Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Conceptual Art
and the
Photograph
19641977
Published by
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Front cover: Marcel Broodthaers, Portrait of Maria Gilissen with Tripod (Portrait de Maria
Gilissen avec Statif), 1967 (plate 17). Back cover: John Baldessari, Throwing Three Balls
in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), 1973 (detail; plate 44). Endpapers: Jan Dibbets (Dutch, born 1941). Horizon IIISea (Horizon IIIZee), 1971. 35 mm
color film, two screens; 5 min. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Pages 1415: Giulio Paolini,
Anna-logy (Anna-logia), 1966 (plate 15). Pages 5657: Eleanor Antin, 100 Boots, 197173
(plate 37). Pages 8889: Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #4, New York City, 1968, 1968 (plate
32). Pages 13233: John Baldessari, Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line
(Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), 1973 (detail; plate 44). Pages 16263: Alighiero Boetti, Twins
(Gemelli), 1968 (plate 75). Pages 20607: Annette Messager, Voluntary Tortures (Les
Tortures Volontaires), Album-Collection No. 18, 1972 (plate 95).
The Unfixed
Photograph
Matthew S. Witkovsky
16
T h e U nf i x e d P h otogr a p h
Circa 1930
T he Prehistory of an Expandable Medium
Artists who turned to photography in the Conceptual era revived, in
most cases unwittingly, precedents established nearly a half century
earlier. Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism all involved the elaboration
of a new set of standards for art in which photographs and theories
of photography played a major role. The Primitivist adoption of photomontage and the photograma barbarous attack on the fine arts,
fine camera skills, and fine society all at oncewas a hallmark of
those historical avant-gardes in the period immediately following
World War I. So was the turn to vernacular forms such as photojournalism and the amateur snapshot as sources of creative inspiration.6
Magazines soon became a chosen site of display, a vanguard alternative to the museum or gallery exhibition, with radical implications
for the definition of art and its audiences. The creation of singular
images was in important instances displaced by serial or collective
production, a transformation of authors into producers, as Walter
Benjamin incisively observed at the time, that would reappear with
force in Conceptual Art.7 In a separate development, the term medium
came into use around 1930 to help frame the first histories of photography as art.8 Writings on photography at the time dealt not only
with its medium specificityits origins and supposedly distinct
identifying featuresbut also with questions of function and institutional positioning: debates over the document and the relation of
image to caption, and challenges to the notion of originality, among
other discursive matters. It was in the 1910s through the 1930s as
well that photographs first found a niche in art museums and the
art marketplace.9
That intense ferment ceased by 1940, resurfacing only sporadically
in the subsequent decades before a new conjunction of interests
coalesced prior to 1970 that allowed photographs to be theorized and
viewed as vanguard art.10 The process took a number of years and,
more importantly, initially involved photographic forms other than the
standard gelatin silver print. Conceptual artists in the 1960s made
books, canvases, slides, and magazine pieces before they commonly
began to exhibit straight photographs. This is not to say that conven-
Circa 1960
Photography as Mass Medium
A nearer historical precedent to photography in the Conceptual era
was the engagement with mass media pictures that swelled during
the 1950s and culminated in Pop Art. Here, however, it is important
to distinguish between artists general fascination with the photographic and the production of new photographs that became a feature
of Conceptual Art. Earlier collages or assemblages, for example, by
the proto-Pop Independent Group in London (founded 1952), or Robert
Rauschenberg in his Combines (from around 1954) reflect an understanding of photography as a pool of public imagery, anonymous and
available for poetic and critical reappraisal. The assisted readymade
techniques of the Franco-Italian Affichisteswho removed accretions
of torn billboards wholesale from the street, including (from around
1960) ones with photographic imageryand, most famously, the silk
screens of Andy Warhol (from 1962), likewise depended on the ubiquity
of print media as an image world. When artists did make photographs,
as in early Fluxus, they circulated them as ephemera in an alternative
media stream. Yves Kleins iconic trick photograph of 1960, Saut
dans le vide (Leap into the Void), likewise illustrated a mock tabloid that
Klein provocatively subtitled Le journal dun seul jour (One-Day
Newspaper) (fig. 4, p. 137).11
Also germane to the beginnings of photoconceptualism in the
mid-1960s were contemporaneous paintings and drawings from photographs (whether appropriated or original) by, among others, Richard
Artschwager, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Vija Celmins. Such
works, like those by Warhol and Rauschenberg, certainly helped gain
acceptance for camera pictures as a basis for fine art. More profoundly,
these paintings, however flat they initially appeared, showed an
unexpected emphasis on the material qualities of photographic source
imagery (in contrast, for example, to the glassy canvases of Robert
Bechtle, Richard Estes, and other Photorealist painters also from that era).
