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Traces and Boundaries:

The Photographic Legacy of Post-Object Art

Christina Barton

Writing now at the end of 2000 about art made in the 1970s and 1980s I am aware of the effects of and pitfalls posed by the passage of time on our (or any) historical enterprise.

[1] What is it about our present moment that allows this thing called 'post-object art' to come into view? How might we retrieve this work given its ephemerality? Is it perhaps the nature of art history that it requires some kind of temporal distance to accrue in order for a period, a programme, a category to take shape and therefore be granted meaning? And if so, given the nature and intentions of post-object art, what kind of resistance does such work still offer to this project? By way of addressing, without necessarily answering these questions, I want to consider the uses, roles and functions of photography in post object art. In choosing this topic I am endeavouring to find a way to deal with the historical specificity of that moment without reducing post-object art to an inert and lifeless label, and without assuming I can unproblematically reconstitute it. That is, I am trying to find new ways to think about work which, by its nature is largely irrecoverable except as secondary documentation, and to address it in a way that is alert to the implications of this situation. As an outcome of this I want to explore an idea I have that photography, as it was used by post-object artists, especially in the form of photo-documentation, has a particular and contingent relation to the sites of its immediate and ongoing historicisation. This continues to challenge traditional conceptions of art and places special demands on any attempt by art history to accommodate it. I propose that post-object art, in seeking to divest itself of a modernist 'presence', operated with the condition of 'present-ness', in relation to which the photograph serves as a crucial trace. The photographic document holds a particular position between the absent object and its site of historical reception that may refuse the distance needed for art history to do its work. It may also confirm the impossibility of the discipline to fully know its object and demand a different kind of critical attention. This may indeed be one of post-object art's most important legacies, though also a reason for its near complete invisibility. Through the course of this paper I hope the implications of this proposition will become clear. However my more overt ambition is to use this occasion to not only re-think my own work on the period, but also to map out the nature and significance of the photographic dimension in and of post-object practice.

When, in the mid-1980s, I wrote my thesis on post-object art I gave an account of a range of work, made largely within the expanded field of contemporary sculpture, as an instance of a set of critical practices opposed to the fate of the art object in contemporary, consumer society. I argued this work posed a challenge to the hegemony of painting and to the fate of art in the museum and the market. I saw it as a symptom of larger, counter-cultural activities of new, critical voices in society who were seeking to take on or find an alternative to the system. This stemmed, I believed, from a desire on the part of artists to re-engage their practices with the reality of their lived experience, in conscious opposition to the perceived evils and alienations of contemporary society. In claiming for this work an oppositional relation to traditional art and its institutionalisation and to the economic, social and political frameworks within which art operated, I was idealistically proposing an (albeit historical) alternative to the reality of the art world within which I was working and writing. These were the heady, pre-Crash days of the early 1980s, when painting was enjoying a come-back, when the art market was at a buoyant height, and when public galleries were witnessing unprecedented success through their wooing of the corporate sector, by their promotion of the international 'blockbuster' exhibition. Claiming that post-object artists rejected the loaded history within which painting in particular was implicated, I argued that artists therefore refused the primacy of the visual as the foundation of the aesthetic experience. Instead, I maintained that artists sought alternatives that revised the meaning and function of art from a question of the quality of the visual experience as an autonomous event, to the examination of how art produces meaning in light of and in relation to its social function and situation. This led, I argued, to the development of practices that required direct bodily and cognitive engagement. While I did acknowledge that such evasive tactics led to a rejection of the primary status of the art object and that, as a result, often the only residue of art activity was secondary documentation, I did not make much of the fact that this usually took photographic form: in still and moving images, photocopies and videotapes. Nor did I pay much attention to the prominent place of reproductive technology in the work, other than to argue that this was symptomatic of a desire to work with current technologies and media in place of the traditional and precious materials associated with so-called fine art. Finally, I failed to recognise the problem this material posed for my own enterprise, as someone who had not actually witnessed a single performance or installation, who was then working, first, from the vestigial primary documents that survived, and, more importantly, from the secondary documentation that was subsequently published. In a sense, then, I was 'seeing-through' these images, imagining that I was attending to the absent art they documented. Now, in light of a welter of writing about conceptual and post-conceptual photography by prominent theorists like Jeff Wall, John Roberts, David Campany and others;[2] and in the wake of photographic theory and practice undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s under the rubric of post-modernism,[3] the ubiquity and mediations of photography cannot be overlooked. I have come to realise that the transparency of photography is an illusion and that its proliferation was no accident. Indeed I am invoking a central role for photography in post-object art as a way to revise my understanding of it. Rather than a distinct mode of practice with historically circumscribed boundaries, I now see post-object art as part of a larger project that was neither completed by the early 1980s nor impermeable to other modes of working. This can more broadly be thought of as symptomatic of the emergence of a critical as opposed to a conventional art practice that is one of the conditions of contemporary, that is to say post-1960s art.