jeff wall-marks of indifference

8/2/2019 Jeff Wall-Marks of Indifference

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Jeff Wall

"Marks of Indifference":Aspects of Photographyin, or as, Conceptual Art(1995)Originally published in Ann Goldstein and AnneRorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Ar t ,1965-1975, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museumof Contemporary Art, 1995),247-267.

PrefaceThis essay is a sketch, an attempt to studythe ways that photography occupiedConceptual artists, the ways that photography decisively realized itself as a modernistart in the experiments of the 1960s and1970s. Conceptual art played an importantrole in the transformation of the terms andconditions within which established photography defined itself and its relationshipswith other arts, a transformation whichestablished photography as an institutionalized modernist form evolving explicitlythrough the dynamics of its auto-critique.Photography's implication with modernistpainting and sculpture was not, of course,developed in the 1960s; it was central to thework and discourse of the art of the 1920s.

But, for the sixties generation, artphotography remained too comfortablyrooted in the pictorial traditions of modemart; it had an irritatingly serene, marginalexistence, a way of holding itself at a distance from the intellectual drama of avantgardism while claiming a prominent, evendefinitive place within it. The youngerartists wanted to disturb that, to uproot andradicalize the medium, and they did so withthe most sophisticated means they had inhand at the time, the auto-critique of artidentified'with the tradition of the avantgarde. Their approach implied that photography had not yet become "avant-garde"in 1960 or 1965, despite the epithets beingcasually applied to it. It had not yet accomplished the preliminary autodethronement,or deconstruction, which the other arts hadestablished as fundamental to their development and their anwur-propre.Through that auto-critique, painting andsculpture had moved away from the practice of depiction, which had historicallybeen the foundation of their social andaesthetic value. Although we may nolonger accept the claim that abstract arthad gone "beyond" representation ordepiction, it is certain that such developments added something new to the corpusof possible artistic forms in Westernculture. In the first half of the 1960s,Minimalism was decisive in bringing backinto sharp focus, for the first time sincethe 1930s, the general problem of howa work of art could validate itself as an

Edward Rusch.; 1555 Artesia Blvd. and 6565 Fountain Ave ., from Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965 ;photooHset-prinled book; 7 Is x 5 'Is in. (18.1 x 14.3 em); Walker Arl Center

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object among 811 other objects in the worlUnder the regime of depiction, that is, inthe history of Western art before 1910, awork of art was an object whose validity asart was constituted by its being, or bearinga depiction. In the process of developingalternative proposals for art "beyond"depiction, art had to reply to the suspicionthat, without their depietive, or representational function, art objects were art inname only, not in body, form, or function.Art projected itself forward beari ng only iglamorous traditional name, thereby enteing a troubled phase of restless searchingfor an alternative ground of validity. Thisphase continues, and must continue.Photography cannot find alternatives todepiction, as could the other fine arts.It is in the physical nature of the mediumto depict things. In order to participatein the kind of reflexivity made mandatoryfor modernist art, photography can putinto play only its own necessary condit ionof being a depiction-which-constitutesan-object.In its attempts to make visible this condition, Conceptual art hoped to reconnectthe medium to the world in a new, freshway, beyond the worn-out criteria for photography as sheer picture-making. Severalimportant directions emerged in thisprocess. In this essay I will examine onlytwo. The first involves the rethinking and"refunctioning" of reportage, the dominanttype of art-photography as it existed at thebeginning of the 1960s. The second isrelated to the first, and to a certain extentemerges from it. This is the issue of the deskilling and re-skilling of the artist in a context defined by the culture industry, andmade controversial by aspects of Pop art .1. From Reportage to PhotodocumentationPhotography entered its post-Pictorialistphase (one might say its "post-Stieglitzianphase) in an exploration of the borderterritories of the utilitarian picture. In thisphase, which began around 1920, importanwork was made by those who rejected thePictorialist enterpri se and turned towardimmediacy, instantaneity, and the evanescent moment of the emergence of pictorialvalue out of a practice of reportage of onekind or another. A new version of whatcould be called the "Western Picture,"or the "Western Concept of the Picture,"appears in this process.


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The Western Picture is, of course, thattableau , that independently beautifuldepiction and composition that derivesfrom the institutionalization of perspectiveand dramatic figuration at the origins ofmodern Western art, with Raphael, Durer,Bellini and the other famili ar maestri. It isknown as a product of divine gift, high skill,deep emotion, and crafty planning. It playswith the notion of the spontaneous, theunanticipated. Th e master picture-makerprepares everything in advance, yet truststhat all the planning in the world will leadonly to something fresh, mobile, light andfascinating. Th e soft body of the brush,the way it constantly changes shape as it isused, was the primary means by which thegenius of composition was placed at riskat each moment, and recovered, transcendent, in the shimmering surfaces of magicalfeats of figuration.

Pictorialist photography was dazzledby the spectacle of Western painting andattempted, to some extent, to imitate itin acts of pure composition . Lacking themeans to make the surface of its picturesunpredictable and important, the firstphase of Pictorial ism, Stieglitz's phase,emulated the fine graphic arts, re-inventedthe beautiful book, set standards forgorgeousness of composition, and faded .Without a dialectical conception of itsown surface, it could not achieve the kindof planned spontaneity painting had putbefore the eyes of the world as a universalnorm of art. By 1920, photographers interested in art had begun to look away frompainting, even from modem painting,toward the vernacular of their ownmedium , and toward the cinema, to discover their own principle of spontaneity,to discover once again, for themselves,that unanticipated appearance of thePicture demanded by modern aesthetics.At this moment the art-concept of photojournalism appears, the notion that art canbe created by imitating photojournalism.This imitation was made necessary by thedialectics of avant-garde experimentation.Non-autonomous art-forms, like architecture, and new phenomena such as masscommunications, became paradigmaticin the 1920s and 1930s because the avantgardeswere so involved in a critique of theautonomous work of art, so intrigued bythe possibility of going beyond it into autopian revision of society and consciousness. Photojournalism was created in the

framework of the new publishing and communications industries, and it elaborateda new kind of picture, utilitarian in itsdetermination by editorial assignment andnovel in its seizure of the instantaneous, ofthe " news event" as it happened. For boththese reasons, it seems to have occurred toa number of photographers (Paul Strand ,Walker Evans, Brassa'i, Henri CartierBresson) that a new art could be madeby means of a mimesis of these aims andaspects of photography as it really existedin the world of the new culture industries.This mimesis leu to transformations inthe concept of the Picture that had consequences for the whole notion of modernart, and that therefore stand as preconditions for the kind of critique proposedby the Conceptual artists after 1965. Postpictorialist photography is elaborated inthe working out of a demand that thePicture make an appearance in a practicewhich, having already largely relinquishedthe sensuousness of the surface, must alsorelinquish any explicit preparatory processof composition. Acts of composition arethe property of the tableau. [n reportage,the sovereign place of composition isretained only as a sort of dynamic of anticipatory framing , a "hunter's consciousness,"the nervous looking of a "one-eyed cat,"as Lee Friedlander put it. Every pictureconstructing advantage accumulated overcenturies is given up to the jittery flow ofevents as they unfold. The rectangle of theviewfinder and the speed of the shutter,photography's "window of equipment," isall that remains of the great craft-complexof composition. The art-concept of photojournalism began to force photography intowhat appears to be a modernistic dialectic.By divesting itself of the encumbrances andadvantages inherited from older art forms,reportage pushes toward a discovery ofqualities apparently intrinsic to themedium, qualities that must necessarilydistinguish the medium from others, andthrough the self-examination of whichit can emerge as a modernist ar t on aplane with the others.This force, or pressure, is not simply social.Reportage is not a photographic typebrought into existence by the requirementsof social institutions as such, even thoughinstitutions like the press played a centralpart in defining photojournalism. Th e presshad some role in shaping the new equipment of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly

the smaller, faster cameras and film stock.But reportage is inherent in the nature ofthe medium, and the evolution of equipment reflects this. Reportage , or the spontaneous, fleeting aspect of the photographiimage, appears simultaneously with the pictorial, tableau-like aspect at the origins ofphotography; its traces can be seen in theblurred elements of Daguerre's first streetscenes. Reportage evolves in the pursuitof the blurred parts of pictures.In this process, photography elaboratesits version of the Picture, and it is the firstnew version since the onset of modernpainting in the 1860s, or, possibly, since theemergence of abstract art, if on e considersabstract paintings to be, in fact, picturesanymore. A new version of the Pictureimplies necessarily a turning-point in thedevelopment of modernist art. Prob.lemsare raised which will constitute the intellectual content of Conceptual art, or at leastsignificant aspect s of that content.Alfred Slieglilz; The Flatiron Building. 1902-1903;gelatin silver print; 6 ' /, 6 X3'14 in. (17 " 8.3 em) ;The J. Paul Golly Museum. Los Angeles

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On e of the most important critiquesopened up in Conceptual a rt was that ofart-photography's achieved or perceived"aestheticism." The revival of interestin the radical theories and methods of thepoliticized and objectivistic avant-garde ofthe 1920s and 1930s has long been recognized as one of the most significant contributions of the art of the 1960s, particularlyin America. Productivism, "factography,"and Bauhaus concepts were turned againstthe apparently "depoliticized" and resubjectivized art of the [940s and 1950s. Thus,we have seen that the kind of formalisticand "re-subjectivized" art-photography thatdeveloped around Edward Weston andAnsel Adams on the West Coast, or HarryCallahan and Aaron Siskind in Chicagoin those years (to use only American examples) attempted to leave behind not onlyany link with agit-prop, bu t even any connection with thl: nervous surfaces of socia llife, and to resume a stately modernist pictorialism. This work has been greeted withopprobrium from radical critics since thebeginnings of the new debates in the [960s.The orthodox view is that Cold War pressures compelled socially-conscious photographers away from the borderline forms ofart-photOjournalism toward the more subjectivistic versions of art infol711el. In thisprocess, the more explosive and problematic forms and concepts of radical avantgardism were driven from view, until theymade a return in the activistic neo-avantgardism of the 1960s. There is much truthin this construction, but it is tlawed in thatit draws too sharp a line between the methods and approaches of politicized avantgardism and those of the more subjectivisticand formalistic trends in art-photography.The situation is more complex because thepossibilities for autonomous form


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and occasionallyConceptual ar t can be seen

both an overturning of academicizedto these issues, and as an

of existing tensions insideacademicism, a new critical phase of

and not simply a renunciationit. Photoconceptualism was able to bring

energies from the other fine arts intoproblematic of art-photojournalism,

had tended to obscure the wayswhich it was rooted in the unresolved

aesthetic issues ofof the 1940s and 1950s.

tually, the stage was thus set forrevival of the whole drama of reportage

The peculiar situation of art-photography in the art marketat the beginning of the 1960s is anotherprecondition, whose consequences arenot simply sociological. It is almost astonishing to remember that important art-photographs cold be purchased for under $100not only in 1950 but in 1960. This suggeststhat, despite the internal complexity ofthe aesthetic structure of art-photography,its moment of recognition as art in capitalistsocieties had not yet occurred. AJI the aesthetic preconditions for its emergence as amajor form of modernist art had come intobeing, but it took the new critiques andtransformations of the sixties and seventiesto actualize these socially. It could be saidthat the very absence of a market in photography at the moment of a rapidly booming one for painting drew two kinds ofenergy toward the medium.The first is a speculative and inquisitiveenergy, one which circulates everywherethings appear to be "underva lued ."Undervaluation implies the future, opportunity, and the sudden appearance ofsomething forgotten. The undervalued isa category akin to Benjaminian ones likethe "just past," or the "recently forgotten ."The second is a sort of negative versionof the first. In the light of the new criticalskepticism toward "high art" that beganto surface in the intellectual glimmeringsaround Pop art and its mythologies, the lackof interest of art marketers and collectorsmarked photography with a utopian potential. Thus, the thought occurred that a photograph might be the Picture which couldnot be integrated into "the regime," thecommercial-bureaucratic-discursive orderwhich was rapidly becoming the object of

criticisms animated by the attitudes ofthe Student Movement and the New Left.Naive as such thoughts might seem today,they were valuable in turning seriousattention toward the ways in which artphotography had not yet become Art.Until it became Art , with a big A, photographs could not be experienced in termsof the dialectic of validity which marksall modernist aesthetic enterprises.Paradox.ically, this could only happen inreverse. Photography could emerge sociallyas art only at the moment when its aestheticpresuppositions seemed to be undergoinga withering radical critique, a critiqueapparently aimed at foreclosing any furtheraestheticization or "artification" of themedium. Photoconceptualism led the waytoward the complete acceptance of photography as art-autonomous, bourgeois,collectible art-by virtue of insisting thatthis medium might be privileged to be thenegation of that whole idea. In being thatnegation, the last barriers were broken.Inscribed in a new avant-gardism, andblended with elements of text, sculpture,painting, or drawing, photography becamethe quintessential "anti-object." Asthe neo-avant-gardes re-examined andunraveled the orthodoxies of the 1920sand 1930s, the boundaries of the domainof autonomous art were unexpectedlywidened, not narrowed. In the explosion ofpost-autonomous models of practice whichcharacterized the discourse of the seventies,we can detect, maybe only with hindsight,

the extension of avant-garde aestheticismAs with the first avant-garde, postautonomous, "post-studio" art required itdouble legitimation-first, its legitimationas having transcended-or at least havingauthentically tested-the boundaries ofautonomous art and having become functional in some real way; and then, secondlthat this test, this new utility, result in woror forms which proposed compelling models of ar t as such, at the same time that theseemed to dissolve, abandon, or negate itJ propose the following characterization othis process: autonomous ar t had reacheda state where it appeared that it could onlvalidly be made by means of the strictestimitation of the non-autonomous. This heronomy might take the form of direct crical commentary, as with Art & Language;with the production of political propaganda, so common in the 1970s; or with thmany varieties of "intervention" or appropriation practiced more recently. But, inall these procedures, an autonomous workof art is still necessarily created . The innovation is that the content of the work is thvalidity of the model or hypothesis of nonautonomy it creates.This complex game of mimesis has been,of course, the foundation for all the"e ndgame" strategies within avant-gardisThe profusion of new forms, processes,materials and subjects which characterizethe art of the 1970s was to a great extentstimulated by mimetic relationshipswith other social production processes:

Richard Long: England 1968. 1968: black-and-while pholograph: dimension s variable: courtesy Ihe arlisl

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industrial, commercial, cinematic, etc. Artphotography, as we have seen, had alreadyevolved an intricate mimetic structun;,in which artists imitated photojournalistsin order to create Pictures. This elaborate,mature mimetic order of productionbrought photography to the forefront ofthe new pseudo-heteronomy. and permitted it to become a paradigm for all aesthetically-critical, model-constructing thoughtabout art. Photoconceptualism worked outmany of the implications of this, so muchso that it may begin to seem that many ofConceptual art's essential achievements an;either created in the form of photographsor are otherwise mediated by them.Reportage is introver ted and parodied,manneristically, in aspects of photoconceptualism. The notion that an artisticallysignificant photograph can any longer be:made in a dirl!ct imitation of photojournalism is rejected as having been historicallycompleted by tht: earl ier avant-gardeand by the lyrical subjl!ctivism of 1950s ar tphotography. The gesture of reportageis withdrawn from the socia l field andattached to a putative theatrical event. The:social field tcnds to be aba ndoned to professional photojournal ism proper, as i f thl:aes thetic problems associated with depicting it were no longer of any consequence,and photojournalism had entered noto much a postmodernist phose as a "post

aesthetic" one in which it was excluded fromaesthetic evolution for a time. This, by theway, suikd the sl!nsibilities of those politicalactivists who attemptcd a new version ofproletarian photography in the period.

introversion , or subjectivization, ofreportage was manifested in two important

brought photographyinto a new relationship with the:Bru ce Nauman , Self-Port rail as a Fountain.1966-1967/1970 (under cal. no. 106)

problematics of the staged, or posed, picture: , through new concepts of performance.Second, the inscription of photography intoa nexus of experimental practices led to adirect but distantialed and parodic relationship with the art-concept of photojournalism. Although the work of many artistscould be discussed in this context, for thesakt: of brevity I will discuss the photographic work of Richard Long and BruceNauman as representative of the first issue.that of Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler,and Robert Smithson of the second.Long's and Nauman's photographs document already conceivt:d ar tistic gesture:s,ac tions, or "studio-events"-thingsthat stand self-consciously as conceptual,aes thetic models ror stalt:S of a f f a i r ~ inthe world , which, as such, ne:ed no longerappear directly in the picture. Long 'sEnglal/d 1968 (I96R) documents an actionor gesture. made by the artist alone,out in the countrysidl!, away from the normal environs of ar t or performance.Generically, his pictures are landscapes,and their mood is rather different fromthe typologies and intentions of reportagc.Conve:ntional artistic landscape photography might feature a foreground motif, suchas a curious heap of stoncs or a gnarledtrce, and eountcrpoint il to the rest of thescene, showing it to be singular, differentiated from its surroundings, and yet existingby means of those surroundings. Jn suchways, a landscape picture can be thoughtto be a report on a state of affairs. andtherefore be consistent with an art-conceptof reportage. Long's walke:d line in thegrass substitutes itself for the foregroundmotif. It is a gesture akin to BarneltNewman's notion of the establishment ofa "Here" in the void of a primeval terrain.Bruce Nauman: Failing to Levitafe in the Siudio.1966; black'"nd'while pholograph; 20 x 24 In .(50.8 x 60.9 em); eourlesy the .r l is l

It is simultaneously agriculture, religion,urbanism, and theater, an intervention ina lonely. picturesque spot which becomessetting completed artistically by the gestuand thc photograph for which the gesturewas enacted. Long does not photographevents in the process of their occurrence,but stagcs an event for the benefit of a preconceive:d photographic rendering. Thepicture is presented as the subsidiary formof an act, as "photo-documentation ." ft hbe:eome that, howcver, by means of a newkind of photographic mise-en-scene. Thais, it exists and is legitimated as continuouwith the project of reportage by moving inprecisely the opposite: direction , towardcompktely designed pictorial method. anintroverted masquerade that plays gamewith the inhcritcd aesthetic proclivities ofart-photography-as-reportage. Many of thsame elements, moved indoors. characterize Nauman 's studio photographs, suchas Failing 10 Levilale in the Siudio (L966)or Self-Portrail as a Fountain (J 966-67/70)The photographer's studio, and the genercomplex of "studio photography, " was thePictorialist antithcsis against which theaesthetics of reportage were elaborated.Nauman changes the terms. Working withtht: experimcntal framework of what wasbeginning at the time to be called "pe rformance art ," he carries out photographacts ot reportage whose subject-matter isthe self-conscious, self-cente:red " play" taing place in the studios of artists who havemoved "beyond" the modern fint arts intthe new hybridities. Studio photographyis no longer isolated from reportage : it isreduced analytically to coverage of whatever is happening in the studio, that placeonce so rigorously controlled by precedenand formuta, but which was in the processof being reinvented once more as theater.factory, reading room, meeling place,gallery, museum, and many othcr things.Nauman 's photographs. films, and vidt:oof this period are done in lwo modes orslyles. The first, th at of Failing to Levitateis " direct,"' rough, and shot in black andwhite. The other is based on studio lightineffeets-multiplt: sources, colored gels,emphatic contrasts-and is of course domin color. The two styles, reduced to a setof bas ic formulae and effects, are signif ierfor the new co-existence of species ofphotography which had seemed ontologically separated and even opposed inthe art history of photography up to thattime. It is as i f the reportage works go


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back to Muybridge an d the sources of alltraditional concepts of photographic documentary. and the colur pictures to the early"gags" and jokes, to Ma n Ray and MoholyNagy, to the birthplace of effects usedfor their own sake. Th e two reigning mythsof photogra phy-the on e that claimsthat photographs are " true" a nd the om;that claims they are no t -a re shown tobe grounded in the same praxis. availablein the same place, the studio, at that place'smoment of historical transformation.These practices. or strategies. a re extremelycommon by about 1969, so common asto be de rigueu l' across th e horizon of performance art. earth ar t, Arte Povera, andConceptualism, ami it can be said that thesenew methodologies of photographic practice arc the strongest factor linking toge therthe experimental forms of the period , whichca n seem so disparate and irreconcilab le.This integration or fusion of reportageand performance, its manneristic introv t: rsion, can be seen as an implicitly parodiccritique of the concepts of art-photography.Smithson and Graham , in part because theywere active as writers, were able to providea more explicit parody of photojournalismthan Nauman or Long.Photojournalism as a social institution canbe defined most simply as a collaborationbetween a writer and a photographer.Conceptual art's intellectua lism was engendered by young, aspiring artists for whomcritical writing was an important practiceof se lf-definition. Th e example of DonaldJudd's criticism for AI'IS Magazine was decisive here, and essays like "S pecific Objects"(1964) had the impact, almost, of literaryworks of art. Th e interplay betwecn a veteran litterateur. Clement Greenberg; ayoung academic ar t critic, Michael Fried;and Judd, a talented stylist, is on e of therichest episodes in the history of Americancriticism, and had much to do with ignitingthe idea of a written critique standingas a work 01 art. Smithson's "The CrystalLand ," published in Hmper 's Bazaar in1966, is an hom age to Judd as a creator ofboth visual and literary forms. Smithson'sinnovation, however, is to avoid the genreof art criticism. writing a mock-travelogueinstead. He plays the par t of the inquisitive,belletristic jou rnali st , accompanying andinterpreting his subject. He narrativizes hisaccount of Judd 's art, moves from criticalcommentary to storytelling and n;-invents

