), males 2 one will notice the words falling into their
(+ 1 female), male/female, message, own categories, two being those of formal
mutilation, movement, masks (monsters), concerns and content.
Below are the current categories in my files missing (area), macho
of movie stills, which form a large part of
the raw material from which I draw to do N
my work. I hope the categories (which are naked, noose, nature, nature (water),
continually shifting according to my needs nourish, newsphotos
and interests) will provide some clues to
what animates the work I do. O
octopus, operation, oval, obstacle
A
attack, animal, animal/man, above, P
automobiles (left), automobiles (right) phallic, prison, purity, perspective, posture,
paint, past, parachute, products, portrait
B (male), portrait (male, color), parallelo-
birds, building, below, barrier, blood, bar grams, pairs (images) |
(man in), books, blind, brew, betray, book-
ending, bound, bury, banal, bridge, boat, R
birth, balance, bathroom roller coaster, rescue, repel, radiating
(lines), race, relief, revive, rectangle (long),
(C rectangle (wavy), reason
cage, camouflage, chaos/order, city, cook-
ing, chairs, curves, cheering, celebrity, con- S
sumerism, curiosity, crucifixion, crowds, snakes, shadows, ships, smoke, sports,
climbing, color, civic signal, search, secret, survive, stress, sepa-
ration, safe, struggle, sad, soul, suitcase,
D switch, sinking, structure, seduction, sex
dwarf, death, disgrace, danger, discipline, (desire), small, shape (smear), shape
disaster, division, door (awkward), shape (black), shape (arc),
shape (circle), shape (blur), shape (white)
E
escape, eat, ephemeral, exteriors T
technology, tables, table (settings), think-
F ing, trapeze, time, three, trains, two, teeth,
facial (expression), fall, fake, framing, thought, triangle, triangle (truncated)
freeway, fire, foreground, falling, forest,
females, form U
upside down, unconscious
G
good/evil, goodbye, giant, gate, grief, guns, Vv
guns (aggression), gamble, growth, groups vision, victim, vulnerable

H Ww
hope, horizontal, hard/soft, hands, heel walls, water, wound, watching, winning,
(ankle), hole (cavity), houses, hiding women, women (2), women (group)

I
injury (impair), interiors

J
judgment, journey (path, guide)
Melanie Marino generic art transgressed the boundaries Illustrated American, Paris moderne, and
that traditionally delimited the specificity Berliner illustrierte Zeitung; in the legendary
of each medium—for instance, the irre- picture magazines Life and Look; and
Disposable Matter: ducible flatness of painting. No longer in style and fashion monthlies such as Vu,
Photoconceptual constrained by such categorical confine- Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar.
ments, these practices also tested institu-
Magazine Work of tional limitations, extending the display In their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s
the 1960s and distribution of art beyond the white these widely circulated publications
boasted some of the most influential names
cube of the gallery or the museum.
in photojournalism, as photographers like
Melanie Marino is a writer and art historian
For more than a decade, the various recoy- Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa,
based in New York. She has published widely
eries of that story by academy and museum Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger,
on contemporary art and is currently preparing
alike have opened a space to rethink the and W. Eugene Smith brought the news
a book on Conceptual photography.
central, if unconscious, place of photogra- home with “Lifestyle” verve. It was then
phy. Previously subsumed under the rubric too that an international readership luxuri-
of art that uses photography—in contradis- ated in the modish fashion and celebrity
tinction to art photography—the conver- spreads of Cecil Beaton, Louise Dahl-
It was a bound magazine, published once upon gence of art and photography within Wolfe, Man Ray, Martin Munkacsi, and
a time, in a barely remembered age. .. . Yes, Conceptual Art is now condensed by the Edward Steichen. Meanwhile, Brassai,
matter has grown old and weary, and little has terms Conceptual photography and photo- Lisette Model, and Weegee pictured a
survived of those legendary days—a couple conceptualism.? But as those hybrid names “social fantastic’ that cannily synthesized
of machines, two or three fountains—and no endow the transformation of the photo- Surrealism and journalism.
one regrets the past, and even the very concept graphic medium within Conceptual Art
of “past” has changed. with a punctual identity, they also tend to Of course, prior to that moment, the vari-
obscure the very inconsistencies that ren- ous endorsements of the artistic legitimacy
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading der photoconceptualism impossible to of the ascendant media image (which did
contain and that mark that impossibility not preclude critical innovation) were
as a place of reading in its own right. For controverted by a collective (if often con-
We enter this past through a lament from instance, how might we grasp the contra- flicted) assault on the aura of bourgeois
the world of fashion, straight from its ver- diction between the photographic media- aestheticism. Berlin Dada and its heirs
satile impresario Irving Penn: “The printed tion of Conceptual Art and the aim to displayed anarchic photomontages to
page seems to have come to something dismantle medium-based categories of advance an agenda of political protest and
of a dead end for all of us.”! Penn made art that demarcated the shared cognitive agitation—for instance, in Der Knuppel,
this statement in 1964, but it was precisely ground of the so-called movement? Die rote Fahne, and Arbeiter illustrierte
at that moment (around 1963) that Zeitung. Almost simultaneously, Russian
Conceptual Art reinstated photography Clement Greenberg once exhorted, “Let Constructivism deployed a homologous
to the space of printed matter: books, photography be literary.” The implacably array of photographic practices—for exam-
catalogues, and magazines. There is a prescriptive modernist critic appeared to
difference, of course, between the slick stipulate an anecdotal specificity for the Edward Ruscha’s ad “Rejected,” Artforum 29
accomplishment of commercial photogra- photographic medium. Without stating it, (March 1964): 55

phy exemplified by Penn’s artful platinum Greenberg alluded to a semiotic ontology adequately rey
works on Eurc
prints and the photoconceptual adaptation of the medium that casts the photograph
REJECTED
ly in English, 1
known to a |
of the slipshod, amateur snapshot to mass as intrinsically narrative and therefore as painters in Ar
Oct. 2, 1963 bythe much therefrc
publication. It is the difference between simultaneously visual and temporal. This Library of Congress curators. The 1

the cultivation of an art effect and the heterogeneous condition, he seemed to Washington 25, D.C.
their decorati
them prototyp

mimesis of a non-art style. That difference suggest, derives from its stubborn indexi- of sculptural
pressed spatia

bears on photography’s dense and complex cality—the photographic image is a photo- make-believe
Pieta, the “Ai

relation to the high-low dialectic, the mechanically reproduced trace of its triptych of the
done their pi
knotty binarism that splices through the referent or what it represents. artists, as ha
all, and the
discourse of the medium, shuttling to Poussin, The
these works ai
one end Alfred Stieglitz’s modernist icon It is to that history of mechanical reproduc- er has seen,
similes. The f¢
Paula and, to the other, Richard Avedon’s tion that Conceptual photography looks to get some |
ows of the 17t
lustrous superstars. back. It leads from the medium’s begin- pictures,
The authors
nings in the nineteenth century—from the French art his
Mander of tl
By now, the narrative of Conceptual Art invention of the calotype to the perfection copies available @ $3.00 cism of the F
art to have br
is well rehearsed. The unruly “movement” of the halftone block—to its incarnation National Excelsior
23514 Vestal Avenue
tinuity of Fre
see as “belitt
was united by its wide-ranging inquiry into in the twentieth century, the mass-media Los Angeles 26, Calif,
muses,” for w

the nature of art-in-general. Disputing the image. For the first half of the last century, Wittenborn & Company
seek correctio:
of pictorial ac
1018 Madison Avenue
values of aesthetic autonomy and purity that image found its home next to print, New York 21, New York
believe unequ
by Spain, Ger
Italy.
prized by high-modernist formalism, in early illustrated periodicals such as

196 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

ple, in Lef and Kino Front or Vestnik Truda interspersed blank sheets with twenty-six in the same year that Ruscha’s book was
and Molodaya Gvardia—to shape a collec- photographs, printed in halftone (as single published, Twentysix Gasoline Stations tied
tive revolutionary consciousness. These square images on the upper-right-hand artistic production to the serial rhythms
interventions opened onto a critique of corner of a page or as full-page spreads) of production and consumption. Like
media culture—take, for example, Hannah and identified by a caption that tersely Warhol’s thirty-two paintings, which pic-
H6ch’s complex response to the network listed the corresponding station’s trade tured the exact number of Campbell’s
of “New Woman” stereotypes circulated name and location. This mundane collec- soups available at the time, mounted to
within the Weimar press or Aleksandr tion calibrated a uniform, amateur locution the wall and ranged along a thin, white
Rodchenko’s uses of the defamiliarizing to its “banal-vernacular”!° subject matter. shelf like cans sold in a supermarket,
snapshot to revolutionize the Soviet Each image—like the squat structure it Ruscha’s twenty-six stations present their
press—whose utopian aspirations would housed—looked like the next. own eccentric lineup. We consume his
be mitigated, at least implicitly, by books and stations as so many repetitious
Conceptual photography. In effect, the book presented a “non-state- signs, whose symbolic value is now deter-
ment with no style”!! that tuned the “docu- mined by their difference from other
Conceptual photography made its way into mentary style” of Walker Evans and Robert signs—the Standard Station from the
the magazine page> during a time of transi- Frank (its effacement of the author)!2 Union Station, for instance. Yet if it follows
tion for the magazine industry; Collier’s to the Duchampian readymade (its with- the logic of the commodity-sign, it follows
closed shop in 1957, followed by Look in drawal of the auratic art object).!3 Ruscha the logic of obsolescence; as Warhol
October 1971 and Life in December of once referred to the Stations as “an exten- favored the fading icon, “the thing just
the next year.® Photoconceptual magazine sion of a readymade in photographic on its way out,”!5 Ruscha “operated on
work held its brief tenure within the nar- form.”!4 Here the artist asserts the second- a kind of waste-retrieval method.”!¢
rowed venue of the specialist magazine, ary, intermediate status of photography
slipping nearly imperceptibly into the while pointing to the way the Stations, fol- Ruscha’s books drive the worn down and
pages of art magazines like Artforum and lowing the readymade, tested art’s conven- left out into our visual focus. There they
Arts Magazine or the fashion magazine tions (by substituting for art photography return as depleted of value as they are
Harper’s Bazaar. Rigging out their own a version of popular snapshot photography devoid of sense. For Ruscha’s shabby gas
amateur idiolects of advertising and keyed to its mass-cultural iconography) stations—like his derelict land parcels,
reportage, these subtle pieces flouted and art’s institutions (by displacing the depopulated parking lots, and empty swim-
the arty conventionality of contemporary fine art print destined for the gallery or ming pools—are both redundant and
media photography, while demythifying museum wall with the book designed for nonsensical. Indeed, the atrophy of signifi-
the radical social promise attributed mass distribution). cation follows from the incessant drum-
to such interventions by their avant-garde ming of repetition, which greased the gears
precursors. This double-edged critique This exposition of the readymade’s aes- of industrial production as it sanded down
looked neither aesthetic nor quite com- thetic indifference to industrial dedifferen- the very differences that produce meaning.
mercial. But even that crafty disguise tiation owes much to Andy Warhol. Like These photographic images, like words
could not ensure its survival. the artist’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, exhib- turned to clichés or figures that blend into
ited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles their ground, mime that lack of distinction,
First, a Manual
Edward Ruscha, Standard, Amarillo, Texas, from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962 (cat. no. 129)
In the year following the publication of
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), Edward
Ruscha placed an ad in Artforum. Above
a photograph of the book’s cover, the fol-
lowing notice was posted in bold print:
“REJECTED / Oct. 2, 1963 by the / Library
of Congress / Washington 25, D.C.”7 This
wry publicity image parodied the book’s
obscurity. “When I first did the book on
gasoline stations,” Ruscha recalled, “peo-
ple would look at it and say, ‘Are you kid-
ding or what? Why are you doing this?’
In asense, that’s what I was after; I was
after the head-scratching.”®

Intended as a “training manual”? for mass STANDARD, AMARILLO, TEXAS

distribution, Tiventysix Gasoline Stations

collated a typology of the filling stations
that dotted Route 66, along the stretch that
connected Los Angeles to Oklahoma City.
Throughout its forty-eight pages the book
that like-ness. But these hollowed-out signs “Eddie Russia.” This ad winks in shared temporary, Bruce Nauman, who honed
also touch on a hidden economy in every- knowledge of the artist’s (and his art’s) that strategy, unabashedly concatenating
day perception, bidding us, as Ruscha put double status; the image could pose at multiple personifications of doubt, of
it, “to [see] the electric vibrancy in some- once as art (object) and as design (exhibi- frustration, of shame and humiliation—for
thing that’s so dead.”!7 tion announcement). And all of this refers instance, in Bound to Fail (1967) or, more
us slyly to the unwieldy heterogeneity of relevantly, the photograph of the artist’s
Business Art photography’s functions (aesthetic, utilitar- bowed head distributed by Galerie Konrad
ian, commercial). Fischer in 1969 as an exhibition announce-
Ruscha’s curious manual perplexed its ment postcard. Ruscha’s work, however,
readers. “Only an idiot,” Jeff Wall later The commercial aspect is of particular coheres less around the charismatic per-
remarked, “would take pictures of nothing significance to this magazine piece, at least sona of the loser than it does around the
but the filling stations.”!8But stranger insofar as commercial art relates to art. modality of “perceptual withdrawal.” The
still than the book was the ad that followed There were several names for that relation, impoverishment of the image—and, we
it. For as the mass-produced Stations but the most pertinent for Ruscha again might add, its information—deflated the
thumbed its nose at the precious livre comes from Warhol, who blithely pro- value of photographic reproduction within
d artiste, so its branding rubbed the opulent nounced, “Business art is the step that media culture, derailing, however tem-
sheen off mass advertising. comes after Art.”!9 If Ruscha’s publicity porarily, the ordered cycles of commerce.
“caper”20 extends art’s franchise into “busi-
Slotted into page 55 of Artforum’s March ness art,” it does so critically, for the work’s Ruscha’s amalgamation of culture and
1964 issue, the advertisement’s montage simultaneous operation of medium and advertising arced into a kind of anti-ad.
was patently unappealing. Its dry confec- mass media—now media is the medium— That conversion finds its sibling in Dan
tion of a banal black-and-white reproduc- defies the exigencies of capital. His ad does Graham’s ad, Figurative (1965), which
tion—of the softcover’s red serif title, not propel the image through the circuit appeared in the March 1968 issue of
counted out into three symmetrical, evenly of desire that is also capital’s flow. It does Harper's Bazaar.*! On page 90 of the maga-
spaced horizontal lines—and generic not direct us from the promise of consump- zine, a vertical column of numbers insinu-
typography—the faux-bureaucratic type- tion to the consummation of purchase. ated itself between two advertisements,
face of the “rejected” stamp—did nothing Rather, it relays the latter’s malfunction— one for Tampax and another for a Warner’s
to woo consumer desire. Clearly this rebuff no Sale here, not even for free, not even to bra. Spliced at the top and bottom to con-
to commodity fetishism was tactical. the Library of Congress—into an equivocal form to the measurements of these brack-
critique of the capitalist establishment by eting ads, Graham’s cash-register receipt
Ruscha, as we know, was hardly incogni- inverting the rhetoric of achievement into in effect proffers a record of a commercial
zant of the templates of merchandising. a trope for failure. transaction. If its styptic tabulation repre-
He worked on this very magazine’s produc- sented anything then, it represented what
tion when it still made its home in Los This is not to suggest that Ruscha’s promo- has been. This signals, of course, the tense
Angeles, appearing on its masthead from tion served only to idealize the artist’s of photography, which here is diverted to
October 1965 through summer 1969 as thwarted success. It was the artist’s con- supplant the subjunctive mood of advertis-
ing—‘figured” by the two solicitations for
Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts Magazine 41 (December 1966—January 1967): 21-22 the female consumer’s body—with the
evidence of a completed sale. The receipt
quite literally eviscerates the advertise-
ment, supplanting its fantasy of consump-
tion with the enervated figures of
Armory ’66 expenditure.
Not Quite What
We Had in Mind

Everyday Homes

Graham’s early magazine work followed

the short-lived John Daniels Gallery
(founded by the artist in 1964 and closed
the following year). “The art world,”
Graham shrewdly intuited, “was very much
a part of the publicity media world,” and
his early forays into art tracked those con-
nections by dodging the gallery exhibition
altogether to create “conceptual pages
in magazines.”22

The most formidable instance of this cir-

cumvention remains Graham’s photo essay
“Homes for America,” first published as

198 MELANIE MARINO

a double-page spread in the December unremittingly dull snapshots—automati- art in context—where its decentering
1966—January 1967 issue of Arts Magazine. cally focused and exposed, perfunctorily of subjective expression reads less as a
Beginning on page 21, halfway down a framed, monotonous—which shrivel the “liberating” aesthetic procedure than as
column of text where the previous article promise of individual possession into bland a naive idealization of a penitentiary,
ends, Graham’s article pedantically expli- ciphers of alienation. “one-dimensional” culture—it also reposi-
cates the system of the “large-scale housing tioned Pop Art. “I wanted to make a ‘Pop’
‘developments’ that constitute the new These signs allude as much to the mass- art which was more literally disposable,”
city.” A double-column list of twenty-four produced architecture of the “blurbs”— Graham insisted.27 His work redirected
single-family tracts, tabled alphabetically, to borrow Robert Smithson’s portmanteau Pop’s mass-culture iconography, returning
forms an epigraph to the essay. It unfolds for the border zone of the suburbs—as its borrowed signs from the space of the
a litany of proper names—Belleplain, to the “specific objects” of Minimalism. gallery to the printed page of the maga-
Brooklawn, Colonia, and so on. But this Moving almost undetectably into the mar- zine. There it synchronized the Minimalist
list does not nominate specific identities gin between art and art criticism, “Homes” emphasis on the here and now of percep-
so much as aggregate one thing after introduces this connection: “Both architec- tual experience to the commodity rhythms
another, as if to disclose their repetitive ture and craftsmanship as values are sub- of the magazine—here today, gone tomor-
serial ordering—to insist, that is, that one verted by the dependence on simplified row—and in this throwaway aesthetic,
is interchangeable with the next: “They and easily duplicated techniques of fabrica- we discern a mirror image of the suburban
are located everywhere. They are not par- tion and standardized modular plans.” home doomed to obsolescence.
ticularly bound to existing communities; The passage goes on to link those methods
they fail to develop either regional charac- of standardized construction and assembly This reflection of the throwaway invites
teristics or separate identity.”23 to the Minimalist eschewal of subjective comparison with “the everyday [as] plati-
expression: “Contingencies such as mass tude (what lags and falls back, the residual
In its original layout, “Homes for America” production technology and land use life with which our trash cans and cemeter-
included six thirty-five-millimeter photo- economics make the final decisions, deny- ies are filled: scrap and refuse).”28 In this
graphs—of split-level and ground-level ing the architect his former ‘unique’ role.” sense, “Homes” marshals a brand of
“two home homes” (Jersey City); rear and Finally, it draws a parallel between mimesis that one might call everyday real-
front views of setback rows (Bayonne); Minimalism’s idealist isolation—its pri- ism—akin to Jean-Luc Godard’s “maga-
and a single view of two rows of setbacks mary structures are disconnected from zine-like” films (Deux ou trois choses que je
(Jersey City)—which together with the their historical referents—and the deraci- sais delle or Weekend) and to Alain Robbe-
text proposed a kind of bilateral equation. nation of the suburban environment: Grillet’s “nouveau roman” tabulations
If the images illustrated the text, the text “There is no organic unity connecting the (Snapshots). Its referent, however, is not
amplified them in equal measure, so land site and the home. Both are without the manufactured homes that form the
that Graham’s pictures of redundant roots—separate parts in a larger, prede- essay’s ostensible subject but rather every-
architectural forms—the doubled door- termined, synthetic order.”26 day life in “a bureaucratic society of con-
ways, setback views, or ziggurat steps— trolled consumption.”2° That is, “Homes”
sound a counterpoint to serial lists and As “Homes” effectively placed Minimal duplicates the everyday logic of enforced
columns—of models, color types, and
ordinal combinations. Dan Graham; Homes for America, 1966-1967; photo-offset reproduction of layout for Arts Magazine;
341% x 25 in. (87.6 x 63.5 cm); Walker Art Center

For the final version of the essay, the

magazine’s editors replaced Graham’s pho-
tographs with a single image by Walker Homes for
Evans, Wooden Houses, Boston, 1930. The
America
D.GRAUAM

Evans appears above a real estate photo-

graph and house plan of “The Serenade,”
visually expounding the oppositions dia-
grammed by the article’s subtitle, “Early
Twentieth-Century Possessable House to
the Quasi-Discrete Cell of 66.” Although
Evans’ lineup of vernacular row houses
seemed to shadow the repetitious domestic
architecture recorded by Graham, the
structures, as Graham qualified, are histori-
cally distinct; the Boston residences,
“designed to last for generations,”*4 are
the antithesis of the New Jersey throwaway
cell. To relay this difference, Graham
shunned the art of Evans’ “documentary
style,”25 trading instead in the standardized
currency of mass information. Hence the
consumption that packages our “quasi- and so on—and, quickly thereafter, the photostat of a map of the site. This tour
discrete cells” into morbid uniformity. names and colors of Montclair’s “box-like” recalled to some the eighteenth-century
This quotidian rationalization withers the middle-income housing developments: category of the picturesque.*? The critic
very possibility of aesthetic expression. Royal Garden Estates, Rolling Knolls Sidney Tillim, for one, wrote: “Robert
Ultimately, it is this grim dynamic of deple- Farm, and so on. Smithson’s compulsive Smithson virtually parodied the modern
tion that Graham’s article mimes, offering list making recalls Graham’s “Homes”; picturesque when he visited the ‘monu-
up to its readers a spectacle of the deep both make the connection between ments’ of Passaic, carrying his Instamatic
banality of everyday experience. Minimal art (Smithson refers to Judd’s camera like the older connoisseur carried
“pink-plexiglas box”) and everyday subur- a sketchbook, perhaps.”23 Smithson blasted
Picturesque Tours ban architecture. But Smithson’s article this association (or at least its pictorial
also crystallizes the “mineral” latticework implications), although he too recognized
“Banality? Why should the study of the of those redundant homes, only to rip into the essay’s picturesque filiation when he
banal be itself banal? Are not the surreal, its underside, an abandoned industrial submitted its prospectus to a magazine
the extraordinary, the surprising, even the quarry where “fragmentation, corrosion, well known for its longstanding allegiance
magical, also part of the real? Why shouldn’t decomposition, disintegration, rock creep, to the picturesque travelogue, Harper's,
the concept of everydayness reveal the debris slides, mud flow, and avalanche which nevertheless rejected his idea as
extraordinary in the ordinary?” These are were everywhere in evidence.”3! too “elliptical.”34
not Robert Smithson’s words—they belong
to Henri Lefebvre—but Smithson might Smithson’s errant pairing of architecture To read Smithson’s narrative is to move
well have posed the same questions to and nature, of the bland regularity of one between image and text, from site to site.
Graham. In a way, Smithson did just that in and the material degeneration of the other, Like the stroller delighting in the pictur-
a series of magazine articles: “The Crystal inducts us into his next essay, “Monuments esque garden, who stops and looks to
Land” (Harper’s Bazaar, May 1966), of Passaic.” Originally titled “A Tour of constitute and de-constitute its various
“Monuments of Passaic” (Artforum, the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” prospects, we too advance by breaking
December 1967), and “Incidents of Mirror the article warps the Grand Tour—in which between reading and looking. Over and
Travel in the Yucatan” (Artforum, Rome, as the ancient capital of Western over again, we go back and forth, mean-
September 1969). Proposing their own civilization, traditionally figured as a privi- dering through a sequence of interrup-
quixotic rendition of reportage—we might leged destination—into a detour through tions. These interruptions bring us to the
call it expeditionary—these illustrated the industrial detritus that borders heart of Smithson’s picturesque, which
essays followed Smithson’s rambles from Passaic’s polluted river, leading from the we might therefore conceive as closer to
the Garden State to the Yucatan to dis- bridge linking Bergen County with Passaic Minimal art (in its privilege of succession)
close “the extraordinary in the ordinary.” County, through the construction site of and far afield of the pictorial (in its repudi-
an unfinished highway along the river, ation of static opticality).
In the first of Smithson’s travelogues, and finally into the town center. The text
“The Crystal Land,” he records (without trails eight images of “the rotting industrial At times, this contingent, moment-by-
photographs) a day trip to Upper town”; a newspaper reproduction of moment account spirals out into “a typical
Montclair Quarry and Great Notch Quarry Samuel Morse’s painting Allegorical abyss.”35 Consider the first stop, “The
with his wife, Nancy Holt, and Donald and Landscape; photographic views of “The Monument of Dislocated Directions.”
Julie Judd. Smithson rattles off two lists, Bridge Monument,” “Monument with Before the rotating bridge, Smithson
an alphabetic sequence of more than fifty Pontoons,” “The Great Pipes Monument,” recounts: “Noon-day sunshine cinema-
trap-rock minerals from his Brian H. “The Fountain Monument,” and “The ized the site, turning the bridge and
Mason booklet—actinolite, albite, allanite, Sand-Box Monument”; and a negative the river into an overexposed picture.
Photographing it with my Instamatic was
Robert Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6 (December 1967): 48-49 like photographing a photograph” (49).
We turn to the image, which pictures at
THE MONUMENTS OF PASSAIC once a reflexive image of photography’s
light and dark (through the partial silhou-
ettes cast by the structural steel beams and
railing) and the painterly, monocular per-
Has Passaic replaced Rome as the cternal city?
spective system of camera optics—the
wooden slats of the walkway narrow in its
recessional march toward the bleached-out
horizon. To shift from the textual register
to the visual is to confront a photograph
of what is already a photograph, to plunge,
like Smithson, through the empty space
of endless referral.