[4] Indeed a careful mapping of the activities, apparatuses and traces of photography in art of at least the last 30 years would confirm that, as Jeff Wall claims, photography became the paradigm for all aesthetically-critical, model-constructing thought about art.[5]

What then was the attraction of photography for post-object artists and what was the nature and function of its usage, what if you like, made me overlook it in the first place? These are important questions, especially in light of the fact that so much of the early thinking (my own included) about this 'new art' was concerned with direct experience, with the importance of participating in live action as a way of both evading the system and breaking down barriers between artists and audiences, of a new and radical temporality. In this light traditional representational procedures were thought to distance viewers and makers from their objects and, given their loaded history, interpolate expressive and formal meanings that freighted the art work with significance that was thought questionable and to be jettisoned. Although photography is a mode of (mechanical) representation it served as an alternative to those traditional practices. There are I believe six qualities, conditions or potentialities of photography that post-object artists were drawn to in their specific critique of the historical meaning and function of art. In light of these, it could be claimed that the photograph and its derivatives provided a means to supplement without separating post-object art from the social environment that was its raw material, and to more seamlessly insert it into a discursive field.[6] They are: the an-aesthetic dimension of photography; its ubiquity, its reproducibility; its heterogeneity; indexicality and finally its reflexivity or self-criticality. And I shall briefly outline each. In the 1970s it was exactly photography's freedom from the baggage of fine art that was the draw for artists searching for an alternative to the aesthetic tyrannies of late modernism. While art photographers were arguing their case for a place for photography in the pantheon of high art, on the grounds of its intrinsic formal qualities, post-object artists were merely using the camera as a recording device in their moves away from that institutional framework. They were disinterested in the aesthetic qualities of photography or the technical aspects of its production as ends in themselves. Rather photography was undertaken largely without the requirement of skill or specialist technical knowledge, in the mode of the amateur snapshot or the scientific record, often not by the artist themselves, but rather by someone else, charged with the business of documenting the action. As well as distancing themselves from the craft of photography or any aspirations to photography as Art, artists were attracted to the medium on the grounds of its ubiquity. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has pointed out, photography is historically the means by which the world is represented for most inhabitants of industrialised society.[7] Indeed as Joseph Kosuth has argued, photography's pervasiveness meant that it had been naturalised.[8] In other words photography's myriad everyday uses made it seem to artists more closely coupled to the world and less easily separated into the autonomous arena of art. And it was in this social realm that artists were endeavouring to work. Added to its ubiquity was its reproducibility, a function that Walter Benjamin had so persuasively argued posed a vital challenge to the separateness of art. If one of the claims of post-object art was to shift attention away from the unique and therefore precious art object, then photography's multiple identity was obviously an advantage. Furthermore, its ubiquitous usage in all published media allowed photo-documentation a more democratic distribution in the form of artists' books, journals, catalogues and publications. In these contexts photographs were compiled not so much as illustrations of objects located elsewhere, but as transcriptions of events that now had no other existence or indeed purely for publication. In this situation too, the social nature of the photograph was underscored, both by its juxtaposition with texts and images that brought other meanings to bear on the work, but also for the inevitable associations that could be made with the plethora of images circulating in the mass media. As Dan Graham has argued, in relation to his work for magazines, situated in these contexts, such work gained a 'certain independence' by 'belonging to the more general cultural framework'.