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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]
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