Delay, too, breaches the coherence of

Smithson’s third travelogue, “Incidents of

200 MELANIE MARINO

Mirror Travel in the Yucatan.” Chronicling To Smithson, the idea of entropy as “energy His photo-essay stands as a figure for that
the artist’s expedition through the Yucatan drain” called up “a new kind of monum- limitation. As it overruns the confines of
Peninsula in April 1969, the photo essay entality.”35 Remodeling building as ruina- medium, extending art into the open land-
is organized around a series of twelve- tion,>? these “new monuments” follow scape and onto the printed page, it gener-
inch-square mirrors, scattered and half- the logic of temporal dispersion so that ates a hybrid picture “that has broken away
buried at nine different locations in almost “time becomes a place minus motion.”40 from the whole, while containing the lack
parallel configurations. Each installation Passaic’s monuments exemplified precisely of its own containment.”
is enantiomorphic, which is to say, both that “zero panorama,” replete with “holes,”
symmetrical and asymmetrical to the next, with “monumental vacancies that define, Postscript
so that the already decomposed land- without trying, the memory-traces of an
scape—whose photographic view is par- abandoned set of futures” (50). Is the magazine, like Smithson’s future,
tially blocked by the mirrors, which in their “out-of-date” and “old-fashioned”? Are
turn reflect only a partial view of the sky— It was that very emptiness that sloped the photoconceptualism’s pages, like so much
ever So progressively collapses in on itself: picturesque (long familiar to magazines) outmoded ephemera, doomed to inconse-
“Tn this line where sky meets earth, objects into the threat of “nothing further happen- quence? After all, they looked like nothing
cease to exist.”36 ing,”*! the privations of the sublime. But really. But it was just that blankness that
that adjustment also entailed a problematic pointed to the banality of everyday life,
What do these indistinctions evoke if not dedifferentiation of history. If Ruscha and whose elaboration in the artwork enlarged
the sublime? Is this then the other name Graham took as their subject the homoge- the compass of art’s intervention. In this
for Smithson’s picturesque? Passaic, our nization of everyday life, they remain, way, these magazine pieces not only dis-
guide tells us, is “a self-destroying postcard strategically, in the historical now. puted the autonomy of the art object—
world of failed immortality and oppressive Smithson, by contrast, exalted the efface- by mingling the photographic and the tex-
grandeur” (50). Grandeur notwithstand- ment of historical memory: “the suburbs tual and by exploiting the suspension of
ing—we think of fugitive monuments like exist without a rational past and without the photograph and the magazine between
the drainage pipes and sandbox elevated to the ‘big events’ of history .. . just what mass culture and high art—but effectively
the status of “The Great Pipes Monument” passes for a future” (56). Antimonumental turned that challenge to social use—by
and “The Desert”—the sublime effect of in its impulse, this maneuver jettisoned figuring, in different ways and to different
the suburb’s monuments cannot be likened the present into a paradoxical prehistoric degrees, the everyday conditions that
to the terrified awe of Kant’s tourist, who future—thus, the sand-box monument is impinge on the re-presentation of art
enters Saint Peter’s Basilica for the first likened to an “open grave,” “the sudden in late capitalist culture.
time gripped by “the feeling that his imagi- dissolution of entire continents, the drying
nation is inadequate for exhibiting the idea up of oceans,” “a vast deposit of bones As Conceptual Art’s institutional critique—
of a whole.”37 The same intuition of and stones pulverized into dust” (51). or what Smithson referred to as “the appa-
boundlessness, of objects “great beyond ratus the artist is threaded through”\—
all measure,” convulses Passaic’s visitor, In the end, however, “Monuments” was dilated into cultural critique, it increasingly
who confesses, “I had been wandering in not quite so sublime. Its author was careful invalidated the distinction between art and
a moving picture I couldn’t quite picture” to draw a distinction between the “experi- non-art. Throughout the 1970s the politics
(50). But here that experience of incom- ence before the physical abyss” (the sub- of feminism reshaped this expanded model
mensurability (between that which can be lime) and that “before the mapped version” of art, which intensively pursued the ques-
thought and that which can be repre- (the sublime picturesque).*? “It isn’t a tion of the subject’s constitution in social
sented) is brought into view through the question of form or anti-form,” Smithson
terms of entropy. repeatedly insisted, “it’s a limitation.”43 Robert Smithson, The Bridge Monument Showing
Sidewalks, from Monuments of Passaic, 1967
(under cat. no. 173)
Robert Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6 (December 1967): 50-51
and psychosexual difference. And thus in O'Brian, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949 Armstrong, “Interviews with Ed Ruscha and
various periodicals, artists such as Victor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 63. Bruce Conner,” October 70 (fall 1994): 56.
Burgin and Martha Rosler shifted the 4. See Pierre MacOrlan, “Elements of a Social 14. The public life of the readymades had just
analysis of art’s commodity status into Fantastic” (1929), in Photography in the Modern begun to gather momentum following the publi-
a critique of class relations, on one hand Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, cation of the first monograph on the artist by
(Burgin’s “Think about It”), and mass- 1913-1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Robert Lebel (1959) and the first retrospective
cultural representations of women, on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 31-33. exhibition of his work at the Pasadena Art
other (Rosler’s “Body Beautiful, or Beauty 5. Here I do not refer to the numerous examples Museum, By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose
Knows No Pain”). In parallel fashion, less of purely textual magazine or even newspaper Sélavy (1963). See Henri Man Barendse, “Ed
strictly Conceptual artists such as Judy work, such as Dan Graham’s Schema (March Ruscha: An Interview,” Afterimage (Rochester)
Chicago (Artforum, December 1970) and, 1966), which was originally set for Arts Magazine 8 (February 1981): 9.
notoriously, Lynda Benglis (Artforum, but appeared instead in Aspen, no. 5-6 15. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, “Comics,”
November 1974) posted self-advertise- (1966-1967), Stephen Kaltenbach’s advertise- in High and Low: Modern Art and Popular
ments that restyled the commodification ments in Artforum from 1968 and 1969, and Culture, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of
of artistic identity into a parody of gender Joseph Kosuth’s Second Investigation Modern Art, 1990), 193.
bias in the art world. (1968-1969), which was published in newspapers 16. See Bernard Brunon, “Interview with Ed
from different countries. Ruscha,” in Edward Ruscha, exh. cat. (Lyon:
Propelled by the turn of feminist art to 6. Threatened by the expansion of the suburbs, Musée Saint-Pierre Art Contemporain, 1985), 95.
other mass-media spaces and, in larger and with their fragmented sales and distribution 17. Ruscha, as quoted in Kerry Brougher,
more troubling measure, by Conceptual infrastructure, and by market competition from “Words as Landscape,” in Ed Ruscha, exh. cat.
Art’s displacement by a “hunger for pic- the paperback book industry and commercial (Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and
tures,”46 Conceptual magazine work television, magazines increasingly targeted more Sculpture Garden, 2000), 161.
receded in the 1980s. Today, however, the specific audiences. See John Tebbel and Mary 18. Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 266.
return of art and theory to the 1960s asks Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 19. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
us to reread those early pages. For to this 1741-1990 (New York and Oxford: Oxford (From A to B and Back Again) (New York:
day their austere intercession remains University Press, 1991), esp. 227-247. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 92.
inarticulate, too little understood. It hangs 7. See Artforum 29 (March 1964): 55. 20. See A. D. Coleman, “I’m Not Really
in the margins, like a kind of residual life, 8. Trina Mitchum, “A Conversation with Ed a Photographer,” New York Times, 10
waiting to reinvent the practice of critical Ruscha,” Southern California Art Magazine (Los September 1972.
leveling, waiting to transform the inconsis- Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art), no. 21 21. Graham borrowed the photographic frame
tencies of our globally enforced homoge- (January—February 1979): 24. of his ad from the surrounding layout, which
nization. Might that suspension also harbor 9. Traveling outside California’s culture industry also inspired the work’s title. Both layout and
an invitation? To heed its call is to dispel of Hollywood and Disney, Ruscha’s books allude title were determined by the magazine’s editors.
our indifference to the past. Then perhaps as well to the technocratic culture that had gath- 22. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Moments of
this work would not be disposable after all. ered since the 1940s around the massive develop- History in the Work of Dan Graham” (1977),
ment of the aircraft and military defense in Jean-Francois Chevrier, Allan Sekula, and
Notes industries and their companion think tanks in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Walker Evans and Dan
1. Richard Avedon/Irving Penn session, n.d., in Los Angeles. See David Bourdon, “Ruscha as Graham, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum
Alexey Brodovitch workshop session notes, Publisher (or All Booked Up),” Art News 71 of American Art, 1992), 211.
Design Laboratory, 1964, Library, Museum of (April 1972): 33. 23. Dan Graham, “Homes for America: Early
Modern Art, New York. 10. Dan Flavin, “Some Other Comments... : Twentieth-Century Possessable House to the
2. For an early review of art that “uses” photog- More Pages from a Spleenish Journal,” Artforum Quasi-Discrete Cell of 66,” Arts 41 (December
raphy, see Lawrence Alloway, “Artists and 6 (December 1967): 27. 1966—January 1967): 21.
Photographs,” Studio International 179 (April 11. Bourdon, “Ruscha as Publisher,” 68. 24. Ibid.
1970): 162-163. For more contemporary consid- 12. Ruscha first encountered the work of Evans 25. As Evans explained, “You see, a document
erations of Conceptual photography, see Jeff and Frank while he was enrolled at Chouinard has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore
Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Art Institute. For Evans, the “documentary art is never a document, though it certainly can
Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in style” articulated a type of “photography without adopt that style. ’m sometimes called a ‘docu-
Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965-1975, exh. operators.” See Walker Evans, “The mentary photographer,’ but that supposes quite
cat., ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Reappearance of Photography,” reprinted in a subtle knowledge of the distinction I’ve made,
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan which is rather new” (Leslie Katz, “Interview
247-267; John Roberts, “Photography, Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island with Walker Evans,” Art in America 59
Iconophobia, and the Ruins of Conceptual Art,” Books, 1980), 186. [March-April 1971]: 87).
in The Impossible Document: Photography and 13. When asked about Duchamp’s most impor- 26. Graham, “Homes,” 22.
Conceptual Art in Britain, 1966-1976, exh. cat. tant contribution, Ruscha first responded, “That 27. Dan Graham, “My Works for Magazine
(London: Camerawork, 1997), 7-45. he discovered common objects and showed you Pages: ‘A History of Conceptual Art,” in Gary
3. Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass- could make art out of them,” adding, “He played Dufour, Dan Graham, exh. cat. (Perth: Art
Eye: Review of an Exhibition by Edward with materials that were taboo to other artists Gallery of Western Australia), 12.
Weston” (March 9, 1946), in Clement Greenberg: at the time; defying convention was one of his 28. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,”
The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John greatest accomplishments.” See Elizabeth in ibid., 13.

202 MELANIE MARINO

29. Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Monuments,” in Writings, 11.
Everydayness,” reprinted in Yale French Studies 39. As the artist expanded elsewhere: “They are
73 (1987): 9. During the 1960s Lefebvre’s cri- not built for the ages but rather against the ages.
tique of everyday life was almost completely They are involved in a systematic reduction of
unknown outside France, where its call to trans- time down to fractions of seconds, rather than
form the banality of the everyday environment representing the long spaces of history”
was most actively taken up by the Situationists, (Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” ibid., 191).
but the concept of everyday life was made indi- 40. Smithson, “Entropy and the New
rectly present through the reception of the Monuments,” 10.
nouveau roman. 41. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Sublime and
30. Ibid. the Avant-garde,” in The Inhuman: Reflections
31. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel
Harper’s Bazaar, May 1966, 73. Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
32. Posed halfway between the beautiful and the Press, 1991), 99.
sublime, the picturesque denotes “that peculiar 42. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the
kind of beauty [agreeable in a picture]” (William Mind: Earth Projects,” in Writings, 84.
Gilpin, An Essay upon Prints [1768], rev. ed. 43. Robert Smithson, “Fragments of a
[London: Cadell and Davies, 1802], 2) to be Conversation,” ibid., 170.
found (by its first aestheticians) in nature’s rough 44, Smithson, “A Sedimentation,” 90.
and rugged subjects—in its ruined abbeys, 45. Bruce Kurtz, ed., “Conversation with Robert
moldering castles, gnarled oaks, shaggy goats, Smithson on April 22nd 1972,” in Writings, 200.
and raggedy shepherds—and to be cultivated 46. See Wolfgang Max Faust, Hunger nach
(according to the second generation) by a gar- Bildern: Deutsche Malerei der Gegenwart
dening of “variety” and “intricacy” (Uvedale (Cologne: DuMont, 1982).
Price, Esq., Essays on the Picturesque, as
Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful;
and, on the Use of Studying Pictures for the
Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, vol. 1
{London: J. Mawman, 1810], 21). Extracted
from the sphere of landscape painting, the aes-
thetic of the picturesque was easily absorbed
by the photographic medium around the mid-
nineteenth century, when it flourished in the
popular illustrated travelogues of the time.
Nearly another century later, when the pictur-
esque came back into fashion, Smithson worked
to supplant its static view of nature with “a
process of ongoing relationships existing in a
physical region” (Robert Smithson, “Frederick
Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,”
in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy
Holt [New York: New York University Press,
1979], 119).
33. Sidney Tillim, “Earthworks and the New
Picturesque,” Artforum 7 (December 1968): 43.
34. Robert Smithson to Robert Kotlowitz,
microfilm reel no. 3833, frame 1092, Robert
Smithson Papers, Archives of American Art,
Washington, D.C.
35. Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of
Passaic,” Artforum 7 (December 1967): 51.
Reference to all subsequent quotations from this
article is made by page number.
36. Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-
Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum 8 (September
1969), 28.
37. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790),
trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987), 109.
38. Smithson, “Entropy and the New
Douglas Crimp extensions of that theatrical position into gies which really make her quite absent,
the art of the seventies. I wrote at that time or only there as the kind of presence that
that the aesthetic mode that was exemplary Henry James meant when he said, “The
The Photographic Activity during the seventies was performance, presence before him was a presence.”
of Postmodernism all those works that were constituted in
This is precisely the kind of presence that
a specific situation and for a specific dura-
(1980) tion; works for which it could be said liter- I attributed to the performances of Jack
ally that you had to be there; works, that Goldstein, such as Two Fencers, and to
Originally published in October, no. 15 (winter is, which assumed the presence of a specta- which I would now add the performances
1980): 91-101. tor in front of the work as the work took of Robert Longo, such as Surrender. These
place, thereby privileging the spectator performances were little else than pres-
instead of the artist. ences, performed tableaux that were there
in the spectator’s space but which appeared
It is a fetishistic, fundamentally anti-technical In my attempt to continue the logic of the ethereal, absent. They had that odd quality
notion of art with which theorists of photogra- development I was outlining, I came even- of holograms, very vivid and detailed
phy have tussled for almost a century, without, tually to a stumbling block. What I wanted and present and at the same time ghostly,
of course, achieving the slightest result. For to explain was how to get from this condi- absent. Goldstein and Longo are artists
they sought nothing beyond acquiring creden- tion of presence—the being there necessi- whose work, together with that of a great
tials for the photographer from the judgment- tated by performance—to that kind of number of their contemporaries, ap-
seat which he had already overturned. presence that is possible only through the proaches the question of representation
absence that we know to be the condition through photographic modes, particularly
Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of of representation. For what I was writing all those aspects of photography that have
Photography” about was work which had taken on, after to do with reproduction, with copies, and
nearly a century of its repression, the ques- copies of copies. The extraordinary pres-
tion of representation. I effected that tran- ence of their work is effected through
That photography had overturned the sition with a kind of fudge, an epigraph absence, through its unbridgeable distance
judgment-seat of art is a fact which the dis- quotation suspended between two sections from the original, from even the possibility
course of modernism found it necessary to of the text. The quotation, taken from one of an original. Such presence is what
repress, and so it seems that we may accu- of the ghost tales of Henry James, was a I attribute to the kind of photographic
rately say of postmodernism that it consti- false tautology, which played on the dou- activity I call postmodernist.
tutes precisely the return of the repressed. ble, indeed antithetical, meaning of the
Postmodernism can only be understood as a work presence: “The presence before him This quality of presence would seem to be
specific breach with modernism, with those was a presence.” just the opposite of what Walter Benjamin
institutions which are the preconditions for had in mind when he introduced into the
and which shape the discourse of mod- What I just said was a fudge was perhaps language of criticism the notion of the
ernism. These institutions can be named at not really that, but rather the hint of some- aura. For the aura has to do with the pres-
the outset; first, the museum; then, art his- thing really crucial about the work I was ence of the original, with authenticity, with
tory; and finally, in a more complex sense, describing, which I would like now to elab- the unique existence of the work of art in
because modernism depends both upon its orate. In order to do so, I want to adda the place in which it happens to be. It is
presence and upon its absence, photogra- third definition to the word presence. that aspect of the work that can be put to
phy. Postmodernism is about art’s dispersal, To that notion of presence which is about the test of chemical analysis or of connois-
its plurality, by which I certainly do not being there, being in front of, and that seurship, that aspect which the discipline
mean pluralism. Pluralism is, as we know, notion of presence that Henry James uses of art history, at least in its guise as
that fantasy that art is free, free of other in his ghost stories, the presence which is Kunstwissenschaft, is able to prove or dis-
discourses, institutions, free, above all, of a ghost and therefore really an absence, prove, and that aspect, therefore, which
history. And this fantasy of freedom can the presence which is not there, I want to either admits the work of art into, or ban-
be maintained because every work of art is add the notion of presence as a kind of ishes it from, the museum. For the museum
held to be absolutely unique and original. increment to being there, a ghostly aspect has no truck with fakes or copies or repro-
Against this pluralism of originals, I want of presence that is its excess, its supple- ductions. The presence of the artist in the
to speak of the plurality of copies. ment. This notion of presence is what we work must be detectable; that is how the
mean when we say, for example, that museum knows it has something authentic.
Nearly two years ago in an essay called Laurie Anderson is a performer with pres-
“Pictures,” in which I first found it useful ence. We mean by such a statement not But it is this very authenticity, Benjamin
to employ the term postmodernism, simply that she is there, in front of us, but tells us, that is inevitably depreciated
I attempted to sketch in a background to that she is more than there, that in addition through mechanical reproduction, dimin-
the work of a group of younger artists to being there, she has presence. And if ished through the proliferation of copies.
who were just beginning to exhibit in New we think of Laurie Anderson in this way, “That which withers in the age of mechani-
York.! I traced the genesis of their concerns it may seem a bit odd, because Laurie cal reproduction is the aura of the work
to what had pejoratively been labeled the Anderson’s particular presence is effected of art,” is the way Benjamin put it.2 But,
theatricality of minimal sculpture and the through the use of reproductive technolo- of course, the aura is not a mechanistic

204 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

concept as employed by Benjamin, but then, the connoisseurship of photography the one I have already mentioned: the
rather a historical one. It is not something is an activity diametrically opposed to the various attempts to recuperate the auratic.
a handmade work has that a mechanically- connoisseurship of painting; it means look- These attempts are manifest in two, con-
made work does not have. In Benjamin’s ing not for the hand of the artist but for tradictory phenomena: the resurgence
view, certain photographs had an aura, the uncontrolled and uncontrollable intru- of expressionist painting and the triumph
while even a painting by Rembrandt loses sion of reality, the absolutely unique and of photography-as-art. The museum has
its aura in the age of mechanical reprod- even magical quality not of the artist but embraced both of these phenomena with
uction. The withering away of the aura, of his subject. And that is perhaps why it equal enthusiasm, not to say voraciousness.
the dissociation of the work from the fabric seemed to him so misguided that photo-
of tradition, is an inevitable outcome graphs began, after the commercialization Little, I think, needs to be said about the
of mechanical reproduction. This is some- of the medium, to simulate the lost aura return to a painting of personal expression.
thing we have all experienced. We know, through the application of techniques imi- We see it everywhere we turn. The market-
for example, the impossibility of experienc- tative of those of painting. His example place is glutted with it. It comes in all
ing the aura of such a picture as the Mona was the gum bichromate process used in guises—pattern painting, new-image paint-
Lisa as we stand before it at the Louvre. pictorial photography. ing, neoconstructivism, neoexpressionism;
Its aura has been utterly depleted by the it is pluralist to be sure. But within its indi-
thousands of times we’ve seen its reproduc- Although it may at first seem that vidualism, this painting is utterly conform-
tion, and no degree of concentration will Benjamin lamented the loss of the aura, ist on one point: its hatred of photography.
restore its uniqueness for us. the contrary is in fact true. Reproduction’s Writing a manifesto-like text for the
“social significance, particularly in its most catalogue of her American Painting: The
It would seem, though, that if the withering positive form, is inconceivable,” wrote Fighties—that oracular exhibition staged
away of the aura is an inevitable fact of our Benjamin, “without its destructive cathar- in the fall of 1979 to demonstrate the
time, then equally inevitable are all those tic aspect, its liquidation of the traditional miraculous resurrection of painting—
projects to recuperate it, to pretend that value of the cultural heritage.”© That was Barbara Rose told us:
the original and the unique are still possi- for him the greatness of Atget: “He initi-
ble and desirable. And this is nowhere ated the liberation of the object from the The serious painters of the eighties are an
more apparent than in the field of photog- aura, which is the most incontestable extremely heterogeneous group—some
raphy itself, the very culprit of mechanical achievement of the recent school of pho- abstract, some representational. But they are
reproduction. tography.”7 “The remarkable thing about united on a sufficient number of critical issues
[Atget’s] pictures ... is their emptiness.”8 that it is possible to isolate them as a group.
Benjamin granted a presence or aura to They are, in the first place, dedicated to the
only a very limited number of photographs. This emptying operation, the depletion preservation of painting as a transcendental
These were photographs of the so-called of the aura, the contestation of the unique- high art, and an art of universal as opposed
primitive phase, the period prior to pho- ness of the work of art, has been acceler- to local or topical significance. Their aesthetic,
tography’s commercialization after the ated and intensified in the art of the past which synthesizes tactile with optical qualities,
1850s. He said, for example, that people two decades. From the multiplication of defines itselfinconscious opposition to pho-
in these early photographs “had an aura silkscreened photographic images in the tography and all forms of mechanical repro-
about them, a medium which mingled with works of Rauschenberg and Warhol to duction which seek to deprive the art work
their manner of looking and gave them a the industrially manufactured, repetitively of its unique “aura.” It is, in fact, the enhance-
plenitude and security.” This aura seemed structured works of the minimal sculptors, ment of this aura, through a variety of means,
to Benjamin to be a product of two things: everything in radical artistic practice that painting now self-consciously intends—
the long exposure time during which the seemed to conspire in that liquidation of either by emphasizing the artist’s hand, or
subject grew, as it were, into the images; traditional cultural values that Benjamin by creating highly individual visionary images
and the unique, unmediated relationship spoke of. And because the museum is that that cannot be confused either with reality
between the photographer who was “a institution which was founded upon just itself or with one another.”
technician of the latest school,” and his sit- those values, whose job it is to sustain those
ter, who was “a member of a class on the values, it has faced a crisis of considerable That this kind of painting should so clearly
ascendant, replete with an aura which pen- proportions. One symptom of that crisis see mechanical reproduction as the enemy
etrated to the very folds of his bourgeois is the way in which our museums, one after is symptomatic of the profound threat to
overcoat or bow-tie.”4 The aura in these another, around 1970, abdicated their inherited ideas (the only ideas known
photographs, then, is not to be found in responsibility toward contemporary artistic to this painting) posed by the photographic
the presence of the photographer in the practice and turned with nostalgia to the activity of postmodernism. But in this case
photograph in the way that the aura of the art that had previously been relegated it is also symptomatic of a more limited
painting is determined by the presence of to their storerooms. Revisionist art history and internecine threat: the one posed to
the painter’s unmistakable hand in his soon began to be vindicated by “revela- painting when photography itself suddenly
picture. Rather it is the presence of the tions” of the achievements of academic acquires an aura. Now it’s not only a ques-
subject, of what is photographed, “the tiny artists and minor figures of all kinds. tion of ideology; now it’s a real competition
spark ofchance, of the here and now, with for the acquisition budget and wall space
which reality has, as it were, seared the By the mid-1970s another, more serious of the museum.
character of the picture.” For Benjamin, symptom of the museum’s crisis appeared,
But how is it that photography has suddenly on that theme. But I do so here in order to other, a successful imitation of the first, was
had conferred upon it an aura? How has point out that the recuperation of the aura delegated to have relations with the world.
the plenitude of copies been reduced to the for photography would in fact subsume My first self remains at a distance, impassive,

scarcity of originals? And how do we know under the banner of subjectivity all of pho- ironical, and watching.!!
the authentic from its reproduction?!0 tography, the photography whose source
is the human mind and the photography Not only do we recognize this as a descrip-
Enter the connoisseur. But not the con- whose source is the world around us, the tion of something we already know—the
noisseur of photography, of whom the most thoroughly manipulated photo- primal scene—but our recognition might
type is Walter Benjamin, or, closer to us, graphic fictions and the most faithful tran- extend even further to the Moravia novel
Roland Barthes. Neither Benjamin’s scriptions of the real, the directorial and from which it has been lifted. For Levine’s
“spark of chance” nor Barthes’s “third the documentary, the mirrors and the win- autobiographical statement is only a string
meaning” would guarantee photography’s dows, Camera Work, in its infancy, Life in of quotations pilfered from others; and if
place in the museum. The connoisseur its heyday. But these are only the terms of we might think this is a strange way of writ-
needed for this job is the old-fashioned art style and mode of the agreed-upon spec- ing about one’s own working methods,
historian with his chemical analyses and, trum of photography-as-art. The restora- then perhaps we should turn to the work
more importantly, his stylistic analyses. tion of the aura, the consequent collecting it describes.
To authenticate photography requires all and exhibiting, does not stop there. It is
the machinery of art history and museol- extended to the carte-de-visite, the fashion At a recent exhibition, Levine showed six
ogy, with a few additions, and more than plate, the advertising shot, the anonymous photographs of a nude youth. They were
a few sleights of hand. To begin, there is, snap or polaroid. At the origin of every simply rephotographed from the famous
of course, the incontestable rarity of age, one there is an Artist and therefore each series by Edward Weston of his young son
the vintage print. Certain techniques, can find its place on the spectrum of Neil, available to Levine as a poster pub-
paper types, and chemicals have passed subjectivity. For it has long been a com- lished by the Witkin Gallery. According
out of use and thus the age of a print can monplace of art history that realism and to the copyright law, the images belong to
easily be established. But this kind of certi- expressionism are only matters of degree, Weston, or now to the Weston estate. I
fiable rarity is not what interests me, nor matters, that is, of style. think, to be fair, however, we might just as
its parallel in contemporary photographic well give them to Praxiteles, for if it is the
practice, the limited edition. What inter- The photographic activity of postmod- image that can be owned, then surely these
ests me is the subjectivization of photogra- ernism operates, as we might expect, in belong to classical sculpture, which would
phy, the ways in which the connoisseurship complicity with these modes of photogra- put them in the public domain. Levine has
of the photograph’s “spark of chance” is phy-as-art, but it does so only in order to said that, when she showed her photo-
converted into a connoisseurship of the subvert and exceed them. And it does so graphs to a friend, he remarked that they
photograph’s style. For now, it seems, we precisely in relation to the aura, not, how- only made him want to see the originals.
can detect the photographer’s hand after ever, to recuperate it, but to displace it, to “Of course,” she replied, “and the originals
all, except of course that it is his eye, his show that it too is now only an aspect of the make you want to see that little boy, but
unique vision. (Although it can also be his copy, not the original. A group of young when you see the boy, the art is gone.” For
hand; one need only listen to the partisans artists working with photography have the desire that is initiated by that represen-
of photographic subjectivity describe the addressed photography’s claims to original- tation does not come to closure around that
mystical ritual performed by the photogra- ity, showing those claims for the fiction they little boy, is not at all satisfied by him. The
pher in his darkroom.) are, showing photography to be always a desire of representation exists only insofar
representation, always-already-seen. Their as it never be fulfilled, insofar as the origi-
I realize of course that in raising the ques- images are purloined, confiscated, appro- nal always be deferred. It is only in the
tion of subjectivity I am revising the cen- priated, stolen. In their work, the original absence of the original that representation
tral debate in photography’s aesthetic cannot be located, it always deferred; even may take place. And representation takes
history, that between the straight and the the self which might have generated an place because it is always already there
manipulated print, or the many variations original is shown to be itself a copy. in the world as representation. It was, of
course, Weston himself who said that
Cindy Sherman; Untitled #66, 1980; color photograph; In a characteristic gesture, Sherrie Levine “the photograph must be visualized in full
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm); courtesy Metro Pictures begins a statement about her work with before the exposure is made.” Levine has
an anecdote that is very familiar: taken the master at his word and in so
doing has shown him what he really meant.
Since the door was only half closed, I got a The a priori Weston had in mind was not
jumbled view of my mother and father on the really in his mind at all; it was in the world,
bed, one on top of the other. Mortified, hurt, and Weston only copied it.
horror-struck, I had the hateful sensation of
having placed myself blindly and completely This fact is perhaps even more crucial in
in unworthy hands. Instinctively and without those series by Levine where that a priori
effort, I divided myself, so to speak, into two image is not so obviously confiscated
persons, of whom one, the real, the genuine from high culture—by which I intend both
one, continued on her own account, while the Weston and Praxiteles—but from the world

206 DOUGLAS CRIMP

itself, where nature poses as the antithesis Sherman’s photographs are all self- these ghosts of fiction. Focusing directly
of representation. Thus the images which portraits in which she appears in disguise on the commodity fetish, using the master
Levine has cut out of books of photographs enacting a drama whose particulars are tool of commodity fetishism of our time,
by Andreas Feininger and Elliot Porter withheld. This ambiguity of narrative par- Prince’s rephotographed photographs take
show scenes of nature that are utterly famil- allels the ambiguity of the self that is both on a Hitchcockian dimension: the commod-
iar. They suggest that Roland Barthes’s actor in the narrative and creator of it. For ity becomes a clue. It has, we might say,
description of the tense of photography though Sherman is literally self-created in acquired an aura, only now it is a function
as the “having been there” be interpreted these works, she is created in the image of not of presence but of absence, severed
in a new way. The presence that such pho- already-known feminine stereotypes; her from an origin, from an originator, from
tographs have for us is the presence of déja self is therefore understood as contingent authenticity. In our time, the aura has
vu, nature as already having been seen, upon the possibilities provided by the cul- become only a presence, which is to say,
nature as representation. ture in which Sherman participates, not a ghost.
by some inner impulse. As such, her pho-
If Levine’s photographs occupy a place tographs reverse the terms of art and auto- Notes
on that spectrum of photography-as-art, it biography. They use art not to reveal the This paper was first presented at the colloquium
would be at the farthest reaches of straight artist’s true self, but to show the self as “Performance and Multidisciplinarity:
photography, not only because the photo- an imaginary construct. There is no real Postmodernism” sponsored by Parachute in
graphs she appropriates operate within Cindy Sherman in these photographs; Montreal, October 9-11, 1980.
that mode but because she does not manip- there are only the guises she assumes. And 1. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October, no. 8
ulate her photographs in any way; she she does not create these guises; she sim- (Spring 1979), 75-88.
merely, and literally, takes photographs. ply chooses them in the way that any of 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the
At the opposite end of that spectrum is the us do. The post of authorship is dispensed Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
photography which is self-consciously com- with not only through the mechanical Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York,
posed, manipulated, fictionalized, the so- means or making the image, but through Schocken Books, 1969, p. 221.
called directorial mode, in which we find the effacement of any continuous, essen- 3. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of
such auteurs of photography as Duane tial persona or even recognizable visage Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen,
Michals and Les Krims. The strategy of this in the scenes depicted. vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972), 18.
mode is to use the apparent veracity 4. Ibid., p. 19.
of photography against itself, creating The aspect of our culture which is most Sbllaitelyieb TW
one’s fictions through the appearance of a thoroughly manipulative of the roles we 6. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” p. 221.
seamless reality into which has been woven play is, of course, mass advertising, whose 7. Benjamin, “Short History,” p. 20.
a narrative dimension. Cindy Sherman’s photographic strategy is to disguise the 8. Ibid., p. 21.
photographs function within this mode, directorial mode as a form of documentary. 9. Barbara Rose, American Painting: The Eighties,
but only in order to expose an unwanted Richard Prince steals the most frank and Buffalo, Thoren-Sidney Press, 1979, n.p.
dimension of that fiction, for the fiction banal of these images, which register, in the 10. The urgency of these questions first became
Sherman discloses is the fiction of the self. context of photography-as-art, as a kind of clear to me as I read the editorial prepared by
Her photographs show that the supposed shock. But ultimately their rather brutal Annette Michelson for October, no. 5, A Special
autonomous and unitary self out of which familiarity gives way to strangeness, as an Issue on Photography (Summer 1978), 3-5.
those other “directors” would create their unintended and unwanted dimension of fic- 11. Sherrie Levine, unpublished statement, 1980.
fictions is itself nothing other than a dis- tion reinvades them. By isolating, enlarging,
continuous series of representations, and juxtaposing fragments of commercial
copies, fakes. images, Prince points to their invasion by

