Photography After Conceptual Art PDF

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This article was downloaded by: [24.69.76.10] On: 28 September 2014, At: 14:56 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Visual Studies Publication details, including instru...

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This art icle was downloaded by: [ 24.69.76.10] On: 28 Sept em ber 2014, At : 14: 56 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK

Visual Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rvst 20

Photography After Conceptual Art Trudi Lynn Smit h

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York Universit y Published online: 21 Oct 2011.

To cite this article: Trudi Lynn Smit h (2011) Phot ography Aft er Concept ual Art , Visual St udies, 26:3, 270-271, DOI: 10.1080/ 1472586X.2011.610953 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 1472586X.2011.610953

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Visual Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3, November 2011

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Reviews

Photography After Conceptual Art edited by Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 200 pages ISBN: 978-1-4443-3360-2 (paperback) Price $34.95 Reviewed by Trudi Lynn Smith, York University

Michael Fried. The editors note that the original call for chapters was specifically to critique ‘Wall’s history of photo-conceptualism and the implications of his practice, and Fried’s critical positioning of recent photographic practice as an inheritance of the absorptive pictorial tradition and the aims of high modernist painting’ (8).

What assumptions underlie the rapidly firming history of contemporary photographic art, and how can it be engaged, critiqued and complicated through reconsidering theoretical or aesthetic issues? These questions are at the heart of a new volume of writing by art historians, theorists and philosophers, collected together as Photography After Conceptual Art.

The authors find that Wall draws too sharp a line in the history of photography since 1960, one that is structured around a binary between works as conceptual or pictorial, aesthetic or anti-aesthetic. The collection of authors subsequently challenge this history and attempt to argue outside and around the binary, and expose a hybrid tension alive in contemporary art photography.

This volume is a timely and illuminating engagement with the history of photography since 1960. It emerges out of a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project ‘Aesthetics After Photography’ directed by Margaret Iversen (Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex) and Diarmuid Costello (Philosophy Department, University of Warwick), who are the editors of this volume. Photography After Conceptual Art is also the product of a two-day session at the annual Association of Art Historians conference held at Tate Britain, in 2008 and was originally published as an edition of Art History (32:5) in 2009.

Chapters two and three nicely reconsider these binaries in their treatment of the influential art of Ed Ruscha. Margaret Iversen challenges Wall’s interpretation that the importance of works like Ruscha’s 1962 ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ lies in the amateur or journalistic aesthetic. Instead, Iversen’s art history draws our attention to the performativity and physicality of Ruscha’s book works. By drawing out the connection of Marcel Duchamp’s influence on Ruscha, Iversen shows that Ruscha’s is an interest actually found in the ‘instructional and performative Duchamp’ (13). In this way Iversen brilliantly re-situates Ruscha’s books into performance works, and raises the possibility that the artist is more concerned with rules and the outcome of performance than in the particular aesthetic of the photography. Chapter three by Aron Vinegar flags the importance of Ruscha’s books to the history of photography and investigates ‘deadpan’, a term frequently deployed to describe post-conceptual photographic practices. To situate his argument, Vinegar outlines the use of ‘deadpan’ in contemporary photography and beyond, and then suggests a re-consideration of the term using Heidegger’s understanding of mood. Both chapters two and three will be of interest to readers interested in visual culture, as their readings of Ruscha fit into thinking about embodiment, audience and the multisensory reality of visual culture.

Nine chapters plus an introduction comprise Photography After Conceptual Art. Complementing the rich content contributed by some of the leading scholars in the area of art history, this book is well illustrated, with high quality reproductions. In the introduction, Costello and Iversen articulate what is at stake in contemporary photographic art and offer an overview of what they see as limitations with Jeff Wall’s historicisings of photography. They explain how contributors to the volume take issue with Wall’s enormously influential history of photo-conceptualism that he has used to legitimate his own work with photographic tableaux. In Wall’s writing over the course of his career, such as his 1996 ‘“Marks of indifference”: Marks of photography in, or as, conceptual art’ (an article many of the authors reference), Wall has produced an art history in general that he self-consciously positions his own work (6). Beyond the work of Wall, Costello and Iversen set the framework for contributors to engage the recent work of ISSN 1472-586X printed/ISSN 1472-5878 online/11/030270-7 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2011.610953

