Photography out of Conceptual Art

Art History, 2009

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, 1999

They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication. - Dennis Oppenheim on his use of photographs.(1) This statement by Dennis Oppenheim introduces the paradox inherent in any discussion of photography within Conceptual Art. Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography per se. To hear the artists tell it, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. Time and again artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation. For many years curators, critics and historians have corroborated this reductive understanding of the role of photography in Conceptual Art. Sidestepping the aesthetic properties of conceptual photographs is convenient; it simplifies the distinction between Conceptualism and the more material-based practices of Pop Art and Min...

Visual Studies, 2011

Image [&] Narrative, 2009

Certain contemporary photographs, most prominently by Jeff Wall, are considered to bring to life the absorptive tradition of painting. Taking that finding as its starting point, this paper scrutinizes work by another photographer today, Allan Sekula. Although Sekula"s images visibly engage similar absorptive motives, his work is not championed by the defendants of the current revival of the tableau tradition. But nor does it testify to the ambition to do so. From a discussion of dramatic and compositional elements in images by Wall and Sekula, the essay finds that their work is marked by either a classical or a vernacular pictorial style. Stylistic differences account for diverging opinions concerning art"s function. Classical or neo-realist style stands for an ambition to create a pleasurable and peaceful moment to spend with the image presented as a singular artwork. Vernacular or critical realist style does not eschew caricature nor is it averse to provoking a physically strenuous experience of multi-image installations. These issues are traced back to paragon debates that emerged at the very origins of modern art itself, in the late 16 th Century. Résumé: Plusieurs photographies contemporaines, exemplairement celles de Jeff Wall, nourrissent l"ambition de redonner vie à la tradition de l"absorption picturale. C"est à la lumière de cette tendance que le présent article examine le travail d"un autre photographe d"aujourd"hui, Allan Sekula. Malgré la présence de nombreux thèmes empruntés à la tradition de l"absorption picturale, le travail de Sekula est plutôt ignoré par les défenseurs de la tradition du tableau. L"appartenance de l"artiste à cette tradition est du reste tout sauf évidente. Analysant les éléments de mise en scène et de composition dans des images de Wall et Sekula, l"article démontre que leur oeuvre se définit par un style pictural qui est ou bien classique (Wall) ou bien populaire (Sekula). Ces différences renvoient à des conceptions antagonistes sur la fonction de l"art. Le style classique ou néoréaliste cherche à susciter le plaisir du spectateur, seul face à l"oeuvre, présentée comme image isolée. Le style populaire ou critique ne recule pas devant la caricature, ni devant la confrontation souvent rude avec des installations multiimages. L"article se termine par une relecture de ces positions contemporaines à la lumière des débats sur les mérites respectifs des arts initiés au début de l"art moderne, c"est-à-dire à la fin du 16 e siècle.

2016

This essay explores the relationship of the work in the Museum of Modern Art's 1970 exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, to the contemporaneous activities of conceptual artists using photography--works very rarely discussed in relation to one another. It outlines their shared rejection of the values of modernist fine art photography and explores the different ways that they interrogated traditional notions of medium in their uses of photographs. It reveals the extent to which Photography into Sculpture expanded the notion of photography as art from within an institutional art photography context, while the conceptual artists employed a short-term strategy of treating photography as one non-art medium among several to challenge fine art aesthetics. In order to underline the paradoxes inherent in the ways photography was discussed and institutionalized at the time, the essay's examples of conceptual art using photography are drawn from the Information exhibition curated by ...

In this essay, I explore two contemporary photographic projects – Trevor Paglen’s Limit Telephotography series of US military black sites, and Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture on urban poverty – and the place of Conceptualism and the ‘conceptual’ in critically understanding them. To do this, I will firstly offer a brief delineation of the two terms, before examining in detail how the projects I’ve chosen relate to and augment both.

June e technical developments of the last two decades have changed our relationships with photographic images -may they be moving or still, situated in artistic or non-artistic contexts. While in most cases the increased ease of production and distribution was met with enthusiasm, for artists the shear amount and fast pace of digital images presents a challenge. To illustrate this point Dutch art director, collector, curator, and artist Erik Kessels has allegedly printed each photo uploaded to Flickr within a single day for his installation Hrs in Photos. e spectacular installation was shown several times since its rst instantiation in -usually at photography venues or festivals -and we can imagine how photographers encounter it with both compulsion and despair. In another reaction to the lost value of photographic prints Kelley Walker decided to o er his piece Chess Players from as a digital le and concedes the owner the right to modify, print, and display it in any desired form. In a recent gallery show in Berlin the work hence was simply crumpled up on the oor. Images are disappearing as it seems -at least for artists. One strategy to face this situation is what some call the 'networked image, ' that is the assembly of images and people in social media as demonstrated by Amalia Ulman in her Instagram performance Excellences & Perfections. Over a period of several months Ulman blended her artist persona with a stereotyped social media addict who pretended to optimize her photographic appearance also by use of plastic surgery. She thus showed how the border between image and body has blurred. ese are just three more or less arbitrarily chosen examples that demonstrate the precarious state of photographic images or the medium of photography in ne arts as it is debated in post-photography discourses. Of course, artists did not need to wait for digital photography and the internet to reject the production of new images in view of those that already exist. But when Rosalind Krauss described the destructive energy of photography as a 'theoretical object' -i.e. the in ltration of ne arts with photography's logic of reproduction etc. -she did not yet imply the possibility that this would nally also strike back on photography as an artistic medium.

Academia Letters, 2021