Richard Prince; Untitled (single man again), 1977-1978; Ektacolor photograph; Richard Prince, Untitled (three men looking in the same direction) (detail),
20 x 24 in. (51 x 61 cm); courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York 1978 (cat. no. 120)
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Left:
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974 Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974
(cat. no. 93) (cat. no. 92)
Gordon Matta- Clark, Splitting: Exterior,
c. 1974 (cat. no. 94)

210 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 eA ce er

Ana Mendieta, Untitled

(Facial Cosmetic Variations), 1972/1997
(cat. no. 95)
Mario Merz, Fibonaccio 1202, 1970
(cat. no. 96)
Right: details

212 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, c. 1975
(cat. no. 102)

214 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 je

¥
if a
ae

j 4:

‘a ‘

Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, c. 1970

(cat. no. 100)
Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, c. 1975
(cat. no. 104)

216 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 Made wiate
ta titan
be

LapsOS
See es

SIRS a
a

Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, c. 1972

(cat. no. 101)
 Thi
7
7

FIP LE
f
4 if ,
?
MhA
Adiitest f
HE)

’ ye
Ble

} :
y
Mh,
YW,

a
7
ve:

dj
>
aA
—— et
SAS SSS
SS

1966-196 1970 (und er

c La at. no. 106)
sruce
Bruce } Naum
arn an, Waxi
é ng Hot
)966 196 7 1970
1970 (under
( } cat. no. 106)
Bruce Nauman, Eating My Words,
1966-1967/1970 (under cat. no. 106)

220 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 Ce te
enw t
a
¥

e
aee
SOLOS
RAD

se
TIS
xdRe
he
arg

ITITTRT rereTett:
4

Bruce Nauman,
Bound to Fail, 1966-1967/1970
(under cat. no. 106)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Bruce Nauman, Finger Touch with Mirrors,
1966 —-1967/1970 (under cat. no. 106)

222 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Bruce Nauman, Coffee Thrown away
Because It Was Too Cold, 1966—1967/1970
(under cat. no. 106)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 |

|i
}
sf

Bruce Nauman, My Name as Though It

Were Written on the Surface of the Moon:
Bbbbbbbbbbrrrrrmrrruuuuuuuuuucccececcc
ceeeeeceeee, 1967 (cat. no. 107)

224 JHELAST PICTURE SHOW

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Hélio Oiticica and Neville d’Almeida, Hélio Oiticica and Neville d’Almeida,
03/CC 5 (Hendrix War, Cosmococa 07/CCS (Hendrix War, Cosmococa
Programa-in-Progress), 1973/2003 Programa-in-Progress), 1973/2003
(cat. no. 108) (cat. no. 110)

226 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

| jimi hendrix:
war heroes
 READING POSITION FOR SECOND DEGREE BURN
“Stage I, Stage II. Book, skin, solar energy. Exposure time: 5 hours. Jones Beach. 1970
Reon Saline Se

Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for

Second Degree Burn, 1970 (cat. no. 112)

228 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 GALLERY TRANSPLANT. 1969.
Floor specifications Gallery #3, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, transplanted to
Jersey City, New Jersey. Surface: Snow, dirt, gravel. Duration: 4 weeks.

bibtiotnees

Dennis Oppenheim, Gallery Transplant,

1969 (cat. no. 111)
 a
Taner aee*
ee Lies
Pee ones

Load
oe ee
vate

%
sane y
Lore Re UE SY
eee!
cna
av ene
vy eee
tycated

vaet
rere)
or eee
*

wi aoe
Sore
Seato™
a0
¥

renee
ornees
oeeee®
a
were re

v4
yaneeeese:
a8 aan

paore
CT aeeees

Se eee’
aeweeee*
oavre

7ae . vawer®

+
yeeeere®
eonee®

va seeete
syareesee
Lae
poses esneee
Sener ete
-
Souaer sores
ee ats os
Sasi 222555
— at tisashnts
3330233TSeest
til 3 sinners eee 3 , TS TS TAee
sere s >

Giulj Lae
iulio Paolini, Proust, 1968 (cat. no. 113)

230 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 oe 1232 CONE Ia.
Se VAS yee nc reset itenaneee
Seore
pryyed 3 or
:

rT has
arate
eanoreso sty
ry
+

sere
acaver
aoree
aeoer®
wray
yracoeree
bee
oo

eeaves or” eee

44a
2eere

ats
vecoeees
7

eeet
29
+0
eeee
par

aero
aeenee™

veueeeet

eet
ee

eaeeeet’
saegvers?

aneneet
aeee

phase? . co 0o*
Peeeeent ooo?
eee?
bee Seacoast
ee

acre
somese?
eoret?
eee?

°°
a reeceree

<eaoeF
teaeert
. aeer
peeeenet

erent
eeoreceeeet
oreo

wot
Bsleaesee
 ete | g
EMMALi gg
BER,Se Eve:
ee i =
8 cee

Giuseppe Penone, Svolgere la propria pelle

(To display one’s skin), 1971 (cat. no. 114)
Right: details

232 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

UMBC IPR ss Sa se
BMPR YW See od a
mae
iN
TSS st eel hl
PF oi, Tere
i
| a
 POR MY IMPERFECTION
1 CAN FINALLY Say THIS TO YOU. | AM MAINTAINS AN UNBRIOGEABLE
PROTECTED AND STRENGTHENED BY MY CHASM BETWEEN US; IT PROTECTS US
INADEQUACY. 1 AM SECDRE SMLGLY BOTH FROM EACH OTHER, BUT MOST
IMPORTANTLY, ME FROM You. THE DE-
SECORE, FOR MY PERSONAL FLAWS
WILL CONSTITUTE A MORE THAN ADE- FECT | HAVE IN MIND 18 THAT | CAN =
QUATE DEFENSE AGAINST WHATE NOT LOVE You, Witt NEVER BE
YOUR RESPONSE MIGHT BETO ASLE TO LOVE YOu, WHERE THERE
WHAT | HAVETO SAY TO MIGHT HAVE BEEN FEELING,
THERE \S ONLY IMPERSONAL

qus Wyte Bug: VYou Liter), Tne Mytnic Being: VYoultec),t:

Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being:

I/You (Her) (details), 1974 (cat. no. 116)

234 THE LAST PICTI JRE SHOW

 NOW l-HAVE LEARNEDTO
RIVE ON IT, | MUST, IN ORDER BUT YOU TOOK ME OFF GUARD
TO PROTECT MYSELF AND THUS | ALIEN- ONCE, AND IT WAS VERY PAINFUL,
ATE YOU IN TORN. OUR FEMININITY ITSELF ( WILL NEVER GIVE You THE OPPORTU-
CAN NEVER AGAIN BEA POINT OF CONTACT NiTy TO COTHAT AGAIN. my DEFENSES
BETWEEN US. | PERCEIVE THAT NOW, HAVE SOUDIFIED) THERE'S NOTHING | CAN DO,
YOU ARE NO MORE CAPABLEOF TRUST- (T SICKENS ME TO REAUZE THAT \ HAVE
ING ME THAN | AM OF TRUSTING YOU, GROWN INCAPABLE OF OVERCOMING
THE
AND | CRy FOR OUR MUTUAL IMPOV= DISTANCE BETWEEN US. | HATE YOU
ERISHMENT: THAT, AT LEAST, WE FOR DOING THIS TO ME, AND MYSELF
CAN SHARE, FOR ALLOWING IT TO

Tue mythic Bee: 1/You(HEr), 7 The my Huc Beug: '/You (Her), 10.
Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit (details),
1971 (cat. no. 115)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Sigmar Polke, Polkes Peitsche
(Polke’s whip), 1968 (cat. no. 117)

238 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 ar Polke, Bamboowange lich
Zollstockstern (Bamboo pole
Top: Bottom:
Richard Prince, Untitled (three men Richard Prince, Untitled (three women
looking in the same direction), 1978 looking in the same direction), 1980-1984
(cat. no. 120) (cat. no. 121)

240 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 Richard Prince, Untitled (living rooms),
1977 (cat. no. 119)

242 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Richard Prince, Untitled (gang),
1982-1984 (cat. no. 122
Sherrie Levine

Statement (2002)
Originally published in Isabelle Grau,
interview with Sherrie Levine, Texte zur
Kunst 12, no. 46 (2002): 84-85.

When I began this work, I considered

myself a still-life artist—with the bookplate
as my subject. Iwanted to make pictures
that maintained their reference to the
bookplates. And I wanted my pictures
to have a material presence that was as
interesting as, but quite different from,
the originals.

I wanted to make pictures that contra-

dicted themselves. I wanted to put one pic-
ture on top of another so that there were
times when both pictures disappear and
other times when they were both manifest.
That vibration is basically what the work
was about for me—that space in the middle
where there’s no picture, rather an empti-
ness, an oblivion.

You build energy by the interaction

between things. One and one don’t always
make two, but sometimes five or eight or
ten, depending on the number of interac-
tions you can get going in a situation. Like
the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally
fond of that kind of precision that creates
movement: A hot dog walks into a bar and
asks for a drink. The bartender says, I’m
sorry, Sir, we don’t serve food here.

Certainly there is a contentious and oedi-

pal aspect to my work. But I don’t think it’s
useful to see dominant culture as mono-
lithic or only patriarchal. I’d rather see it as
polyphonic with unconscious voices, which
may be at odds with one another. If Iam
attentive to these voices, then maybe I can
collaborate with some of them to create
something almost new.

244 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Barbara Kruger

Incorrect (1982)
Originally published in Effects, no. 1 (summer
1983); reprinted in Barbara Kruger, Remote
Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of
Appearances (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993),
220-221.

Photography has saturated us as spectators

from its inception amidst a mingling of
laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its
current status as propagator of conven-
tion, cultural commodity, and global
hobby. Images are made palpable, ironed
flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the
seemingly real through the representative.
And it is this representative, through its
appearance and cultural circulation, that
detonates issues and raises questions.
Is it possible to construct a way of looking
which welcomes the presence of pleasure
and escapes the deceptions of desire?
How do we, as women and as artists, navi-
gate through the marketplace that con-
structs and contains us? I see my work as
a series of attempts to ruin certain repre-
sentations and to welcome a female specta-
tor into the audience of men. If this work
is considered “incorrect,” all the better, for
my attempts aim to undermine that singu-
lar pontificating male voiceover which
“correctly” instructs our pleasure and his-
tories or lack of them. I am wary of the
seriousness and confidence of knowledge.
I am concerned with who speaks and who
is silent: with what is seen and what is not.
I think about inclusions and multiplicities,
not oppositions, binary indictments, and
warfare. I’m not concerned with pitting
morality against immorality, as “morality”
can be seen as a compendium of allowances
inscribed within patriarchy, within its
repertoire of postures and legalities. But
then, of course, there’s really no “within”
patriarchy because there’s certainly no
“without” patriarchy. I am interested in
works that address these material condi-
tions of our lives: that recognize the uses
and abuses of power on both an intimate
and global level. I want to speak, show,
see, and hear outrageously astute questions
and comments. I want to be on the sides
of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt
the dour certainties of pictures, property,
and power.
Richard Prince

The 8-Track Photograph

(1977-1978)

Excerpts from unpublished artist’s notebooks

c. 1977-1978.

: Ae
The 8-Track Photograph ((eat Tha or Jack )
1. original copy
2. re-photographed copy
3. angled copy
4. cropped copy
5. focused copy
6. out-of-focused copy
7. black and white copy
8. color copy

Bach track (or reproduction), is a program. Hach program

a code. These codes can be produced with commercially avail-
able materials from commercially available sources. The dis-—
play of any program or combination of programs can be selected
quickly because of availability. This availability always
exists due to each programs independence from other programs.
It is never a question of addition or subraction, since each
track is atweys available—+e—program. The primary advantage
is that the compoyants of the picture exist on bankable tracks.
Whatever state the\picture finally exists in.... the states
that helnedito.maka-the photograph exist, continue to exist
until called for again.

Seo
to

246 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 THe age 2 re
eee en Rey Be ae
Move, delete, menu, cursor, keypad, commanding the picture, picture-display,
stored, memory, the picture can be ears Vinee cae rotated, enlarged,

enchanced, eliminated.... J wwee Chlley Cov Ww

waters A ae ar
i

there is no more air-brush, paint, aritsts knieves, rubber cement

pre-plating functions such as cutting, pasting, stipping in are now preformed

electronically. ‘Mh eked yams -

IF A PICTURE WAS ONCE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS, WNE_SQUARE INCH OF AN IMAGE IS © Um,
WORTH #%2¥ 360,000 BYTES OF CUMPUTER STORAGE SPACE,t+ 2(aciw «mee Oe* er sae ~ kegs

the Hell Chromacom turns images into numbers

Lots sey Re pT
eb
Leen
pore
you see the action on the monitor (Telepremter ¢
electoronic scissors

Right now esstentially what you have is the apportunity to actually see what

your picture could look like before you committ it to paper

—=_=_

TYPING PICTURES
re
*.
Oe347 eees
</ oe es |
WRITING PHOTOGRAPHS
losy » urlhr
ure clverd
The ( , Peve. one =— W 2 Ceeres, wre
\ae ' ok,

wD Swe Nrod s
tm Te ob) cet 4) i dogust
(
+ | . ile

a] ire? t L de slegven 4O- nacrety <

i) os Te Rug he o

—
le hth tte lieben) ie
ee e

CAM IAR OS 4)
nee Tee wevet

a “he emuteen ratrice

«
ee Cees \o
Pe
\~U~— TH ceak & rege i

<
fosen pc gt
On
Rea pened
ear .

con ae anylends | caclesegedicnie re

Be e
Ce A
ters A
a ae he (pmileLion 5

ec
Richard Prince

The Velvet Well

(1983)

Originally published as “The Velvet Well: An

Excerpt from Why | Go to the Movies Alone,”
Effects, no. 1 (summer 1983): 7.

The first time he saw her, he saw her in

a photograph. He had seen her before,
at her job, but there, she didn’t come across
or measure up anywhere near as well as
she did in her picture. Behind her desk she
was too real to look at, and what she did
in daily life could never guarantee the effect
of what usually came to be received from an
objective resemblance. He had to have her
on paper, a material with a flat and seam-
less surface . . . a physical location which
could represent her resemblance all in one
place ...a place that had the chances of
looking real, but a place that didn’t have
any specific chances of being real.

His fantasies, and right now, the one of

her, needed satisfaction. And satisfaction,
at least in part, seemed to come about by
ingesting, perhaps “perceiving,” the fiction
her photograph imagined.

She had to be condensed and inscribed

in a way that his expectations of what he
wanted her to be, (and what he wanted
to be too) could at least be possibly, even
remotely, realized. Overdetermination
was part of his plan and in a strange way,
the same kind of psychological after-life
was what he loved, sometimes double
loved about her picture.

It wasn’t that he wanted to worship her.

And it wasn’t that he wanted to be taxed
and organized by a kind of uncritical devo-
tion. But her image did seem to have a
concrete and actual form .. . an incarnate
power ...a power that he could willingly
and easily contribute to. And what he
seemed to be able to do, either in front
or away from it, was pass time in a particu-
lar bodily state, an alternating balance
which turned him in and out and made
him see something about a life after death.

248 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Molly Nesbit 1959, when they were children, at the end ties restaurant-collective now best known
of the decade that had seen and loved six as the brainstorm of Gordon Matta-Clark,
seasons of J Love Lucy. Sirk’s film showed when the police padlocked it temporarily.
Without Walls the danger that lay in wait for every success With the accumulation of friendship,
and star. Salle took Sirk’s warning back to collaboration, and exchange, none of
Molly Nesbit is professor of art history at his studio and wrote a set of statements their work was completely individual.
Vassar College and a contributing editor of designed to set out the issues for his own Call it instead independent.
Artforum. She was cocurator, with Hans Ulrich work: “The pictures present an improvised
Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, of Utopia Station view of life as normal. Life is shown as we What to put where? Sherrie Levine would
at the 2003 Venice Biennale. She is the author think we see it but in fact never do. The put seventy-five pairs of small shoes, sized
of Atget’s Seven Albums (Yale University Press, pictures imitate life to find a way out.”3 for a child but styled for a man, on sale
1992) and Their Common Sense (Black Dog, There was New York. at the Three Mercer Street Store. That
2000). This essay was originally published, in she had found them at a California job lot
slightiy different form, as “Bright Light, Big City: They had all come to a city fabled for its sale hardly mattered. Artists could work
The '80s without Walls,” in Artforum 41 (April art. They settled themselves downtown, through any economy, the thrift economy
2003): 184-189, 245, 248. into the new center of activity in SoHo, and too. The money economy proved more
took stock. Around them the entire econ- difficult. She made a series of silhouettes
omy had fallen into the grip of a deep and taken from the penny, the quarter, and
slowly grinding recession. There were no the new half-dollar coin, painting the presi-
In Buffalo, in art school, Cindy Sherman galleries coming to call, no sense that a dents so that they faced each other, flatly
sat down in a photo booth and gave the person wanting to perform great art experi- fluorescent on small sheets of graph paper.
camera a look. She came up under Lucille ments could expect to make a living from She called them Sons and Lovers. She hap-
Ball’s face so successfully that her own face them, much less obtain general recogni- pily parodied D. H. Lawrence. Douglas
subsided. Most people her age were swim- tion. Louise Lawler, who had come to the Crimp included them in the group show
ming in another direction, preferring the city earlier from Cornell, could have told he did at Artists Space in the fall of 1977.
pond of their own nonconformity. Hers was them this.4 These conditions would require He called it Pictures. Pictures also an-
a different, though still contrary position: inventing the space for their art. They nounced a twenty-six-second film loop by
the negative of your negative is my Lucy. had come to a place without walls. Jack Goldstein called The Jump, in which
This idea had led her first toward elabo- he had altered some stock footage so that
rately unpredictable appearances at parties. Spaces were being invented, spaces one saw only a human silhouette filled with
Her boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, for living, spaces for eating, spaces for a light effect repeatedly run, jump, and
suggested she combine them and her work. nightlife. Inside and outside were indistin- dive, piking stylishly off the end of an
Was he proposing an imitation of life? They guishable. If their day jobs were necessary unseen board into perfect darkness that,
moved to New York together in the sum- and various, bottom-feeding along the like a psychedelic reflex, swallowed it
mer of 1977, the summer of the blackout commercial art hierarchies or teaching whole. Crimp put it first in his catalogue
and the string of murders by a man calling nursery school or cooking in restaurants essay.° In hindsight The Jump looks like a
himself the Son of Sam. or sitting fairly dutifully at a reception pure description of a professional situation.
desk, their own free time merged.
That same year David Salle, who had come Collective life led to collective art life. Cindy Sherman; Untitled, 1975; sepia-toned black-and-
white photograph; 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm); courtesy
to New York from CalArts in 1975, took The place names were generic but memo-
Metro Pictures, New York
a job teaching drawing at the Hartford rable: Artists Space, the Kitchen, Franklin
School of Art. He brought various friends Furnace, 112 Greene Street, Printed
there to help, among them Sherrie Levine. Matter, the Performing Garage. One
She herself had arrived from Madison, via of Louise Lawler’s place-mat pictures had
Berkeley, having had her own experience to be rescued from Food, the early seven-
of work and play. She had made a series
of short Super 8 movies. One of them Still from Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959),
with Lana Turner and John Gavin
let six cowgirl candles burn down to
a puddle, weeping, she noted later, like
a country-western song, but in silence.!
Bruce Nauman, when he saw this, felt the
result was boring. She took this as reason
enough to destroy the whole series.

Permanent silence seemed not to be fatal.

Levine taught a course in Hartford on the
work of Douglas Sirk. She and David Salle
plunged themselves into the aesthetics of
melodrama. They fixed on Sirk’s /mitation
ofLife.2 Imitation of Life had appeared in
Two years later Artforum sent out a received idea into the devil’s plaything. the vastness, has a history that is and is not
questionnaire asking artists to address Play the infinity itself backwards. These an art history, that is and is not American.
the change in the general professional were thoughtful, not adolescent moves.
situation or, as it diplomatically put it, the The scholar of this vastness, however, was Malraux too was concerned with the con-
change in the audience.’ Assuming, Vito someone else, whom Salle had neither temporary predicament; he had, however,
Acconci said, that the gallery could still be met nor read. It is difficult to address art’s introduced his law of metamorphosis dif-
considered the space of operations, one inherited relationship to the expanse of ferently—by recounting the plight of the
had two options: either to use the gallery the world without citing and turning to the masterpiece, uprooted from its human
like language, as a sign, and for all intents scholar. In English his magnum opus is time and place and left drained, bleak,
and purposes turn it into a book, or to use known as The Voices of Silence. alone, in the museum. He wrote of a dou-
the gallery as the space where art itself ble displacement being made by the newest
occurred while someone else watched. In The Voices of Silence was written by André act of preservation, what he termed the
the 1970s he had taken the second option, Malraux during a fifteen-year period that Museum without Walls being organized
which meant that the gallery then became included the Second World War. Though by default in a mind overstimulated by the
something else, “a community meeting- considered a classic by the 1970s, it was cir- expanding archive of the photographic
place, a place where a community could be culating mostly as an echo in the work of reproduction. He saw a great threat. It
formed, where a community could be later authors. George Kubler’s Shape of came from the formalisms and profession-
called to order, called to a particular pur- Time, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and alism of a modern art culture keeping art
pose.” The community was understood to Brian O’Doherty’s series of Artforum arti- from its chief and ancient business, the
be an art community. “The art public was, cles that would become Inside the White confrontation with the totality of experi-
in effect, a substitute for “community,” he Cube all showed the effects of Malraux’s ence and fate. True arts and cultures,
noted, “but, at least, this was a way to work epic, as did Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Malraux went on to say, put man into a
in a public rather than in front of a written soon after The Voices of Silence relation with duration and sometimes with
public.”’ In 1976, in the pages ofArts appeared. Barthes had taken Malraux’s law eternity, “and make of him something
Magazine, David Salle had already paid of metamorphosis and from it developed other than the most-favored denizen of a
Acconci the supreme compliment of calling his concept of myth, that peculiar, bour- universe founded on absurdity.” “No cul-
him the anthropologist of his own universe. geois type of speech made by leeching a ture has ever delivered man from death,”
sign and corrupting its meaning. He had he wrote a few pages later, “but the great
The terrible scale of the world outside this taken his examples from the Americanized cultures have sometimes managed to trans-
universe, outside the galleries too, the mass culture then pouring into France, form his outlook on it, and almost always
infinity that drove its wedge into every little epitomized by myths like Greta Garbo’s to justify its existence. ... What the tragic
certainty, struck Salle early. He tried to face.!0 The problem under consideration art of modern times is trying to do away
locate the artist: “Never underestimate here, how to find forms that can address with is the gag of lies with which civilization
either the seriousness of ambivalence or
the malaise of the vastness, or the attempt Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #48, 1979 (cat. no. 152)
at vastness, of scholarship which is not
really invoked to explain anything, but only
used to keep going. You take ten people,
get each one to tell a joke (usually not
funny at all). Someone comes along, tells
the joke badly—you laugh your head off.
This is why Vito Acconci is an artist.”? This
was a way to begin, a way to become a fig-
ure in the vastness. Take steps, games,
awkward jokes, black humor. Turn the

Jack Goldstein; The Jump, 1978; still from a color

film in 16 mm; 26 seconds; courtesy 1301 PE,
Los Angeles

250 MOLLY NESBIT

stifles the voice of destiny.” Art was meant went down at the movies. They would other, a double, that reveals and pinpoints
to bear this kind of knowledge, “a limbo find their rhetoric of form there. the shadows, reflections, the mirrors. The
of negations,” Malraux concluded.!! This double wakens when the body sleeps, it is
was the darkness, the danger, that still This choice came heavy with implications. freed and becomes ‘spirit’ or ghost when
greeted the young artist. The movies had inherited the old social the body no longer wakes up. It survives
role of the theater. Like the theater, they the mortal. The gods will separate them-
At some point while revising the final chap- were central to the mediation of long-term selves from the common dead to become
ters in 1951, Malraux watched a new storm social processes that had for more than five the great immortals. The double lies at
of metamorphosis come. The ghost of hundred years been pulling populations the origin of the gods.”2° Modern life, he
Hegel had been haunting him all along, into cities. Their overwhelming importance noted, had forced the double to atrophy
helping him chart the rhythms of metamor- was a given. By the end of the nineteenth and paste itself flat against the body’s skin;
phosis in the vastness and see the fluctua- century Nietzsche could lean without com- it has become our “role,” he said; all dual-
tions moving necessarily into negativity in ment on the maskers’ trope as he casti- ity had been submerged, forced inside.
order to make any progress, and the gated his age, reserving the full weight of The star had the power to revive the
specter kept striking its low chords off- his scorn for those who fell under the spell archaic force of the double and let it live
stage. Remember Hegel? “The History of of the banal pressure to take on a given elsewhere. Life being more than a hall
the World is not the theatre of happiness,” role until it became instinct. Those intent of coats, or gloves. This was the life being
Hegel had intoned. “Periods of happiness upon success, Nietzsche remarked, had set up for imitation in 1977. It was hardly
are blank pages in it, for they are periods had to become skilled players, had cut their superficial or conceptually thin. It was a
of harmony—periods when the antithesis coat according to the available cloth and life to uncover and discover. For the time
is in abeyance.”!2 How not to hear Hegel had adapted to every shift of circumstance being, walls were secondary.
in the back of Malraux’s mind, lecturing and wind to such a degree that they had
on the philosophy of history?! become the coat themselves, if it had not After arriving in New York, Cindy
already become them.!8 In the twentieth Sherman and Robert Longo went one
Yet Hegel had given Malraux the direction century things changed slightly. One now day to David Salle’s loft and there saw,
to go looking for the future. The quantum became the coat, the same instinctual coat, spread around, photos spirited out of the
change he was witnessing, Malraux with the help of a mirror. archive of the pulp magazine publisher
thought, as Hegel had, might be linked to where Salle had a day job. There lay cheap
the birth of an American culture, which he It would not take long for the new adver- pictures of soft-porn starlets posing and
had described as the home of an extremely tising industry to claim the mirror image exposing. Sherman saw them enacting pic-
efficient publicity descended in fact from and produce new mechanisms for social ture stories, little novellas, and she took
one of painting’s traditions and “making and commercial identification. Every day the idea back to her own work with charac-
for its canned goods a Museum without Hegel’s “automatic self-mirroring activity ters. It was no longer possible for her to
Walls of foodstuffs.”!4 Owing to the Cold of consciousness” found practical appli-
War, however, Malraux could not yet pre- cation.!9 All kinds of thinkers and artists Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6, 1977
dict much. Would the changes in the twen- could readily see a reflection’s central (cat. no. 135)

tieth century spring from the final triumph importance. In some cases, as with the psy-
of Russian communism or even from the choanalyst Jacques Lacan, a mirror alone
resurrection of Europe?!5 Malraux did set the development of human subjectivity
not commit himself. But now we see that into motion. When in the mid-1950s the
he was announcing the new priorities that sociologist Edgar Morin wrote of the cin-
Barthes would analyze and that would, ema’s great attraction, he tracked the par-
a decade later in Fluxus and Pop, produce allel movement of the star’s life in his or
the massive breakdown of the hierarchies her roles and the self-consciousness of the
that had kept commercial art and its forms ordinary person: “the ‘T’ is first of all an
separate, at least theoretically, from the
noble aesthetic pursuits. We have been Cindy Sherman; Untitled #66, 1980; color photograph;
schooled in the literature chronicling this 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm); courtesy Metro Pictures,
New York
collapse.!6 Let us say only that by the 1970s
the irresolution of history itself was appar-
ent in New York. The term postmodern
was not needed to see this. Generically
speaking, no walls. Institutionally speaking,
few walls. Any and all media were avail-
able. Stories were shattering and rising.
The youth cultures multiplying and mutat-
ing added momentum and pulse.'” Young
artists coming to the city found an unusu-
ally open theater of operations that found
its physical equivalent every time the lights
imagine personifying a star; nor did she Her characters kept a degree of this blank- be possible to pry a person from her shell?
experiment with her characters on the ness, of a reflection that seemed incom- Sherman kept her work at one remove
street. The street was already too full pletely bleached, its roots somehow still from stardom, aspiring to a life rather than
of people in their camouflage, New York showing a darkness that was not a color. imitating it exactly, working loosely with
being a city where an everyday theater the lesser lights.24 The first results were
of the self was viewed as both normal She dressed herself in clothes from thrift shown at Artists Space in the fall of 1978
and necessary, a Nietzschean protection. shops. This let her pictures cut time two in a group show curated by Janelle Reiring.
Sherman began to make imitation film ways: fifties and sixties dresses could look There she shared a space with Louise
stills of herself in poses, the first six pic- old and new because of the contemporary Lawler, Christopher d’Arcangelo, and
tures showing the same blonde starlet aesthetic of thrift. This too was a thought- Adrian Piper.?5
at different points. “The role-playing was ful move. Thrift culture was being
intended to make people become aware embraced in the 1970s as an antidote, the That year Lawler made her own one-time
of how stupid roles are, a lot of roles,” refusal of commercial fashion and its dic- character experiment disguised as Mata
she said later, “but since it’s not all that tate to imitate; those who wore thrift were Hari for a book cover.*° For Artists Space,
serious, perhaps that’s more the moral to living simply, closer to the ground, using however, she abandoned the figure com-
it, not to take anything too seriously.”?! the old coat as a badge of alienation. pletely and instead used two lights to break
She let her starlet go forth as a baby doll, “My ‘stills’ were about the fakeness of apart the givens of figure, picture, and the-
face ready for the world but otherwise role-playing,” Sherman said, “as well ater. The scene was extreme. There was a
undressed, flopped on a bed, paralyzed as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ spotlight glaring inside and a pink search-
by a thought that seemed to be crossing audience who would mistakenly read the light shining outside. On the empty wall
her mind very slowly. The light overhead images as sexy.”2? She might as well have hung a borrowed painting of a racehorse
shone evenly. Her hand mirror was dra- said, “Under my cloak, the king is a joke,” for whom all bets were off a long time ago.
matically thrown aside. Was another image the line Cervantes used to begin the tale There was no race. The bright lights took
coming to mind as a better alternative? of Don Quixote.*3 These were jokes to lean over everything. “You are standing in your
on and to drink to. Someone somewhere own shoes,” Lawler says now. You have
Later Sherman took her shots and her was always laughing her head off. Sherrie walked into a situation that has rearranged
characters one by one. She arrived at them Levine’s shoes made similar points. your own world and made you well aware
by poring over books about the movie idols of it.2”7 In other words, you as an image are
of her childhood, unfocusing her memory Neither small shoes nor film stills offered gone. The room was flooded, but there was
and trying from that blurred point to the recipe for freedom, but they did show neither an image nor the reflection of an
embody the increasingly distant reflection. a woman opening a space for herself in the image. Light moved the ground without
She thought of her face as a blank canvas. narrower spectrum of her choice. Might it becoming the ground. On other occasions
Lawler let matters go completely dark. In
Louise Lawler; A Movie Will Be Shown without a Picture, 1979; Aero Theater, Santa Monica, California; Santa Monica in 1979, she arranged for a
courtesy the artist
midnight screening at a local movie the-
ater. On the marquee it was advertised as
A Movie without a Picture, and it was just
that, The Misfits, shown with the lights in
the projector out, voices rising and falling
away, but always voices without silence.