Moving from Ruscha’s book art to the sustained documentation of industrial architecture, Sarah E. James reviews Bern and Hilla Becher’s instrumental practice in chapter four. James complicates their objective

Reviews

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photography by reconsidering the history and specificity of a moment in German history. From this context, in chapter five Gordon Hughes draws attention to the artistic practice of Douglas Huebler, while in chapter six Luke Skrebowski details the work of Mel Bochner, and in chapter seven Mark Godfrey explores the book works of Roni Horn. Each works to complicate the history of post-conceptual practices and the pictorial tradition in photography. The final three chapters in the volume concentrate more fully on the photography of Jeff Wall. Using Wall’s writing about Sherrie Levine as a starting point, Tamara Trodd (chapter eight) makes an excellent contribution to scholarship that considers the relationship between sculpture and photography. Chapter eight continues another thread woven throughout the volume – the problem of trying to claim photography as a medium. In chapter nine, Wolfgang Brückle calls into question Wall’s art history by using Wall’s own photographic works as an example. The volume ends aptly with an essay by Christine Conley (chapter ten) who takes up Wall’s ‘Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, 1999’ to contest Fried’s interpretation of the work. Ultimately, while Wall has carved out space for himself in the history of art, the authors of Photography After Conceptual Art act to broaden that space and consider other possibilities, while contributing to interpretations of Wall’s own work. While they interrogate and question the claims made by Wall and Fried, they also make a sound advancement to theory about Wall’s undeniably important photographic works. This volume extends the lexicon of contemporary art photography. If Wall and Fried’s lexicon of contemporary art photography is aesthetic, pictorial, conceptual and, as contributor Tamara Trodd summarises, includes the terms ‘tradition, composition, unity, intention, and medium’ (137), then collectively these authors have sought to broaden the discussion by emphasising performance, subjectivity, mood, the visceral and multisensory. This shift in emphasis puts this work at the leading edge of visual culture studies.  C

2011 Trudi Lynn Smith

Between art and anthropology: Contemporary ethnographic practice edited by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright Oxford: Berg, 2010, 192 pages ISBN: 1-847-88500-4 (paperback) Price $29.95 Reviewed by Kathryn Ramey, Emerson College

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Between Art and Anthropology is a collection of essays examining the borderlands of the two practices and emphasising commonalities of what on the surface appear to be disciplines populated by dissimilar people and involving different processes and methodologies (1). The editors of this book argue that by and large anthropologists are dismissive of formal/visual experimentation. In their reluctance to incorporate any image making into their field work, beyond the photograph as document, social scientists exhibit a kind of ‘iconophobia’ – fear of images – and ‘chromophobia’ – fear of colour – that have corollaries in the art world (3). What the authors of these collected essays assert from their varied perspectives as artists, art critics and anthropologists is that artists and anthropologists because of their overlapping interests and areas of work, can learn from each other. The authors also hope that such dialogues could promote working relationships between these two practices producing work that could exist and circulate in either world. After Wright’s and Schneider’s introductory essay, world renown art critic and cultural theorist Lucy Lippard explores the work of four artists working firmly within their own subjectivity as Native/Others and/or activists to produce art that lays bare the ethical question ‘who exploits whom for what and why’ (24). The working practices of these artists have much in common with participant observation, the bedrock of anthropological fieldwork. The products of this embedded labour evoke the ethnographic write up in that they communicate a ‘thick description’ to quote Clifford Geertz, of the experiences of the artist and her collaborators. In the final analysis, Lippard muses that as more non-white artists move into the mainstream of contemporary art it is possible that the art world will abandon anthropology just as casually as it picked it up decades ago. Working directly across the divide, anthropologist and sound artist Steve Feld and visual artist Virginia Ryan create multi-media collaborations that have been exhibited in both worlds. Ryan produced photographs and multi-media installations and Feld created soundscapes and videos that responded to and accompanied them. Their work circles around notions of the reflexivity of the gaze of the artist and a sensuous presentation of historical knowledge. Following Walter Benjamin, Feld states that he wants to use ‘the ephemeral and material nature of sound to grasp that idea of historical seizure’ when an image of the past flashes into the present (118). While Feld acknowledges that his and Ryan’s collaborative art projects require less explanation to and are better received by an art audience, he hopes that more anthropologists will begin to utilise aesthetic strategies to present their studies as he says,...