[9] Together with its ubiquity and reproducibility photography played a heterogeneous role in post-object practice. It could be one element of a work an image on a monitor, for example which might also consist of text, found and manufactured objects, sound, light, real bodies, and so on. This hybridity was a direct affront to modernism"s central claims. And there, in the work, the image might function to shift consciousness away from the physical components of the piece, to relay for example different temporal moments (through feedback and time delay) or to shift spatial parameters and boundaries. As well, in its secondary documentary capacity, the photograph provided another layer to the work in a distinct format. The artwork existed then in some strange intermediate zone, between the now past physical situation and the multiple and proliferating space of reproduction. Thus the utter separation of the art object from reality, on which modernist autonomy depends, was undone and the world was brought into the work in ways which forced the abandonment of a definition of art as being discrete, bounded, separate. I would like to think perhaps that this supplies a destination for art that is not the museum, necessarily, but yours and my bookshelf. This was possible because of the very nature of the photograph. For the photograph has an indexical relation to reality, whereby the mechanical action of light passing through an aperture provides images that not only iconically resemble the objects they represent, but more importantly, bear the direct traces of those objects to which the film has been exposed. As Rosalind Krauss has argued, The photograph is thus genetically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm-prints, death masks, cast shadows…. Technically and semiologically speaking, drawings and paintings are icons, while photographs are indexes.[10] The photograph, being of a different order of signification, bringing with it traces of the world, could be thought of as having a more direct relation to the object or event it depicted. The camera, used mechanically without attention to technique or craft, served as a technological aid, producing images that could then be multiplied, dispersed back into the world to circulate more freely, rather than to accumulate value, as objects do in museums. But as I have argued elsewhere,[11] photography was also recognised as a language, and thus of a different order to the experience of reality we may physically, sensuously enjoy. Artists used photography reflexively to point out this difference, to allow a play between past and present, duration and the instant, to highlight the tenuous connection between the there of the world and the here of the photograph. As Bruce Barber stated, the point was not to frame experience (the illusory nature of this task was understood), but to frame 'the sets and contingencies through which experience may be obtained'.[12] Thus the photograph was not used in the belief that it might transcend its status as sign, in some pure and unmediated relation to the real. Indeed, the photograph was required to function without deception as a technical device, in recognition of its usage in both art and non-art contexts. And photographic meaning was not thought of as inherent in the image, rather it was recognised as being produced in relation to a context, to a history and to the nature and limits of the apparatus. Photography served, therefore, as a means to critically reflect on the nature, meaning and function of representation, its relation to perception and its social applications and ideological effects. In Barber's Kiss (1974), for example, we are presented with a slide-tape piece that documents the artist walking up to and kissing Sophia Loren as she is depicted on a billboard advertising the movie, The Man from La Mancha. His recorded actions are accompanied by a voice-over of Pauline Barber reading from anthropologist, Mary Douglas's, Purity and Danger. The complex positioning of photography in this work, where real action is undertaken in relation to a mass-produced, spectacular image, but then re-presented as a sequence of projected images that are reminiscent of the filmic experience, makes the point that our lives and desires are mediated by images. And that any response to this realisation can only occur through a similar process of mediation. Art's mediating role in the social realm was one focus for post-object artists' critique, another was to examine the status of the art object in both ontological and epistemological terms. For example, in documenting objects that have been manipulated, set up and positioned expressly for the camera the artist confronts us with a cognitive and perceptual conundrum. These objects may have once had tangible life as 'sculpture' in the tradition of the assemblage or site-specific marker, but as photographs they are only images. The physicality of the object is replaced by an evanescent trace, contrasting the experience of being in the same space as the object with a representation of what now can only reside in memory. In their publication or presentation, such images serve as metonyms of the very representational process, whereby lived events are granted meaning. The object is fixed in time by the framing mechanisms of the camera, just as meaning is fixed when an artwork is placed into a discursive framework. These works are not concerned with the visual (in formal or expressive terms) but rather deal with what David Campany has called, 'making visible'.[13] As Jeff Wall argues, It is this contradiction between the unavoidable process of depicting appearances, and the equally unavoidable process of making objects that permits photography to become a model of an art whose subject matter is the idea of art.[14]