The work in the place with few walls had

pushed them to concentrate on the defini-
tion of the individual figure, its silhouette,
its limits, its surface and interior business.
This had led them to see the vastness in

Louise Lawler; untitled installation at Artists Space,

New York, 1978; courtesy the artist

252 MOLLY NESBIT

the figure itself, a vastness for which there this work on the figure by invoking critical something always held away from you, suc-
would be no single pictorial equivalent, categories derived from the act of making cessively distanced, and that inversion of
no single sign, only approximations that in one picture imitate another form or pic- intention makes sense if you see the aes-
their work became even more approximate ture—the photographic, the index, the thetic as something which is really about
as the different layers of a figure were copy, the allegory, the myth—in order loss and longing rather than completion.”*!
explored. The light effects native to mass to bring this work into line with the new So much for words. Salle pulled the images
culture became the artist’s scalpel; the critique of representation that was arriving off the screens and set them into dulled
same light effects gave these artists their from Europe.?? In the 1970s both art criti- arrangements on canvas to make a series of
material: spotlights; floodlights; fluores- cism and art history were experiencing paintings where mostly undressed women
cent pigment; overhead, slide, and rear a change that would affect the way they were smoking. J Can Even Personify, one
projectors were all put to work. These light posed the most basic questions of aesthet- of them claimed, as if the figure were a per-
effects did not coalesce into a code of ics. The crisis and expansion that ensued son. She was painted in rough red outline,
shapes and forms, or settle into someone’s produced yet another set of ramifications thick like a lipstick; around her, like fig-
definition of a medium. They overstepped intellectually, but for the most part the new ments of someone else’s imagination, gray
their old function as modifiers. The picture New York art criticism was concerned not charcoal figures floated in and out, like
of the figure was dissolving into a multiplic- with the imitation of life, but only with imi- ash. Light here had been stubbed out.
ity, a limbo of quasi-negativity from which tation. One can see why. The imitation of The group was shown at the new Nosei-
it would not be rescued, only bathed. It did life in the work of Sherman, Salle, Levine, Weber/Gagosian gallery space at the same
not seem to be attached to a new meaning. and Lawler was difficult, and not because time as the installation at the Kitchen.
it was theory driven. It had become an
Light effects were being revealed as effects. imitation overtaken by light, the identifi- The paintings and those that followed
The figure was being revealed as another able light of the movies and the stranger were much criticized for being misogynist,
effect, a social character. For their figures, reflected lights observable in people on the as if they were people, perhaps because
these artists often relied upon images that street. A social light was leaking and flood- they were speaking the formal language
they had found, reusing them, refilling ing out of these pictures. They seemed by which people recognized other people.
them partly sometimes or lifting them to request nonpictorial discussion. Sherrie Levine finally felt it important to
lightly into transfers. Some called this alle- come to Salle’s defense in 1981 in the sum-
gory.28 Better to say that the image too was The title of David Salle’s installation at the mer Flash Art. Without saying so, she gave
entering into the general culture of thrift. Kitchen in November 1979, The Structure everyone the piece of advice (“Maybe
Somewhat paradoxically, this time of thrift Ts in Itself Not Reassuring, put the matter I should see things as they really are and
led to the picture of an impossibly younger, plainly. It drew from the installations he not as I want them to be”) that had gone
untraditional, unknowable self. Salle, had been doing since his solo show at unheeded in Jmitation ofLife. These
Sherman, Lawler, and Levine were still Artists Space in 1976, taking shape in 1979 figures, she explained, had been given
making their work for themselves and as a group of ink drawings on backlit rice-
their small public. This was the position: paper screens in front of which bare light Sherrie Levine; President Profile, 1979; slide
projection; dimensions variable; courtesy Paula
myself is ourselves, maybe. bulbs hung down.*9 He had revised the
Cooper Gallery, New York
statements he’d written over the past two
In February 1978 Sherrie Levine reworked years and published them in Cover in May.
her presidents’ heads. Each was filled with The next year he and James Welling pub-
a photograph now, as if each had had a lished a conversation in which Salle put the
change of character. Lincoln was made problem in the form of an unresolvable
into a postcard announcement, and JFK contradiction. “An ‘aesthetically motivated’
became an eight-foot-tall slide projection. ... image is so directly of the world that it
The image was thrown there by light, hov- bypasses art altogether. . . The image is
ered there in light, transient as a ray, held in a nexus of won’ts and can’ts, like
utterly fragile. It was a mother-and-child
photograph that had been lifted from a David Salle; / Can Even Personify, 1979; acrylic on
canvas; 48 x 72 in. (121.9 x 182.9 cm); courtesy Mary
fashion magazine and framed as a presi-
Boone Gallery, New York
dent that hovered there, sociable but anti-
social, nothing really coming together,
and certainly not as a family. When Crimp
published a revised version of the Pictures
essay in October in 1979, the JFK projec-
tion appeared as an illustration, and Cindy
Sherman’s film-still project was added.
As was an uncredited reference to
Barthes’ Mythologies.

There would be an effort in the essays

of Crimp and Rosalind Krauss to ground
the role of exposing the problem of the that my photographs, which contain their own nication, analysis and defense.” She
other, its untruth, and the untruth inherent contradiction, would represent the best of both revived their “independent inquiry into
in the cultural confusion of women with worlds.33 certain normal predicaments of human
truth itself. “In this culture which publicly divinity.”35 But she employed the most
denies our most primary desire and The Weston estate took exception to impersonal, least theatrical techniques of
dread,” she concluded, “the most impor- this, seeing instead a breach of copyright. thrift to bring the divinity back. The trace
tant function of art is to mediate between Levine was obliged to withdraw the work, of her own labor was confined to the zone
our private and public selves.”22 The but she did not abandon the approach. The of internegativity, as if there she could
self, she was intimating, was not an image. next year she made a series from the work exist, a person only of shift, not swallowed
Salle had seen the other in the dullness. Walker Evans did for his book with James by the darkness but not visible either,
Was it Morin’s archaic double? As for Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. something like a person without walls.
Levine herself, by the time she wrote this,
she had found her own way through the Levine made another statement in 1980 Cindy Sherman began a new series of pic-
labyrinths of light. in which she recounted, without citation, tures in 1980 using the cheap staging tech-
Alberto Moravia’s first sight of the primal nique of rear projection. In 1979 she had
In 1980 Sherrie Levine had cut out scene, telling how when “she” witnessed gone west to visit her family, newly moved
Andreas Feininger reproductions from “her” parents in this way, “she” divided to Phoenix, and while with them had trav-
books and mounted them, untouched, as herself into two, an imitation self who eled, from time to time making more stills
her own collages. Then she took photo- entered the world and a first self who on their vacation locations. She had come
graphs of the photographs reproduced in maintained a great distance, watching.*4 with her costumes. The possibilities multi-
books, starting with Edward Weston’s por- She found a way to take this split and dou- plied. Her father helped sometimes with
traits of his son Neil, shown as a nude bled (or tripled) self into the material of the shutter release. He helped with “the
torso. She wrote a statement explaining the photograph: she took her photographs hitchhiker.” She came home with the wider
herself: from books and made the finished print repertoire. In the studio she looked into
from what is called an internegative, lifting ways to extend it further. She was setting
Instead of taking photographs of trees or the image into a thinner, lighter, less scenarios of trap and escape. She pulled
nudes, I take photographs of photographs. I intensely toned second generation, less a into closer shots that still showed her mov-
choose pictures that manifest the desire that copy than a shift. In this backstage step of ing in a frosty light, looking over her shoul-
nature and culture provide us with a sense of transfers through a negative state, the fig- der warily as she crossed the highway with
order and meaning. I appropriate these images ure emerges like a double, leaving another her bike. The figure was never removed
to express my own simultaneous longing for double behind. To put the matter more from the push of a life. Through the swell
the passion of engagement and the sublimity concretely, her Annie Mae Gudger print and fade of the rear projection, through
of aloofness. I hope that in my photographs of has used Evans and Agee’s effort to reset the brilliance of a flashbulb forestalling
photographs an uneasy peace will be made the poverty of the sharecropper, as Agee sundown, a character was caught between
between my attraction to the ideals these pic- said, “to recognize the stature of a portion the movies and the street outdoors. It
tures exemplify and my desire to have no of unimagined existence, and to contrive was a limbo of another kind.
ideals or fetters whatsoever. It is my aspiration techniques proper to its recording, commu-

David Salle; The Structure Is in Itself Not Reassuring, 1979; ink on rice-paper screens with colored lights, Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4, 1981
71 x 169 x 39 in. (180.3 x 429.3 x 99 cm), installation view, The Kitchen, New York; courtesy Mary Boone Gallery (under cat. no. 85)

| f

|
|

|
|
\
;

254 MOLLY NESBIT

In these different ways the figure of the oration set up extremely temporary, self- This was the situation that prompted
self being presented by this group of young organized exhibition spaces. The only Cindy Sherman to speak of the fakery in
artists was telescoping into zones that a trace of the collaboration would come, role-playing. Louise Lawler would organ-
pictorial figure could never contain. This gallery style, with an invitation card. ize A Movie Will Be Shown without a
self was not orbiting around the institutions Outside New York, the project might Picture at the Bleecker Street Cinema.
art was supposed to treat as polestars. It appear in a small gallery or on the wall She chose to show The Hustler in the
was not drowning in the totalizations of the of a student’s studio. In New York itself, dark, along with the cartoon What's
spectacle, but neither would it declare itself the shows were held just for an evening Opera Doc? On the poster for the event,
master of the social world. It was inconclu- in the private lofts of friends. For the one she quoted Jack Palance’s character from
sive. But this art was already setting up held in May 1981 Lawler brought seven Contempt saying, “Every time I hear the
another idea of the stage on which art was photograms of long-playing records, one word culture, I take out my checkbook.”
to play, just as it was setting up a scale for of them the Supremes’ “Where Did Our It had become a time of checkbooks.
itself that went beyond the usual profes- Love Go?” The next month there was an
sional questions. They were issues with evening in Lawler’s loft, where Levine David Salle began using an overhead
which to begin a life’s work, which is how showed her Eliot Porter series. And so projector to center his images on the can-
Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine and it went, as needed, more private than pub- vas as he painted them, painting them
David Salle and Louise Lawler used them. lic. In 1982 they did a set of pages using into the light by immersing himself in it.
the title for Phil Mariani and Brian Wallis’ In 1983 he took the picture from behind,
In 1981 Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler new magazine Wedge.38A Picture Is letting the name of King Kong come up
collaborated on a work that let them No Substitute for Anything. The project like a misunderstood rear projection over
inhabit an older art collaboration begun marked the end of their wall-lessness, the backs of two motherly nudes walking
in 1962 by Hollis Frampton and Carl and their innocence. up a beach as if they had literally walked
Andre, then twenty-six and twenty-four, out of the living room. The theater of the
respectively, and thinking about the large For as it did so, the spaces of the art mar- monster falling like a light over mother
questions themselves. Frampton and Andre ket had regrouped, and a new economy pushed the imitation of life over the edge.
had spent evenings typing out a dialogue for art had emerged. Galleries now were Salle began to think in the physical terms
of challenges to each other, Frampton at coming to call. Mary Boone had opened; of theater, beginning here by affixing an
one point declaring, “A photograph is no Larry Gagosian would come; in 1980 end table to the painting, like a stage.
substitute for anything.”3° Levine and Helene Winer had left Artists Space to That year he would begin to paint to the
Lawler, upon reading this in the book pub- found Metro Pictures with Janelle Reiring. time of the dance of Karole Armitage.
lished in 1980 by Nova Scotia College of By 1981 wall-lessness was hardly the only
Art and Design, took the sentence into option. The modern art museum would Sherrie Levine grew more sanguine as
their own, not always serious pattern of present itself as everyone’s final destina- she went forward. “When I started doing
internegativity and emerged with an ongo- tion and only point of reference. But was this work,” she wrote a few years later,
ing project of their own,A Picture Is No the museum necessarily the frame for “T wanted to make a picture which contra-
Substitute for Anything. It spoke worlds for art’s future? Where did the art go? dicted itself. Iwanted to put a picture on
worlds. It also spoke up for the side of life
that held anything. Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine; A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything, 1981-1982; installation view,
Louise Lawler’s apartment, New York, 1981; courtesy Louise Lawler

This anything had come up for discussion

in 1962. Its terms will be familiar. At one
point, Frampton and Andre had pondered
the problem of the scale of their universe.
They tried to speak about how the dis-
tances had changed, and the measurements
too. “Unless we have an inch in common,
an untaxed inch, I might add,” Andre
declared, “our years will contradict, and
our miles will wander northward without
ever reaching Boston.” But no one would
be stepping outside the markets of their
day, Frampton wrote at the end. Andre
countered, adding “I would say it is impor-
tant not to become a weapon in the hands
of those we despise.”37

Levine and Lawler took this up, using the

warmth in the young men’s coats to take
up the problem of wail-lessness, of making
more space for their work. Their collab-
top of a picture so that there are times passed between friends. But as she said these artists are as follows, and I have drawn
when both pictures disappear and other this, she was looking backward. upon all of them, as well as upon my conversa-
times when they’re both manifest; that tions with the artists. On Sherrie Levine, see
vibration is basically what the work’s about Notes Douglas Crimp, Pictures (New York: Artists
for me—that space in the middle where 1. Sherrie Levine, conversation with the author, Space, 1977), the catalogue of an exhibition fea-
there’s no picture, rather an emptiness, May 8, 2002. turing the work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack
an oblivion.”39 At the same time she also 2. Peter Schjeldahl, Salle (New York: Vintage, Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and
turned outward, “I like to think of my 1987), 21, 39. See also Kate Linker, “Melo- Philip Smith (see also the revised version in
paintings as membranes permeable from dramatic Tactics,” Artforum 21 (September October, no. 8 [spring 1979]: 75-88); Craig
both sides so there is an easy flow between 1982): 30-32. Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a
the past and the future, between my 3. Note 9 from the first version of a statement in Theory of Postmodernism,” in Beyond
history and yours.”40 My self is our self typescript dated 1977-1978 in Salle’s archives. It Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture
more broadly now, but the interaction would be published, revised and dated 1979, in (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
being imagined remains personal, full of Cover, no. 4 (winter 1980-1981): 52-53. California Press, 1992), 52-87, first published in
the trace internegativity of the old days, 4. Louise Lawler arrived in New York in 1969. October, nos. 12 and 13 (spring and summer
as if art might still be something that The best sources for the early work of each of 1980); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical
Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in
David Salle; King Kong, 1983; oil and acrylic on canvas with mixed media, 123 x 96 x 96 in. Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21 (September
(312.4 x 243.8 x 243.8 cm); courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York 1982): 45-56; Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality
of the Avant-garde,” October, no. 18 (fall 1981):
47-66; Gerald Marzorati, “Art in the
(Re)Making,” Art News 85 (May 1986): 91-99;
interview with Jeanne Siegel, March 1985, pub-
lished in Jeanne Siegel, Art Talk: The Early 80s
(New York: Da Capo, 1988), 244-255; David
Deitcher, Sherrie Levine, exh. cat. (Zurich:
Kunsthalle Ziirich, 1991); Howard Singerman,
“Sherrie Levine’s Art History,” October, no. 101
(summer 2002): 96-121. On David Salle, see
Janet Kardon, David Salle, exh. cat.
(Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art,
University of Pennsylvania, 1987); his 1979 state-
ment (see note 3 above) has been reprinted,
undated, in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of
Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis
(New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art;
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 325-327; inter-
view with Peter Schjeldahl, in Salle; “Images
That Understand Us: A Conversation with David
Salle and James Welling,” LAICA Journal, no. 27
(June—July 1980): 41-44, reprinted in the fall
1984 issue; Molly Nesbit, “Limbo,” in David
Salle: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1981-1999,
exh. cat. (Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte
Contemporaneo de Monterrey, 2000), 27-44. On
Cindy Sherman, see Gerald Marzorati,
“Imitation of Life,” Art News 82 (September
1983), 78-87; interview with Jeanne Siegel,
October 1987, in Siegel, Art Talk, 268-282; Alan
Jones, “Friday the Thirteenth: Cindy Sherman,”
NY Talk, October 1985, 44-45; Michael Shore,
“Punk Rocks the Art World: How Does It
Look?” Art News 79 (November 1980): 78-85;
Vicki Goldberg, “Portrait of a Photographer as a
Young Artist,” New York Times, October 23,
1983; Peter Schjeldahl and Lisa Phillips, Cindy
Sherman, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum
of American Art, 1987). On Louise Lawler, see
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical
Procedures”; Andrea Fraser, “In and out of

256 MOLLY NESBIT

Place,” Art in America 73 (June 1985): 122-129; or presents itself as a limit for the thinking sub- Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Tobias Smollett
Kate Linker, “Rites of Exchange,” Artforum ject, and its infinite reflection on itself.” (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), 21.
25 (November 1986): 99-101; Louise Lawler, 14. Malraux, Voices of Silence, 523. 24. Eventually she would frame her shots by
An Arrangement of Pictures (New York: 15. Ibid., 543. See also Hegel, Philosophy of propping a real mirror near the camera so that
Assouline, 2000). History, 86. she could check the effect of her pose.
5. 112 Workshop/112 Greene Street opened as a 16. See, for example, the following texts and 25. The 1978 Artists Space show, curated by
not-for-profit exhibition space in 1970; the their arguments, marked as much by Hegel as by Janelle Reiring, September 23—October 28,
Kitchen was founded in 1971 in the kitchen of Marx: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, included work by Christopher d’Arcangelo,
the Mercer Art Center; Artists Space was trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper, and Cindy
founded in 1972, as was Printed Matter; the Swerve, 1994), first French edition 1967; Henri Sherman.
Wooster Group, founded in 1975, was based in Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald 26. It provided the cover for one of the small,
the Performing Garage; Franklin Furnace was Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), first untitled books she made in 1978.
founded in 1976. French edition 1974; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The 27. Louise Lawler, conversation with the author,
6. Crimp, Pictures; the revised version of the cat- Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi September 12, 2002.
alogue essay was included in the anthology Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 28. Notably Craig Owens (“The Allegorical
after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. 1984), first French edition 1979. Impulse”) and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of 17. On the role played by the mass media forms (“Allegorical Procedures”).
Contemporary Art; Boston: D. R. Godine, in the development of modern art, see especially 29. For a good characterization of the landscape
1984), 175-187, which remains the best general Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in facing the art critic, see Anders Stephanson’s
guide to the debates in New York during this the Visual Arts,” in Modernism and Modernity: “Interview with Craig Owens” (1987), in Owens,
time. The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed. Benjamin Beyond Recognition, 300: “[In the mid- to late
7. “Situation Esthetics: Impermanent Art and H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut, and David Solkin 1970s] there was a new interest in and prolifera-
the Seventies Audience,” Artforwm 18 (January (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art tion of art writing, which deliberately did not set
1980): 22-28. and Design, 1983), 215-264; reprinted in short- itself the task of coming up to the level of ‘seri-
8. Ibid., 22. ened form in Crow’s collection Modern Art in the ousness’ set by Greenberg and Fried. What then
9. David Salle, “Vito Acconci’s Recent Work,” Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University came to be seen as the postmodern was that pro-
Arts 51 (December 1976): 91. Four years later Press, 1996). The discussion of the relevance of liferation of discourses on the outside. These
George Trow would write a book on the sinister the high/low art hierarchy continued to be played were not activities that were trying to theorize
effects of this scale, Within the Context of No out in academic and museum circles during the postmodernism or the question of postmod-
Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1980s. Its historical importance for modern art in ernism, but to function as postmodernism.
1981), first published in the New Yorker in 1980. the years before 1968 remains undisputed, and Roughly at the same time, some of us began to
10. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. after 1968 it continued to have its usefulness in articulate this within art practice, as one way of
Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University the development of a political aesthetics. But on detaching oneself from the art that was being
Press, 1978), first French edition 1953; George the street these questions were moot, and by the pushed by the galleries, the art that was being
Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the time of the High and Low exhibition at the written about in the art journals. So there was a
History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Museum of Modern Art in 1990, it was clear that strong sense that this articulation removed one
Press, 1962); John Berger, Ways of Seeing they could only sustain academic life. from the dominant centers of the art world and
(London: Penguin, 1972); Brian O’Doherty, 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. art market. Whether it was good old modernist
Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, withdrawal is another matter. . . . Initially what
Space, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1974), 316-317. The way out of such normative was informing the debate anyway was Frankfurt
University of California Press, 1999); Roland social construction has been famously plotted by School stuff, and Walter Benjamin. The dis-
Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and course in the art world was identified with the
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), first French edi- the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, photographic.” This work on this identification
tion 1957. 1990). was being led by Rosalind Krauss. See her inter-
11. Malraux, Voices of Silence, 525, 540, 19. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 77. view with Paul Taylor, in Art and Text, no. 8 (sum-
respectively. 20. Edgar Morin, Les stars (1957), 3d ed. (Paris: mer 1982): 31-37, and her essays from the
12. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Seuil, 1972), 63 (translation by the author). period, collected in The Originality ofthe Avant-
trans. J. Sibree (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, Jacques Lacan’s landmark article on the mirror garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge:
1991), 26-27. See also his Introductory Lectures phase, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the MIT Press, 1985); most relevant is the title essay
on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet Function of the I,” was first given as a talk in (see note 4 above). Equally important to the for-
(London: Penguin, 1993), 51-52. 1949 and published in his Ecrits, trans. Alan mation of a criticism around this work are
13. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 77: “Time is the Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7. For Douglas Crimp’s essay for Pictures (see note 4
negative element in the sensuous world. Thought more on the mirror functions in social formation, above) and his “The Photographic Conditions of
see, for starters, Marshall McLuhan, Postmodernism,” October, no. 15 (winter 1980):
is the same negativity, but it is the deepest, the
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 91-101, in addition to the articles on allegory by
infinite form of it, in which therefore all existence
is dissolved; first, finite existence—determinate, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), and Lefebvre, Owens and Buchloh.
The Production of Space. 30. “Ultimately,” said the press release, “the
limited form: but existence generally, in its objec-
21. Interview, in Siegel, Art Talk, 282. viewer confronts a situation in which all associa-
tive character, is limited; it appears therefore as a
22. Ibid., 272. tions and connections—though real and opera-
mere datum—something immediate—author-
23. Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don tive in the context of the piece—become
ity;—and is either intrinsically finite and limited,
subsumed in ‘just looking.’ The disconnected con- tured in the spring of 1981 at UCLA; (3) an exhi-
nectedness of the images is related to the notion bition of Lawler’s photograms was shown at the
of hypnagogic thinking—that state before sleep loft of Harold Rivkin, 45 Lispenard Street, New
when images pass through the mind with a sense York, on May 27, 1981, from 7 to 9 p.m.; (4) an
of portent that cannot be explained rationally.” exhibition of Levine’s photographs after Eliot
31. Salle and Welling, “Images That Understand Porter was shown at Lawler’s loft on Greenwich
Us,” 44. Street on June 25, 1981; (5) Ronnelle Gallery in
32. “David Salle,” Flash Art, no. 103 (summer Nova Scotia showed a Lawler arrangement pho-
1981): 34. Later Paul Taylor would report that tograph, on December 18 and 19, 1981; (6) at
Levine thought that Salle’s pictures, whatever CalArts on Valentine’s Day 1982, Levine and
the gender of his figures, showed a man being Lawler displayed a poster showing Andy Warhol
looked at by a woman and that she thought that poster in red in an arrangement of Lawler’s done
Cindy Sherman’s pictures worked the same way, for a student’s studio wall; (7) project pages for
except that they showed a woman being looked Wedge, no. 2 (fall 1982): 58-67; (8) a matchbook
at by a man: “I had the idea that they were pic- cover for friends; (9) “Can you argue with a nat-
tures of a man looking at a woman looking at a ural?” was planned for Max’s Kansas City as a
man. And I thought that was pretty interesting, glass bowl of white roses on an empty table.
because I’ve always seen the self-portraits of 39. First published (with the last phrase edited
Cindy Sherman as pictures of a woman looking out) in the March 1985 interview in Siegel,
at a man looking at a woman. His are pictures Art Talk, 247.
that posit a man’s consciousness in relation to a 40. Blasted Allegories, 93.
woman’s consciousness” (in Paul Taylor, “How
David Salle Mixes High Art and Trash,” New
York Times Magazine, January 11, 1987, 28). Salle
would agree. He spoke of internalizing the
meaning of a gesture “as if she’s doing it to me or
I'm her doing it,” he said in his interview with
Peter Schjeldahl in LAICA Journal, no. 30
(September- October 1981): 20.
33. First published, dated 1980, in Buchloh,
“Allegorical Procedures,” 52-53.
34. First published, dated 1980, in Crimp,
“Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 98,
and then reprinted with a group of statements in
Blasted Allegories, 92.
35. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1941), xiv.
36. Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, Twelve
Dialogues, 1962-1963, ed. Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design; New York: New York
University Press, 1980), 21. Later Frampton
pushed into the problem of using appearances in
order to sketch an aesthetics of their use. “To use
an image is to make another,” he declared (92).
And earlier he had put it even more modestly,
“Photographs and paintings are not visible sub-
stitutes for visible things, but are additions to the
list of visible things” (70).
37. Ibid., 40, 92, respectively.
38. Guy Bellavance wrote about the project for
Parachute (December 1983). The project devel-
oped in various venues as follows: (1) “His
Gesture Moved Us to Tears” was printed on a
small blue card pinned to the wall at James
Turcotte Gallery, Santa Monica, April 6, 1981;
(2) “A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything” was
printed on an unsolicited matchbook cover for
an evening with Julian Schnabel when he lec-