Whether it was the blur haunting camera images taken from life, the
dot screens and fiber grain in printed pages, or even the numbing repetition of sheets coming off the printing press, the material and
mechanical basis for mass media photography informed vanguard
paintingjust as it would inform Conceptual Art. Although the latter
movement was said from early on to be aiming at dematerialization,
that tag was a misnomer for what amounted to the development of
a new set of material practices, grounded in the mutability and anonymity of photographs.12
1963
Ed Ruscha and the Analogic Image
The authoring of photographic works as Conceptual Art finds one
prototypical origin in the books of Ed Ruscha, a string of sixteen
publications that began with Twentysix Gasoline Stations, prepared
in 1962 and published in April 1963. Ruscha had been taking his
own photographs and, exceptionally for the period, came close to
exhibiting them, albeit in an importantly altered form: I had taken
photographs of a market sign on the corner of Alvarado and Sunset,
where the Burrito King is, and they were dilapidated neon signs
that were no longer in use, and the sign just sat at the top of this
building [fig. 1]. I drove by that place every day and looked at that
sign, which had a kind of mystical connection to me somehow. I
started photographing it, then Id transpose the photograph to
something, mount that down on something, and try to make that
into something else.13
Curator Walter Hopps reported discovering combinatory objects
in Ruschas studio in late 1961 that featured a mixture of book covers
and the artists photographs mounted to canvas and framed by handpainted lettering.14 Although Ruscha left off these works and did
not present Sunset and Alvarado in any form during that period, the
experiments are significant, both for introducing an artists original
photographsrather than found imagesinto a work of fine art,
and for adopting transposition as a working method. To take ones
own photograph and make that into something else, even while
keeping the photograph intact, was a novel procedure that would
animate Ruschas photobooks as well.
Figure 1 Ed Ruscha (American, born 1937). Sunset and Alvarado, Market Sign, 1961. Gelatin
silver print; 25.4 20.3 cm (10 8 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago, future gift of the artist,
80.2010.
M at t h ew S . W i t kov s k y
17
18
Figure 2 Mel Bochners 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams on view in Scale Models and Drawings
at the Dwan Gallery, January 1967. Dwan Gallery Records, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
T h e U nf i x e d P h otogr a p h
1966
Photoconceptualism Year Zero
Four works from 1966 offer model pathways into what had become
a nascent photoconceptual movement: the photocanvas Anna-logia
(Anna-logy) by Giulio Paolini; Dan Grahams slide projection Homes
for America; the first photowork by Mel Bochner, 36 Photographs and
12 Diagrams; and Bruce Naumans photographs, particularly SelfPortrait as a Fountain. Across a variety of preoccupations, these pieces
confirmed the self-reflexive attention in Conceptual Art to cameras
as generators of analog imagesalthough notably, only one of the
four listed was presented in the conventional art-photographic form
of a single print.
Photocanvases proved attractive in 196569 to a variety of mostly
European artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Baldessari, Marcel
Broodthaers, and Jan Dibbets (plates 66, 2, 17, 9, 76). Clearly, this
short-lived technique established an inroad for photography as a
fine art before working with actual photographs had become readily
accepted. It also changed the relations between photography and
painting, just as Ruschas books had done with respect to sculpture
but according to a different type of analogic reasoning. Rather than
suggesting structural similarities in a conventionally distinct form (the
book as sculpture), photocanvases created a scalar surrogate,
producing photographs in and of the space of painting.
In Anna-logy (plate 15), Paolini had himself photographed from
behind by his future wife, Anna Piva, while handling one of his very
first photoemulsion pieces, 1421965a work that itself consisted of
M at t h ew S . W i t kov s k y
19
and debased. The photograph offered a third mess in its own right,
an ungainly ten-foot piece that disjointedly mapped the studio
terrain as if in imitation of the lunar surveys then underway through
the Apollo space program.29
Reviving the precedent of visual puns by Man Ray and Marcel
Duchamp, Nauman also turned to photography to make language
and sculpture interchangeable. His photographs of farcically literal
enactments of common expressionsprinted, moreover, in color, an
adaptation of commercial photography more shocking even (in an
art context) than Ruschas photobooksclearly stood alone as finished
works; they were not a serial or multipart creation (even though
eleven of the resulting photographs were later issued as a portfolio)
but individual pieces. Furthermore, the punning pictures swallowed
their captions, such that the common Conceptual move to lay bare
the coded nature of visual representation by expressing the codes
directly as language was here accomplished instead by subsuming
language within the image itself.
