|
April 23, 2009
On e way of looking at photography is the art history one. This holds that from the time of its appearance, photography occupied a contested ground between art and science, some purists claiming it was not really art at all, but a craft, a technology, or, even less respectably, mere merchandise. This view faulted photography as an inferior, mechanical form of painting that required little or no artistic skill to perform. The very fact that this nineteenth-century dispute over the artistic value of painting
Photography's relationship with reality has historically been aligned with the positivist desire for impartial truth of what is. The conventional documentary images have historically has given photography its identity. The accompanying rhetoric - firmly linked to objectivity, veracity, knowledge and the claim that something is really only meaningful only in the event that it can be proven true or false--had become the standard means by which to measure the medium in the nineteenth century. The photograph represents empirical truth and photography became a popular example of the positivist view of the world: it represents things as they are without the distortions of human subjectivity. The implication was that photography was transparent, styleless, and a mere mirror reality. This was its ontology and it runs through photography journalism and documentary photography which constructs a narrative based on facts.
That rhetoric has been heavily contested and photography, along with its ability to represent what is has become highly politicised. There have been two reactions. Firstly, an emphasis on photography's potential as an art form of personal expression or narrative in opposition to photography associated with commerce. Pictorialists were fine art photographers. Pictorialism, for instance, began imitating paitings of the period, like Turner and Whistler, or even Japanese prints and it simulated foggy, hazy, unclear, dark paintings by using altered photography. "Pictoralist photography kind of leaned on painting and it was the other side of the dualism of positivist objectivity and individual expression. Within this duality there is a hierarchy: positivist objectivity was privileged over pictorialism, in the sense that the latter is subordinate.
Andso we have the scientism-aestheticism conflict with its faith in the objective powers of the machine and a belief in the subjective, imaginative capabilities of the artist")." Photography is torn between two languages, one expressive, the other scientific.
In the 1930s we had the restaging of the old debate over the artistic status of documentary photography, with some exponents of the often romantic, soft-focused, high-art school of photography regarding the work of Walker Evans and his colleagues as more sociology than art. The lines were not clearly drawn between the two camps by any means, with both Evans and Lange beginning their careers as "art" photographers and Weston affirming the social role of photography in some of his writing. Nevertheless, Evans regarded his work as representing a clear "counteraesthetic" mounted against the style of the "artistic and romantic" Stieglitz.
The documentary photography of Walker Evans both sought to represent the cultural and political chaos of the Depression with an eye toward penetrating the illusions of the American dream even as they sought to develop distinct representational styles of their own. This emergence of the new school of documentary photography as a serious visual art form is one in which Evans makes "photographs" as much the subject of his book (American Photographs) as America society.
The middle term between the two is formalism, which focuses on how photographs are made, rather than what they physically represent: the form is the content and it rejects both positivist realism and pictorialism. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content. Everything necessary in a work of art is contained within it. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance.
The American art critic Clement Greenberg, in an influential article in Partisan Review, argued that the value of art was located in its form. The representational aspects of a work of art are less important than those aspects which embody a thing's 'internal identity'. This led Greenberg to the conclusion that abstraction was the purest art of all in that modern painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the 'flatness' of the picture plane. This triumphal narrative represses Duchamp, the Surrealists and Warhol.
Greenberg's neo-Kantian aesthetics was premised on the idea that the judgment of beauty was (tacitly) universal and incompatible with interest and practicality. The judgment of beauty (what is good in art) is based on taste and experience of the good eye of the critic, independently of any specific knowledge of the circumstances of production or the tradition to which the art belongs.
Greenberg's own position on photography was dismissive as he saw photography's uses within an art context as very narrowly circumscribed. In this "utopian modernism" each discipline, but paradigmatically the discipline of painting, withdraws into what is unique to it--in the case of painting, into the optical--and through renunciation of everything extrinsic to the purely optical finds something positive.The historical situation for modernists was that painting was the core of art, not photography or sculpture. Painting was the key to the internal development of purifying art, which was deemed the goal of historical development of art. So argued Clement Greenberg. The history of art and the history of painting were identical.