258 MOLLY NESBIT

Sarah Charlesworth and Barbara Kruger images by adding more and more to them. Incapable of producing metaphors by
And it is these images which have relation- means of signs alone, he (the phobic per-
ship. The actual relationship between two son) produces them in the very material
Glossolalia human beings completely ends when there of drives—and it turns out that the only
(1983) is a formation of images. .. . All our rela- rhetoric of which he is capable is that of
tionships, whether they be property, ideas, affect, and it is projected, as often as not,
or people, are based essentially on this by means of images.
Originally published in Bomb, no. 5 image-forming, and hence there is always —Julia Kristeva
(spring 1983): 60-61. a conflict.
— Krishnamurti ... the image is treated as a stand-in or as
a replacement for someone who would not
Where the real world changes into simple otherwise appear...
Representation, then, is not—nor can images, the simple images become real — Craig Owens
it be-—neutral; it is an act—indeed the beings and effective motivations of hyp-
founding act—of power in our culture. notic behavior. All art is “image making” and all image
— Craig Owens — Guy Debord making is the creation of substitutes.
—E. H. Gombrich
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven The acquisition of my tape recorder
image, or any likeness of any thing that is (camera) really finished whatever emo- In a world which is topsy-turvy, the true
in the earth beneath, or that is in the water tional life I might have had, but I was glad is amoment of false.
under the earth: thou shalt not bow down to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem — Guy Debord
thyself to them; nor serve them... again, because a problem just meant a
— God good tape (photo), and when a problem Photography today seems to be in a state
transforms itself into a good tape (photo) of flight... . The amateur forces his
Deprived of narrative, representation its not a problem anymore. An interesting Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.
alone, as signifying device, operates as problem was an interesting tape (photo). — Dorothea Lange
guarantee for the mythic community: it Everybody knew that and performed for
appears as symptomatic of the pictorial the tape (photo). You couldn’t tell which The destiny of photography has taken it far
work’s adherence to an ideology; but it problems were real and which problems beyond the role to which it was originally
also represents the opposite side of the were exaggerated for the tape (photo). thought to be limited; to give more accu-
norm, the antinorm, the forbidden, the Better yet, the people telling you the prob- rate reports on reality (including works
anomalous, the excessive, and the lems couldn’t decide anymore if they of art). Photography is the reality; the real
repressed: Hell. were really having problems or if they object is often experienced as a letdown.
—Julia Kristeva were just performing. Photographs make normative an experi-
—Andy Warhol ence of art that is mediated, second-hand,
The desire of representation exists only intense in a different way.
insofar as the original is always deferred. The objects which the image presents — Susan Sontag
It is only in the absence of the original to us and to which our only relation can
that representation takes place, because be that of possession, necessarily repre- To see and to show, is the mission now
it is already there in the world as repre- sents our being, our situation in the world. undertaken by LIFE. (magazine)
sentation. The libidinal investment in the image, an —Henry Luce
—Douglas Crimp investment on which the economic invest-
ment turns, is profoundly narcissistic, The literal photograph reduces us to the
Every cigarette, every drink, every love and avoidance of the problem of the other. scandal of horror, not to the horror itself.
affair echoes down a never-ending passage- —Colin MacCabe —Roland Barthes
way of references—to advertisements, to
television shows, to movies—to the point The photographs have a reality for me that People were murdered for the camera;
where we no longer know if we mimic or the people don’t. It’s through the photo- and some photographers and a television
are mimicked. graph that I know them. Maybe it’s in the camera crew departed without taking
—Tom Lawson nature of being a photographer. I’m really a picture in the hope that in the absence
never implicated. I don’t have any real of cameramen acts might not be commit-
Relationship between human beings is knowledge. ted. Others felt that the mob was beyond
based on the image-forming, defensive —Richard Avedon appeal to mercy. They stayed and won
mechanism. In our relationships each of Pulitzer Prizes. Were they right?
us builds an image about the other and —Harold Evans
these two images have relationship, not the
human beings themselves. ... One has an
image about one’s country and about one-
self, and we are always strengthening these
Distanciation is this: going all the way in The morphology of photography would ... the very question of whether photo-
the representation to the point where the have been vastly different had photo- graphy is or is not an art is essentially a
meaning is no longer the truth of the actor graphs resisted the urge to acquire the cre- misleading one. Although photography
but the political relation of the situation. dentials of esthetic respectability for their generates works that can be called art—
—Roland Barthes medium, and instead simply pursued it it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives
as a way of producing evidence of intelli- aesthetic pleasure—photography is not,
The world is centered for us by the camera gent life on earth. to begin with, an art form at all. Like
and we are at the center of a world always —A. D. Coleman language, it is a medium in which works
in focus. As long as we accept this centering of art (among other things) are made.
we shall never be able to pose the question For every photographer who clamors — Susan Sontag
of “who speaks” in the image, never be able to make it as an artist, there is an artist
to understand the dictation of our place. running the risk of turning into The blatantly mechanistic condition bound
—Colin MacCabe a photographer. to photographic seeing has confounded
—Nancy Foote photographic discourse. One-way thinking
A clear boundary has been drawn between has stratified this moonlighting medium
photography and its social character. ever since its invention, zoning it into
In other words, the ills of photography are Photography is better than art. It is a solar polemic ghettos walled off by hegemonies
the ills of estheticism. Estheticism must phenomenon in which the artist collabo- and hierarchies.
be superceded, in its entirety, for a mean- rates with the sun. — Ingrid Sischy
ingful art, of any sort, to emerge. —Lamartine
—Allan Sekula It is a fetishistic and fundamentally anti-
The photographic artist’s downfall is the technical notion of art with which theorists
Our conviction that we are free to choose romance with technique. of photography have tussled for almost
what we make of a photograph hides the — Carol Squiers a century, without of course achieving the
complicity to which we are recruited in slightest result! For they sought nothing
the very act of looking. The creative in photography is its capitula- beyond acquiring credentials for the pho-
—Victor Burgin tion to fashion. The world is beautiful. tographer from the judgement-seat he had
That is its watchword. already overturned.
For the first time in world history, mechan- — Walter Benjamin — Walter Benjamin
ical reproduction emancipates the work
of art from its parasitical dependence on While the aesthetics of consumption That photography had overturned the
ritual. To an even greater degree the work (photographic or otherwise) requires judgement-seat of art is a fact which the
of art reproduced becomes the work of a heroicized myth of the artist, the exem- discourse of modernism found it necessary
art designed for reproducibility. plary practice of the player-off codes to repress, and so it seems that we may say
—Walter Benjamin requires only an operator, a producer, of postmodernism that it constitutes the
a scriptor, or a pasticheur. return of the repressed. These institutions
... for the modern photographer the end — Abigail Solomon Godeau can be named at the outset: first the muse-
product of his efforts is the printed page, ums; then Art History; and finally, in a
not the photographic print. Montage before shooting, montage during more complex sense, because modernism
—Irving Penn shooting and montage after shooting. depends both on its presence and upon
—The Dziga Vertov Group its absence, photography.
Much of painting today aspires to the qual- —Douglas Crimp
ities of reproducible objects. Finally, pho- A work that does not dominate reality and
tographs have become so much the leading that does not allow the public to dominate The postmodernist critique of representa-
visual experience that we now have works it is not a work of art. tion undermines the referential status of
of art which are produced in order to be — Bertolt Brecht visual imagery, its claim to represent reality
photographed. as it really is—either the appearance of
— Susan Sontag A certain contempt for the material things or some ideal order behind or
employed to express an idea is indispensa- beyond appearance.
For a certain moment photography enters ble to the purist realization of this idea. — Craig Owens
the practice of art in such a way that it con- — Man Ray
taminates the purity of modernism’s sepa- Quotation has mediation as its essence,
rate categories, the categories of paint and You know exactly what I think of photo- if not its primary concern, and any claims
sculpture. These categories are subse- graphy. I would like to see it make people for objectivity or accuracy are in relation
quently divested of their fictive autonomy, despise painting until something else to representations of representations,
their idealism, and thus their power. would make photography unbearable. not representations of truth.
— Douglas Crimp — Marcel Duchamp —Martha Rosler

260 SARAH CHARLESWORTH AND BARBARA KRUGER

Perception that stops at the surface has
forgotten the labyrinth of the visible.
— Ingrid Sischy and Germano Celant

In order for history to be truthfully repres-

ented, the mere surface offered by the pho-
tograph must somehow be disrupted.
— Siegfried Kracauer

The intention of the artist must therefore

be to unsettle conventional thought from
within, to cast doubt on the normalized
perception of the “natural” by destabilizing
the means used to represent it.
—Tom Lawson

To reframe is of course to represent that

which I have seen . . . to represent the
process by which vision projects and trans-
forms itself, to engage in the struggle
to discover that which is absent, obscured
from our vision, through an encounter
with that which is manifest, given.
— Sarah Charlesworth

To photograph is to confer importance.

There is probably no subject that cannot
be beautified; moreover, there is no way
to suppress the tendency inherent in all
photographs to accord value to their sub-
jects. But the value itself can be altered...
— Susan Sontag
Kate Bush their critical interrogations to generate historical home in the dematerialized, dem-
a lengthy conversation with future genera- ocratically disseminated printed media.
tions. And yet photography now is not
The Latest Picture just omnipresent, it is also plural in its The legacy of these investigations is felt
forms, and it is possible to discern in the work of a variety of artists who con-
Kate Bush is senior programmer at the mutated aspects of the Conceptual and tinue to reflect self-consciously and criti-
Photographers’ Gallery, London, where she neo-Conceptual project in the work of cally on photography’s identity and value
produces a program that brings into dialogue young artists, even though the shift from as a representational medium. First among
diverse aspects of photographic practice. Conceptual Art’s interest in the photo- them is the conceptual photographer
She has organized exhibitions of work by Amy graph as document to the current under- Thomas Ruff, an artist whose entire oeu-
Adler, Ed van der Elsken, Malerie Marder, standing of the photograph as art object vre has been dedicated to exploring pho-
Jean-Luc Mylayne, Catherine Opie, Shirana has been firmly and finally established.! tography not merely as medium, but as
Shahbazi, Piotr Uklanski, Richard Wentworth, subject (and in this he is greatly distin-
and Francesca Woodman, among others. She Early Conceptual artists can be divided guished from his Diisseldorf colleagues
is a regular contributor to Artforum magazine. into those who utilized photography as Gursky and Struth). Where Ruff has fur-
a tool to document ephemeral actions or thered the work of 1960s Conceptualists
events or gestures and those who reflected is in accepting that, however rigorously
more profoundly on photography’s inher- systematized and objectified his approach,
With documentary-“style” photography ent “anti-artistic” nature—its widespread the photograph ultimately can never tran-
and video currently saturating the contem- functional applications; its descriptive pre- scend authorship or aesthetic choice. He
porary art world, it would be easy to lose cision; its non-unique, serial nature; and its acknowledges: “I’m always present in my
sight of the impact on present generations stylistic neutrality. Photography was widely photographs as the author because I[ point
of the eras of photoconceptualism recruited in a philosophical assault against to something, be it a face, a house, a star.
and photographic postmodernism. the auratic, authored, and commodified I’m always there in the choice of subject
Representational, pictorial, expensive, artwork. As a pure instrument of reproduc- and frame.” Rather than photographing
and large, photography seems to be every- tion, a “dumb copying device,” as Douglas an original model existing in reality, Ruff
where, apotheosized by the escalating mar- Huebler termed it,? photography could makes images of images, representations
ket success of the two giants of the work to relieve artists from aesthetic deci- of representations. “Photographs are still
Diisseldorf school, Andreas Gursky and sion-making and leave them free to con- always depictions, it’s just that for my gen-
Thomas Struth. In the 1980s and 1990s centrate on pure idea. Photography could eration the model for the photograph is
poststructuralist theory, suspicious of pho- also potentially redeem art from the reifi- probably not reality anymore, but images
tography’s putative purchase on the catory space of the art gallery by sharing its we have of that reality.” This concern
“truth,” encouraged a generation of artists
to critique their privileged relation to the Bruno Serralongue; Escalier Central, Expo 2000, 2000; IIfochrome, aluminum; 50% x 63% in. (129 x 161 cm);
world they pictured and to qualify the pho- courtesy Air de Paris

tograph’s inherently flexible meanings by

combining it with text. The waning influ-
ence of these theories has coincided with
an emphatic return to observant modes
and the scaling of new heights of technical
spectacle, suggesting a rupture with the
immediately preceding decades and a
direct return to traditions of photographic
modernism exemplified by a lineage that
stems from Eugene Atget through Walker
Evans to Robert Adams and beyond, in
which the world is the primary referent
and the image is conceived with maximum
clarity and minimum artifice.

The signal works in photography of the

1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s—Dan
Graham’s magazine articles, Edward
Ruscha’s seventeen photography books,
the Bechers’ industrial typologies, Cindy
Sherman’s simulated film stills, Sherrie
Levine’s appropriations, and Richard
Prince’s rephotographs among them—
were radical in their approach and some-
times perhaps too finite in the terms of

262 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

connects him back to Pop (and before the journalist-photographer or reporter. something, and yet nothing, of the events
Pop, interestingly, to Walker Evans, whose In Robert Smithson’s mock travelogues, unfolding around him.
photographs of urban signage and bill- Dan Graham’s magazine articles, and,
boards have been cited by Dan Graham most thoroughly, in Douglas Huebler’s This recognition of the photograph as
as a clear influence on both Pop and self-assigned absurdist photography proj- repository of concrete information about
Conceptual Art*) through to postmod- ects, the artists parodied “working” pho- the real world, and its simultaneously
ernism and appropriation art. But where tography in order to release the artwork limited ability to articulate any definitive
Sherrie Levine, for example, appropriated from aesthetic concerns into an order of truth about that world, is also fundamental
individual photographs by “masters” pure information. In Location Piece No. 13, to the work of the young Iranian artist
such as Edward Weston and Aleksandr November 1969, Huebler took the logical Shirana Shahbazi. Shahbazi, like Serra-
Rodchenko in order to refute notions of step and got himself a job as special corre- longue, while being well aware of photog-
artistic originality, Ruff mimics and manip- spondent for the Haverhill Gazette, a local raphy’s shortcomings, nevertheless claims
ulates different codes or types of photo- Massachusetts paper, making the front the right to return her art to a social field.
graphic representation in order to amplify page with a story about a peace march She practices an emphatically utilitarian
the semantic limitations of the medium in Washington, D.C. documentary approach to the extent that
itself and to assert its status not as “window individual images, whether street portraits
to the world,” but as autonomous depiction, The young French photographer Bruno or urban landscapes, might appear
as pure picture. From press and passport Serralongue, in hybridizing the roles of excruciatingly banal in the rigidity of their
pictures to night surveillance photography photojournalist and conceptual artist, viewpoints, in the simplicity of their com-
to Internet pornography, he co-opts every- rekindles this strand of conceptual prac- positions, and in their eschewal of decisive
day, vernacular imagery and technology so tice. Serralongue, like Ruff, rejects photo- or significant moments. Yet her images,
as to probe the limits of what photography graphic “auteurism” and develops arranged serially in magazine-style layouts
can do and mean. methodologies that work to reduce his on the wall of the gallery, accumulate
authorial decisions to a minimum in order into a shifting set of “micro-events” and
For Ruff, ultimately, photography lacks to pare the photograph down to an essen- observations, which collectively map
narrative, psychological, and metaphoric tial degree of meaning—or lack thereof. her subject—the contemporary city of
meaning and reveals itself as nothing more In the 1997 piece Corse-Matin, he joined Tehran—without claiming to define it.
than an apparatus for the production of the staff of a regional daily newspaper in Also like Serralongue, Shahbazi delegates
images: pure surfaces, pure reproductions, Corsica and spent a month working on aspects of the making of her work to
pure depictions. His methodology, in being assignment. The newspaper’s editor deter- others—in this case, to commercial street-
as coolly detached and systematic as possi- mined the subject, the selection, and the poster painters in Tehran, who are
ble, relates directly back to Conceptual final form of Serralongue’s photographs. commissioned to realize her understated,
forebears, notably his teachers Bernd and The resultant artwork consists of a compi- sometimes private photographs as
Hilla Becher. But where, for the Bechers, lation of the twenty photographs that were billboard-scale public paintings.
the subject of the photograph—and there- published, with the editor’s crops intact.
fore its documentary value—was of pri- The piece echoes Henry Bond and Liam Many artists of the Conceptual and neo-
mary concern (as it was arguably too for Gillick’s Documents series, made in the Conceptual generations used photography
Ruscha, who said in 1981 of his first book, early 1990s—in which the artists tracked
Twentysix Gasoline Stations [1962]: “The press calls and newsworthy events in Shirana Shahbazi; from Goftare Nik, 2000-2001;
photography by itself doesn’t mean any- black-and-white reportage shots—but chromogenic print; dimensions variable; courtesy
the Photographers’ Gallery, London
thing to me: it’s the gas station, that’s the Serralongue goes further in relinquishing
important thing”), one senses for Ruff that all decisions about content and form to
the subject of the image is increasingly, and someone else, thus demoting himself from
perhaps inevitably, secondary to his mod- “artist” to pure “operator.”
ernistic reduction of the photograph to its
perceptual and philosophical limits. It’s Serralongue works to critique not just the
significant that the recent Substratum role of photographer as author but also,
series (2001—) pushes the blurred effects of in subsequent works, the role of the photo-
the preceding Nudes (1999-) into a purer journalist as empowered or privileged wit-
realm of abstraction. Here, with the subject ness to world events. He has been present
all but evacuated, we are left with a gor- at a variety of historically significant occa-
geous, radiant, pulsating surface. The pho- sions—the thirtieth anniversary of the
tograph comes full circle to return as pure death of Che Guevara in Cuba in 1997,
image, distinct and nearly autonomous the British return of Hong Kong to the
from the world, in contrast to the represen- Chinese in the same year, a mass meeting
tational photography of Gursky and Struth. of thousands of supporters organized by
the Zapatista Indians in southern Mexico
Conceptual artists impersonated not just in 1996—and the photographs he has made
the look of non-artistic or vernacular pho- of these events are characterized by a
tography but also the role or persona of strange tension between communicating
to document putatively theatrical actions Rosler) to the stock subjects of liberal or ated and degraded by the confrontation,
or events. Bruce Nauman’s Eleven Color humanist documentary: the representation exposed to a truth we cannot walk away
Photographs and Gilbert and George’s of “real” people whose lives have unfolded from and cannot bear to share.” Instead,
Living Sculptures in the late 1960s; works outside societal norms—the poor, the he casts his work as a theatrical representa-
for camera by Adrian Piper, Eleanor disenfranchised, the dysfunctional—but tion of social reality: “Manipulating with
Antin, and Bas Jan Ader in the early 1970s; elaborated in ways that confront the dis- money is somehow a new way of legal rela-
and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills credited morals and mores of that histor- tions in all areas of the former USSR....
in the late 1970s can all be linked to a tra- ical genre of photography. These artists I wanted to transmit the feeling that in that
jectory involving the fictive staging of self explicitly coerce their subjects—with place and now, people can be openly
which can be traced as far back into the money, drink, or drugs—to perform more manipulated. ... Iwanted to copy or per-
early history of photography as Hippolyte or less degrading scenarios to camera, form the same relations which exist in soci-
Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man and the resulting works are—certainly in ety between a model and myself.”>
(1840), in which the photographer the case of Wearing’s monumental black-
famously staged his own suicide. This and-white video projection Drunk, more Drunk, Gillian Wearing’s study of a group
fusion of reportage photography with pre- subtly in Mikhailov’s Case History— of London street alcoholics, also empha-
conceived performative acts continues into frankly aestheticized and unapologetic sizes the performative nature of all social
the present in work as diverse as Austrian about their status as artworks rather than documentary photography: the fact that,
sculptor Erwin Wurm’s One-Minute “documents.” As such, they've garnered however noble its intentions, it always turns
Sculptures and the performed self-portraits a predictable amount of opprobrium. other people’s lives into a kind of visual
of the young Korean artist Nikki S. Lee. theater for the entertainment of more
Mikhailov’s Case History is an epic, bruis- or less privileged viewers. Wearing, like
But what appears particularly distinctive ing account of a new underclass of home- Mikhailov, short-circuits any emotional or
in art now is the emergence of what might less people in his native Kharkov, the empathic identification we might form with
be dubbed a hybrid form of “performative bomzhes, social casualties of the Ukraine’s her subjects and, in doing so, makes us con-
reportage,” a kind of photography/video abrupt shift from Soviet-style socialism to tinually aware—in a way comparable to
that dislodges the artist as protagonist of capitalism. He pays these people to reveal a Brechtian model of theater—that while
the performance, replacing him or her with their derelict, diseased bodies and to per- what we are watching is, on one level, real,
traditional social documentary subjects. form intimate acts in front of his lens, it is also always a drama or representation.
In Boris Mikhailov’s Case History, for which he then examines as forensically, and
example, or in the recent work of Gillian dispassionately, as a surgeon or a pornog- Young Japanese photographer Shizuka
Wearing or Santiago Sierra, there’s been rapher. There’s no pretence to nobility in Yokomizo also marries pseudo-conceptual
a dramatic return (in contravention of the suffering here, as social documentarians strategy to a documentary style in order
prohibitions against the photographic insisted, and Mikhailov makes no recourse to dramatize difference or “otherness,”
exploitation of “others” so carefully estab- to the redemptive or transformative rheto- albeit in a much gentler emotional register.
lished by politicized Conceptual photogra- ric of socially engaged photography: “We In Strangers (1999-2001), she wrote letters
phers such as Victor Burgin and Martha as spectators are the ones who are humili- to people she had never met, but whom
she knew to live on the ground floor of a
Boris Mikhailov, from the Case History series, 1998; chromogenic prints; 901% x 50 in. (230 x 127 cm); courtesy house or apartment somewhere in the city.
the Photographers’ Gallery, London
The letters were addressed simply “Dear
stranger” and signed, equally anony-
mously, “From the artist.” They stated
that, at a particular time and date,
Yokomizo would be waiting with her cam-
era outside their window and would, if
they chose to cooperate, take their portrait
as they drew their curtains and looked out-
side toward her. They, the subjects, were
promised a copy of their image at the con-
clusion of the exercise, but the artist
requested that the contract of anonymity
never be breached and that they never
attempt to make contact with her again.

The stranger—whether oppressed

outsider, exotic foreigner, or elusive
celebrity—is the classic subject of docu-
mentary portraiture, but here the “stran-
geness” of the stranger is concentrated,
rather than struggled to be overcome
through a state of temporary intimacy

264 KATE BUSH

willed by the photographer toward the for Sherman et al. it was a question of of painterly uniqueness and artistic
photographed. Most photographed people using the camera to signify the fundamen- originality. As a conceptual maneuver it
present themselves to the lens of the cam- tally fragile nature of the self, forged as was interestingly flawed, for as works by
era rather than the person behind it, and an imaginary construct through represen- Prince and Levine took their place in the
yet here it is the photographer, crouching tational stereotypes, for Lee, identity is pantheon of significant art, it became clear
behind her apparatus in the obscurity of understood as constantly—and positively— that the “aura” of an original had not been
the night, who is as much the undiscovered fluctuating through a set of shifting rela- permanently dislodged but merely dis-
subject of the picture, as each individual tionships with other people. Here the self placed to become an aspect of the appro-
peers out at the mysterious voyeur. In is not presupposed to consist of some uni- priationist’s copy.
these portraits, both photographer and tary essence, but is defined in relation
subject are looking and being looked at: to what, and who, is around it. Amy Adler picks up this dialogue in her
both are active subjects of their own gaze complex play with photographs and draw-
and, simultaneously, passive objects of the Many young contemporaries could be ings, copies and originals. For her, Prince’s
gaze of the Other. Intimacy—and its cor- loosely deemed “post-appropriationists.” rephotographs ultimately devolved not
relative, empathy—is replaced with a more There’s a thriving school of “clip and mon- into a critique of mass advertising, but into
varied emotional scale—wariness, fear, tage artists,” who raid popular culture, par- a representation of his own desire, con-
curiosity, trepidation, anxiety, hesitation. ticularly television and film, for their raw structed through the appropriation of
Operating around a two-way dynamic of material—Pierre Bismuth, Candice Breitz, popular imagery. Her own work has inves-
calculated estrangement, Strangers could Douglas Gordon, Johan Grimonprez, and tigated the complex ways in which images
be described as a dramatized photography Jonathan Horowitz among them—but if can both encapsulate and catalyze desire.
of “otherness.” one were to single out an artist who has Here, real-life characters—including her-
explored most directly the legacy of Andy self—and film characters converge: “I
Where Yokomizo dramatizes separation, Warhol, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, believe it is impossible to separate the two
Nikki S. Lee’s photographic projects could and Sherrie Levine, it might be Los worlds, as I know that my identity has been
be said to dramatize notions of assimila- Angeles—based Amy Adler. In appropria- formed in relation to characters I see in
tion or integration. There are clear tion art, reality is represented as always film... they come to represent people you
antecedents for the work of this young constructed in representation, rather know, desire, want to be.” What happens
Korean artist in the concerns of female than residing in any original referent. when the representation, the fantasy,
artists during the 1970s and 1980s, artists Appropriationists exploited photographic becomes real, as it did on January 15, 2001,
who enacted to camera performances of reproducibility in a critical questioning when Leonardo DiCaprio came to Adler’s
self-transformation in order to highlight
the pervasive effects of ethnic and gender Shizuka Yokomizo; Stranger, 1999; framed chromogenic print; 42'/2 x 50 in. (108 x 127 cm); courtesy the
archetypes (works such as Eleanor Antin’s Approach, London