If being there actually witnessing the performance, encountering the work was thought to be vital, if the audience had to be a participant (as Bruce Barber preferred) then what becomes of the work in its historical aftermath? Should we view the fact that documentation now functions like a surrogate art object and therefore is capable of being valued as a precious artefact, as proof of the 'failure' of conceptual art? Or is its relocation as an image a refusal of categorisation, museumification, an effective form of ongoing resistance? Despite claims otherwise, I believe documentation has always been critical to post-object art and that photo-documentation serves a particular purpose in the critical and reflexive methodologies of conceptual artists. It is more than a secondary supplement that does not attempt to replace the absent (and therefore privileged) original, but rather seeks to interpolate itself in an active and self-critical fashion into the discursive framework. Furthermore, I would argue that, meta-discursively, the photo-document serves to chart a gradual shift, as we move from the 1970s to the 1980s, away from the primacy of the live event and its material and experiential actualities, to a growing investment in and ultimate deferral to its secondary textualisation. This may be post-object art"s fate but it is also its legacy. Briefly, and to conclude, I want to offer three examples to explain this point. In 1974, Billy Apple undertook an important tour of New Zealand, executing a number of installation works in various venues around the country. These consisted of "subtractions" or "alterations" of actual spaces and posed a radical alternative to conventional notions of sculpture. At the Auckland City Art Gallery he executed two works in the two adjacent galleries on the first floor. In one of these he removed the wax polish from an 8 x 8 square of floor tiles and in the other, he painted the requisite number of floor tiles along the far wall to make it appear to a viewer, able to see both galleries simultaneously, that the two spaces were of equal dimensions. This radical emptying of the gallery must have had a disorienting effect on visitors who would have had to spend some time there literally looking for the art. I can imagine a confused milling or tentative foray or even an ignorant and un-seeing passage through the space. The works were recorded by the gallery photographer (John Daley) and published with documentation of a number of other works Apple undertook, with a commentary by Wystan Curnow in an issue of the Auckland City Art Gallery Quarterly.[15] These photographs, while not formalist, do however fix the view. The orderly geometry of the architecture and the relentless grid of the floor tiles are reproduced in the photographic images in strict symmetry, their point of view relentless in its replication of an ordering, optical perspective. Here then, the temporal experience of being in the space was replaced by the fixity of a single instant. Set on the page, text and image replicate the geometrical grid that organises the space. No doubt on the artist"s instruction, the photographer has chosen to present us with an ideal view. This makes legible the work"s allegiance to a minimalist aesthetic and procedure. Accompanied by an expository essay, the documentation functions conventionally as text and illustration whereby the text establishes a suitably objective vantage point from which to view the work. Thus the ordered stasis of the perspectives organised in the photography serves as a visual equivalent to the critical distance evident in the writing. Both seem to confirm the logical separation of art and commentary and the priority of the live event in light of its subsequent explication. However, this is complicated by the fact that the work itself only survives as documentation. This is no conventional reproduction. It does not illustrate some absent real object. Indeed, set amongst the conventional art historical essays also included in the journal, these images are somewhat troubling. In their problematic standing-in for the original, the photographs here function like some uncanny double with their own supplementary meaning. For the removal of the floor wax, which typifies Apple"s ambition to make work out of the givens of the situation has an indexical relation to the space similar to the photograph"s indexical relation to the work. Both are granted meaning that is contingent, both therefore refuse autonomy and the distance between art object and documentation begins to blur. Moving to the early 1980s and the performance work of Peter Roche and Linda Buis we find a somewhat different order of documentation. Their performances were structured around the dynamics of their physical and psychological interaction, and their negotiation of the relationship between performers and spectators. Each work was undertaken over a particular period of time and acted out within the confines and at times, in relation to the limits, of an actual context. If the accounts of those exemplary witnesses, Tony Green and Wystan Curnow are anything to go by, these were no comfortable affairs. For the repetitive, arduous and at times emotionally charged interchange was designed to make the audience think: about their role as observers and how they might or should respond. But in their documentation, which is some of the most visually arresting of the period, the duration of the event and the endurance it required were replaced by single images of particular moment.[16] Though Roche and Buis used film in their work they seem to have preferred still imagery as the primary form of its documentation and distribution. Photographs of performances were taken by friends and fellow artists, in particular Ron Brownson and Greg Burke. The photographs often distilled the essential charge of the event, hypostasised the occasion. The single image serves a different function to that of the actual event, then. Its focus on and capture of a moment or series of moments accords meaning that is both part of the action but separate from it. Being the work of an unnamed third party, given the freedom to document as they saw fit, it shifts the usual relation of the photograph to the artist as author of their work, to a second order of significance as a commentary or mode of interpolation. The photograph is what the work meant to this invisible collaborator. It is not only then a picture of the work but a picture about the work. When placed in the context of a journal article these photographs continue to function discursively, but now as one order of sign amongst others. This is the case in 'Peter Roche/Linda Buis. A Gathering Concerning Three Performances' a piece compiled by Wystan Curnow and published in Parallax in 1983.