Several of these works were shown at Naumans debut exhibition
with Leo Castelli in January 1968 (fig. 3).30 Here Nauman presented
what would become his signature photograph, Self-Portrait as a
Fountain (1966; plate 14), which he used for the invitation card as
well. In the exhibition, this work hung alongside a panel, originally
made for a storefront window, upon which Nauman had lettered
20
Figure 3 Bruce Naumans debut exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, January 27
February 17, 1968. Castelli Gallery Archives, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
T h e U nf i x e d P h ot ogr a p h
The True Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain. The juxtaposition seems disappointingly to relegate the photograph (much smaller
and placed in a corner) to the level of an illustration. One could, however, reverse the equation and see this installation as a subversive
monumentalization of the convention of photographic captioning.31
Whereas most Conceptual uses of photography retained the caption
function even when they invested it with irony, the Castelli presentation
of these two works, one isolating image and the other text as a visual
field, could be understood as defamiliarizing that convention and
thereby prompting a more categorical set of reflections: for example,
on the dethronement of fine art achieved by repositioning a giant
wall work as a subordinate element in the register of the photographic.
1969
Apotheosis and Dispersion
With Self-Portrait as a Fountain, one might say that uses of photography
in Conceptual Art had reached their ultimate conclusionbut this
would be to misread the drive toward multiplicity in that singular image.
Nauman, like Man Ray, did not want to be bound to any notion of
medium or continuity of practice, and if photography helped him especially to achieve that aim, it was because it patently relied on so
many other creative domains for its identity. However, the arrival
of photography as contemporary art interestingly brought this lack
of fixity to bear on photographs themselves. As Conceptual Art entered
its phase of apotheosis, the issue shifted from using photographs
as a form of art by other meanscanvases, slides, magazines, grids,
and photostatsto what, literally, to make of photographs.
One thing to make of them was a hypostatized image at actual
size. This approach, first explored in Ruschas twenty-five-foot book
Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966; plate 28), proposed photographic images as forcefully mediated substitutes for the experience
of space.32 For Bochner, such investigations came out of skepticism
regarding photography as verifiable truth.33 His photoworks Actual
Size (1968)two photographs, one showing the artists head and
shoulder, the other his right hand, against an index of measurement
placed in vinyl on the wallsuggest that, even though the physical size
of a photograph and the size of what it depicts might be made to
seem identical, contradictory cognitive systems are in play. With sheer
hyperbole, Michael Heizer soon created a far different piece under
the same title. His Actual Size: Munich Depression (196970) was a
mammoth, multiple-projector slide installation that meticulously
adapted the dimensions of a spherical earthwork he had made outdoors in Munich to the cuboid volume of art spaces in New York.
Occupying more than seven thousand square feet and reaching more
than eighteen feet high, the surrogate projection undoubtedly made
an overwhelming impression when it was shown at the Dia Foundation
in 1970 and again at the Guggenheim International exhibition the
following year. Heizer made several studies for the slide piece, assembling necklaces of collaged photographs from eight feet (plate 24)
to eighteen feet long (Fotomuseum, Winterthur) as he prepared the
final slide version, now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, for
which he had anabolic lenses fabricated to minimize planar distortion.34 [T]he experience of looking is constantly altered by physical
factors, Heizer noted at the time, and he acknowledged photography
as a physical experience: I think certain photographs offer a precise
way of seeing works. You can take a photograph into a clean white
room, with no sound, no noise. You can wait until you feel so inclined
before you look at it and possibly experience to a greater depth whatever view you have been presented with.35
Using a variety of mechanisms, Ger van Elk, Gordon Matta-Clark,
and many others pursued the problem of actual size throughout
the early 1970s (plates 20, 26). Giuseppe Penone in particular tested
life-size photography as a means of suggesting the interdependence
between nature and its representation in art. His multiple Untitled
(plate 103) shows the artists forearm, again at actual size, placed
along the sides of a square photographic image, with each of the
pictures framed in galvanized aluminum; on the side touched by
the image of his body, the frame is corroded, as if by human oil and
sweat. For another set of works, Penone projected pictures of his
chest or foot on plaster casts of those parts of his body, inviting the
viewer to reconstruct reality as a composite of image and object
(plate 104).