1972 Representational Painting, Adrian

Piper’s 1975 Mythic Being: Cruising White
Women, and of course, the photographs
of Cindy Sherman). Lee, over a period of
weeks or months, infiltrates a particular
social group (to date, those groups have
included lesbians, punks, Hispanics, yup-
pies, skateboarders, exotic dancers, and
midwesterners), adapting her dress code,
her body language, and even her skin
color and her weight, in order to blend,
chameleon-like, into her chosen commu-
nity. Her extraordinary acts of physical and
behavioral mimesis are recorded in photo-
graphs that themselves mimic the code of
amateur photography (and as such revive
a visual trope descended from Conceptual
photography). These cheap color snaps,
complete with date stamp, are artless and
naturalistic, and they work to register the
realism of Lee’s transformation to such
an extent that occasionally it is difficult to
distinguish her from others in the picture.
Lee’s work develops the thinking of the
earlier generation of artists who under-
stood the photograph’s primacy in the con-
struction of personal identity. But where
flat in a modest South London neighbor- in a final twist, each of her Cibachromes Contemporary Art, 1995], 252).
hood? “There he was. My apartment is only one in a series, and thus they could 2. Douglas Huebler, exhibition catalogue state-
turned inside out. My living room was the also be said to be as non-unique and inter- ment for Prospect ‘69, Stadtische Kunsthalle,
stage, the cup of coffee I offered him, a dependent as a frame in an animated film. Diisseldorf, September—October 1969, quoted in
prop. He was tall, shaggy, ok... . beautiful, Adler’s convoluted game-play, her layer- Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head: Reflections on
sexy, and radiant. ... I shot a roll of film ing of originals—lost and substituted— Conceptual Art,” Artforum 8 (February 1970): 41.
there in my bedroom by the window. and copies, her blurring of real experi- 3. Thomas Ruff, quoted in Matthias Winzen, “A
I didn’t pose him or style him, he was ences and representations, are ultimately Credible Invention of Reality,” in Thomas Ruff:
there, that was the point.”6 metaphors for the convolutions of desire 1979 to the Present, exh. cat. (Cologne: Verlag der
itself, which, like photography, tends to Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2002), 155, 150.
In the resulting work, Amy Adler be predicated on a lost object or original. 4. Dan Graham, in Chris Dercon, “Dan Graham:
Photographs Leonardo DiCaprio (2001), I Enjoy That Closeness . . .” Forum International
Adler has appropriated not just the image For the early Conceptual artists, photo- 2 (September—October 1991), quoted in the
of a celebrity icon, but the celebrity him- graphy became relevant because it was, foreword to Jean-Francois Chevrier, Allan
self. “I cast him into my work, my land- in its vernacular forms at least, a func- Sekula, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Walker
scape. He’s playing a part in my film.”7 tional medium, evolved to record and Evans and Dan Graham, exh. cat. (Rotterdam:
The photographs she made were then describe rather than to express or aestheti- Witte de With; New York: Whitney Museum of
subjected to her characteristic working cize. The rigorous application of photogra- American Art, 1992), 6.
method: she develops the original photo- phy’s purely reproductive function in, for 5. Boris Mikhailov, in Boris Mikhailov: Case
graph, makes a pastel drawing from it, example, the work of Ruscha or Huebler History (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 9.
and then photographs her drawing. The was in a sense as radical and unrepeatable 6. Amy Adler, unpublished lecture, The
drawing is then destroyed, and all that an idea as Duchamp’s readymades. Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2001.
remains is a sequence of unique glossy Now, with the proliferation of “pictorial” 7. Ibid.
Cibachromes, with Adler’s drawings photography—and by pictorial I mean
“trapped” in their surfaces. The destruc- both the idiom of artificially enhanced or
tion of the drawing—which, in being hand- “directed” reality bequeathed by Jeff Wall
crafted, stands for “art,” as opposed to and the post-Becher school of painting-
the documentary photograph—renders scaled composed photography practiced
the photographic copy the original by by Gursky—it appears that artist-photog-
default. In stressing the uniqueness of raphers have forgotten Conceptualism in
these Cibachromes, Adler reverses Levine their bid to finally claim equal status with
and the notion of the photograph as pure painting and sculpture. And yet the spirit
reproduction or copy and works to demon- of Conceptual Art’s engagement with pho-
strate the displacement of the “aura” from tography lives on in the work of many con-
drawing to photograph. But, then again, temporary artists who continue to ask not,
“Is photography art?” but “Can photogra-
Amy Adler; Amy Adler Photographs Leonardo DiCaprio, phy show us something that art isn’t?”
2001; 6 Cibachrome prints; 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6
cm) each, (detail 2 of 6); collection of Gary and Tracy
Mezzatesta Notes
1. Jeff Wall, in “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects
of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,”
argues convincingly that it was precisely early
Conceptualism’s inscription of what was deemed
to be “non-artistic” photography within avant-
gardist discourses that paradoxically created the
conditions for photography to be subsequently
and finally accepted as an art form in its own
right. “Photography could emerge socially as art
only at the moment when its aesthetic presuppo-
sitions seemed to be undergoing a withering rad-
ical critique, a critique apparently aimed at
foreclosing any further aetheticization or ‘artifi-
cation’ of the medium. Photoconceptualism led
the way toward the complete acceptance of pho-
tography as art—autonomous, bourgeois, col-
lectible art—by virtue of insisting that this
medium might be privileged to be the negation
of that whole idea” (in Reconsidering the Object
ofArt, 1965-1975, exh. cat., ed. Ann Goldstein
and Anne Rorimer [Los Angeles: Museum of

266 KATE BUSH

Charles Ray, Untitled, 1973
(cat. no. 125)
268 THELAST PICTURE SHOW
Previous spread:
Charles Ray, Plank Piece IIT, 1973 Charles Ray, All My Clothes, 1973
(cat. no. 124) (cat. no. 123)

270 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two
Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974
(cat. no. 126)
Right: details

979 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 loopy groggy boozy

tight steamed up bent

folded flooey

in one's cups

under the influence

liquored up tanked up

juiced up slopped up sloppy

bloated loaded full

274 THELAST PICTURE SHOW
Allen Rupp ersberg,
W. B. Yeats,19ne
| 28)
(cat. no.
 ite

epee

Allen Ruppersberg, Seeing and Believing,

1972 (cat. no. 127)
Right: details

276 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

mn EN RATT
=
oc
 TWENTYSIX

GASOLINE

278 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 UNION, NEEDLES, CALIFORNIA

Edward Ruscha,
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (details), 1962
(cat. no. 129)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW 279

 VARIOUS

SMALL

FIRES
280 THELAST PICTURE SHOW
 VARIOUS
SMALL FIRES
AND MILK

EDWARD RUSCHA

Edward Ruscha,
Various Small Fires and Milk (details), 1964
(cat. no. 130)
 EVERY BUILDING

THE
SUNSET
STRIP

EDWARD RUSCHA

1 9 6 6

282 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

LTE
ETI ee nailaatiniei
ini ae
re wilsconce meth wie,

6 6648 4650 8652 8654 8656 8660 8700 8702 8704

L598 6S98 1998 £908 soon 4998 6900 1408 £208 12a VeLe

9000 9016 9018 9022 9026 9028 9030 90:

6006 1106 5106 1206 Auayiwom

UGH

Edward Ruscha,
Every Building on the Sunset Strip (details),
1966 (cat. no. 131)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stull #50,
1979 (cat. no. 153)

284 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #54,
1980 (cat. no. 156)
 Right:
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #10, Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #34,
1978 (cat. no. 137) 1979 (cat. no. 145)

286 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #97, 1982
(cat. no. 159)

288 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #98, 1982
(cat. no. 160)
Laurie Simmons,
New Bathroom/Woman Standing, 1979
(cat. no. 170)

290 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Laurie Simmons, Blonde/Red Dress/Kitchen/Milk,
1978; Cibachrome print; 3 1/2 x 5 in. (8.9 x 12.7 cm);
courtesy the artist and Per Skarstedt, New York
Laurie Simmons, Brothers/Horizon, 1979
(cat. no. 163)

292 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Laurie Simmons,
Woman/Green Shirt/Red Barn, 1979
(cat. no. 171)
Robert Smithson,
Monuments of Passaic (detail), 1967
(cat. no. 173)

294 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 . AS fae

Robert Smithson,
Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9), 1969
(cat. no. 175)
Robert Smithson,
Hotel Palenque (details), 1969
(cat.no. 174)

296 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

 Ger Van Elk, The Co-Founder of
the Word O.K.—Hollywood, 1971
(cat.no. 176)

298 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

[-
]
J

Ger Van Elk, Los Angeles Freeway Flyer,

1973/2003 (cat. no. 178)

THE LAST PICTURESHOW 299

Ger Van Elk, The Discovery of the Sardines,
Placerita Canyon, Newhall, California, 1971
(cat. no. 177)

300 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 M((i, My
AWWmeltTila

Jeff Wall, Double Self-Portrait, 1979

(cat. no. 179)
Andy Warhol, Photobooth Pictures
(Andy Warhol with Sunglasses), c. 1963
(cat. no. 181)

302 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Andy Warhol, Photobooth Pictures
(Andy Warhol in Tuxedo), c. 1963
(cat.no. 180)
Andy Warhol, Photobooth Pictures (Sandra
Hochman for Harper's Bazaar “New Faces,
New Forces, New Names in the Arts”),
June 1963 (cat. no. 183)

304 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Andy Warhol, Photobooth Pictures (Writer
Donald Barthelme for Harper’s Bazaar “New
Faces, New Forces, New Names in the Arts”),
June 1963 (cat. no. 184)
Andy Warhol, Photobooth Pictures (Edward
Villella for Harper’s Bazaar “New Faces,
New Forces, New Names in the Arts”), June
1963 (cat. no. 182)

806 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait in Drag,
c. 1981 (cat. no. 187)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait in Drag,
c. 1981 (cat. no. 188)

308 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait in Drag,
c. 1981 (cat. no. 189)
 Right:
Robert Watts, 7V Dinner, 1965 Robert Watts, Portrait Dress, 1965
(cat. no. 191) (cat. no. 190)

310 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

William Wegman, Crow, 1970
(cat. no. 193)

312 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

William Wegman, Milk/Floor, 1970
(cat.no. 194)
William Wegman, Reading Two Books, 1971
(cat. no. 196)

314 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

 ov

TO HIDE HIS DEFORMITY HE WORE SPECIAL CLOTHING

William Wegman, 7o Hide His Deformity

He Wore Special Clothing, 1971
(cat. no. 197)
 William Wegman,
Before/On/After: Permutations, 1972
(cat. no. 198)

316 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

James Welling, The Waterfall, 1981
(cat. no. 205)
James Welling, In Search of ..., 1981
(cat. no. 202)

618 THE LAST PICTURE Shit

James Welling,(2fhm2-29 lV, 1980, 1980 James Welling, July 10 (a) (1980), 1980
(cat. no. 199)
(cat. no. 201)
James Welling, March 16 (198: 0), 1980 J ame s Welling, Whitfield, 1981
cat. no. 2 0 0) (cat. no. 206)
 al alla) s|a) a/alalalalalae/alal

Hannah Wilke, S.O.S.—Starification

Object Series, 1974-1982
(cat. no. 207)
Exhibition 6. In Search of the Miraculous 12. Choosing (A Game for 17. Coal Bunkers, 1966-1977/2000
Black-and-white photographs
(One Night in Los Angeles), 1973 Two Players): Rhubarb, 1972
Checklist Black-and-white photographs with Type-R prints, typewritten sheet, 9 photographs, 22 Ys x 18 4 in.
handwritten text in white ink mounted on paperboard (56.2 x 46.4 cm) each
18 photographs, 8 x 10 in. 7 prints, 14x 11 in. 68 14x 56 4 in. (173.4 x 142.9 cm)
(20.3 x 25.4 cm) each (35.6 x 27.9 cm) each overall installed
Vito Acconci 30 x 75 in. (76.2 x 190.5 cm) 11x 8 12 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) text Collection Artur Walther,
overall installed Collection Angelo R. Baldassarre, New York
(born New York 1940)
Collection Philip E. Aarons, Bari, Italy
New York 18. Grain Elevators USA, 1977/1995
1. Jumps, 1969
(Not shown in Minneapolis) 13.A Movie: Directional Piece. Black-and-white photographs
Black-and-white photographs,
Where People Are Looking (with R, 15 photographs, 22 Ys x 18 4 in.
foam core, chalkboard spray,
chalk, felt-tip pen ink 7. Untitled (Flower Work), 1974 VY, G, Variants and Ending with (56.2 x 46.3 cm) each
27 x 143 in. (68.6 x 363.2 cm) Chromogenic prints Yellow), 1972-1973 66 ¥8 x 91 4 in. (168.6 x 231.8 cm)
Collection Michael Benevento, Edition 1/3 Black-and-white and color overall installed
New York 3 frames, 13 8x 100 Y8x 1% in. photographs, acrylic paint, Collection Artur Walther,
(33.4 x 255.6 x 4.5 cm) each mounted on paperboard New York
2. Margins, 1969 La Coleccién Jumex, Mexico 28 photographs, 3 Y2x 5 in.
Black-and-white photographs, (Shown only in Minneapolis) (9x 13 cm) each Joseph Beuys
foam core, chalkboard spray, 84 x 72 in. (213.4 x 182.9 cm) (born Krefeld, Germany, 1921;
chalk, felt-tip pen ink Giovanni Anselmo overall installed died 1986)
95 x 95 in. (241.3 x 241.3 cm) (born Borgofranco d’Ivrea, Collection Fundacao de Serralves,
Collection Fried, Frank, Harris, Italy, 1934) Museum of Contemporary Art, 19. Vakuum <> Masse
Shriver & Jacobson, New York Porto, Portugal (Vacuum <-> mass), 1970
8. Lato destro (Right side), 1970 Black-and-white photograph
Bas Jan Ader Color photograph 14. Embed Series: Oiled Arm on photosensitive canvas
(born Winschoten, Holland, 12 ¥8x8 Y8 in. (32.1 x 22.5 cm) (Sinking Boat and Palms), 1974 Edition 7/100
1942; died 1976) Courtesy Esso Gallery and Books, Black-and-white photographs 49 4x 69 in. (125.1 x 175.3 cm)
New York mounted on paperboard Alfred and Marie Greisinger
3. Broken Fall (Geometric), 2 photographs, 16 3/4 x 23 Y2 in. Collection, Walker Art Center; T. B.
Westkapelle, Holland, 1971 9. Entrare nellopera (42.6 x 59.7 cm) each Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992
Color photograph (Entering the work), 1971 23 Y%4 x54 V2 in.
Edition 2/3 Photographic emulsion on canvas (59.1 x 138.4 cm) framed 20. La rivoluzione siamo noi, 1972
15 Y2x 11 ¥8 in. (39.4 x 29.5 cm) 104 5/16 x 153 16 in. Collection Walker Art Center, Phototype on polyester, ink,
Courtesy Bas Jan Ader Estate, (264.9 x 390.1 cm) Minneapolis; T. B. Walker ink stamp
Patrick Painter Editions, Hong Private collection; courtesy Galleria Acquisition Fund, 1996 Edition 7/180 (+ 18 APs)
Kong and Vancouver Tucci Russo, Torre Pellice, Italy 75 Y2 x 39 Y8 in. (191.8 x 100 cm)
15. Alignment Series: Things in Alfred and Marie Greisinger
4. Pitfall on the Way to a New Neo Eleanor Antin My Studio (by Height), 1975 Collection, Walker Art Center; T. B.
Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland, (born New York 1935) Black-and-white photographs, Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992
1971 ink, mounted on paperboard
Color photograph 10. Carving:A Traditional 11 photographs, 3 12x 5 in. 21. Enterprise 18.11.72, 18:5:16
Edition 2/3 Sculpture, 1972 (8.9 x 12.7 cm) each Uhr (Enterprise 11/18/72, 18:5:16
15 4x 11 Y8 in. (40 x 29.5 cm) Black-and-white photographs, Private collection, New Jersey hours), 1973
Courtesy Bas Jan Ader Estate, text panel Zinc, black-and-white
Patrick Painter Editions, Hong Edition 2/2 Bernd and Hilla Becher photograph, camera, felt
Kong and Vancouver 148 photographs, 7 x 5 in. (Bernd Becher: born Siegen, Edition 7/24
(17.8 x 12.7 cm) each Germany, 1931) 16 Y8x12x6 Yin.
5. Untitled (Tea Party), 1972 15 Y2x 10 4% in. (Hilla Becher: born Potsdam, (40.9 x 30.5 x 15.6 cm)
Color photographs (39.4 x 26.1 cm) text Germany, 1934) Alfred and Marie Greisinger
Edition 3/3 31 x 209 4 in. (78.7 x 531.5 cm) Collection, Walker Art Center; T. B.
6 photographs, 4 15/16 x 7 5/8 in. overall installed 16. Gas Tanks (Spherical), 1963 Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992
(12.5 x 19.4 cm) each Collection Gary and Tracy Black-and-white photographs
Courtesy Bas Jan Ader Estate, Mezzatesta, Los Angeles 9 photographs, 22 ¥8 x 18 1 in. Mel Bochner
Patrick Painter Editions, Hong (56.2 x 46.3 cm) each (born Pittsburgh 1940)
Kong and Vancouver John Baldessari 68 4x 56 4 in. (173.4 x 142.9 cm)
(born National City, California, overall installed 22. Crumple, 1967/1994
1931) Collection Artur Walther, Silhouetted silver dye
New York bleach print (Ilfochrome)
11. The Spectator Is 74 x 34 in. (188 x 86.4 cm)
Compelled ..., 1966-1968 Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery,
Acrylic and photographic emulsion New York
on canvas
59 x 45 in. (149.9 x 114.3 cm)
The Broad Art Foundation,
Santa Monica

322 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

23. Surface Deformation/Crumple, Victor Burgin Valie Export Hans-Peter Feldmann
1967/2000 (born Sheffield, England, 1941) (born Linz, Austria, 1940) (born Diisseldorf 1941)
Gelatin silver print mounted
on Masonite 29. Performative/Narrative, 1971 35. AufhockungI (Squat in I), 1972 43. 12 Bilder (12 pictures), 1968
54 x 28 in. (137 x 71 cm) Black-and-white photographs, Ink on black-and-white photograph Offset lithograph, ink stamp
Collection Suzanne Cohen, printed text 31 x 22 in. (78.7 x 55.9 cm) framed 3 2x3 VB in. (8.9 x 9.8 cm)
Baltimore 16 panels, 13 98 x 26 ¥8 in. Marieluise Hessel Collection on Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
(33.9 x 66.9 cm) each permanent loan to the Center for
24. Surface Dis/Tension, 1968 Courtesy the artist and Christine Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 44. 1] Bilder (11 pictures), 1969
Silhouetted composite gelatin silver Burgin Gallery, New York Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Offset lithograph, ink stamp
print mounted on board 3 Y8x3 116 in. (9.2 x 9.4 cm)
72x 68 in. (182.9 x 172.7 cm) Sarah Charlesworth 36. Geometrische Figuration Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, (born East Orange, New Jersey, (Geometrical figuration), 1972
New York 1947) Acrylic paint on black-and-white 45. 3 Bilder (3 pictures), 1970
photograph Offset lithograph, ink stamp
Christian Boltanski 30. April 21, 1978, from Modern 2/3; edition of 3 5 4x3 1Mo in. (13.3 x 9.4 cm)
(born Paris 1944) History, 1978 16 Ys x 24 in. (41 x 61 cm) Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Black-and-white direct positive Collection Kunstmuseum
25. Les habits de Francois C. prints Winterthur, Winterthur, 46. 1 Bild (1 picture), 1970
(The clothes of Francois C.), 1972 AP 1/2 (edition of 3+ 2 APs) Switzerland Offset lithograph, ink stamp
Black-and-white photographs 45 prints, 22 x 16 in. 5 4x3 16 in. (13.3 x 9.4 cm)
in tin frames with glass (55.9 x 40.6 cm) each 37. Starre Identitat Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
24 photographs, 8 3/4 x 12 in. Collection Walker Art Center, (Fixed identity), 1972
(22.2 x 30.5 cm) each Minneapolis; Justin Smith Purchase Ink on black-and-white photograph 47. 7 Bilder (7 pictures), 1970
38 x 77 in. (96.5 x 195.6 cm) Fund, 2003 16 Ys x 24 in. (41 x 61 cm) Offset lithograph, ink stamp
overall installed Collection Museum moderner 3 %o6x5 VY in. (9.1 x 13.3 cm)
Collection Daniel Bosser, Paris Bruce Conner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
(born McPherson, Kansas, 1933) (Shown only in Minneapolis)
26. Les 62 membres du Club Mickey 48. / Bild(1 picture), 1971
en 1955 (The 62 members of the 31. ANGEL, 1975 38. Trapez (Trapezoid), 1972 Offset lithograph, ink stamp
Mickey Mouse Club in 1955), 1972 Gelatin silver print photogram Black-and-white photograph 8x5 !e in. (20.3 x 14.8 cm)
Black-and-white photographs in 85 x 39 in. (215.9 x 99.1 cm) 16 ¥8 x 24 in. (41.6 x 60.9 cm) Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
tin frames with glass Collection Walker Art Center, Collection Cindy Sherman,
62 photographs, 12 x 8 4 in. Minneapolis; Butler Family New York 49. 14 Bilder (14 pictures), 1971
(30.5 x 22.3 cm) each Fund, 1989 Offset lithograph, ink stamp
72 x 88 in. (182.9 x 223.5 cm) 39. Wir sind Gefangene unserer 3 1%6x5 Win. (9.7 x 13.9 cm)
overall installed 32. NIGHT ANGEL, 1975 Selbst (We are prisoners of Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, Gelatin silver print photogram ourselves), 1972
New York 85 x 39 in. (215.9 x 99.1 cm) Black-and-white photograph 50. 9 Bilder (9 pictures), 1971
Collection Walker Art Center, 16 1/2 x 24 in. (41.9 x 60.9 cm) Offset lithograph, ink stamp
Marcel Broodthaers Minneapolis; Butler Family Courtesy the artist, Vienna 3 8x3 1M in. (9.2 x 9.4 cm)
(born Brussels 1924; died 1976) Fund, 1989 Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
40. Zuhockung IT (Squat in II), 1972
27. No Photographs Allowed/Défense Jan Dibbets Ink on black-and-white photograph 51. 8 Bilder (8 pictures), 1972
de photographier, 1974 (born Weert, the Netherlands, 16 12x 24 4 in. (41.9 x 61.6 cm) Offset lithograph, ink stamp
Color photographs on cardboard 1941) Collection Thea Westreich and 23% x3 1M in. (6.9 x 9.4 cm)
16 photographs, 11 x 12 9 in. Ethan Wagner, New York Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
(27.9 x 31.5 cm) each 33. Comet Horizon 6 °—72°
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Sky / Land / Sky, 1973 41. Abrundung IT 52. 3 Bilder (3 pictures), 1972
Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, Germany 12 color photographs (Round off II), 1976 Offset lithograph, ink stamp
122 x 113 Mo in. (309.9 x 287.5 cm) Black-and-white photograph, 5 Yi6x 4 4 in. (12.9 x 10.8 cm)
28. La soupe de Daguerre (The soup overall installed cut out on negative Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
of Daguerre), 1974, from Artists Courtesy the artist, Amsterdam 22 x 31 in. (55.9 x 78.7 cm) framed
and Photographs portfolio, 1975 Marieluise Hessel Collection on 53. 3 Bilder (3 pictures), 1972
Color photographs mounted 34. Horizon 1°-10° Land, 1973 permanent loan to the Center for Offset lithograph, ink stamp
on paper 10 color photographs Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 5 4x4 Win. (13.3 x 10.8 cm)
Edition 20/60 48 x variable width in. (121.9 x vari- Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
21 x 20 2 in. (53.3 x 52.1 cm) able width cm) overall installed
Courtesy Marian Goodman Collection Walker Art Center, 42. Einkreisung 54. 5 Bilder (5 pictures), 1972
Minneapolis; Art Center (Encirclement), 1976 Offset lithograph, ink stamp
Gallery, New York
Acquisition Fund, 1978 Ink on black-and-white photograph 6 16 x5 in. (15.4x 12.7 cm)
16 2x 24 4 in. (41.9 x 61.6) cm Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Collection Thea Westreich and
Ethan Wagner, New York; prom-
ised gift to The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
55. 7 Bilder (7 pictures), 1973 Dan Graham Yves Klein Jeff Koons
Offset lithograph, ink stamp (born Urbana, Illinois, 1942) (born Nice, France, 1928; (born York, Pennsylvania, 1955)
47/16x 3% in. (11.3 x 9.5 cm) died 1962)
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York 61. Homes for America, 1966-1967 73. The New Jeff Koons, 1981
Slide projection 68. Dimanche, 1960 Duratran, lightbox
56. Sonntagsbilder Dimensions variable Offset lithograph 40 ¥g x 30 Y8 in. (103.2 x 77.8 cm)
(Sunday pictures), 1976-1977 Courtesy the artist and Marian 22 x 15 in. (55.9 x 38.1 cm) Courtesy The Brant Foundation,
Black-and-white offset Goodman Gallery, New York Collection Walker Art Center, Greenwich, Connecticut
lithographs and screenprints Minneapolis; T. B. Walker
21 of various dimensions Hans Haacke Acquisition Fund, 1994 Barbara Kruger
The Heithoff Family Collection, (born Cologne, Germany, 1936) (born Newark, New Jersey, 1945)
Minneapolis Imi Knoebel
62. Live Airborne System, (born Dessau, Germany, 1940) 74. Untitled (Your comfort
Peter Fischli and David Weiss November 30, 1968, 1968 is my silence), 1981
(Peter Fischli: born Zurich 1952) Black-and-white photograph 69. Projektion 1 (450 Fotos Innen- Color photograph
(David Weiss: born Zurich 1946) 30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 101.6 cm) und Aussenprojektionen) (Projection 60 x 40 in.
Private collection, New Jersey 1 [450 photos interior and exterior (152.4 x 101.6 cm) framed
57. Wurstserie projection]), 1968-1971 Daros Collection, Switzerland
(Sausage series), 1979 63. Cast Ice: Freezing and Melting, Black-and-white photographs
Am Nordpol (At the North Pole) January 3, 4,5... 1969, 1969 120 photographs, 9 7/16 x 12 in. 75. Untitled (You are not yourself),
Der Brand von Uster Black-and-white photograph (23.9 x 30.5 cm) each 1982
(The fire of Uster) 8x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 98 x 148 16 in. (248.9 x 377 cm) Black-and-white photograph
Hohlenbewohner (Caveman) Private collection, New Jersey overall installed 72 x 48 in. (182.9 x 121.9 cm)
Im Teppichladen Courtesy the artist, Diisseldorf Collection Per Skarstedt, New York
(In the carpet shop) 64. Spray of Ithaca Falls: Freezing
In den Bergen (In the mountains) and Melting on Rope, February 70. Projektion 3 (115 Fotos kleine David Lamelas
Modeschau (Fashion show) 7, 8,9... 1969; 1969 abstrakte Projektion) (born Buenos Aires 1946)
Moonraker Black-and-white photograph (Projection 3 [115 photos small
Pavesi 8x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) abstract projection]), 1973 76. Rock Star (Character
Titanic Private collection, New Jersey Black-and-white photographs Appropriation), 1974
Der Unfall (The accident) 80 photographs, 9 7/16 x 12 in. Black-and-white photographs
Color photographs 65. Tokyo Trickle, 1970 (23.9 x 30.5 cm) each 14 photographs, 4 Y2x 6 4 in.
9 2x 13 % in. (24.2 x 34.9 cm) each Black-and-white photograph 98 x 98 13/16 in. (248.9 x 250.9 cm) (11.5 x 15.9. cm) each
Collection Walker Art Center, 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) overall installed Collection Fundacao Serralves,
Minneapolis; Clinton and Della Private collection, New Jersey Courtesy the artist, Dusseldorf Museum of Contemporary Art,
Walker Acquisition Fund, 1993 Porto, Portugal
Douglas Huebler 71. Projektion 16
Gilbert & George (born Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1924; (54 Fotos Sternenhimmel) 77. The Violent Tapes of 1975, 1975
(Gilbert: born Dolomites, died 1997) (Projection 16 [54 photos Black-and-white photographs
Italy, 1943) starry sky]), 1974 10 photographs, 15 34 x 11 13/6 in.
(George: born Devon, 66. Variable Piece #99, Israel, Black-and-white photographs (40.1 x 30 cm) each
England, 1942) July 1973, 1973 54 photographs, 12 x 9 /16 in. Collection Bruno van Lierde,
Drawings, photographs, (30.5 x 23.9 cm) each Brussels
58. Photo-Piece, 1971 typed text on paperboard 74 x 96 16 in. (187.9 x 244 cm)
25 black-and-white photographs 31/8 x31 16 in. (80.3 x 79.9 cm) overall installed Louise Lawler
73 X37 in. (185.4 x 93.9 cm) Courtesy Greengrassi, London Courtesy the artist, Diisseldorf (born Bronxville, New York, 1947)
overall installed
Collection Angelo R. Baldassarre, 67. Variable Piece #101, West Silvia Kolbowski 78. Why Pictures Now, 1981
Bari, Italy Germany, March 1973, 1973 (born Buenos Aires 1953) Black-and-white photograph
Black-and-white photographs Edition 1/10
59. Raining Gin, 1973 and statement 72. Model Pleasure 1, 1982 3 x 6 in. (7.6 x 15.2 cm)
44 black-and-white photographs 10 photographs, 6 2x 4 2 in. Chromogenic prints, Courtesy the artist and Metro
78x 45 in. (198.1 x 114.3 cm) (16.5 x 11.4 cm) each gelatin silver prints Pictures, New York
overall installed 11x8 Y2in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) 10 photographs, 8 2x 10 2 in.
Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, statement (21.6 x 26.7 cm) each 79. Arranged by Barbara and
New York 32 x 38 in. (81.3 x 96.5 cm) Collection Walker Art Center, Eugene Schwartz, 1982
overall installed Minneapolis; T. B. Walker Black-and-white photograph
60. Dead Boards #5, 1976 Collection Bruno van Lierde, Acquisition Fund, 2002 Edition 3/5
16 black-and-white photographs Brussels 16 x 23 Y2 in. (40.6 x 59.9 cm)
97 x 81 in. (247 x 206 cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro
overall installed Pictures, New York
Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery,
New York