the relationships between visual a rt andliterature. Smithson's most importa nt published works, such as "The Monuments ofPassaic," and " Incide nts of Mirror-Trav.:! inthe Yucatan" are "auto-accompaniments ."Smithson the journalist-photographeraccompanies Smithson the artist-experimenter and is able to produce a sophisticated apologia for his sculptural work in theguist of popular entertainment. His essaysdo not make the Conc.:ptualist claim to beworks of visual ar t , bu t appear to remaincontent with being works of literature. Th ephotographs included in them purport toillustrate the narrative or commentary . Th enarratives, in turn, describe the event ofmaking the photographs . "On e never knewwhat side of the mirror on e was on," hemused in " Passaic, " as if reflecting on theparody of photojournalism he was in theprocess of enacting. Smithso n's parody wasa way of dissolving, or softening, the objectivistic and positivistic tone of Minimalism,of subjectivizing it by associating its reductive formal la nguage with intricate, drifting,even delirious moods or states of mind.The Minimalist sculptural forms towhich Smithson's texts constantly alludeappeared to erase the associative chainof experience, the interior m o n o l o ~ u e ofcreativity , insisting on the pure immediacyof the product itself, the work as such,a5 "specific object." Smithson's exposureof what he saw as Minimalism's emotionalinterior depends on the return of ideasof time and process, of narrative andenactment, of experience, memory, a ndallusion, to tht.: artistic forefront, againstthe rhetoric of both Greenberg and Judd.

Cove r of Arlforum . no. 1 (September 1959).with photography of Robert Smithson 's fi rs t MirrorDisplacement . 1959

His photojournalism is at once selfpurtrai ture- tha t is. performance-andreportage about what was hidden and evrepr.:sse d in the art he most admired. Itlocated the impulse tow ar d self-sufficienand non-Objective forms of ar t in concrepersonal responses to real life, socialexperiences, thereby contributing to th enew critiques of formalism which wereso central to Conceptual art 's project.Da n Graham's involvement with theclassical traditions of repurtage is uniqueamong the artists usually identified withConceptual art, and his architectural phographs continue some aspects of WalkerEvans's project. In this, Graham locateshis practice at the boundary of photojounalism, participating in it, while at thesame time placing it at the service of othaspects of his oeuvre. H is architecturalphotographs provide a social groundingfor the structural models of intersubjectiexperience he elaborattd in tt:xt, video,performance and sculptural environmenpieces. His works do not simply makereference to the la rger social world in themanner of photojl.lurnalism; rather theyrefer to Graham's own other projects,which, true to Conceptual form, are modof the social, not depictions of it.Graham's Homes for A merica (1966--67)has taken on canonical status in this regaHere the photo-essay format so familiarto the history of photography has beenmeticulously replicated as a model of theinstitution of photojournalism. Like WalEvans at Fortune, Graha m writes the textand supplies the pictures to go along withHomes was actually planned as an essay oRobert Smithson. The Bridge Monument ShowingSidewalks, 1967. from Monuments of Passaic(cal. no. 173)


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suburban architecture for an art magazine,and could certainly stand unproblematicallyon its own as such. By chance, it was neveractually published Graham had intendedit. Thereby, it migrated to the form of a lithographic print of an apocryphal two-pagespread.3 The print, and the original photosincluded in it, do not constitute an act orpractice of reportage so much as a model ofit. This model is a parody, a meticulous anddetached imitation whose aim is to interrogate the legitimacy (and the processes oflegitimation) of its original , and thereby(and only thereby) to legitimate itself as art.The photographs included in the workare among Graham's most well-known andhave establ ished important precedents forhis subsequent photographic work. In initiating his project in photography in t e r m ~ of a parodic model of the photo-cssay,Graham positions all his picture-makingas art in a very precise, yet very conditional,

photograph may be-or , mustbe considered as possibly hcing-no morethan an illustriltion to an essay, and therefore not an autonomous work of art. Thus,they appear to satisfy. as do Smithson'sphotographs, the demand for an imitationof the non-autonomous. Homes for

in being both really just an essayon the suburbs and. as well, an artist's print,constituted itself explicitly as a canonicalinstancc of the new kind of antiutonomous yet autonomous work ofart. The photographs in it oscillate at the

threshold of the autonomous work, crossingand recrossing it, refusing to depart fromthe artistic dilemma of reportage andthereby establishing an a..:sthetic modelof just that threshold condition.Huebler's work is also engaged with creating and examining the effect photographshave when they masquerade as part ofsome extraneous project, in which theyappear to be means and not ends. UnlikeSmithson or Graham, though, Hueblermakes no literar y claims for the textualpart of his works, the "programs" in whichhis photographs are utilized. His worksapproach Conceptual ar t per se in that they..:schew literary status and make claims onlyas visual ar t objects. Neverth..:kss. hisrenunciation of the literary is a languageact , an act enunciated as a manoeuvreof writing. Huebler's "pieces" involve theappropriation, utilization and mimesisof various "systems of documentation,"of which photography is only onc. It ispositioned within the works by a groupof generically relat..:d protocols, definedin writing, and it is strictly within theseparameters that the images have meaningand artistic status. Where Graham andSmithson make their works through mimesis and parody of the forms of photojournalism, its published product. Hueblerparodies the assignment, the "project"or enterprise that sets th..: whole processinto motion to begin with. Th e seeminglypointless and even trivial procedures that

Dan Graham. "Homes for Am erica," Arts Magazine 41 (December 1966-January 1967): 21 - 22

Armory '66

constitute works like Duration Piece #Amsterdam. Holland (1970) or DuratioPiece #7, Rome (1973) function as mofor that verbal or written constructionwhich, in the working world, causes phgraphs to he made. Th e more the assigment is emptied of what could normatconsidered to be compelling social submatter, th..: more visible it is simply asan instance of structure, an order, andmore clearly it can be experienced asmudel of relationships between writinphotography. By emptying subject mafrom his practice of photography, Hurecapitulates important aspects of thedevelopment of modernist painting.Mondrian, for example, moved away fdepictions of the landscape, to experital patterns with only a residual depictvalue, to abstract works which analyzemodel relationships but do not depictrepresent them. The idca of an an whprovides a direct experience of situatior relationships, not a secondary, reprtational one. is one of abstract art's mpowerful creations. Th e viewer does nexperience the "re-representation" ofabsent things, but the presence of a thithe work of art itself. with all of itsindwelling dynamism, tension and complexity. The cxperience is more like anencounter with an entity than with a mpicture. Th e entity d o e ~ not bear a deption of another entity, mon: importanit; rather, it appears and is experiencein the way objects and entities are expenced in the emotionally-charged conof social life.Huebler's mimesis of the model-constive aspects of modernist abstract art tradict's, of course, the natural depictiqualit'ies of photography. This contradtion is the necessary center of these wBy making photography's inescapabledepictiv.: character continue evcn whit has been decreed that there is nothiof significancc to depict, Huebler aimmake visible something essential abouthe medium's nature. The artistic. crepart of this work is obviously not the ptography, the picture-making. This diplays all the limited qualities identifiewith photoconceptualism's dc-skilledamateurist sense of itself. What is crein these works are the wrilt..:n assignmor programs. Every clement that coulmake the pictures '-interesting" or "goin terms derived from art-photographsystematically and rigorously excluded