[17] Here a sequence of first-hand accounts by Curnow and Green, of three performance works are interspersed with recollections and commentaries by the artists. These run alongside un-captioned documentary images whose scale and presentation mirror the textual page layout. The piece functions as a non-linear, first person, multi-voiced narrative that endeavours to offer a written and visual record of past work. It does this not by assuming the critical distance of objective interpretation, but rather by a process of experiential montage and compilation. Here images and words function as equivalent 'texts'. There is an attempt to re-present the performance in a manner that refuses the functions of interpretation, but which does not deny the problem of narrativisation. In its shifts from live action to recollection; from the movement of actual bodies to the stasis of single images; in its slippage from linear time to the shifting temporal zones of memory and intention; and in its multiple and proliferating viewpoints this text declares itself of a different order to the live performance, but also to the usual formats and expository styles of the scholarly journal. The piece does not assume that the object of art can be fixed and anatomised, granted a single meaning, indeed it does not have a single author. Crucially, it works in acknowledgement of the problems of representation, of the likelihood of different interpretations, faulty memory, misplaced emphasis. It is not surprising then that it appears in a journal of postmodern literature and art (indeed the first of its kind in New Zealand). Here, perhaps for the first time, an intertextual reading of a work is postulated.[18] My final example refers to post-object art but is of a different order. It is a recipient of that history and a commentator on it, operating, I think as a potential valedictory. This is an installation by Julian Dashper: Motorway Schools, first staged at 100m², one of New Zealand's first alternative art spaces, in 1980. This work has been re-presented on a number of occasions in the form of documentation and, in this capacity, I consider it to be one of the first examples of post-conceptual art to be undertaken in New Zealand. It is of particular interest in this context because it is a temporary, site-specific work in which photography plays a key role. But also because, in its after-life, it is a self-conscious example of conceptual art as documentation. The exhibition consisted of a sequence of four sets of three polaroid photographs of a generic institutional building, a typical 'Nelson Block', which was the school of the title[19] and a soundtrack of motorway traffic. As Tim Walker wrote in Art New Zealand this was one of the best uses of this particular space, which had previously functioned as a small, inner-city factory and warehouse.[20] Perhaps this was because the artist had spent a week sitting in the space before deciding what to do and because the minimal intervention Dashper eventually made served to reinforce or draw out the inherent meanings of the site. Although the show was only on for five days it not only generated the article by Walker, but also two short reviews by fellow students at Auckland University where Dashper was still at art school. These corroborate Walker's assertion that the work functioned as a critique of the instituitional and technological infrastructures within which we operate. One author recalled bored moments at school when she, as a kid, was physically present but mentally absent, and the other imagined the motorway as a metaphor for the 'fast-lane' onto which we are all meant to embark.[21] Subsequently, however, on at least three occasions (1989, 1994 and 1999),[22] Dashper has re-presented the work, not in its original configuration for the space has long since been demolished but in a vitrine. Here he has laid out the polaroid snaps, the cassette tape of the recorded sounds, and the original signage, with professional photographs of the installation (taken by Peter Hannken), together with a copy of Art New Zealand open to the pages of Walker"s article. Self-consciously, then, Dashper makes us aware of the fate of site-specific work and of the operations of primary and secondary documentation. His work is no longer about schools and motorways and their effects on our lives, it has no bearing on that social circumstance. Nor is it really about the ephemerality or resistance of such installation practice. Rather it is about the process of inscription of artistic acts as texts and of their eventual institutionalisation and historicisation. In its quotation of conceptual art documentation this is a postmodern work. By accomplishing its own critical self-reflection, Motorway Schools is rendered impermeable both to the social realm of which it was once a part and to its critical or discursive milieu where commentators once effectively collaborated. It seems to await acquisition by the museum, its ultimate mise-en-abyme. Dashper has thus shifted the tense of his practice from the "present-ness" of post-object art to one of "past-ness", which is of course postmodernism's condition. We are witnesses to a subtle slippage, a waiving of the potential of post-object art; a knowing deferral to the power and pervasiveness of the frame, of the distancing effects of art as representation. It may have been this that I refused when I embarked on my research in the first place. Now I can (or must) appreciate the significance of the various ways such works fold their meanings into their mode of re-presentation and of the role photography plays in this process. For it is a condition from which there is no escape, a fact rendered visible by post-object artists, and made their business. Critically, knowingly, resistantly engaging this intertwined nexus of events, images and texts, post-object art not only challenged the autonomy and status of the art object but also tested and teased its discursive spaces. It is in this inter-textual domain that such work continues to operate, charging the art historian to reconsider the nature of their objects and to question the limits and shape of their discipline.