Author Luigi Bonfante
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We live immersed in images, in a world that generates images as a continuous stream, especially of a photographic nature, and in which photography has become so ubiquitous and within grasp (i.e. of smartphones) that it no longer feels like a technique, but rather a simple extension of our gaze. It is capable of generating, recovering, archiving and transmitting images with the same ease with which we breathe. What happens to photography as an artistic activity and art form in an environment like this? Now that art has reached the “gaseous state”, to use a beautiful image by Yves Michaud, and that the aestheticization of the images is the very air we breathe, what can an artist who works with this medium do?
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An answer to this question can be found in a best-selling book firstly published in 2004, then updated and extended several times, with its fourth edition just translated by Einaudi: "Photography as Contemporary Art", written by Charlotte Cotton, curator of important collections of photography such as that of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
The answer should not be sought by reading the theoretical part, in the form of some definition or proposal of aesthetic criteria, but by looking at the works and looking in the text for the idea or project (often these are images taken from a series) that the artist tried to embody in them, and the process through which he made them. The best merit of the book is in fact the extraordinary quantity and diversity of the selected photographs: it is a bird's eye view of the production of hundreds of artists, of which 273 works are shown, mostly made during the last thirty years. In almost all cases, only one photo per artist was chosen, with a brief comment that summarizes the type of research and poetics that that image and that author pursue. This makes it difficult to give the right critical weight to the works, but is at the same time an «unavoidable simplification», as the author says, in order to have a reasonably broad overview of recent art photography in the world.
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The overall impression of this overview is revealed in the very first lines: the only "dominant idea" in contemporary photography is its "wonderful pluralism" (a consideration that is, however, valid for all art characterized by the post-Duchampian paradigm and by what Arthur Danto called "aesthetic anarchy"). To guide us in this wonderful pluralism, Cotton proposes a typology which, according to him, is not based much on contents or styles, but on "motivations and work practices" (in reality, as we will see, there are also categories defined by subject matter and actual styles). Each of the nine chapters of the book therefore brings together photos and photographers who share a certain way of conceiving photography, a certain type of research, and has an evocative title, like the one a curator - which in fact the author is - could give to the selection of works and artists for a themed exhibition.
The first chapter, entitled “If this is art”, proposes a modality inspired by the artistic research that gave impetus to the contemporary paradigm in the sixties and seventies, dominated by conceptual art and performance art.
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Pixy Lao, Homemade Sushi, 2010
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These artists’ and these photos’ common denominator is the planning and staging of an event that will be captured by the photo shoot. The focus, however, is not as much the concept-project itself, nor the unrepeatable event in presence, like it was in the cited art, but the image constructed through a planned action. A good example of this is the photo by Zhang Huan (b.1965): naked young men emerge from the chest upwards, rigid and still, with a defiant gaze towards the viewer as if they were doing a heroic action of resistance. It is in fact a group of Pekingese dissidents who are "raising the water level in a fishpond", as the title of the photograph states (1997). The title conceptually transfigures the image, making it resonate with an ironically revolutionary meaning. A more recent work chosen by Cotton for this chapter is a photo from the Experimental Relationship series made by the Chinese Pixy Lao (b.1979), in which a young naked man is stretched out on a bed and tied like a roll: an image that ironically overturns sexist erotic stereotypes (Homemade Sushi, 2010).
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The second category, presented in the chapter entitled “Once Upon a Time”, offers once again photos of staged situations, while showing off the theatrical and narrative dimension typical of most classical painting. Not surprisingly, in the Anglo-Saxon world photography is called "tableau vivant". The work of a famous author such as Jeff Wall (b.1946) is quite paradigmatic. Cotton has chosen to represent Wall’s work with a photo in which a seedy domestic environment is carefully reconstructed, brightly lit and artfully strewn with clues suggesting a long sleepless night . Equally paradigmatic is the photo, from the Italian School series, of the Ukrainian Sergey Bratkov (b.1960): three children from a reformatory stage a sacred Renaissance representation in the garden of the institute, creating a brutal contrast between iconographic memory and documented reality (# 1, 2001).
