The Message and the Messenger Lee Gallery 2015
The Message and the Messenger Lee Gallery 2015
Photography’s use as a documentary tool has long been recognized as one of the medium’s most important attributes. In the experimental world of 1960s and 70s performance and conceptual art, however, this attribute took on even greater significance. As artists increasingly focused on performance, the ephemeral qualities of their work demanded some permanent record, another medium that was equally rooted in time but that that could transcend the momentary. Photography was so well suited to the task that it was, perhaps, inevitable that it would become both the documenter and the documented: many of the performances would be both about photography and recorded by photography. The photographs presented in the following pages demonstrate the complex relationship between conceptual and performance art, and the role that photography played in its genesis and its preservation. With the distance of a few decades time, we can now see many of these photographs in a complete way, as both art objects and objects about art, products and reproductions, the message and the messenger. In some cases, the photograph so thoroughly transforms the piece that it supposedly documents that it is arguably a new piece altogether. The individual images documenting Dan Graham’s “Rolling Piece” for example, gives us staccato and frozen representations of his body, a sequence of moments but not the whole continuum that comprised the original performance. What was once fixed in a set amount of time and relied upon the relationship between the artist and his audience (the audience’s presence was always a significant component in his rolling pieces) is now available for an individual viewer to experience for as short or long a time as they desire.
There are other times, however, when the document mirrors the nature of the performance, even when it reveals little about it. The two pictures of Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed,” for example, present a gallery space almost completely void of activity, save for the visitor walking across the slightly raised floor in the first image. In this literally seminal piece, performed at Sonnabend Gallery in 1972, Acconci was concealed beneath the raised section, masturbating. While the pictures lack the soundtrack of Acconci recounting his fantasies about the visitors above him—which were played on a loudspeaker in the gallery—they do echo the visual absence of the artist in the original performance. Certain properties of photography often became the subject of performance pieces in an almost deadpan sense of humorous insight. Lew Thomas’s exploitation of the sequential production of photography is defined by its rote, but very accurate title, “Jumping with Nikomat,” giving us exactly what it promises while also engaging with the notion of photography as performance. Likewise, William Wegman’s work often played with certain conceptions about photography: in a sequence of photographs of his fingers titled “Index”, he aligns the function of the forefinger as the “pointer” with the indexical properties of the photographs, which in this case, all point to the pointer. While many performance based artists were reacting against the flush consumer culture emerging in the 1960s and 70s, another group of artists embraced it. The influential “Pictures” exhibition in 1977, introduced the New York art world to a group of artists that
attempted to put the image back into the making of art, after it had been almost completely dissolved by picture-less minimalism. Instead of engaging with their own bodies as producers, the Pictures artists borrowed pieces of the external world and restaged them, often at scales that broadly distorted the original. Works like the pseudo-portrait from Laurie Simmons’ and Allan McCollum’s Actual Photos project stand in stark contrast to the featureless and vacuous spaces of Vito Acconci’s performance. Simmons and McCollum photographed the tiniest figures from model train sets using a microscope, transforming the minute into the monumental while posing questions about the photograph’s status as an original or a recorder of the real: their insistence on “actuality” in the project title is the first clue that the pieces are suspect. In directly engaging with the properties of photography or in employing it as a documentary tool, conceptual and Pictures artists consistently tested the limits of the medium and posed questions about originality and what can and cannot be recorded. The works in this catalogue invite us to consider what remains of these fleeting moments even as they remind us of what is gone. In today’s digital moment, when photography is increasingly becoming an immaterial phenomenon, these objects might prove to be some of the last great relics of photography’s material age, quietly insisting on the ephemeral past through their status as objects in the present.
Dan Graham Documentation of “Rolling Piece” 7 9/16” x 9 3/8” silver print
Dan Graham Diptych from “Homes for America” 21 3/4” x 14” two chromogenic prints 1966
Vito Acconci Stills from”Blindfolded Catching Piece” 5 11/16” x 9 3/16” silver print 1970
Vito Acconci “Seedbed” 6 3/8” x 9 3/8” silver print 1972
Vito Acconci “Seedbed, Installataion/Performance” 7 7/16” x 9 3/8” silver print 1972
Vito Acconci Maquette for “35 Approaches” 6 1/2” x 8 1/4” three mounted silver prints 1970
Various Artists Selections from “Artists & Photographs” various sizes 1972
Dennis Oppenheim Rocked Circle - Fear (from performance on one-half hour video tape with Super-8 film loop) 16 1/8� x 10 3/8� two silver prints 1971
Bill Viola “Zona,” Florence, Italy, June 9, 1975 9 1/16” x 6 5/8” silver print 1975
John Van Saun “Water” four silver prints 1969
Lew Thomas Jumping with Nikomat 33 3/8� x 13 7/8� three silver prints, printed 2006 1973
Lew Thomas “Displacement Piece” each print 15 3/16” x 19 3/16” two silver prints 1972
Lew Thomas Ruler 2 3/8” x 47 15/16” silver print 1975
(verso)
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS ON THE MARCH, La Jolla, California, July 6, 1972, 11:45 A.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1972
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS IN THE WILD MUSTARD, Solana Beach, California, June 19, 1971, 3:00 P.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1972
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS BY THE BIVOUAC ‘The Pillbox’, California, Sept. 8, 1971, 8:30 P.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1971
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS IN THE PARK, Central Park, New York City, May 16, 1973, 2:40 P.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1973
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS TRY AGAIN, Del Mar, California, June 24, 1972, 11:00 A.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1971
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS ON RECONAISSANCE, Sorrento Valley, California, June 24, 1972, 9:30 A.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1972
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS UP, Del Mar, California, June 28, 1972 1:30 PM” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1972
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS ON VACATION, Torrey Pines Park, California, Feb. 9, 1971, 4:30 P.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1971
Eleanor Antin “100 BOOTS IN THE MARSH, San Elijo Lagoon, California, Oct. 8, 1971, 8:00 A.M.” 4 1/2” x 7” postcard 1971
William Wegman “Index” 13 3/8” x 10 5/8” (each) five mounted silver prints 1973
William Wegman “Reduce/Increase” 13 7/8” x 11” silver print with ink markings 1977
William Wegman “Cup/Socks” 13 15/16” x 11 1/16” silver print with ink markings 1978
John Divola untitled [from the “Vandalism” series] 7” x 7” silver print 1974
John Divola untitled [from the “Vandalism” series] 7” x 7” silver print 1974
Elaine Sturtevant Duchamp Objet Dard 5” x 7” three mounted silver prints 1967
(film still used for appropriation)
Alan McCollum “Incidental to the Action” 19 1/16” x 15 1/2” silver print 1983
Laurie Simmons & Alan McCollum Untitled (from Actual Photos) 9 1/4” x 6 1/2” cibachrome print 1985
David Robbins “Talent” each print 8” x 10” eighteen gelatin silver prints 1986
James Casebere “Covered Wagons” 18 3/8” x 14 9/16” silver print, printed 1998 1985
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