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At the same time, Huebler eliminatesall conventional "literary" characteristicsfrom his written statements. The workis comprised of these two simultaneousnegotiations, which produce a "reportage"without event, and a writing without narrative, commentary, or opinion. This doublenegation imitates the criteria for radicalabstract painting and sculpture, andpushes thinking about photography towardan awareness of the dialectics of its inherent depictive qualities. Huebler's worksallow us to contemplate the condition of"depictivity" itself and imply that it is thiscontradiction between the unavoidableprocess of depicting appearances, and theequally unavoidable process of makingobjects, that permits photography tobecome a model of an ar t whose subjectmatter is the idea of art.II. AmateurizationPhotography, like all the arts that precededit, is founded on the skill, craft, and imagination of its practitioners. It was, however,the fate of all the arts to become modernistthrough a critique of their own legitimacy,in which the techniques and abilitiesmost intimately identified with them wereplaced in question. The wave of reductivism that broke in the 1960s had, ofcourse, been gathering during the preceding half-century, and it was the maturing(one could almost say, the totalizing)of that idea that brought into focus theexplicit possibility of a "conceptual art,"an art whose content was none otherthan its own idea of itself, and the historyof such an idea 's becoming respectable.Painters and sculptors worked their wayinto this problem by scrutinizing and repudiating-if only experimentally-theirown abilities, the special capacities that hadhistorically distinguished them from otherpeople-non-artists, unskilled or untalented people. This act of renunciation hadmoral and utop ian implications. For thepainter, a radical repudiation of complicitywith Western traditions was a powerfulnew mark of distinction in a new era ofwhat Nietzsche called "a revaluation of allvalues."4 Moreover, the significance of therepudiation was almost immedia tely apparentto people with even a passing awaren essof an, though apparent in a negative way.What! You don 't want things to lookthree-dimensional? Ridiculous!" It is easyto experience the fact that something usu-

ally considered essential to art has beenremoved from it. Whatever the thing theartist has thereby created might appear tobe, it is first and foremost that which resultsfrom the absence of elements which havehitherto always been there. The reception,if not the production , of modernist art hasbeen consistently formed by this phenomenon, and the idea of modernism as such isinseparable from it. The historical processof critical reflexivity derives its structureand identity from the movements possiblein. and characteristic of, the older finearts, like painting. The drama of modernization, in which artists cast off the antiquated characteristics of their rru!tiers, isa compelling one, and has become the conceptual model for modernism as a whole.Clement Greenberg wrote: "Certain factorswe used to think essential to th e makingand experiencing of ar t are shown no t tobe so by the fact that Modernist paintinghas been able to dispense with them andyet continue to offer the experience of ar tin all its essentials."sAbstract and experimental art beginsits revolution and continues its evolutionwith the rejection of depiction, of itsown history as limning and picturing,and then with the deconsecration of theinstitution which came to be known asRepresentation. Painting finds a new telos,a new identity and a new glory in beingthe site upon which this transformationworks itself out.

It is a commonplace to note that it wasappearance of photography which , as threpresentative of the Industrial Revolutin the realm of the image, set the historiprocess of modernism in motion. Yetphotography'S own historical evolutioninto modernist discourse has been detemined by the fact that, unlike the olderarts, it cannot dispense with depictionand so, apparently, cannot participatein the adventure it might be said to havsuggested in the first place.Th e dilemma, then, in the process of legmating photography as a modernist artthat the medium has virtually no dispenble characteristics, the way painting, forexample, does, and therefore cannot coform to the ethos of reductivism, so succinctly formulated by Greenberg in theslines, also from "Modernist Painting":"What had to be exhibited was not onlywhich was unique and irreducible in ar tgeneral, but also that which was uniqueirreducible in each particular art. Each ahad to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive toitself. By doing so it would, to be sure, nrow its area of competence, but at the satime it would make its possession of thaarea all the more certain ."6Th e essence of the modernist deconstrution of painting as picture-makin g was nrealized in abstract ar t as such; it was reized in emphasizing the distinction betw

Dan Graham: Homes for America. 1966-1967: phola-affsel repraduclion 01 layout tor Arts Magazine:34 '; ' , 25 in. (87.6 , 63.5 em): Walker Ar l Cenler

Homes forAmerica

j


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the institution of the Pictun: and the necessary structure of the depict ion itself. It wasphysically possible to separate the: actionsof the painter-those touches of the brushwhich had historically always, in the Westat least, led to a depiction-from depiction,and abstract art was the most conclusiveevidence for this.Photography constitutes a depiction notby the accumulation of individual marks,but by the instantaneous operation of anintegrated mechanism. All the rays permitted to pass through the lens form an imageimmediately, and the lens, by definition,cre:ates a focused image at its correct focalkngth. Depiction is the only possibleresult of the camera system. and the kindof image formed by a lens is the onlyimage: possible in photography. Thus. nomattt:r how impressed photographers mayhave been by the analytical rigor of modernist critical discourse, they could notparticipate in it directly in their practicebecause the specificities of their mediumdid not permit it. This physical barrier hasa lot to do with the distanced relationshipbetween painting and photography inthe era of art-photography, the: first sixtyor so years of this century.Despite the barrier, around the middleof the 1960s. numerous young artists andart students appropriated photography,turned their attention away from aUlet/rislversions of its practice , and forcibly subjected the medium to a full-scale immer-

sion in the logic of reductivism. Th e essential reduction came on the level of skill.Photography could be integrated into the:new radical logics by eliminating all thepictorial suavity and technical sophistication it had accumulated in the process ofits own imitation of the Great Picture . Itwas possible, therefore, to test the mediumfor its indispensable elements, withoutabandoning depiction, by finding ways tolegitimate pictures tha t demonstrate:d theabsence of the conventional marks of pictorial distinction developed by the greatauteurs, from Atget to Arbus.Already by around 1955, the revaloriza tionand reassessment of vernacular idioms ofpopular culture had emerged as part of anew " new objectivity," an objectivism bredby the limitations of lyrical art informel,the introverted and self-righteously loftyar t forms of the 19405 and 1950s. This newcritical trend had sources in high art andhigh academe, as the names Jasper Johnsand Piero Manzoni, Roland Barthes andLeslie Fiedler, indicate. It continues afundamental project of the earlier avantgarde-the transgression of the boundariesbetween " high" and " low" art, betweenartisb and the rest of the people, between"art" and "life." Although Pop ar t in thelate fifties and early sixties seemed to concentrate on bringing mass-culture elementsinto high-culture forms, already by the1920s the situation had become far morecomplex and reciprocal than that, andmotifs and styles from avant-garde and