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Thomas Ruff, Portrait (A. Volkmann), 1998 / Sergey Bratkov, Italian School #1, 2001
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The third modality, the aesthetics of impassivity, is actually a real "style", or rather "the predominant photographic style since the nineties", the one that "has decreed the entry of this medium among the forms of contemporary art". Cotton indicates among the reasons for its success the technical quality, the wealth of visual information, the large dimensions (suitable for the spaces of the art gallery that had recently opened to the new medium) and the effect of novelty after the emphasis on subjectivity and neo-expressionist painting of the eighties. Refusal of subjectivity and reduction of emotion are recurring traits in this type of research, which finds its historical references in the work and teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher, already active in the late 1950s, and even earlier in the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") of German photography of the 1920s and 1930s. A leading figure in this category is Andreas Gursky (b.1955): his famous large-format photos capture, with extreme clarity, overcrowded and repetitive social and urban spaces, often shot from above, and seem like alien gazes observing the tingling that alienates the human world. The aesthetics of impassivity have also been applied to photo portraits (in fact the definition "deadpan photography" derives from the expression deadpan, "dead face", which was used in the Buster Keaton comedy). Exemplary, in this case, is the series of portraits by Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), with the cut of a large passport photo, which looks at the viewer with ostentatious inexpressiveness (Portrait, A. Volkmann), 1998.
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Kawauki Rinko, Untitled, 2004
The fourth chapter, “Something and Nothing”, shows examples of photography capable of attributing to trivial and ordinary objects and situations "a visual charge and an imaginative potential", transforming them into "activators of the imagination". Cotton speaks of "playful conceptualism" and suggests affinities with a certain post-minimalist sculpture that aims to "make art with the things of everyday life", as well as conceptual dynamics that "create confusion and contradict our expectations". We start with examples of widely historicized authors such as Fischli & Weiss (the "comical drama" of a grater that holds a carrot and a zucchini in an impossible balance), Gabriel Orozco (the infrasottile breath on the glossy black lid of a piano) and Félix González-Torres (the famous blow-up of the two crumpled pillows displayed as a billboard), to arrive at works by more recent artists such as the Japanese Kawauki Rinko (b. 1972): ephemeral epiphanies created by small casual encounters of things in nature, the feeling that something is about to happen, perhaps a minimal but imminent event (Untitled, 2004).
Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994
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The Intimate Life chapter - probably among the most heartfelt by the author, attentive to feminist and gender issues, which find a lot of echo here - presents a photographic practice as an “exercise in pathology, a montage and a sequencing of apparently unfiltered private moments which reveal the origins and manifestations of the subjects' emotional lives.” The founder of this practice is the American Nan Goldin (b. 1953), whose work documents her own affective and friendly relationships with great intensity and authenticity. Cotton also cites the influence of Araki Nobuyoshi’s (b.1940) photos, an uncensored diary of his own erotic fantasies, and those of Larry Clarck (b.1943), who in the 1960s and 1970s portrayed nihilism with great complicity sex & drug & rock'n'roll of young Americans. A very effective example, both for the expressiveness of the images, and as a paradigm of this category, is the photo of the English Richard Billingham (b.1970), who had started taking snapshots of his family at the Andy Capp - alcoholic father, obese and irascible mother - as sketches for his paintings at art school (Untitled, 1994). Within a few years his photos ended up in a book (Ray's laugh) and they earned him a show at the Royal Academy.
Zarina Bhimji, Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt, 1998-2003
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In the chapter on "documentary-style" artistic photography, entitled “Moments in History”, another aspect that is evidently sensitive to the author emerges: attention to political and social issues. Faced with the decline of publications specialized in photographic reportage, some documentary photographers have found new life in the forms and research of art. Zarina Bhimji (b.1963) returns to Uganda, from which she was expelled when the dictator Idi Amin was in power, to create photos that look like still life, but actually highlight the absences and traces of time, evoking stories of elimination and extermination (“Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt”, 1998-2003). A completely different register is the one on which the French Luc Delahaye (b. 1962) works: for his “History” series he adopts the panoramic format and giant prints to create "historical tableaus" in which the strong contrast between the aesthetically impeccable composition and the rawness of the situation emerges, as in the photo of the crowd around the corpses on an Afghan road. The British Patrick Waterhouse (b. 1981) addresses the legacy of colonial photography in Australia by offering the aborigines, as a symbolic compensation, to "enclose" their images by covering them with the traditional dot painting of these communities (Hip-Hop Gospel and Tanami. Restricted with Athena Nangala Granites, 2016).
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Patrick Waterhouse, Hip-Hop Gospel and Tanami. Restricted with Athena Nangala Granites, 2016
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The seventh category, “Resumed and Redone”, focuses on the artistic-photography practice most explicitly linked to the Postmodernist way of thinking, which has taught us to look (also) at photographs not as works created by authors, but as signs "inside of a broader system of social and cultural codification”. The photographs selected show «experiences based on the gallery of images in our memory» and make explicit the fact that they feed on a culture of already known images. The most famous “postmodernist” photographs are those of Cindy Sherman (b. 1954): in her “Untitled Film Stills” she personifies the stereotypes of the female figure present in the collective imagination, staging typical moments of the cinema of the fifties and sixties. In this way she "is at the same time the one who observes and the one who is observed" and she shows how "femininity" is a cultural artifact to be worn and changed. Other well-known representatives of postmodern art photography are Richard Prince (b.1949) and Sherrie Levine (b.1947). The former became famous by re-photographing the unbranded, textless billboards of Marlboro cigarettes with their idealized visions of American cowboys. The second took the practice of appropriation to the extreme by shamelessly re-photographing photography classics such as Walker Evans (1903-1975).