In Greenberg's view, photography's transparent relationship to the world undermines any attempts on the part of photographers to make autonomous works of art. A photograph that respects the obligations of its own medium would be anecdotal and literary. Greenberg exiles realism from painting, yet requires it in photography. The limitation upon the medium's artistic potential was its indexicality--as either brute information or uninflected documentation. Each art then had to expel--or "repress"--whatever does not belong to its essence. The Modernist history of photography is marked by various, increasingly elaborate attempts to distinguish art photography from commercial and amateur productions
The inference is that any importance the event photographed may have had (which is what is emphasized in [photojournalism) other than as a configuration of shapes in space, is denied and so lost. The work is intended to be self-reflexive and subjective. Event is indistinguishable from non-event, bad timing is celebrated and tropes of photographic "failure" are used as signatures of a newly self-aware, self-critical tendency. These works were certainly framed institutionally as high modernism and were promoted with an emphasis on mastery and originality of the modernist artist in MoMA-style photographic formalism.
The first real advocate of formalism in photography was John Szarkowski. He became Director of the Department of Photography at MoMA in 1962. with a directive and desire to legitimate photography as a fine art. Szarkowski generated a transliteration of Greenberg's formalist aesthetics into photographic terms. He embraced the notion of medium specificity but rejected Greenberg's emphasis on the indexical essence of photography Szarkowski laid out his approach in 1966, in a brief but highly influential eponymous catalog essay for the exhibition "The Photographer's Eye." In it he distills the photographic medium to five properties: "The Thing Itself," "The Detail," "The Frame," "Time" and "Vantage Point."
He defines "The Thing Itself" as the actual, the presence of reality in the photograph, what is called the index. While Greenberg describes transparency as the key defining characteristic of photography, Szarkowski seeks to undermine the power of the index by revealing its artificially conventionalized nature. He writes that our faith in the thing itself "is naive and illusory, but it persists."(17) For him, photographs offer an illusion of transparency, which need not serve as a limitation, but merely add a frisson of reality to the image. Identifying the trace of the real as one of the defining characteristics of photography, Szarkowski claims it as part of his formalist model, even though it is a semiotic rather than an aesthetic property of the medium. Similarly, "The Detail" is a category designed to refute the notion that photographs are fundamentally anecdotal. The term does not refer to the precision of photographs, but rather to their capacity to resist narrative. Szarkowski asserts that the fragmentation created by cropping photographs allows an image to function as a symbol rather than a story because it is cut off from spatial and temporal continuity. "
The Frame" and "Vantage Point" are the two most dearly formal categories. The former refers to the edges of each image and the resulting geometric patterns created within the picture, while the latter describes the spatial relationship between camera and subject. "Time" also becomes a formal category for Szarkowski; it refers to the lines and shapes created in the composition at the moment of exposure.
Szarkowski was effective in legitimating a form of photographic modernism, complete with autonomous artworks and inspired authors. The theory was particularly useful to MoMA in allowing photographs made at any time for any reason to be judged aesthetically without reference to their original context. By daring to attempt to define photography in terms of medium specificity, Szarkowski opened the door to photographers making use of all photographic properties, including those that he deliberately repressed - indexicality, contingency and conventionality.
Yet the great river of painting ran out of puff after colour field abstraction, and the river became a network of tributaries that lacked any single current. The modernist narrative had collapsed.he way that modernism has been construed is crucial.There is a basic difference between European modernism and American modernism and Adorno's account of the former and Greenberg's account of the latter. It is the latter (American modernism and Greenberg's aesthetics) that is in contention. And for good reason.
Greenberg's art historical narrative and aesthetics is at the core of the disputes about artistic modernism since he argued that American modernism (that means painting--eg, abstract expressionism, colour field, hard edged abstraction) was an evolution from the modernism of the European avant garde; an an evolution towards the purity of the medium which is the end point of art. Any other path was a false path that lead to kitsch or novelty (as in novelties sold in stores). The only true road was abstraction---- ie., progress from naturalistic representation to abstraction to purity --- in this art historical narrative.
This grand narrative presupposed a kind of trans-historical essence of art that discloses itself through history. This trans-historical essence of art was then equated with a regional style of a particular period---the monochrome abstract. The implication is that art of any other style is false. So we have all the denunciations of the heretics and art that doesn't matter (eg., postmodernists in this discussion).
There are other characteristics of Greenberg's modernist master narrative: that each art stay within the boundaries of its medium and not usurp the prerogatives of any art or medium; that the evolution of art to purity was to be enacted through painting; the denunciation of parts of the European avant garde---Dada, surrealism--as historically retrograde and outside the pale of history; in 1992 looking back to the 1960s he said that nothing had happened in art for 30 years, and, in looking forward, he just saw decadence.
|
Your essay strikes many chords within me