high-culture sources wt:re circulatingextensively in the various new CultureIndustries in Europe, the United States,the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Thistransit between "high" and " low" hadbecome the central problematic for theavant-garde because it reflected SO decisively the process of modernization of alcultures. Th e gre:at question was whetheor not art as it had emerged from the pawould be '" modernized" by being dissolvinto the new mass-cultural structures.Hovering behind all tendencies towardreductivism was the shadow of this grea" reduction." Th e experime:ntation withthe "anaesthetic," with " the look of nonart," "the condition of no-art," or with"the loss of the visual." is in this lighta kind of tempting of fate. Behind theGree:nbergian formulae, first elaboratedin the late 1930s, lies the fear that theremay be. finally, no indispensable characteristics that distinguish the arts, and thart as it has come down to us is very dispensable indeed . G aming with the anat:thetic was both an intellectual necessityin the context of modernism, and at thesame time the release of social and psycenergies which had a stake in the " liquidtion" of bourgeois " high art." By 1960there was pleasure to be had in this expementation, a pleasure, moreover. whichhad been fully sanctioned by the aggressvity of the first avant-garde or, at least,important parts of it.

Douglas Huobler; Duralion Piece #7. Rome. March 1973 (delail). 1973 ; 14 black andwhite pholograph s and stalement; overall dimensions 39':', x 32 '/ in.(99 .7 x 81 .9 cm) framed; courtesy Darcy Huebler

Duration Piece 1i7RomeFourteen photographs were made, at exact. 30 second In te rva.ls. In order to dncument.speo1f1c Cba.ns8S In the relatlonsbJp between two aspects of the water fai lln e II om.the rocks in one area &t the base of tbe Fountaln of 't'revl.The phot.ograpllS, undeslgn&t.ed by t.he sequence In wbJoh t.hey w(!re ~ e , JOin withtW s sta.t.ement. t.o constitute the form of thi s work.March, 1973 Dougl.a.s Huebler'


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deconstruct ions therefore tooke form of searches for models of the

." Duchamp had charted thisbefore 1920, and his influence was

one for the new critical objecsurfacing forty years later with

Richter, Andy Warhol, Manzoni,Cage, and the rest. Th e anaesthetic

emblem in the Readymade, thein all its guises, forms . andes. Working-class. lower-mid dle class,

and underclass milieux werescoured for the relevant utilitarian

ges, depictions, figurations. and objectsviolated all the criteria of canonical

and technique.s the early years of Pop art seem

a race to find the most peliec!. metaphysically banal image, that cipher that

emonstrates the ability of culture to continue when every aspect of what had beenknown in modern art as seriousness, expertise, and reflexiveness had been dropped .The empty, the counterfeit. the functional,and the brutal themselves were of coursenothing new as art in 1960, having allbecome tropes of the avant-garde viaSurrealism. From the viewpoint createdby Pop art, though, earlier treatments ofthis problem seem emphatic in their adherence to the Romantic idea of the transformative power of authentic art. Th eanaesthetic is transformed as art, but alongthe fracture-I ine of shock . Th e shockcaused by the appearance of the anaesthetic in a serious work is calmed by the

aura of seriousness itself. It is this aurawhich becomes the target of the new waveof critical play. Avant-garde ar t had heldthe anesthetic in a place by a web of sophisticated manoeuvres, calculated transgressive gestures, which always paused on thethreshold of real abandonment. RememberSellmer 's pornography, Heartfield's propaganda, Mayakovsky's advertising. Exceptfor the Readymade. there was no completemimesis or appropriation of the anaesthetic, and it may be that the Readymade ,that thing that had indeed crossed the line,provided a sort of fulcrum upon which,between 1920 and 1960, everything elsecould remain balanced.Th e unprecedented mimesis ofHthe condition of no art" on the part of the artistsof the early sixties seems to be an instinctivereflection of these lines from TheodorAdorno 's Aesthetic TheOlY, which was beingcomposed in that same period : "Aesthetics,or what is left of it, seems to assume tacitlythat the survival of art is unproblematic.Central for this kind of aesthetics therdoreis the question of how art survives, notwhether it will survive at all. This viewhas little credibility today. Aesthetics canno longer rely on art as a fact. I f art is toremain faithful to its concept, it must passover into anti-art, or it must develop a senseof self-doubt which is born of the moralgap between its continued existence andmankind's catastrophes, past and future,"and "At the present time significant modern

Publicity slillirom John Cassavele" Faces (filmed 1965 / released 1968); courtesy Photolesl

art is entirely unimportant in a society thaonly tolerates it. This situation affects ar titself, causing it to bear the marks of indifference: there is the disturbing sense thatthis art might just as well be diff erentor might not exist at all. "7The pure appropriation of the anaestheticthe imagined completion of the gestureof passing over into anti-art, or non-art, isthe act of internalization of society's indifference to the happiness and seriousnessof art. It is also, therefore. an expressionof the artist 's own identification with baleful social forces. This identification may bas always in modernism, experimental, buthe experiment must be carried ou t in actuality, with the risk that an "identificationwith the aggressor" will really occur and bso successful SOCially as art that it becomeinescapable and permanent. Duchampgingerly seemed to avoid this; Warholperhaps did not. Jn not doing so, he helpemake explicit some of the hidden energiesof reductivism. Warhol made his taboobreaking work by subjecting photographyto reductivist methodOlogy, both in hissilkscret:n paintings and in his films. Thepaintings reitt:rated or appropriated photjournalism and glamour photography andclaimed that picture-making skills were ofminor importance in making significantpictorial art. Th e films extended the argument directly into t he regime of the photographic, and established an aesthetic ofthe amateurish which tapped into NewYork traditions going back via the Seatsand independents to the late 1930s andthe film experiments of James Agee andHelen Levitt. To the tradition of independent, intimate, and naturalistic filmmaking,as practiced by Robert Frank, JohnCassavetes , or Frederick Wiseman, Warhoadded (perhaps "subtracted" would bethe better word) the agony of reductivism.Cassavetes fused the documentary traditiowith method acting in films like Faces(1968), with the intention of getting close people. Th e rough photography and lighing drew attention to itself, but the stylesignified a moral decision to forego techncal finish in the name of emotional truth.Warhol reversed this in films like Eat, Kissor Sleep (all 1963), separating the picturestyle from its radical humanist contenttypes, in effect using it to place people ata peculiar distance, in a new relationshipwith the spectator. Thus a methodologicalmodel is constructed: the non-professionaor amateurist camera technique, conven-


