Photography as Conceptual Art Form Conceptual art was concerned with the decisions that are taken in the artistic process and the authority on which these decisions are supposedly based. The camera figured as a device to which specific decisions could be delegated, either entirely or in part, apparently or in reality. For this reason it was important to admit no trace of photographic craftsmanship: a technically perfect photograph would suggest, after all, that the maker had mastered his tools
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and could achieve whatever effect he wanted. The interest of conceptual artists in the photographic medium was thus related to the fact that the competence of the visual artist had not yet colonised the domain of photography. They saw the medium as a non-medium, a tool that was neutral and not ideologically overdetermined in the way that painting and sculpture were. Photography offered artists a discursive space, a way to import ideas, phenomena and cognitive models into the realm of art without automatically sublimating or aestheticising them. According to some commentators photography could even be seen as a “paradigm” for the critical, self-reflective art practice of the 1960s and 1970s.73 Drawing an analogy with Marcel Duchamp’s objet trouvé, one might speak of a “found medium,” a medium that artists chose precisely because they felt no particular bond with it. Baldessari said in 1976: “I have no particular allegiance to photography, other than
73 J eff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference:’ Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in: Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965 – 1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), 254.
that it’s quick.”74 For conceptual artists, the dilettante use of photography was a means of sidestepping professional criteria of artistic quality. “It became a subversive creative act for a talented and skilled artist to imitate a person of limited abilities,” wrote Jeff Wall in 1995. The act of renunciation required for a skilled artist to enact this mimesis, and construct works as models of its consequences, is a scandal typical of avant-garde desire, the desire to occupy the threshold of the aesthetic, its vanishing-point. Artists wished to reduce artisthood to its intellectual kernel and so could no longer call upon any sort of craftsmanship. The technical deficiencies of conceptual photographic work are very real. Referring to Ed Ruscha’s artist’s book Some Los Angeles Apartments, Wall wrote: The majority [of the pictures] seem to take pleasure in a
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74 J ames Hugunin, “A Talk with Baldesssari,” in: David Campany, ed., Art and Photography (London: Phaidon, 2003).
Ed Ruscha 1018 S. Atlantic Blvd. 1965 Gelatin silver print 4" × 4" The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Ed Ruscha Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas 1963 Gelatin silver print 4" × 5" The Whitney Museum of American Art
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Letter, dated October 2, 1963, from the Library of Congress declining to add Ed Ruscha’s artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations to its collections. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas. Ed Ruscha’s notes related to Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas.
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rigorous display of generic lapses: improper relation of lenses to subject distances, insensitivity to time of day and quality of light, excessively functional cropping, with abrupt excisions of peripheral objects, lack of attention to the specific character of the moment being depicted – all in all a hilarious performance, an almost sinister mimicry of the way “people” make images of the dwellings with which they are involved. Some Los Angeles Apartments is one of a series of small printed books that Ruscha began making in the early 1960s. It was produced according to a simple pattern. Each page features a single photograph of a building accompanied by a caption giving the address. The buildings appear to have been selected randomly: apart from their location in Los Angeles it is not clear what they have in common. The pictures are devoid of photographic interest. Ruscha is not concerned with the kind of intensification of the image that has made Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander famous. Man’s alienation from his domestic environment is not allayed, but rather embodied in or extended to the relationship between the artist and his medium.75 The unprofessional quality of these photographs was intended. According to Jeff Wall, Ruscha’s “amateurism” is grounded in an adopted persona: the artist has assumed the guise of an imaginary person who, without plan or artistic intention, takes pictures of his home but in so doing is unable to transcend the socio-economic conditions of the urban landscape. Ruscha’s photographic books, the first of which appeared in 1963 under the title Twentysix Gasoline Stations, have been made, as it were, by a “phantom producer.”
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75 “The pictures are, as reductivist works, models of our actual relations with their subjects, rather than dramatized representations that transfigure those relations by making it impossible for us to have such relations with them.” (Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference,’” 265.)
Front and back of snapshot of gas station in Milam, New Mexico, related to Ed Ruscha’s artist’s book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas.
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Pictorial Photography Although Wall does not identify the material features of pictorial photography, he too forges an implicit link between it and minimalist sculpture. In an important passage in “‘Marks of Indifference,’” he describes what he finds attractive about abstract art. The first qualities he mentions are those celebrated by Greenberg and Fried: autonomy and self-referentiality. However, the way he describes them is closer to Robert Morris than to either of
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Édouard Manet A Bar at the Folies-Bergère 1881 – 82 Oil on canvas 38" × 51" Courtauld Institute, London
Jeff Wall Picture for Women 1979 Cibachrome transparency mounted on a lightbox 80" × 56" Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
these writers. “The idea of an art which provides a direct experience of situations or relationships, not a secondary, representational one, is one of abstract art’s most powerful creations,” this passage reads. “The viewer does not experience the ‘re-presentation’ of absent things, but the presence of a thing, the work of art itself with all of its indwelling dynamism, tense, and complexity. The experience is more like an encounter with an entity than a mere picture. The entity does not bear a depiction of another entity, more important than it; rather, it appears and is experienced in the way objects and entities are experienced in the emotionally charged contexts of social life.” When Wall emphasizes the depictive nature of the photographic image, he is not simply talking about figuration; he means the relational field that photographic figuration discloses to us, a field that includes the viewer. He gestures toward this relational field in a 1985 interview, when inter-
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preting one of his own photographs, Bad Goods (1984).76 Pictorial photography is a new conception of the Western Picture because it shows that these external spaces are actually internal to its own being. Struth’s photographs do this metacritically—by focusing on museum viewers. Wall does this in a more radical way in an early work, Picture for Women, a response to Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère. In Manet’s painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet’s barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer’s role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet’s painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.
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76 “ The picture is composed as a triangle, one pont of which is outside the image. The heap of rotting lettuces is the apex, and the other two corners are made up of the British Columbian in the picture, and the spectator in front of it.” (Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference,’” 273)
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This book was designed by Emily Belshaw in Philadelphia. The font is News Gothic in 8.5/13 pt.
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