|
|
 |
|
|
Conceptual Photography from the 60's and the 70's
David Zwirner 43 Greene Street, New York, NY
Through June 6th, 1998
It has been long espoused that photography flourished out of an instinct
to capture time and confirm ourselves and the world around us. To create
object certainty, but of course the great paradox is, voilà,
here is a false flat image on which the weight of time is all but too
apparent, both chemically and stylistically. "Go ahead Indiana, blow it
up. Blow the Arc back up to God."
Here I wax Susan Sontag: there is the image as experienced in our lives,
the newspaper photo of the president in an unrelated pose that still grants
a degree of authenticity to the news story of the day. We believe the
beauty of an admirer when we unfold the letter to reveal the enclosed
photograph. It could be either someone else's poetry or someone else's
photo. Yet, our trust in the image, its allure, still reigns, even in
an era of digital magic.
Confronted with these photographs at David Zwirner, I was struck with
the heaviness of "conceptual" as an adjective in modifying my reading
of these works. It immediately sets up an expectation that what these
artists intended to do with the medium was ambitiously different, differently
ambitious. It suggests an urgent need to express or effect, by utilizing
the photographic medium itself as an object and beyond that, to lovingly
chide or cliché that medium -- and its inherent romanticism. All this
while pursuing other, different ends than simply to convey.
Bruce Nauman's "Drill Team," (1966) for instance, serves the object up
with violence and with a dusty political irony. Its five drill bits through
a block of wood (as per biting title) apparently pay homage to the wit
of Marcel Duchamp, to steal a reference from another reviewer. One can't
help but see a conversation with a larger segment of photographic history
as well. With the soft edginess of surrealist photographs like Andre Kertesz's
"Time Flies" (a clock distorted as if melting) from around 1938. Or the
abstractions of industrial objects Margaret Bourke-White took in the 1930's.
Or action-oriented object studies like Edward Steichen's "Triumph of the
Egg" which itself bore a dialogue with his heroic images of shadowed skyscrapers.
Yet, the gaudiness of Nauman's image, its color and the political will
of its pun, grant it an otherness that receives that dialogue with history.
That jumps us to reflect on our unavoidable reading of all photographic
images as somehow "despite-it-all" sublime. Their smoothness, an expert
surface, regardless of what they contain.
John Baldessari's "Untitled" (1970) is another work which, like Nauman's,
tries to manipulate our traditional relationship with the photographic
surface. It also tries to collapse its "high" (artistic) and "low" (documentary,
bad snapshots) uses in our lives and history. A series of 22 b/w seemingly
random snapshot-size photos of people moving through city streets, it
indicates direction of movement with the red arrows of a traffic engineer
or a court expert witness. The added dimension of the red arrows to our
reading reflect back on the temporal limit of these photographs in conveying
movement in the first place.
The work in the back room is less involved in complexing around the surface
of the photograph. Many of these pieces instead document non-photographic
work. Yet, in doing so they open a dialogue between the act and its documentation,
between the ephemeral "objectless" work and its stagnant & permanent "object"
image. Vito Acconci's documentation of his performances are executed with
a kind of dull irony, again a random snapshot effect to discount any art
of surface. These documents can't help but draw attention to our non-participation
in these acts as voyeurs and to create amusement over the act of documenting
such an event in the first place. Other pieces such as Gordon Matta-Clark's
Splitting, documenting a piece in which he actually split a house in two
with a chainsaw, leave us with the eerie glimpse of a missed party (perhaps
the 60's) and the ideas we must try to understand as fresh once again.
Dan Machlin