Such projects seemed to ask: Can a photograph usurp its source
to become a contingent part of the physical world, and if so, what
will fix its image in time and space? A slipperiness developed regarding
the appearance of artworks, in which the very same piece could exist
in multiple, dissimilar versions. The standard argument that physical
form held no importance for artists engaged in dematerialization
cannot be reconciled with the artists self-reflexive attention to photographic properties, among them the all-important questions of scale
and sizing. It seems more correct to see variations in presentation
form as a natural consequence of the material pressures put on photography by Conceptual artists. Two works from 1969, Vito Acconci's
Twelve Pictures and Victor Burgins Photopath, give a particular sense
of the stakes involved.
On May 28, 1969, at nine and eleven oclock in the evening, Acconci
walked onstage and performed a piece that he described soon afterward in working notes: House lights out, stage lights out. Starting
from stage left, facing the audience and looking through a camera,
I step to my right, across the stage. At each step, I press down the
shutter: the flash-cube flashes, the stage lights up, the house lights
up. The performance results in 12 photographs. In Twelve Pictures, as
Acconci came to call the first of his many photo exercises in 1969
70, the artist used a camera to test power relations with his audience.
This is what interested him most immediately, as his further notes
for the piece make clear: I can use the flash to let them see. I can
take the stage, take the audience (Ill have their photographs in
my possession).36 After retrieving those photographs from a local
store three months laterAcconci was indifferent to the prints at
first; the performance was the work, the camera its necessary prop
M at t h ew S . W i t kov s k y
21
22
T h e U nf i x e d P h ot ogr a p h
197 71964
From Index Back to Analogon
The slavish doubling of reality undertaken by Burgin seems perfectly
to anticipate the influential insights of art historian Rosalind Krauss,
who declared in 1977 that contemporary art again and again chooses
the terminology of the index. Summarizing the inaugural exhibition
at the art space PS1 in New York, Krauss wrote of the participants that
their procedures were to exacerbate an aspect of the buildings
physical presence, and thereby to embed within it a perishable trace
of their own.44 Krausss two-part article, Notes on the Index, published in the recently founded journal October, stands as a milestone
in the advance of photographic theory during the 1970s, a development that proceeded contemporaneously with market and museum
attention to artists using photography.
In the first part of her essay, Krauss argued that the increasing
use of actual photographs in recent art was but a literal manifestation
of artists awareness that photographic functioning held at its core
no convention of style but instead the imprint of things in the world,
substitut[ing] the registration of sheer physical presence for the
more highly articulated language of aesthetic conventions (and the
kind of history which they encode).45 In the second part, Krauss
praised brute registration as a means of clearing the air: what she
called the quasi-tautological condition of a documentary image
(a seemingly unaltered representation of a preexisting reality), which
freed artists from the mystifications of authorial mark-making and
liberated their work from the truly dead-end obsession with medium
specificity characteristic of abstract painting and sculpture in the
initial postwar decades. In place of that rarefied and hermetic work
had come new forms of abstraction, honest and open to the world,
which shared in their contingency a structural similarity to the photographic image. Newer abstract painting and photography, though
seemingly worlds apart, could thus be shown to be linkedin an
argument against the use of style and medium as meaningful
terms of art historical evaluation.
In elaborating these insights, Krauss turned to writings by French
semiotician and philosopher Roland Barthes, in particular his essay
of 1964, Rhetoric of the Image. Barthes described there the sense
one has in looking at a photograph of a literal, Edenic record of times
passing: This utopian character of denotation is considerably reinforced by the paradox . . . that the photograph (in its literal state), by
virtue of its absolutely analogical nature, seems to constitute a message
without a code. Analog recording, with its myth of photographic
naturalness. . . a guarantee of objectivity, had instituted a new form of
human consciousness, Barthes argued, in which spatial immediacy
was conjoined to temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical
conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at
the level of this denoted message or message without code that the
real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood . . . for the
photograph is never experienced as illusion. To interpret photographs
critically requires conjoining disparate signs, Barthes concluded, in
M at t h ew S . W i t kov s k y
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Notes
1. Jeff Wall, Marks of Indifference: Photography in,
or as, Conceptual Art, in Reconsidering the Object of
Art: 19651975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer
(Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1995),
p. 253. Among the steadily growing literature on photoconceptualism, see Margaret Iversen and Diarmuid
Costello, eds., Photography After Conceptual Art (John
Wiley and Sons, 2010); tep
n Grygar, Konceptuln
ume n a fotografie (Akademie Mzickch Umen, 2004);
Douglas Fogle, The Last Picture Show: Artists Using
Photography, 19601982 (Walker Art Center, 2003);
John Roberts, ed., The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain, 19661976
(Camera Works, 1997).
