Walead Beshty's Abstracting Photography

"Perhaps this confusion of photographic theory for the analysis of images is why the discourse on photography shifted from a focus on its instrumentality, to a concern that photography no longer truly exists." - Walead Beshty

Once again Words Without Pictures is featuring a wonderful new essay on their site. This time Walead Beshty discusses the amorphous, ontological nature of photography in light of the renewed interest in photographic theory over the past 5 to 10 years. His essay, entitled Abstracting Photography, explores what functions, both aesthetically and socially, photographs really serve.

"As George Baker wrote in his essay “Photography’s Expanded Field”, “Critical consensus would have it that the problem today is not that just about anything image-based can now be called photographic, but rather that photography itself has been foreclosed, cashiered, abandoned—outmoded technologically and displaced aesthetically.”[1] In other words, the Barthesian theorization of the “this has been” contained in the photographic image, has become the “this has been” of Photography itself.

This lack of certainty with regard to what constitutes Photography as an object of inquiry can be seen for all its abstractness as a mirror of the problem of theorizing the photograph, the clash between the apparent concreteness of the photographic referent and its slippery contextual play. Yet the term persists past its supposed theoretical and practical disintegration, and with it a forlorn pastiche of critical theorizations and aesthetic conventions that repeatedly confront a metaphor for their own self-imposed failure in the photographic image.[2] In melancholic retrospection, the photographic object itself represents the loss of a unity, dispersed within an equally fragmented field that for the art historian requires it to be resituated, re-pictured, a condition that prompts Baker to go on to say “…the terms involved only now become more complex, the need to map their effects more necessary, because these effects are both less obvious and self-evident.”[3] Baker proposes to “read” the contemporary condition of Photography through an earlier text, that of Rosalind Krauss’ “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” at times going so far as to transplant his terms and formulations into direct quotes from her text, inhabiting her text as much as her text prefigures his own.[4] The task at hand for Baker is to re-picture the scene of dispersal, to connect terms again, yet with the nagging sense that this effort is self-defeating, retrograde, it becomes a gesture of traumatic re-enactment that concludes in another moment of defacement and dispersal (in the end his drawing is scribbled over by one of the artists it is meant to contain[5]). Seeing this as a state of crisis for the medium (and thus the historian/critic who defines it), Baker performs as the allegorist does, reading his own moment through a temporally displaced other, the status of the photograph conflated and reread through the urgency of critique in 1979, his own position as a critic within the contemporary academy metaphorically and metonymically tied to that of Photography’s ebb and flow as an ontological category: “For the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory.” [6] In this, Baker, as allegorist displaces history with pictures, pictures that resist the linear causal chains of historical development and opt instead for the simultaneity and formal morphology of the image."

Read the whole essay here.

Claes Oldenburg's "I Am for an Art" (1961)

I recently bought Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, an anthology of essays, interviews, ideas and manifestos written by artists working from the 1940's through today. One of the more interesting and illuminating texts I've read so far is Claes Oldenburg's "I Am for an Art", a lyrical celebration of the small wonders of everyday life. Below are a few excerpts from the text:

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself...

I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man's metal stick.
I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.
I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweety's arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth.

"I Am for an Art" originally appeared in Environments, Situations, Spaces, and was then reprinted in Store Days: Documents From The Store.

Softlight Switches, 1963-9

Work © Claes Oldenburg

Sze Tsung Leong's A Picture You Already Know

If you haven't been over to Words Without Pictures lately, I'd highly recommend doing so. They are currently featuring Sze Tsung Leong's wonderful essay A Picture You Already Know, a exploration into the history of repetition in photography. In the excerpt below, Leong addresses the various demonstrations and methods of repetitious photographic practice.

"Repetition in photography comprises a wide range of manifestations that have formed a significant part of photographic practice from the early development of the medium. Repetition figured in the use of photographs in racial and criminal studies (in which the repetitive use of portraits was used to identify what were thought to be the physiological foundations of traits and behaviors); in the cumulative documentation of the photographer’s urban or social context, such as in the work of Eugène Atget and August Sander; and in the mimicry of the pictorial conventions of painting genres such as still lifes, portraiture, and landscapes. In the context of contemporary photography, repetition appears in a profusion of varieties. These include the repetition of forms, spaces, or people (such as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies, Candida Höfer’s institutional spaces, Wang Jinsong’s one-child “standard families” in China, and Hans Eijkelboom’s people in public settings); repetition over time (Nicholas Nixon’s periodic portraits of a group of sisters over the decades); repetition of motifs and compositions from art history (Jeff Wall’s rejiggerings of iconic paintings, Rineke Dijkstra’s classically posed portraits); collections of repetitions in imagery from the popular media (Peter Piller’s reordering of existing imagery into distinct categories); repetitions of the self (such as those by Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, Tomoko Sawada, and Tseng Kwong-Chi); overlapping of repeated images (Idris Khan’s layerings of multiples); the reuse of existing imagery as seen in Sherrie Levine’s and Thomas Ruff’s appropriations; and representations of representations (Hiroshi Sugimoto’s wax figures, and Thomas Struth’s museum photographs).

The layers that form the practice of photography are themselves permeated by layers of repetition and multiplication. A chain of duplications begins with the process of taking a photograph, which is, in most cases, the duplication of something existing in “reality.” From this “copy,” which takes the form of a single negative, slide, or digital file, multiple prints can be made. The image represented in these prints, when considered within the scope of a photographer’s body of work, often functions as one of a series, or as one within multiple iterations of an artist’s themes and concerns. The image also contains within it the past history of images that have influenced its conception, and the future lines of influence yet to be formed. These threads of influence—the dialogue between artists and artistic concerns both within and outside of a particular era—weave through historical contexts and future possibilities, and imprint their influence, through variations, similarities, and resonances, on visual culture."