324 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

80. Arranged by Donald Marron, 88. Autobiography, 1980 Ana Mendieta 104. Untitled, c. 1975
Susan Brundage, Cheryl Biship Photo-offset-printed book (born Havana 1948; died 1985) Black-and-white photograph
at Paine Webber, Inc., 1982 10 44x10 Y4x Y2 in. 7 116 x 11 16 in. (19.5 x 29.1 cm)
Black-and-white photograph (26.1 x 26.1 x 1.3 cm) closed 95. Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York
19 Y2x 21% in. (49.5 x 55.3 cm) LeWitt Collection, Chester, Variations), January—February
Collection Per Skarstedt, New York Connecticut 1972/1997 105. Untitled, c. 1982
Color photographs Black-and-white photograph
81. Portrait (Parrot), 1982 Richard Long 7 photographs, 20 x 16 in. 9 ¥gx 11% in. (23.8 x 29.9 cm)
Color photograph (born Bristol, England, 1945) (50.8 x 40.6 cm) each Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York
28 Y4x 28 Y4 in. Courtesy the Estate of Ana
(71.8 x 71.8 cm) framed 89. England, 1967 Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, Bruce Nauman
Collection Allan McCollum, Black-and-white photographic New York (born Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1941)
New York print mounted on paperboard
33 Y4x 45 Y2in. Mario Merz 106. Eleven Color Photographs,
Sherrie Levine (born Hazleton, (85.7 x 115.6 cm) framed (born Milan 1925) 1966-1967/1970
Pennsylvania, 1947) Courtesy Anthony d’Offay, London Portfolio of 11 color photographs
96. Fibonaccio 1202, 1970 Bound to Fail
82. Untitled (President: 2), 1979 90. A Line Made by Walking, Black-and-white photographs, 19 3/4 x 23 Y2 in. (50.2 x 59.7 cm)
Collage on paper England, 1967 neon tubing Coffee Spilled Because the Cup
24 x 18 in. (60.9 x 45.7 cm) Black-and-white photographic 19 11/16 x 196 7 in. (50 x 500.1 cm) Was Too Hot
The Museum of Contemporary Art, print mounted on paperboard overall installed 19 8 x 23 in. (49.2 x 58.4 cm)
Los Angeles; Purchased with funds 33 4x 45 2 in. Dallas Museum of Art, fractional Coffee Thrown away Because
provided by Joel Wachs (85.7 x 115.6 cm) framed gift of the Rachofsky Collection, It Was Too Cold
Courtesy Anthony d’Offay, London Dallas 19 7/8 x 23 Y8 in. (50.5 x 60 cm)
83. Untitled (President: 4), 1979 Drill Team
Collage on paper 91.A Sculpture Left by the Tide, Nasreen Mohamedi 19 7/8 x 23 Y in. (50.5 x 60.3 cm)
24 x 18 in. (60.9 x 45.7 cm) Cornwall, 1970 (born New Delhi 1937; died 1990) Eating My Words
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Black-and-white photographic print 19 ¥g x 23 Vg in. (49.2 x 58.7 cm)
Mary Martin Fund, 1990 mounted on paperboard 97. Untitled, c. 1968 Feet of Clay
35 x 49 in. (88.9 x 124.5 cm) framed Black-and-white photograph 23 8 x 22 Y8 in. (59.4 x 56.8 cm)
84. Untitled (President: 5), 1979 Courtesy Anthony d’Offay, London 9 ¥8x 11 6 in. (23.8 x 29.1 cm) Finger Touch No. 1
Collage on paper Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York 19 Ys x 23 Y2 in. (49.8 x 59.7 cm)
24 x 18 in. (60.9 x 45.7 cm) Gordon Matta-Clark Finger Touch with Mirrors
The Museum of Contemporary Art, (born New York 1943; died 1978) 98. Untitled, c. 1968 19 V8 x 23 ¥4 in. (50.5 x 60.3 cm)
Los Angeles; Purchased with funds Black-and-white photograph Self-Portrait as a Fountain
provided by Joel Wachs 92. Splitting, 1974 7 Y8x 11! in. (19.4 x 30 cm) 19 Ys x 23 12 in. (49.8 x 59.7 cm)
Color photograph Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York Untitled (Potholder)
85. After Walker Evans: 1-22, 1981 Edition 2/2 19 ¥4 x 23 Y in. (50.2 x 60.3 cm)
Black-and-white photographs 26 2 x 39 in. (67.3 x 99.1 cm) 99. Untitled, c. 1970 Waxing Hot
22 photographs, 8 x 10 in. unframed Black-and-white photograph 19 7/8 x 29 Y8 in. (50.5 x 49.2 cm)
(20.3 x 25.4 cm) and 10 x8 in. 35x47 Y4x1 Y2in. 7116 x 11 ¥8 in. (19.5 x 28.9 cm) The Heithoff Family Collection,
(25.4 x 20.3 cm) each (88.9 x 120 x 3.8 cm) framed Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York Minneapolis
Courtesy the artist, New York Courtesy the Estate of Gordon
Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, 100. Untitled, c. 1970 107. My Name as Though It Were
Sol LeWitt New York Black-and-white photograph Written on the Surface of the Moon:
(born Hartford, Connecticut, 1928) 9 16 x 15 in. (23.1 x 38.1 cm) Bbbbbbbbbbrrrr70/-rruuuuuuuuuucce
93. Splitting, 1974 Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York ceccccceeeeeeeeee, 1967
86. Brick Wail, 1977 Black-and-white 15 black-and-white photographs
Photo-offset-printed book photographic collage 101. Untitled, c. 1972 mounted in a frame
10 4x8 ¥4x Y4 in. 40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm) Black-and-white photograph 13 x 138 in. (33.1 x 350.5 cm) overall
(26.1 x 22.2 x .64 cm) closed L A C—Switzerland 7/16 x11 16 in. (18.9 x 29.1 cm) Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery,
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York New York
Connecticut 94. Splitting: Exterior, c. 1974
Black-and-white photographs 102. Untitled, c. 1975
87. Photogrids, 1978 2 photographs, 12 /2x 8 14 in. Black-and-white photograph
Photo-offset-printed book (31.8 x 20.9 cm) each 7x 11 1o in. (17.8 x 30 cm)
10 Y4x 10 Y2x 4 in. 4 photographs, 16 x 20 in. Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York
(26.1 x 26.7 x .64 cm) closed (40.6 x 50.8 cm) each
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Private collection, New York 103. Untitled, c. 1975
Connecticut Black-and-white photograph
9 ¥g x 11 1/6 in. (23.8 x 30 cm)
Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York
 Hélio Oiticica and Giulio Paolini 118. Bamboostange liebt 124. Plank Piece I-IT, 1973
Neville d’Almeida (born Genoa, Italy, 1940) Zollstockstern (Bamboo pole loves Black-and-white photographs
(Hélio Oiticica: born Rio de folding ruler star), 1968-1969 mounted on rag board
Janeiro 1937; died 1980) 113. Proust, 1968 Black-and-white photographs AP 1/2 (edition of 7 + 2 APs)
(Neville d’Almeida: born Belo Photographic emulsion on canvases in 3 frames 2 photographs, 39 1/2 x 27 in.
Horizonte, Brazil, 1941) 2 photographs, 10 4x7 72 in. 15 photographs, 23 7 x 19 13/16 in. (100.3 x 68.6 cm) each
(26.1 x 19.1 cm) each (60.6 x 50.3 cm) each Collection Kiki Smith, New York
108. 03/CC5 (Hendrix War, Collection Lorenzo and Marilena 8134x104 4x2 in.
Cosmococa Programa-in-Progress), Bonomo, Bari, Italy (207.6 x 264.8 x 5.1 cm) 125. Untitled, 1973
1973/2003 overall installed Black-and-white photograph
Chromogenic print mounted Giuseppe Penone Collection Walker Art Center, mounted on rag board
on aluminum (born Garessio, Cuneo, Italy, 1947) Minneapolis; T. B. Walker Edition 1/7 (+ 2 APs)
Edition of 12 + 3 APs Acquisition Fund, 1999 20 2 x 42 2 in. (52.1 x 107.9 cm)
29 13/16 x 44 7/8 in. (76.1 x 113.9 cm) 114. Svolgere la propria pelle The Broad Art Foundation,
Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaca, (To display one’s skin), 1971 Richard Prince Santa Monica
Sao Paulo, and Projeto H.O., Black-and-white photographs on (born Panama Canal Zone 1949)
Rio de Janeiro egg paper mounted on paperboard Martha Rosler
104 photographs, 7 /s x 7 7 in. 119. Untitled (living rooms), 1977 (born Brooklyn)
109. 06/CCS5 (Hendrix War, (20 x 20 cm) each Ektacolor photograph
Cosmococa Programa-in-Progress), 7 paperboard panels, 28 x 43 in. Edition 5/10 (+ 2 APs) 126. The Bowery in Two Inadequate
1973/2003 (71.1 x 109.2 cm) each 4 photographs, 20 x 24 in. Descriptive Systems, 1974
Chromogenic print mounted Dave Mixer Collection, East (50.8 x 60.9 cm) each Black-and-white photographs and
on aluminum Greenwich, Rhode Island Courtesy Barbara Gladstone 3 black panels mounted on 24 black
Edition of 12 + 3 APs Gallery, New York mat boards
44 7/8 x 29 15/16 in. (113.9 x 76.1 cm) Adrian Piper AP (edition of 5+ 1 AP)
Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaga, (born New York 1948) 120. Untitled (three men looking 45 photographs, 8 x 10 in.
Sao Paulo, and Projeto H.O., in the same direction), 1978 (20.3 x 25.4 cm) each
Rio de Janeiro 115. Food for the Spirit, 1971 Ektacolor photographs Courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee,
Black-and-white photographs Edition 4/10 (+ 2 APs) New York
110. 07/CCS5 (Hendrix War, 14 photographs, 21 x 21 in. 3 photographs, 20 x 24 in.
Cosmococa Programa-in-Progress, (53.3 x 53.3 cm) each (50.8 x 60.9 cm) each Allen Ruppersberg
1973/2003 Collection Thomas Erben, Courtesy Barbara Gladstone (born Cleveland, Ohio, 1944)
Chromogenic print mounted New York Gallery, New York
on aluminum 127. Seeing and Believing, 1972
Edition of 12 + 3 APs 116. The Mythic Being: 121. Untitled (three women looking Color photographs, typewriting
44 7/s x 29 15/16 in. (113.9 x 76.1 cm) I/You (Her), 1974 in the same direction), 1980-1984 on paper, framed in 4 frames
Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaca, Black-and-white photographs, Ektacolor photographs 12 photographs; 3 2 x 3 12 in.
Sao Paulo, and Projeto H.O., ink on paper Edition 9/10 (+ APs) (8.9 x 8.9 cm) each
Rio de Janeiro 10 photographs, 8 x 5 in. 3 photographs, 20 x 24 in. 2 texts, 8 2x 11 in.
(20.32 x 12.7 cm) each (50.8 x 60.9 cm) each (21.6 x 27.9 cm) each
Dennis Oppenheim Collection Walker Art Center, The Heithoff Family Collection, 2 frames, 11 2x9 Ys in.
(born Electric City, Washington, Minneapolis; T: B. Walker Minneapolis (29.2 x 23.2 cm) each
1938) Acquisition Fund, 1999 2 frames, 13 3/4x 18 % in.
122. Untitled (gang), 1982-1984 (34.9 x 47.6 cm) each
111. Gallery Transplant, 1969 Sigmar Polke Ektacolor photograph Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery,
Photodocumentation: color and (born Olesnica, Germany, 1944) AP (edition of 2+ 1 AP) Los Angeles
black-and-white photography 86 x 48 in. (218.4 x 121.9 cm)
with marker ink, hand-stamped 117. Polkes Peitsche Collection Nina and Frank Moore, 128. W. B. Yeats, 1972
topographic map, collage text (Polke’s whip), 1968 New York Black-and-white photographs
50 x 160 in. (127 x 406.4 cm) Gelatin silver prints, rope, 5 photographs, 26 4 x 22 34 in.
Courtesy the artist, New York wood, tape Charles Ray (67.9 x 57.8 cm) each
27 Y2x 18 V8 in. (69.9 x 46.1 cm) (born Chicago 1953) Private collection, New York
112. Reading Position for Second Collection IVAM, Instituto
Degree Burn, 1970 Valenciano de Arte Moderno, 123. All My Clothes, 1973 Edward Ruscha
Photodocumentation: color and Generalitat Valenciana, Kodachrome photographs (born Omaha, Nebraska, 1937)
black-and-white photography Valencia, Spain mounted on paperboard
85 x 60 in. (215.9 x 152.4 cm) (Shown only in Minneapolis) 16 photographs, 9 x 60 in. 129. Twentysix Gasoline Stations,
Courtesy the artist, New York (22.9 x 152.4 cm) each 1962
Edition 2/12 Photo-offset-printed book
Collection Ninah and Michael 7M16x5 Y2x 16 in.
Lynne, New York (17.9 x 14x .5 cm) closed
Courtesy the artist, Venice,
California

a0
re) De)oO) THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
130. Various Small Fires and Milk, 137. Untitled Film Still #10, 1978 146. Untitled Film Still #35, 1979 155. Untitled Film Still #53, 1980
1964 Black-and-white photograph Black-and-white photograph Black-and-white photograph
Photo-offset-printed book AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs)
7 VY16x5 Y2x 16 in. 8x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) 8x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
(17.9 x 14x .5 cm) closed Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Courtesy the artist and Metro Courtesy the artist and Metro
Courtesy the artist, Venice, Toronto; Gift from the Junior Pictures, New York Pictures, New York
California Committee Fund, 1988
147. Untitled Film Still #37, 1979 156. Untitled Film Still #54, 1980
131. Every Building on the 138. Untitled Film Still #12, 1978 Black-and-white photograph Black-and-white photograph
Sunset Strip, 1966 Black-and-white photograph AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs)
Photo-offset-printed book AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 10 x8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
7x5 Y/8x ¥8 in. (17.8 x 14,3 x 1 cm) 8x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro Courtesy the artist and Metro
closed Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Pictures, New York
7x 299 1/2 in. (17.8 x 760.7 cm) Pictures, New York
extended 148. Untitled Film Still #43, 1979 157. Untitled Film Still #56, 1980
Courtesy the artist, Venice, 139. Untitled Film Still #13, 1978 Black-and-white photograph Black-and-white photograph
California Black-and-white photograph AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) Edition 6/10 (+ 2 APs)
AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
Cindy Sherman 10 x8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro Des Moines Art Center’s
(born Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Permanent Collections, Des
1954) Pictures, New York Moines, Iowa; Purchased with
149. Untitled Film Still #45, 1979 funds from the Edmundson
132. Untitled Film Still #2, 1977 140. Untitled Film Still #14, 1978 Black-and-white photograph Art Foundation, Inc.
Black-and-white photograph Black-and-white photograph AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs)
AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 158. Untitled Film Still #83, 1980
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro Black-and-white photograph
Courtesy the artist and Metro Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs)
Pictures, New York Pictures, New York 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
150. Untitled Film Still #46, 1979 Courtesy the artist and Metro
133. Untitled Film Still #3, 1977 141. Untitled Film Still #15, 1978 Black-and-white photograph Pictures, New York
Black-and-white photograph Black-and-white photograph AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs)
Edition 6/10 (+ 2 APs) Edition 10/10 (+ 2 APs) 8x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 159. Untitled #97, 1982
8x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro Color photograph
Collection Henry Art Gallery, Collection Mr. and Mrs. Charles Pictures, New York Edition 5/10
University of Washington, Seattle, Shenk, Columbus, Ohio 45 x 30 in. (114.3 x 76.2 cm)
Joseph and Elaine Monsen 151. Untitled Film Still #47, 1979 Collection Per Skarstedt, New York
Photography Collection, gift of 142. Untitled Film Still #16, 1978 Black-and-white photograph
Joseph and Elaine Monsen and Black-and-white photograph AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 160. Untitled #98, 1982
The Boeing Company, Seattle Edition 1/10 (+ 2 APs) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) Color photograph
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro Edition 5/10
134. Untitled Film Still #4, 1977 Collection Sybil Shainwald, Pictures, New York 45 x 30 in. (114.3 x 76.2 cm)
Black-and-white photograph New York Collection Per Skarstedt, New York
AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 152. Untitled Film Still #48, 1979
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 143. Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 Black-and-white photograph Laurie Simmons
Courtesy the artist and Metro Black-and-white photograph AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) (born Long Island, New York, 1949)
Pictures, New York AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) Courtesy the artist and Metro 161. Blonde/Red Dress/Kitchen, 1978
135. Untitled Film Still #6, 1977 Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Cibachrome print
Black-and-white photograph Pictures, New York AP (edition of 7+ 1 AP)
AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 153. Untitled Film Still #50, 1979 3 Y2x 5 in. (8.9 x 12.7 cm)
10x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) 144. Untitled Film Still #24, 1978 Black-and-white photograph Private collection, New York
Courtesy the artist and Metro Black-and-white photograph Edition 9/10 (+ 2 APs)
Pictures, New York AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm) 162. Woman/Red Couch/Newspaper,
8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm ) Des Moines Art Center’s 1978
136. Untitled Film Still #7, 1978 Courtesy the artist and Metro Permanent Collections, Cibachrome print
Black-and-white photograph Pictures, New York Des Moines, Iowa; Purchased with AP (edition of 7+ 1 AP)
AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) funds from the Edmundson Art 3 2x5 in. (8.9 x 12.7 cm)
10 x8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) 145. Untitled Film Still #34, 1979 Foundation, Inc. Private collection, New York
Courtesy the artist and Metro Black-and-white photograph
Pictures, New York AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs) 154. Untitled Film Still #52, 1980
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Black-and-white photograph
Courtesy the artist and Metro AP 2/2 (edition of 10 + 2 APs)
Pictures, New York 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Metro
Pictures, New York
163. Brothers/Horizon, 1979 172. Woman Opening Ger Van Elk 182. Photobooth Pictures (Edward
Cibachrome print Refrigerator/Milk in the Middle, 1979 (born Amsterdam 1941) Villella for Harper’s Bazaar “New
AP (edition of 7 + 1 AP) Cibachrome print Faces, New Forces, New Names in
5x7 % in. (12.7 x 18.4 cm) AP (edition of 7 + 1 AP) 176. The Co-Founder of the Word the Arts”), Jane 1963
Collection Thea Westreich and 3 Y2x5 in. (8.9.x 12.7 cm) O.K.—Hollywood, 1971 Gelatin silver prints on
Ethan Wagner, New York Courtesy the artist and Per Color photographs photographic paper
Skarstedt, New York 3 photographs, 12 M16 x 10 4 in. 7 photographs, 7 13/16 x 1/16 in.
164. Horses/Slant, 1979 (30.9 x 26.1 cm) each (19.8 x 3.9 cm) each
Cibachrome print Robert Smithson Collection Eveline de Vries Robbé, Archives of The Andy Warhol
AP (edition of 7+ 1 AP) (born Passaic, New Jersey, 1938; Amsterdam Museum; Founding Collection;
5x7 Yin. (12.7 x 18.4 cm) died 1973) Contribution The Andy Warhol
Courtesy the artist and Per 177. The Discovery of the Sardines, Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Skarstedt, New York 173. Monuments of Passaic, 1967 Placerita Canyon, Newhall, Inc., Pittsburgh
6 black-and-white photographs, California, 1971 Exhibition copy
165. Man/Blue Shirt/Red Barn, 1979 1 cut photostat Color photographs
Cibachrome print Dimensions variable 2 photographs, 25 1/2 x 27 Y2 in. 183. Photobooth Pictures (Sandra
AP (edition of 7 + 1 AP) The Museum of Contemporary (64.8 x 69.9 cm) each Hochman for Harper’s Bazaar “New
5x7 Yin. (12.7 x 18.4 cm) Art, Oslo Courtesy the artist, Amsterdam Faces, New Forces, New Names in
Private collection, New York the Arts”), June 1963
174. Hotel Palenque, 1969 178. Los Angeles Freeway Flyer, Gelatin silver print on
166. Man/Puddle, 1979 31 chromogenic-development slides 1973/2003 photographic paper
Cibachrome print with audio CD Color contact prints wound 713/16 x 1 %6 in. (19.8 x 3.9 cm)
AP (edition of 7 + 1 AP) Dimensions variable around 6 walking sticks Archives of The Andy Warhol
5x7 Y% in. (12.7 x 18.4 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 27x 198 7 in. (68.6 x 505.1 cm) Museum; Founding Collection;
Courtesy the artist and Per New York; Purchased with funds Collection the artist, Amsterdam Contribution The Andy Warhol
Skarstedt, New York contributed by the International Exhibition copy Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Director’s Council and Executive Inc., Pittsburgh
167. Man/Sky/Puddle/Second View, Committee Members: Edythe Jeff Wall Exhibition copy
1979 Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner (born Vancouver 1946)
Cibachrome print Cooper, Linda Fischbach, Ronnie 184. Photobooth Pictures (Writer
AP (edition of 7 + 1 AP) Heyman, Dakis Joannou, Cindy 179. Double Self-Portrait, 1979 Donald Barthelme for Harper's
5x7 V4 in. (12.7 x 18.4 cm) Johnson, Barbara Lane, Linda Cibachrome transparencies Bazaar “New Faces, New Forces,
Collection Nina and Frank Moore, Macklowe, Brian McIver, Peter in lightbox New Names in the Arts”), June 1963
New York Norton, William Peppler, Denise 64 Yi6 x 85 1316 in. Gelatin silver prints on
Rich, Rachel Rudin, David Teiger, (163.9 x 217.9 cm) photographic paper
168. New Bathroom Plan, 1979 Ginny Williams, Elliot Wolk, 1999 Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, 2 photographs, 7 x 1 16 in.
Cibachrome print Exhibition copy Toronto; Purchase, 1982 (17.7x 3.1 cm) each
AP (edition of 7+ 1 AP) Archives of The Andy Warhol
3 Y2x5 in. (8.9 x 12.7 cm) 175. Yucatan Mirror Displacements Andy Warhol Museum; Founding Collection;
Courtesy the artist and Per (1-9), 1969 (born Forest City, Pennsylvania, Contribution The Andy Warhol
Skarstedt, New York Cibachrome photographs from 1928; died 1987) Foundation for the Visual Arts,
chromogenic 35mm slides Inc., Pittsburgh
169. New Bathroom/Woman 9 framed prints, 17x 17x 1 Y2 in. 180. Photobooth Pictures (Andy Exhibition copy
Kneeling/First View, 1979 (43.2 x 43.2 x 3.8 cm) each Warhol in Tuxedo), c. 1963
Cibachrome print Collection Solomon R. Gelatin silver print on 185. Maquette for Today’s
3 Y2x5 in. (8.9 x 12.7 cm) Guggenheim Museum, New York; photographic paper Teenagers for Time, 1965
AP (edition of 7+ 1 AP) Purchased with funds contributed 7 ¥16x 1/16 in. (18.3 x 3.9 cm) Composite of 28 gelatin silver
Collection Thea Westreich and by the Photography Committee and Archives of The Andy Warhol prints on photographic paper
Ethan Wagner, New York with funds contributed by the Museum; Founding Collection; mounted on paperboard
International Director’s Council Contribution The Andy Warhol 8 x 11 in. (20.3 x 27.9 cm)
170. New Bathroom/Woman and Executive Committee Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Andy Warhol Museum;
Standing, 1979 Members: Edythe Broad, Henry Inc., Pittsburgh Founding Collection; Contribution
Cibachrome print Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Exhibition copy The Andy Warhol Foundation for
AP (edition of 7+ 1 AP) Linda Fischbach, Ronnie Heyman, the Visual Arts, Inc., Pittsburgh
3 Y2x5 in. (8.9 x 12.7 cm) Dakis Joannou, Cindy Johnson, 181. Photobooth Pictures (Andy Exhibition copy
Courtesy the artist and Per Barbara Lane, Linda Macklowe, Warhol with Sunglasses), c. 1963
Skarstedt, New York Brian Mclver, Peter Norton, Gelatin silver print on
William Peppler, Denise Rich, photographic paper
171. Woman/Green Shirt/Red Barn, Rachel Rudin, David Teiger, 5 7/16 x 1 Y16 in. (9.1 x 3.9 cm)
1979 Ginny Williams, Elliot Wolk, 1999 Archives of The Andy Warhol
Cibachrome print Museum; Founding Collection,
AP (edition of 7 + 1 AP) Contribution The Andy Warhol
5x7 Y% in. (12.7x 18.4 cm) Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Courtesy the artist and Per Inc., Pittsburgh
Skarstedt, New York Exhibition copy

328 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

186. Photobooth Pictures (Edie 193. Crow, 1970 202. In Search of... , 1981
Sedgwick), 1965 Black-and-white photograph Gelatin silver print
Gelatin silver prints on 10 x 10 in. (25.4 x 25.4 cm) 22 ¥4 x 18 Y4 in. (57.8 x 47.6 cm)
photographic paper Collection the artist, New York framed
2 photographs, 7 3/16 x 1 116 in. Collection Lisa Spellman,
(18.3 x 3.9 cm) each 194, Milk/Floor, 1970 New York
The Andy Warhol Museum; Gelatin silver prints
Founding Collection; Contribution 2 photographs, 9 2x 7 12 in. 203. June, 1981 (#77), 1981
The Andy Warhol Foundation for (24.1 x 19.1 cm) each Gelatin silver print
the Visual Arts, Inc., Pittsburgh Collection the artist, New York 9 13/16 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm)
Exhibition copy Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow
195. Big and Little, 1971 Artworks + Projects, New York
187. Self-Portrait in Drag, c. 1981 Black-and-white photograph
Polaroid print 8 Y2x 8 V4 in. (21.6 x 20.9 cm) 204. Untitled, 1981, 1981
4 2x3 Yio in. (11.4x 8.4 cm) Collection the artist, New York Gelatin silver print
Collection Walker Art Center, 10x 7 7 in. (25.4 x 20 cm)
Minneapolis; Butler Family 196. Reading Two Books, 1971 Collection Burt Aaron, Detroit
Fund, 2003 Black-and-white photograph
14 Y4x 10 2 in. (36.2 x 26.7 cm) 205. The Waterfall, 1981
188. Self-Portrait in Drag, c. 1981 Private collection Gelatin silver print
Polaroid print 92x78 in. (24.1 x 19.4 cm)
412x316 in. (11.4 x 8.4 cm) 197. To Hide His Deformity He unframed
Collection Walker Art Center, Wore Special Clothing, 1971 22 ¥4x 18 4 in. (58.8 x 47.6 cm)
Minneapolis; Butler Family Black-and-white photograph framed
Fund, 2003 14x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm) Collection Robinson and Nancy
Collection the artist, New York Grover, West Hartford,
189. Self-Portrait in Drag, c. 1981 Connecticut
Polaroid print 198. Before/On/After: Permutations,
412x316 in. (11.4x 8.4 cm) 1972 206. Whitfield, 1981
Collection Walker Art Center, Black-and-white photographs Gelatin silver print
Minneapolis; Butler Family 7 photographs, 9 1/2 x 7 9/4 in. 48x38 in. (11.8
x 9.2 cm)
Fund, 2003 (24.1 x 19.9 cm) each unframed
Collection Walker Art Center, 17x 14 in.(43.2 x 35.6 cm) framed
Robert Watts Minneapolis; Art Center Collection Leslie Tonkonow and
(born Burlington, Iowa, 1923; Acquisition Fund, 1983 Klaus Ottmann, New York
died 1988)
James Welling Hannah Wilke
190. Portrait Dress, 1965 (born Hartford, Connecticut, 1951) (born New York 1940; died 1993)
Black-and-white photographic
transparencies, cloth, vinyl, zipper 199. July 10 (a) (1980), 1980 207. S.O.S.—Starification Object
39 Y2x1934x2 Yin. Gelatin silver print Series, 1974-1982
(100.3 x 50.2 x 3.5 cm) 4Y8 x3 Y8 in. (11.8 x 9.2 cm) Black-and-white photographs,
Collection Walker Art Center, unframed chewing gum
Minneapolis; T. B. Walker 17x 14 in. (43.2 x 35.6 cm) framed 41 16x58 ¥8x 21316 in.
Acquisition Fund, 2003 Collection Leslie Tonkonow and (104.6 x 148.3 x 7.5 cm)
Klaus Ottmann, New York Private collection; courtesy Ronald
191. TV Dinner, 1965 Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Photograph laminated 200. March 16 (1980), 1980
on wood, cast plastic Gelatin silver print
1¥8x 20x11 in. 48x 3 Y8 in. (11.8 x 9.2 cm)
(3.5 x 50.8 x 27.9 cm) unframed
Collection Walker Art Center, 17 x 14 in. (43.2 x 35.6 cm) framed
Minneapolis; T. B. Walker Collection Leslie Tonkonow and
Acquisition Fund, 1993 Klaus Ottmann, New York