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Tacita Dean, Ein Sklave des Kapitals, 2000
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But if in Levine's case what matters is the conceptual aspect of criticism of authorship, other authors have worked on images inherited from tradition in a more active and stimulating way. This is the case of the Englishman Tacita Dean (b.1965), who in the series “The Russian Ending” enlarged some Russian postcards from the early twentieth century found at a flea market and added handwritten annotations on the grainy images to be read as instructions by a director. By suggesting possible endings of imaginary scripts, she made the ambiguities of those images and their hypothetical nature evident : not facts, but potentialities suspended in the interpretations of our gazes of posterity (Ein Sklave des Kapitals, 2000).
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Susan Derges, River, 23 November, 1998
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The “Physical and Material” chapter takes its cue from the reaction to the dematerialization imposed and heralded by the digital format, which has led many artist-photographers to re-evaluate images’ status as physical objects, working artisanally on supports and their production techniques, and at times recovering the nineteenth-century roots of photography. Among the many works selected are those by Ellen Carey (b. 1952) who in the 1980s worked with a giant Polaroid and in recent years with crumpled photographic paper and flashes of light in the darkroom; other works are of the American Penelope Umbrico (b. 1957) who photographs malfunctioning LCD TV screens found on eBay, creating abstract color patterns; and some are by Daniel Gordon (b. 1980) who prints images found online, uses them to compose an elaborate three-dimensional collage which he then photographs obtaining a still life, hypnotically poised between two and three dimensions. But perhaps the most striking examples are those of some artists who recover photographic processes dating back to the early nineteenth century when technical inventions had a nearly alchemical flavor, such as the English Susan Derges (b. 1955) who, recalling Talbot's "photogenic drawings", immersed the sensitive paper under the surface of the water of a river at night and illuminated it in order to capture the movements of the negative reflections (River, November 23, 1998). It is interesting to note that, although it started with the contemporary theme of the relationship between analog and digital, this type of photographic research leads to aesthetic results in evident visual continuity with pictorial modernism. Emblematic in this sense is the work of the Canadian Jessica Eaton (b.1977) who, in the series started in 2011 and significantly titled “Cubes for Albers and LeWitt”, by photographing a simple white cube with multiple exposures and different colored lights, creates geometric abstractions that seem to almost break the three-dimensional eye (l'oeil).
Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2006
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The last category proposed by Charlotte Cotton is the one that accounts for the most recent and advanced research among these. The chosen title, “Photographicness”, is probably an echo of the idea that today "photography as a cultural form is an open field" and the belief that these artist-photographers expose "cultural changes" and "new paradigms". It sounds, though, a bit paradoxical because in reality the selected works suggest a kind of genetic mutation of the photographic medium, which moves away from its nature to hybridize with the most varied modes of artistic expression. In reality, especially here - but also in the two previous chapters - the most appropriate category seems to be that of "reinvention of the medium" proposed by Rosalind Krauss: these artists are trying to reinvent photography by imagining a new language for it and pushing it towards completely unexpected results. . An exemplary case is that of Isa Gentzen (b. 1948) who uses photography as one of the object elements of her installations (Untitled, 2006). Perhaps also for this reason the works presented here are more inhomogeneous in terms of visual strength and conceptual value than those in the previous chapters. Post-Internet artists, Cotton argues, "traverse the whole field of photography" and are "aware of the ways in which the commodified systems of visual communication [...] affect the meaning and creation of photographic works of art and the inseparability of art from its wider visual context ". However, this awareness does not always translate into convincing works.
But even the critic, as Leo Steinberg well knew, can find himself bewildered and bothered by new art. There are works, such as the early Jasper Johns, which Steinberg confesses not to have understood, which present themselves as «challenges to the imagination, and "correct" ways of thinking or feeling them simply do not exist». This doesn't exempt critics from trying to think about them - and help to think about them - using words in the best way.
This is, in my opinion, the weak point of Charlotte Cotton's book, which occasionally falls into ideological forcing and somewhat superficial analysis, and often indulges in a conceptual and rigid writing. But her effort to select and think of the vast and wonderfully pluralist landscape amply compensates for the shortcomings. And she invites us to become critics and curators ourselves, trying new analyses and looking for other connections.
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Zhang Huan, To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997
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