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tionally associated with anti-commercialnaturalism and existential, if not political,commitment, is separated from those asso-ciations and turned toward new psychosocial subjects, including a new version ofthl.! glamour it wanted to leave behind. Inthis process. amateurism as such becomesvisible as the photographic modality or stylewhich, in itself, signifies the detachment ofphotography from three great norms of theWestern pictoria l tradition-the formal , thett:chnical. and the one relating to the rangl.!of subject-matll.!r. Warhol violates all thesenorms simultaneously, as Duchamp haddone before him with the Readymade.Duchamp managed to separate his workas an object from the dominant traditions,but not unt il Warhol had the picture beenaccorded thc same treatment.H Warhol'sreplacement of the notion of thl.! artist asa skilll.!d producer with that of the artist asa consumer of new picture-making gadgetswas only thc most obvious and strikingenactment of what could be called a newamateurism, which marks so much of thear t of the 19605 and earlier I C)70s.Amateurish film and photographic imagesand styles of course related to the documental), tradition, but their deepestresonancc is with the work of actual amateurs-the general population, the "peopie ." To begin with, we must recognize aconscious utopianism in this turn towardthe technological vernacular: JosephBeuys's slogan " every man is an artist ,"or Lawrence Wciner's diffident conditionsfor the realization and possession of hisworks reflect with particular clarity theidealistic side of the claim that the makillgof artworks needs to be, anu in fact hasbecome. a lot easier than it was in thl.! past.These artists argued that the great massof the people had been excluded from artby social barriers and had internalized anidentity as " untalented, " and " inartistic"and so were resentful of the high art thatthe dominant institu tions unsuccessfullycompelled them to veneratc. This resentment was the moving force of philistinemass culture and kitsch, as well as of repressive social and legislative atli tudestoward the ar ts. Continuation of the n;gimeof specialized high art int.:nsified the alienation of both the people and the specialized, talented artists who. as the objectsof resentment , developed elitist antipathytoward " the rabble" and identified with theruling classes as their only possible patrons.This vicious circle of "avant-garde and

kitsch " could be broken only by a radicaltransformation and negation of high art.These arguments repeat those of the earlierConstructivists, Dadaists. and Surrealistsalmost word for word, nowhere more consciously than in Guy Debord's The Socielyof Ihe Specwc/e (1967): "Art in thl.! periodof its dissolution, as a movemcnt of ncgation in pursuit of its own transcendencein a historical society where history is notdirectly lived, is at once an art of changeand a pure expression of the impossibilityof change. The more grandiose itsdemanus. the further from its grasp is trUl:self-realization. This is an art that is necessarily availl-garde; and it is an ar t that is nOl .Its vanguard is its own disappcarance."9The practical transformation of art (asopposed to the idea of it) implies the transformation of the practices of both artistsand their audiences, the aim being to obi teratl.! or disable both categories into a kindof dialectical synthesis of them , a Schillcrlike category of emancipated humanitywhich needs nl.!ithl.!r Representation norSpecatorship. These ideals were an important aspect of the movement for the t r a n ~ -formation of artistry, which opened upthe question of skill. The utopian projectof rediscovering thl.! roots of creativity ina spontaneity and intersubjectivity freedfrom all specialization and spectacularizedI.!xpertise combined with the actual profu sion of light consumer technologies tolegitimate a widespread " de-skilling" and"re-skilling" oj" ar t and art education. Theslogan "painting is dead" had been heardfrom the avant-gardc since 1920: it meantthat it was no longer necessary to separateoneself from the people through the acquisition of skills and sensibilities rooted in acraft-guild exclusivity and secrecy; in fact,it was absolutely necessary not to do so,but rather to animate with radical imagination those common techniques and abilitiesmade availablc by modernity itself. Firstamong these was photography.The radicals' problem with photographywas, as we have seen, its evolution into anart-photography. Unable to imagine anything better, photography lapsl.!d into animitation of high ar t and uncritically recreatcd its esotcric worlds of techniquc and"quality." The instability of the concept ofart-photography, its tendency to bccomereflexive and to exist at the boundary-lineof the utilitarian, was muffled in theprocess of its 'artification." The criteria

of deconstructive radicalism-expressedin ideas like " the conditions of no art," a"every man is an artist"-could be applito photography primarily. i f not exclusively. through the imitation of amateurpicture-making. This was no arbitrarydecision. A popular system of photograpbased on a minimal level of skill was instuted by George Eastman in 1888, withKodak slogan, "you push the button; WI.!do the rest." In the I960s, Jean-Luc(iodard debunked his own creativity witthe comment that " Kodak does 98 pl.!rcent. " The means by which photographycould join and contribute to the movemof the modernist autocritique was theuser-f riend ly mass-market gadget-cameThl.! Brownie, with its small gauge roll-fiand quick shutter was also. of course. thprotutype for the equipment of th..:photojournalist, and therefore is presenas a historical shadow, in the evolution oart-photography as it emergcd in itsdialectic with photojournalism. Bu t theprocess of professionalization of photogphy led to technical transformations ofsmall-scale cameras, which, until the morecent proliferation of mass-producedSLRs, reinstituted an economic barrierthl.! amateur that became a social and cutural one as well. No t until the 19605did we see tourists and picnickers sportiPentaxes and Nikons; before then theyused the various Kodak or Kodak-likeproducts, such as the Hawkeye, or theI nstamatic, which were little differentfrom a J925-model Brownie. 0Andy Warhol: KISS. 1963 ; lilm sldl. blackand whilesilent; The Andy Warhol Museum: Founding Collecti


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is significant, then, that the mimesisamateurism began around 1966; that is,the last moment of the "Eastman era"amateur photography, at the moment

and Polaroid were revolutionThe mimesis takes place at the

of a new technological situation,e in which the image-producing capacitythe average citizen was about to make

quantum leap. I t is thus, historically, really the last moment of "ama

y establi shed and maintained by customnique. Conceptualism t urns towardjust as the past darts by into the

it elegizes something at the sament tha t it points toward the glimmering

ation of avant-garde utopianism.

If "every man is an artist," and that artistis a photographer, he will become so alsoin the process in which high- resolutionphotographic equipment is released fromits cultish possession by specialists and ismade available to all in a cresting waveof consumerism. The worlds of Beuys andMcLuhan mingle as average citizens comeinto possession of "professional -class"equipment. At this moment, then, amateurism ceases to be a technical category;it is revealed as a mobile social categoryin which limited competence becomesan open field for investigation."Great art" established the idea (or ideal)of unbounded competence, the wizardryof continually-evolving talent. This idealbecame negative, or at least seriously uninteresting, 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 talented and skilled artist to imitate a personof limited abilities. It was a new experience,one which ran counter to all accepted ideasand standards of art, and was one of the lastgestures which could produce avant-ga rdistshock .The mimesis signified, or expressed,the vanishing of great traditions of Westernart into the new cu.ltural structures est ablished by the mass media, credit financing,suburbanization, and reflexive bureaucracy.The act of renunciation required for askilled artist to enact this mimeses, andconstruct works as models of its consequences, is a scandal typical of avant-gardedesire, the desire to occupy the thresholdofthe aesthetic, its vanishing-point.