William Wegman 201. 2-29 IV, 1980, 1980

(born Holyoke, Massachusetts, Gelatin silver print
1943) 45x38 in. (11.8 x 9.2 cm)
unframed
192. Cotto, 1970 17x 14 in. (43.2 x 35.6 cm) framed
Gelatin silver print Collection Leslie Tonkonow and
10 2x 10 % in. (26.7 x 27.3 cm) Klaus Ottmann, New York
Collection Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles
Index Barrow, Thomas, 177-180 Cassavetes, John, 41 Gerz, Jochen, 122, 123
Cancellations series, 177 Faces (1965/released 1968), 41
Homage to Paula (1974), 179 Gilbert & George, 15, 91
Horizon Rib (1974), 178 Charlesworth, Sarah, 259-261 Any Port in a Storm series
Page numbers in italics refer to April 21, 1978, from Modern (1972), 15
illustrations. Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 14, 26, 28, History (1978), 74-77 Dead Boards #5 (1976), 137
88, 89, 99-101, 103, 104, 122, 123, Falling (1972), 15
125, 188 Christo, 21, 30 “living sculptures,” 16
Acconci, Vito, 15, 121, 183, 184, 250 Anonyme Skulpturen (1970), Valley Curtain, 30 Raining Gin (1973), 136
Fall (1969), 184 88, 100 Smashed (1972), 15
Jumps (1969), 45 Bergwerk Concordia, Oberhausen, Conner, Bruce, 15 Staggering (1972), 15
Margins (1969), 46 D (1967), 99 ANGEL (1975), 15, 75
Trademarks (1970), 26 Cooling Towers (1972), 27 NIGHT ANGEL (1975), 79 Goldstein, Jack, 204, 249
Gas Tanks (Spherical) (1963), 60 The Jump (1978), 249, 250
Ader, Bas Jan, 15 Grain Elevators USA (1977), De Maria, Walter, 30, 102
On the Road to Neo Plasticism, 58-59 Munich Earth Room (1968), 31 Graham, Dan, 14, 21, 37, 38, 94,
Westkapelle, Holland (1971), 15 Oberhausen series, 99-103 186, 188, 198, 199
Pitfall on the Way to a New Neo Reed & Herb Coal Co., Joliett, Dibbets, Jan, 14, 21, 28, 87, 88 Figurative ad (1965), 198
Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland Schuylkill County, Pa., USA Big Comet 3°-60°, Sky/Sea/Sky Homes for America (1966-1967),
(1971), 47 (1975), 104 (1973), 30, 80 14, 37, 38, 39, 98, 138-142, 186,
Untitled (Tea Party) (1972), 48, 49 Wassertiirme (1972), 187 Dutch Mountain series, 28 187, 188, 198, 199
Horizon 1°-10° Land (1973),
Adler, Amy, 265, 266 Beuys, Joseph, 122 14, 81 Gursky, Andreas, 94, 125, 126, 192
Amy Adler Photographs Leonardo Enterprise 18.11.72, 18:5:16 Uhr Little Comet—Sea 9°—-81 ° Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank
DiCaprio (2001), 266 (1973), 63 (1973), 30 (1994), 192, 193
La rivoluzione siamo noi
Almeida, Helena, 92 (1972), 61 Documenta 5 (1972), 89 Haacke, Hans,
Pintura habitada (1975), 92 Vakuum <> Masse (1970), 62 Cast Ice: Freezing and Melting,
Documenta 6 (1977), 90 January 3, 4,5... 1969 (1969),
Anselmo, Giovanni, 14 Bochner, Mel, 13, 14, 21 143
Entrare nell’opera (1971), 14, 51 Crumple (1967/1994), 65 Duchamp, Marcel, 11, 12, 41, 42, Live Airborne System, November
Lato destro (1970), 50 Misunderstandings: A Theory of 177, 178 30, 1968 (1968), 145
Photography (1967-1970), Air de Paris (1919), 20 Spray of Ithaca Falls: Freezing and
Antin, Eleanor, 16, 24, 28 13, 21, 107-112 Large Glass (1915-1923), 11 Melting on Rope, February 7,
Carving:A Traditional Sculpture Surface Deformation/Crumple 8,9... 1969 (1969), 144
(1972), 16, 52, 53 (1967/2000), 64 Evans, Walker, 18, 19
100 Boots series, 24, 25 Surface Dis/Tension (1968), 66 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Hahn, Betty, 180-182
100 Boots in the Market (1971), 24 (with James Agee, 1939), Broccoli (1972), 181
100 Boots on the Road (1971), 24 Boltanski, Christian, 15, 93, 115, 18, 254 Mejo, Passport Photo (1971), 180
100 Boots Parking (1971), 24 2223 Road and Rainbow (1971), 180
Les habits de Francois C. Export, Valie, 15
Artists and Photographs (Multiples (1972), 67 Einkreisung (1976), 83 Hilliard, John,
Gallery, 1970), 13, 20, 21 Les 62 membres du Club Mickey K6orperkonfiguration series, 15 Camera Recording Its Own
en 1955 (1972), 15, 68, 69 Starre Identitdt (1972), 84 Condition (1971), 92
Baldessari, John, 17, 27, 28, 195 Trapez (1972), 82
Alignment Series: Things in My Broodthaers, Marcel, 91 Wir sind Gefangene unserer Selbst Huebler, Douglas, 15, 20, 28, 38, 39,
Studio (by Height) (1975), 56 La soupe de Daguerre (1974), (1972), 85 120, 121, 263
Choosing series, 27 Hil Duration Piece #7, Rome, March
Choosing (A Game for Two Musée d'Art Moderne, Feldmann, Hans-Peter, 15, 93 1973 (1973), 38, 40
Players): Green Beans (1971), 28 Département des Aigles (1972), Bilder books, 15, 130 Duration Piece #35, Amsterdam,
Choosing (A Game for Two 91 Sonntagsbilder (1976-1977), Holland (1970), 38
Players): Rhubarb (1972), 54 No Photographs Allowed/Défense 15, 93, 129 Location Piece No. 13, November
Embed Series: Oiled Arm (Sinking de photographier (1974), 70 1969, 263
Boat and Palms) (1974), 57 Fischli, Peter, and David Weiss, 15 Variable Piece 14, the Netherlands,
A Movie: Directional Piece. Where Bunnell, Peter, 179 Der Brand von Uster (1979), 131 United States, Italy, France, and
People Are Looking (with R, y Photography into Sculpture Im Teppichladen (1979), 132 Germany, January 1971 (1971),
G, Variants and Ending with (MoMA), 179 Modeschau (1979), 133 28, 29
Yellow) (1972-1973), 17, 55 Moonraker (1979), 134 Variable Piece #99, Israel, July
Burgin, Victor, 15, 93, 94 Titanic (1979), 135 1973 (1973), 146
Baltz, Lewis, 28 Performative/Narrative (1971), Der Unfall (1979), 15 Variable Piece #101, West
East Wall, Western Carpet Mills, IS, 722, 153 Wurstserie (1979), 15, 137-135 Germany, March 1973 (1973),
1231 Warner, Tustin (1974),31 Photopath (1967), 93 147
Fulton, Hamish, 26, 30 Variable Pieces, 15
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 9 untitled book of photographs
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, (1974), 26 Kender, John, 9, 10
Paris (1932), 9

330 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN LIBRARY
Kertész, André LeWitt, Sol, 14, 21, 188, 189 Nauman, Bruce, 12, 20, 22, 36, Polke, Sigmar, 13, 123
Meudon, 1928 (1928), 34 Autobiography (1980), 172, 198, 249 Bamboostange liebt Zollstockstern
173, 189 Bound to Fail (1966-1967/1970), (1968-1969), 13, 239
Kirby, Michael, 21 Brick Wall (1977), 168, 169 198, 221 Gilbert and George (1974), 90, 91
Pont Neuf, 21 Muybridge III, 21 Coffee Thrown away Because It Hohere Wesen befahlen: Rechte
Photogrids (1978), 15, 170, 171, Was Too Cold obere Ecke schwarz malen!
Klein, Yves, 9, 10 188, 189 (1966-1967/1970), 223 (1969), 89, 91
Dimanche (1960), 9, 148 Eating My Words Menschenkreis (1964), 91
Leap into the Void (1960), 9 Long, Richard, 14, 20, 26, 36, 122 (1966-1967/1970), 220 Polkes Peitsche (1968), 13, 238
England (1967), 175 Failing to Levitate in the Studio
Knoebel, Imi, England 1968 (1968), 35, 36 (1966), 36 Prince, Richard, 18, 19, 126, 207,
Abstrakte Projektion (1969), 151 A Line in the Himalayas (1975), Finger Touch with Mirrors 246-248
Aussenprojektion (1971), 149 26 (1966-1967/1970), 222 The 8-Track Photograph
Innenprojektion (1969), 152 A Line Made by Walking, England Flour Arrangements (1966), 12 (1977-1978), 246-247
Sternenhimmel (1974), 150 (1967), 14, 122, 174 LAAIR, 20 Untitled (Cowboy) (1980-1984),
A Sculpture Left by the Tide, My Name as Though It Were ls:
Kolbowski, Silvia, Cornwall (1970), 176 Written on the Surface of the Untitled (gang) (1982-1984), 243
Model Pleasure I (1982), 153, 154 Moon... (1967), 224 Untitled (living rooms) (1977), 242
Longo, Robert, 204, 251 Self-Portrait as a Fountain Untitled (single man again)
Koons, Jeff, (1966-1967/1970), 12, 36 (1977-1978), 207
The New Jeff Koons (1981), 155 Malraux, André, 150, 151 Untitled (Potholder) Untitled (three men looking in the
The Voices of Silence, 250 (1966-1967/1970), 218 same direction) (1978), 18, 207,
Kruger, Barbara, 245, 259-261 Waxing Hot (1966-1967/1970), 240-241
Untitled (You are not yourself) Man Ray, 12 219 Untitled (three women looking in
(1982), 157 Dust Breeding (1920), 11 the same direction)
Untitled (Your comfort is my Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy Newhall, Beaumont, 86, 116, 117 (1980-1984), 240-241
silence) (1981), 156 (c. 1920-1921), 16, 17 History of Photography, 86, 116
Rainer, Arnulf, 92, 121
Lamelas, David, 16 Marey, Etienne-Jules, 97, 98 Niépce, Nicéphore, 187 Grimassen (Automatenfotos)
Rock Star (Character View from the Window at Le Gras (1968-1969), 91
Appropriation) (1974), 16, 158 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 14, 190, (1826), 186
The Violent Tapes of 1975 (1975), TES OD Rautert, Timm,
159 Anarchitecture, 191, 192 Oiticica, Hélio, and Neville Bild-analytische Photographie
Anarchitecture: Home Moving d’Almeida, series, 93
Lawler, Louise, 249, 252, 255 (1974), 192 03/CCS5 (Hendrix War, Cosmococa Untitled (1974), 93
Arranged by Donald Marron, Splitting (1974), 14, 190, 797, Programa-in-Progess)
Susan Brundage, Cheryl Biship 208, 209 (1973/2003), 226 Ray, Charles, 15
at Paine Webber, Inc. (1982), 162 Splitting: Exterior (c. 1974), 210 07/CCS5 (Hendrix War, Cosmococa All My Clothes (1973), 271
A Movie Will Be Shown without Programa-in-Progress) Plank Piece I-II (1973), 15,
a Picture (1979), 252, 255 Mendieta, Ana, 16 (1973/2003), 227 268, 269
A Picture Is No Substitute for Untitled (Facial Cosmetic Untitled (1973), 267
Anything (with Sherrie Levine, Variations) (1972/1997), 16, 211 Oppenheim, Dennis, 20, 28
1981-1982), 255 Directed Seeding (1969), 30 Richter, Gerhard, 91, 123
Portrait (Parrot) (1982), 161 Merz, Mario, 122 Gallery Transplant (1969), 229 Atlas, 91

untitled installation, Artists Fibonaccio 1202 (1970), 212, 213 Parallel Stress, 28 Woman Descending the Staircase
Space (1978), 252 Second Degree Burn (1970), 228 (1965), 97
Why Pictures Now (1981), 19, 160 Michals, Duane, 28
Owens, Bill, 28 Rochester Group, 179, 180
Lee, Nikki S., 265 Mikhailov, Boris, 264 Suburbia, 28
Case History series, 264 Rosler, Martha, 15
Levine, Sherrie, 17, 18, 19, 206, 207, Paolini, Giulio, 12-13 The Bowery in Two Inadequate
Mohamedi, Nasreen, 15 Delfo (1965), 13 Descriptive Systems (1974),
244, 249, 253-255
Untitled (c. 1970), 275 Proust (1968), 230, 231 S27 25279:
After Walker Evans: 3 (1981), 163
After Walker Evans: 4 (1981), 254 Untitled (c. 1972), 217
Untitled (c. 1975), 2/4, 216 Penone, Giuseppe, Ruff, Thomas, 94, 125, 126, 192,
After Walker Evans: 5 (1981), 164
Svolgere la propria pella (1971), 193, 262, 263
After Walker Evans: 17 (1981), 17
Morris, Robert, 21, 30 2325235 Nacht 5 I (1992), 193
After Walker Evans: 18 (1981), 165
Night Pictures, 192, 193
A Picture Is No Substitute for
Mulas, Ugo, 121 Piper, Adrian, 16 Nudes series, 263
Anything (with Louise Lawler,
Verifiche series (1970-1972), 121 Food for the Spirit (1971), 236, 237 Substratum series, 263
1981-1982), 255
President Profile (1979), 253 The Mythic Being: I/You (Her)
Muybridge, Eadweard, 97, 98, 123 (1974), 16, 234, 235 Ruppersberg, Allen, 15
Sons and Lovers, 249
Pugilist Striking a Blow, from Seeing and Believing (1972),
Untitled (President: 2) (1979), 167
Animal Locomotion (c. 1887), 15, 276, 277
Untitled (President: 5) (1979), 166
97 W.B. Yeats (1972), 274-275

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Ruscha, Edward, 12, 20, 22-23, 25, Simmons, Laurie, Van Elk, Ger, 15, 124 Yokomizo, Shizuka, 264, 265
27, 28, 43, 186, 189, 190, 198 Blonde/Red Dress/Kitchen/Milk The Co-Founder of the Word Stranger series (1999-2001),
Baby Cakes, 20 (1978), 291 O.K.—Hollywood (1971), 298 264, 265
books, 12, 20, 22, 25, 27, 43 Brothers/Horizon (1979), 292 The Discovery of the Sardines, Stranger (1999), 265
Business Cards, 22, 23 New Bathroom/Woman Standing Placerita Canyon, Newhall,
Colored People, 27 (1979), 290 California (1971), 15, 300
Crackers, 22, 23 Woman/Green Shirt/Red Barn Los Angeles Freeway Flyer
Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1979), 293 (1973/2003), 299
(1966), 22, 23, 44, 186, 189, 190,
282, 283 Sirk, Douglas, Wall, Jeff, 32-44, 94, 115, 126
A Few Palm Trees (1971), 27, 29 Imitation of Life (1959), 249 Double Self-Portrait (1979), 301
“Rejected” ad (1964), 196,
197, 198 Smithson, Robert, 14, 20, 24-25, 26, Warhol, Andy, 16, 21, 41, 42,
Royal Road Test, 23 28, 37, 87, 99-106, 190, 191, 200, 11223), MO)
64 Parking Lots, 27 201 films, 41
Some Los Angeles Apartments Asphalt Lump (1968), 101 KISS (1963), 41, 42
(1965), 32, 43 Asphalt Rundown (1969), 102 Photobooth Pictures (Andy Warhol
Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los The Bridge Monument Showing in Tuxedo) (c. 1963), 303
Angeles (1967), 189 Sidewalks (1967), 37, 201 Photobooth Pictures (Andy Warhol
Twentysix Gasoline Stations Concrete Pour (1969), 102 with Sunglasses) (c. 1963), 302
(1962), 12, 25, 27, 43, 189, 197, “The Crystal Land” (1966), Photobooth Pictures (Edward
278, 279 37, 200 Villella for Harper’s Bazaar
Various Small Fires and Milk First Mirror Displacement (1969), “New Faces, New Forces, New
(1964), 22, 280, 281 BT, Names in the Arts”) (1963), 306
Glue Pour (1970), 102 Photobooth Pictures (Sandra
Salle, David, 249, 250, 251, 253-255 Hotel Palenque (1969), 14, 103, Hochman for Harper's Bazaar
I Can Even Personify (1979), 253 190, 191, 296, 297 “New Faces, New Forces, New
King Kong (1983), 256 Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Names in the Arts”) (1963), 304
The Structure Is in Itself Not Yucatan, 24-25, 37, 200, 201 Photobooth Pictures (Writer
Reassuring (1979), 253, 254 Monuments of Passaic (1967), 14, Donald Barthelme for Harper’s
26, 37, 103, 190, 200, 201, 294 Bazaar “New Faces, New Forces,
Sebald, W. G., A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey New Names in the Arts”)
Austerlitz (2001), 185 (1968), 101 (1963), 305
illustration by Michael Brandon Non-site invitation (1968), 101 Self-Portrait in Drag (c. 1981),
Jones, 185 Non-Site (Oberhausen) (1968), 307-309
101
Serralongue, Bruno, 263 Oberhausen Photographs (1968), Watts, Robert,
Corse-Matin (1997), 263 100, 102 Portrait Dress (1965), 311
Escalier Central, Expo 2000 Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), TV Dinner (1965), 310
(2000), 262 103
“A Sedimentation of the Mind— Wearing, Gillian, 264
Shahbazi, Shirana, 263 Earth Projects” (1968), 102 Drunk, 264
Goftare Nik (2000-2001), 263 Spiral Jetty (1970), 190
Yucatan Mirror Displacements Wegman, William, 15, 27
Sherman, Cindy, 16, 124, 179, 180, (1-9) (1969), 25, 28, 295 Before/On/After: Permutations
207, 249, 251, 252, 254 (1972), 316
Untitled (1975), 249 Steinert, Otto, 86, 87, 89 Crow (1970), 15, 372
Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), Ein-Fup-Gdnger (1950), 87 Milk/Floor (1970), 313
16, 124, 252 Subjektive Photographie Reading Two Books (1971), 314
Untitled Film Still #6 (1977), 251 exhibitions, 86 To Hide His Deformity He Wore
Untitled Film Still #10 (1978), 286 Special Clothing (1971), 315
Untitled Film Still #34 (1979), 287 Stieglitz, Alfred, 24, 33, 179
Untitled Film Still #48 (1979), 250 The Flatiron Building Welling, James,
Untitled Film Still #50 (1979), 284 (1902-1903), 33 In Search Of... (1981), 318
Untitled Film Still #54 (1980), 285 July 10 (a) (1980) (1980), 319
Untitled Film Still #56 (1980), 16 Struth, Thomas, 94, 125, 126 March 16 (1980) (1980), 320
Untitled #66 (1980), 206, 251 2-29 IV, 1980 (1980), 319
Untitled #97 (1982), 288 Szarkowski, John, 10, 179 The Waterfall (1981), 317
Untitled #98 (1982), 289 The Photographer's Eye Whitfield (1981), 320
(MoMA, 1964), 10, 179
Shunk, Harry, 9, 10 Wilke, Hannah, 16
Szeemann, Harald, 87 S.O.S.—Starification Object Series
Documenta 5 (1972), 89 (1974-1982), 16, 321
Live in Your Head: When Attitudes
Become Form (Kunsthalle
Bern, 1969), 87

co (Fe)NS THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Lenders to IVAM, Instituto Valenciano Talwar Gallery, New York
de Arte Moderno, 303 Gallery, New York
the Exhibition Generalitat Valenciana, Leslie Tonkonow and Klaus
Valencia, Spain Ottmann, New York
Imi Knoebel, Diisseldorf Ger Van Elk, Amsterdam,
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, The Netherlands
Burt. Aaron, Detroit Winterthur, Switzerland Walker Art Center,
Andy Warhol Museum, Marion Lambert, Geneva, Minneapolis
Pittsburgh Switzerland Artur Walther, New York
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + William Wegman, New York
Angelo R. Baldassarre, Projects, New York Thea Westreich and Ethan
Bari, Italy Sherrie Levine, New York Wagner, New York
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Sol Le Witt
New York Bruno van Lierde, Brussels Private collections
Bard Center for Curatorial Ninah and Michael Lynne,
Studies, Bard College, New York
Annandale-on-Hudson, Margo Leavin Gallery,
New York Los Angeles
Michael Benevento, New York Marian Goodman Gallery,
Lorenzo and Marilena New York
Bonomo, Bari, Italy Allan McCollum, New York
Daniel Bosser, Paris Metro Pictures, New York
The Brant Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum
Greenwich, Connecticut of Art, New York
The Broad Art Foundation, Gary and Tracy Mezzatesta,
Santa Monica Los Angeles
Victor Burgin, New York David P. Mixer, East
Christine Burgin Gallery, Greenwich, Rhode Island
New York Nina and Frank Moore,
Suzanne Cohen, Baltimore New York
La Coleccion Jumex, Museu de Serralves, Museum
Mexico City of Contemporary Art,
Dallas Museum of Art Porto, Portugal
Daros Collection, Switzerland Museum Moderner Kunst,
David Zwirner Gallery, Vienna
New York The Museum of Contemporary
Des Moines Art Center, Art, Los Angeles
Des Moines, Iowa Museum of Contemporary
Eveline de Vries Robbé, Art, Oslo
Amsterdam Dennis Oppenheim, New York
Jan Dibbets, Amsterdam Patrick Painter Editions,
Anthony d’Offay, London Hong Kong
Thomas Erben, New York Rachofsky Collection, Dallas
Esso Gallery and Books, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
New York New York
Valie Export, Vienna Edward Ruscha, Los Angeles
Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver Sybil Shainwald, New York
& Jacobson, New York Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shenk,
Galeria Fortes Vilaga, Columbus, Ohio
Sao Paulo, Brazil Cindy Sherman, New York
Galerie Lelong, New York Per Skarstedt, New York
Gorney, Bravin + Lee, SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne,
New York Germany
Greengrassi, London Kiki Smith, New York
Gayle Greenhill, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim
Robinson and Nancy Grover, Museum, New York
West Hartford, Connecticut Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Karen and Kenneth Heithoff, Robert and Melissa Soros,
Minneapolis New York
Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Lisa Spellman, New York
Reproduction © 2003 Hans-Peter Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Solomon R. Guggenheim
Feldmann/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Museum, 25, 103, 295-297;
Credits Society (ARS), New photo: David Zwirner photo: James Cohan Gallery,
York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Gallery, New York, 191, New York, 37 (right), 201
129-130 192, 208-209; photo: Jon and (right), 294
© Hamish Fulton; photo: Anne Abbott, New York, 210 Sonnabend Gallery, New York,
Amy Adler and Casey Kaplan, Center for Creative Metro Pictures, New York, 16, 56, 136
New York, 266 Photography, University 19, 160, 162, 250 (right), 251, Sonnabend Gallery, New York,
Art Gallery of Ontario, of Arizona, Tucson, 26 284-289 and The Tang Teaching
Toronto, and Jeff Wall, 301 (bottom right) The Museum of Contemporary Museum and Art Gallery,
© 2003 Artists Rights Society Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles Art, Los Angeles, 166-167 Saratoga Springs, New York,
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, and New York, 22, 29 (top), © 2003 Bruce Nauman/Artists 68
Paris, 67—69; photo: Glenn 32, 43, 44, 189-190, 197, Rights Society (ARS), Tate Gallery, London/Art
Halvorson, 148 278-283 New York; photo: Sperone Resource, New York,
© 2003 Artists Rights Society Galeria Fortes Vilaca, Sao Westwater, New York, 12, 36, 92 (right)
(ARS), New York/SABAM, Paulo, and Projeto H.O., 218-223; photo: Sonnabend Thomas Erben Gallery,
Brussels; photo: Marian Rio de Janeiro, 226-227 Gallery, New York, and The New York, 236-237
Goodman Gallery, New Galerie Konrad Fischer, Tang Teaching Museum and Thomas Erben Gallery,
York, 71; photo: SK Stiftung Diisseldorf, 101 Art Gallery, Saratoga New York, and Helena
Kultur/Die Photographische Galerie Lelong, 211 Springs, New York, 224-225 Almeida, 92 (left),
Sammlung, 70 Galleria Tucci Russo, Turin; Molly Nesbit, 249 (left) Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,
© 2003 Artists Rights Society photo: Enzo Ricci, 51 Dennis Oppenheim; photo: Netherlands, 299
(ARS), New York/VG Gorney, Bravin + Lee, Joshua Kalin, 228; photo: Ger Van Elk, 298, 300
Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photo: New York, 272-273 David Sundberg, 229 © 2003 Andy Warhol
Glenn Halvorson, 61—63 Stefan Gronert, 93 Patrick Painter Editions, Foundation for the Visual
John Baldessari, 28, 54—55, 57 © 2003 Andreas Gursky/Artists Los Angeles and Vancouver, Arts, Inc./ARS, New York,
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Rights Society (ARS), 47-49 42, 302-306; photo: Cameron
New York, 18, 207, 232-233, New York, VG Bild-Kunst, The Photographers’ Gallery, Wittig, 307-309
240-243 Bonn, 193 (right) London, 265 James Welling, 317-318
Geoffrey Batchen, 178-181 © 2003 Hans Haacke/Artists © Sigmar Polke, 89, 90; photo: White Cube, London, 137
Mel Bochner, 64—66 Rights Society (ARS), Michael Werner Gallery, Witte de With, Rotterdam,
Marilena Bonomo Gallery, New York, 143-145 New York, 238; photo: 158-159
Bari, Italy, 230-231 Glenn Halvorson, Minneapolis, Glenn Halvorson, 239 Cameron Wittig, Minneapolis,
The Brant Foundation, 78-79, 131-135, 153-154, 187 Richard Prince, 246-247 17, 21, 26 (left), 37 (left), 38,
Greenwich, Connecticut, 155 (right), 234-235, 310, 316 © 2003 Man Ray Trust/Artists 45, 58-60, 74-77, 107-112,
Brooke Alexander, New York, Hopefulmonster, Turin, Rights Society (ARS), 163-165, 196, 198, 200, 201
46, 212-213 NY/ADAGB, Paris, 17 (left); (left), 214-217, 247, 254, 311
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/ © 2003 Estate of Douglas photo: FCENAC/MNAM/Dist.
Magnum Photos, Huebler/Artists Rights Réunion des Musées
9 (right) Society (ARS), New York; Nationaux/Art Resource,
Christine Burgin Gallery, photo: Darcy Huebler and New York, 11
New York, and Victor Burgin, Luciano Perna, 29 (bottom), Regen Projects, Los Angeles,
72-73 40, 146-147 267-271
Christine Burgin Gallery, © 2003 Estate of André Kertész Rheinisches Bildarchiv,
New York, and William All rights reserved, 34 Cologne, Germany, 87, 89
Wegman, 312-315 Carmen and Imi Knoebel, Gerhard Richter and © The
CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion 149-152 Art Institute of Chicago,
des Musées Nationaux/Art Barbara Kruger, 156-157 All rights reserved, 91
Resource, New York, 11 Louise Lawler, 161 Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
Rosangela Cochran, Turin, 13 Leslie Tonkonow Art + New York, 52—53, 321
©Walter De Maria; Dia Art Projects, New York, 319-320 © David Salle/Licensed by
Foundation, New York, © 2003 Sol Le Witt/Artists VAGA, New York, NY,
31 (left) Rights Society (ARS), 253 (left), 254 (left); photo:
© Jan Dibbets/Artists Rights New York, 168-173, 188 D. James Dee, 256
Society (ARS), New York, Margo Leavin Gallery, Harry Shunk, 9 (left)
30 (top), 80; photo: Glenn Los Angeles, 274-277 Laurie Simmons, 290-293
Halvorson, 81 Marian Goodman Gallery, © Estate of Robert
Anthony d’Offay, 174-176 New York and Dan Graham, Smithson/Licensed by
Esso Gallery, New York, 50 39, 138-142, 187 (left), 199 VAGA, New York, NY,
Valie Export, 82-85 © 2003 Estate of Gordon 100, 102, 200-201; photo:

334 THELAST PICTURE SHOW

Board of Directors Walker Family Members
2003-2004 Ann Hatch
Kathleen S. Roeder
Chairman Adrian Walker
Stephen E. Watson Brooks Walker, Jr.
Elaine B. Walker
President Jean K. Walker
Roger L. Hale Lindsey Walker

Vice Presidents Honorary Directors

M. Nazie Eftekhari H.B. Atwater, Jr.
Michael Francis Mrs. Julius E. Davis
Stephen Shank Julia W. Dayton
John G. Taft Mrs. Malcolm A. McCannel
Harriet S. Spencer
Secretary Philip Von Blon
Kathy Halbreich David M. Winton

Treasurer Director Emeritus

Ann L. Bitter Martin Friedman

Public Members
Elizabeth Andrus
Carol V. Bemis
Ann Birks
Ralph W. Burnet
Thomas M. Crosby, Jr.
Martha B. Dayton
Andrew S. Duff
Jack Elliott
Jack W. Eugster
Matthew O. Fitzmaurice
Martha Gabbert
Andrew C. Grossman
Karen Heithoff
Martha Kaemmer
Erwin A. Kelen
Sarah Kling
Sarah M. Lebedoff
Jeanne S. Levitt
David M. Moffett
Joan Mondale
J. Keith Moyer
Curtis Nelson
Mary Pappajohn
Michael A. Peel
Rebecca Pohlad
Robyne Robinson
Gregg Steinhafel
Michael T: Sweeney
Marjorie Weiser
Susan S. White
Frank Wilkinson
C. Angus Wurtele
ee
5 4
er
an 7

ae
apy et u pity 5

-
“
Cy
a!
aa
Jaen!
Gtoat

eupen attest
resceeytiyi bseleidy
Raat

seat
Inertia