2. For overviews of these artistic formations, see
Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as
Never Before (Yale University Press, 2008); Douglas
Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 19741984 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009); and Stefan Gronert,
Lcole de Photographie de Dusseldorf: Photographies,
19612008 (Hazan, 2009).
3. Douglas Crimp, The Photographic Activity of
Postmodernism, October 15 (Winter 1980), p. 94;
Jean-Franois Chevrier, The Adventures of the Picture
Form in the History of Photography (1989), in
Fogle, The Last Picture Show, p. 114.
4. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage On the North Sea: Art
in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames and
Hudson, 1999), p. 5. See also Krauss, And Then
Turn Away? An Essay on James Coleman, October
81 (Summer 1997), pp. 533; and Reinventing the
Medium, Critical Inquiry 25, 2 (Winter 1999), pp.
289305. It is not incidental that Krauss focuses her
arguments on Coleman and Marcel Broodthaers,
two key figures of the early Conceptual era.
5. Kaja Silverman, Photography by Other Means,
chap. 7 in Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford University
Press, 2009), pp. 168221. Silverman elaborates in
that book a compelling and much larger set of arguments regarding analogical understanding that can
be addressed here only glancingly. Analogy, she
claims, serves fundamentally to allow us to heal rifts
in our own identity and to bridge differences between ourselves and others; we should understand
the world as a web of resemblances in which we
are bound. Photography is in Silvermans view not
necessarily a means to generate representations
conventionally understood as deceitful, groundless,
or pallidbut a device that can give form to analogical
correspondences, that is, connections across a
distance (the shift to digital matters little in this regard).
6. The turn to photojournalism and amateur snapshots as models for Conceptual Art is one of Walls
main points in Marks of Indifference.
7. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer (1934),
trans. Anna Bostock, in Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 19002000: An Anthology
24
T h e U nf i x e d P h otogr a p h
18. Ken Allan, Ed Ruscha, Pop Art and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles, Art Bulletin 92, 3
(September 2010), pp. 231, 24243.
19. Christophe Cherix has detailed the thematics
of Conceptual Art and displacement. See Greetings
from Amsterdam, in In and Out of Amsterdam:
Travels in Conceptual Art, 19601976 (Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 2009), pp. 1322.
20. Giulio Paolini, interview by Carla Lonzi, Collage
(Palermo) 7 (May 1967), p. 18, cited in Maddalena
Disch, Giulio Paolini, in Che fare? Arte Povera: The
Historic Years, ed. Friedemann Malsch, Christiane
Meyer-Stoll, and Valentina Pero (Kehrer, 2010), p. 196.
21. Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, p. 6.
22. Ibid., p. 2.
23. I wanted to do the same things that I saw in
Minimal and Pop art in a flat, photographic situation.
I wanted to re-do the modules of Larry Bell or Donald
Judd as slide projections. Dan Graham, interview
by Eric de Bruyn, in Beatriz Colomina, Mark Francis,
and Birgit Pelzer, Dan Graham (Phaidon, 2001), p. 44.
Graham devoted a couple of essays to photographic
topics (including one on Eadweard Muybridge) in
his self-published book End Moments (1969), and
thanked photography curator Weston Naef for
the inspiration to write the book. His first two films,
Sunset to Sunrise and Binocular Zoom (1969) were
conceived in filmic and photographic versions as well
(see plate 97). Graham also held one of the earliest
exhibitions in the circuit of vanguard art galleries to
emphasize photography: Dan Graham: Some Photographic Projects (with a catalogue), John Gibson
Gallery, 1970.
24. Mel Bochner, Secrets of the Domes: Mel Bochner
on The Domain of the Great Bear, Artforum 45
(September 2006), p. 344.
25. Mel Bochner, cited in Scott Rothkopf, Mel Bochner
Photographs, 19661969 (Yale University Press, 2002),
p. 14. Rothkopf discusses this particular work and
attendant period issues of literalism and seriality
(pp. 116). See also Sasha M. Newman, The Photo
Pieces, in Richard Field, Mel Bochner: Thought
Made Visible, 19661973 (Yale University Art Gallery,
1995), pp. 11419.
26. See on these points Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter Camera, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford University Press,
1999); David Joselit, Feedback: Television against
Democracy (MIT Press, 2007).
27. Constance Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce
Nauman in the 1960s (University of California Press,
2007), p. 63.
28. Janine Mileaf, Captured Things: Man Rays Photographs of Objects, address, Yale University Art
Gallery, April 2008, in Liliane Weissberg and Karen
Beckman, Picture This! (University of Minnesota
Press, forthcoming).
29. Nauman created a well-known piece in 1968
M at t h ew S . W i t kov s k y
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