Many examples of such amateuristmimesis can be drawn from the corpusof photoconceptualism, and it couldprobably be said that almost all photoconceptualists indulged in it to somedegree. Bu t one of the purest and mostexemplary instances is the group of bookspublished by Edward Ruscha between1963 and 1970.For all the familiar reasons, Los Angeleswas perhaps the best setting for the complex of reflections and crossovers betw eenPop art, reductivism, and their mediatingmiddle term, mass culture, and Ruscha forbiographical reasons may inhabit the persona of the American Everyman particularly easily. Th e photographs in Some LosAngeles Apartments (1965), for example,synthesize the brutal ism of Pop art withthe low-contrast monochromaticism of themost utilitarian and perfunctory photographs (which could be imputed to havebeen taken by the owners, managers, orresidents of the buildings in question).Although one or two pictures suggest somerecognition of the criteria of art-photography, or even architectural photography (e.g."2014 S. Beverly Glen Blvd:'), the majorityseem to take pleasure in a rigorous displayof generic lapses: improper relation oflenses to subject distances, insensitivity totime of day and quality of light, excessivelyfunctional cropping, with abrupt excisionsof peripheral objects, lack of attention tothe specific character of the moment beingdepicted-all in all a hilarious perform-

ance, an almost sinister mimicry of the wa"people" make images of the dwellings inwhich they are involved. Ruscha's impersonation of such an Everyperson obviousldraws attention to the alienated relationships people havc with their built environment, but his pictures do not in any waystage or dramatize that alienation theway that Walker Evans did, or that LeeFriedlander was doing at that moment.Nor do they offer a transcendent experience of a building that pierces t he alienation usually felt in life, as with Atget , forexample. Th e pictures are, as reductivistworks, models of ou r actual relat ions wittheir subjects, rather than dramatizedrepresentations that transfigure those relations by making it impossible for us tohave such relations with them.Ruscha's books ruin the genre of the" book of photographs, " that classical formin which art-photography declares itsindependence. Twentysix Gasoline Stations(1962) may depict the service stations alonRuscha 's route between Los Angeles andhis family home in Oklahoma, but it derivits artistic significance from the fact that aa moment when "The Road" and roadsidelife had already become an auteurist clichin the hands of Robert Frank's epigones, iresolutely denies any representation of itstheme, seeing the road as a system and aneconomy mirrored in the structure of boththe pictures he took and the publicationin which they appear. Only an idiot wouldtake pictures of nothing but the filling

Edward Ruscha. Union. Needle s, Cali/ornia, from Twentysix Gasoline S,.,ions. 1962 (cat. no. 129)

t.-:

u,vw ,\' , I' EEOLES . CAUr-OR> :


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and the existence of a book of usthose pictures is a kind of proof of the

of such a pcrson. But the person,he asocial cipher who cannot connect withhe others around him, is an abstraction, a

of the product said to be by hisanaesthetic. the edge or bound

of the artistic, emerges through the conof this phantom producer. who is

e to avoid bringing in to visibility thcof indifference" with which moder

or as a "free society."is a radic:11 reductivist meth

as it is the form of anraphy posits its escape from the cri

of art-photography through the artist'sas a non-artist who, despite

is neverthelcss COIllto make photographs. These photoJose their status as Representationseyes of thcir audience: they are

," "boring," and "insignificant." Onlybeing so could they accomplish the intel

of reductivism at the heartf the enterprise of Conceptual art. The

of art to the condition of an intelof itself was an aim which

doubt upon any given notion of theexperience of art. Yet the loss

the sensuous was a state which itself hadexpcricnccd. Rcplacing a work with

essay which could hang in itswas the most direct mcans toward

it was Conccptualism's most cclea gesturc of usurpation of the

of all the intellectualizers who controlled and defined the

of Art. But, more importantly,was the proposal of the final and defini-

tive negation of art as depiction, a m;gationwhich, as we've seen, is the telov of experimentaL reductivist modernism. And it canstill be claimed that Conceptual art actuallyaccomplishcd this negation. In conscntingto read the essay that takes a work ofart's place, spectators are presumed tocontinue the process of their own redefinition, and thus to participate in a utopianproject of transformative. speculativc selfreinvention: an avant-garde projec t.Linguistic conce:ptualism takes art as closeto the boundary of its own self-overcoming,or self-dissolution , as it is likely to get,leaving its audience with only the task ofrediscovering legitimations for works ofart as they had existed, and might continueto exist. This was . and remains, a revolutionary way of thinking about art, in whichits right to exist is rethought in the placeor moment traditionally reserved for theenjoyment of art 's actual existence, in thee:ncounter with a work of art. [n true: modernist fashion it establishes the dynamicin which the intellectual legitimation of artas such-that is, the philosophical contentof aesthetics-is cxperie:nced as the contentof any particula r moment of enjoyment.But, dragging its heavy burden of depiction,photography could not follow pure, or linguistic, Conceptualism all the way to thefrontier. It cannot provide the ~ x p e r i e n c e of the negation of experience, but mustcontinue to provide the experience ofdepiction, of the Picture. It is possible thatthe fundamental shock that photographycause:d was to have provided a de:pictionwhich could be experienced more the: waythe visihle world is experienced than hadever been possible previously. A photograph therefore shows its subje:ct by means

Ru scha. Every BUIlding on the Sunset Strip. 1955 (cal. no. 131)

of showing what experience is lih;c; in thsense it provides "an experience of expeence," and it defines this as the significaof depiction.In this light, it could he said that it was ptography's role and task to turn away froConceptual art, away from re:ductivismand its aggressions. Photoconceptualismwas then the last moment of the pre-hisof photography as art, the end of the OldRegime, the most sustained and sophistcated attempt to free the medium from peculiar distanced relationship with artiradicalism and from its tics III the WesttPicture. In its failure to do so, it revolutiized our concept of the Picture and creathe conditions for the restoration of thatconcept as a central category of contemrary art by around 1974.NotesI. Cf. Thierry de Duve's discw . ;o n of nominatin Pictorial ""omillalis/n: ()II I"'arcel DI/champPassage from {'ailllillg 10 the Readymade, trans.Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. 1991).2. Peler Biirger, Them), of he ,Ivallt-Garde,trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnes0l3 Press, 1984).3. A varianl. made as a collage, is in th e Daled('olleclion, Brussels.4. Friedrich Nietzsche. "Ecco Homo ." in Oil tGenealogy ofMorals and Ecce Homo. ed . WalKaufmann an d trans. Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, ICJ67290.5. Clemenl Greenberg, "Modernist Painling."in C/cmcl1I Creenberg: The Col/cctccl Essays alCriticism , vol. 4: Model'llism witlt a Vellgeance.1957-1969, ed . John O ' Brian (Chicago:University or Chicago Press. t993). 92.6. Ibid., 86.7. Theodor .\dorno.Aestllelic TheOl)" trans.e. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & KeganPaul. 1984).464,470.8. Cf. de Duvc's argument thai the Readymadcan/should be nominated as painting.9. Guy Debord, The Society oflhe Spectacle. trDonald Nicholson-Smith (New York: ZoneBooks, t994), 135 (thesis 190).10. Robert A. Sobieszek discllsses RoberlSmithson's use of the Inslamatic camera in hiessay, "Robert Smithson: Photo Works," inRobert Smithsoll: PholO Works. exh. cal. (LosAngeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Artan d Albuquerque: University of New MexicoPress, 1993), 16, 17 (note 24), 25 (note b t) .

jeff wall-marks of indifference

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