PHOTOGRAPHY AT CAA.

88th College Art Association Conference New York, New York

February 23-26, 2000

"Perspectives on Modern Art History: Identities, Institutions, and Images"

The Graduate Center of City University of New York, New York

February 23, 2000

The annual College Art Association (CAA) conference once again proved to be a dynamic opportunity to hear informative lectures by arts professionals working nationwide. This year's convocation was given by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the New York-based, internationally-known temporary project team. In a harmoniously shared presentation, they spoke about the planning and conceptualization of some of their grand projects with an emphasis on The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City which consists of gently billowing textiles attached to steel frames that the couple has been trying to gain approval to install since 1980. They fielded numerous questions about the collaborative aspects of their work and its unique history which includes being credited as solely by Christo to being by both Christo and Jeanne-Claude. (For a more detailed discussion of their collaboration, see "Disappearance and Photography in Post-Object Art: Christo and Jeanne-Claude" by Charles Green, Afterimage 27, no 3.) When asked about the nature of the photographs of their projects, Jeanne-Claude responded, "the photograph is about the work, it is not the work." Yet she also insists that their work is not a performance as the workers are not actors, but actual laborers hired for a specific job. Years of convincing city officials about the merits of their major projects and handling the enormous publicity that it generates have made these artists agile at dealing with such a presentation with humor, clarity and little patience for wasted precious time.

Of the several CAA awards presented was the Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinguished criticism that was given jointly to Moira Roth and Catherine Lord. Since the late 1970s Roth has been a pioneering and impassioned feminist writer, editor and theorist and a champion of diversity in the arts. Lord was honored for her "alternative voice" in the art world, a stance that she exhibited while working at Afterimage as Assistant Editor in the early 1980s and one that she has forcefully and thoughtfully developed in her curating, teaching and critical and fictional writing.

The conference itself hosted a multitude of sessions devoted to the role of photography mediating history. During the panel "Picturing Sculpture," Richard J. Williams discussed the difference between what is understood by looking at photographs of work in the studio and seeing the actual work exhibited in the pristine environment of the gallery and how photography has effected the critical writing about post-object work of the late 1960s. Using the example of photographs of Robert Morris's sculpture Threadwaste he explained how photographs of the work in the studio were published to illustrate Morris's article on the loss of a distinction in perception between the object and its environment, an argument that was visually eradicated in the work's 1969 installation at Leo Castelli's Gallery. Claire C. Black offered the thesis that Rodin's revered status as an artist in the late nineteenth-century was greatly elevated by Edward Steichen's photographs that likened the artist's sculptures to Michelangelo's work i n the Medici Chapel.

A session entitled "Crossing Boundaries in Cyberspace? The Politics of 'Body' and 'Language' after the Emergence of New Media," chaired by Ursula Frohne and Christian Katti, provoked a heated discussion concerning the subtle negotiations between authentic and mediated experience in the digital domain. The proliferation of Web cam activity is an attempt at an authentic experience, but it is inherently a mediated event. As in much of the Internet, participation becomes a form of consumption, not the traditional participatory experience of performance art. Video artist Maureen Conner voiced her fear that despite the seeming structure and controlled system of the Internet, there is real potential for a grossly uncritical dissemination of Web projects, particularly those by Jenni of JenniCam and other cam girls, who do not, in her opinion, offer any social or political critique of the lifestyle or the activities that they transmit.

A session organized by the Association of Art Editors casually discussed the diverse roles of art publications. Walter Robinson, editor of ArtNet Magazine, an on-line magazine, praised the ease and speed of on-line publication where edits and changes can be made continuously on screen. He proudly stated that his magazine no longer publishes on "dead trees." Formerly the news editor at Art in America, Robinson now appreciates being part of the structure of ArtNet, a larger company that provides the marketing assistance that generates a greater number of readers and support. Robinson considers ArtNet Magazine more honest in its portrayal of the relationship between art and money, as compared to other magazines where readers are not made aware that the art discussed is for sale. Janet Kaplan, editor of CAA's Art Journal, described the mission of her magazine as a place where artists and writers can work. Art Journal uses their Web site to gather additional information for the printed journal, such as syllabi th at might go along with certain articles or to post an extended article that is too long for the print journal. Olu Oguibe, an artist, curator and an editor at NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, sees his editorial role as traditional, but serving an underrepresented subject. NKA was founded in 1994 to report on activities of contemporary African art and to train young African writers. Although they are now getting help from foundations, he and founder Okwui Enwezor published the first several issues on their own and claim to still have to beg people to write and to subscribe to the magazine.

Certainly one of the most exciting panels concerning photography was "Mediating History: Photographs as Art, Evidence, Instrument," moderated by Patricia Johnston and Joanne Lukitsh. In "Becoming Photography: Towards a Vernacular History," Geoffrey Batchen called for an inquiry into a vernacular semiology of the photographic, or what he termed "photogrammatology." He used the example of a nineteenth-century locket with a photograph and a lock of hair to show the importance of the indexical presence of both the image and the actual hair. By interacting with the locket and its contents, the viewer engages with its physical and functional attributes. Such photo-objects, and the interaction between the physicality of the photograph and its relationship to touch that they demand, are distinctly different from the kind of photographs that have been the subject of the traditional history of photography and are a needed addition to the critical work of the field.

Jeannene Przyblyski presented the fascinating case of the photographs of the Paris Commune of 1871 to discuss how history must be understood by photographs that were not published at a given period as much as by those that were. By researching publications printed during the Commune she found photographs of the ruined city, but few photographs of the many cadavers, as they were not considered of the appropriate "aesthetic" for the public to see. Yet the many photographs of the Communards in the "giddiness of playing revolution" remain in the archive and continue to be a source for reinterrogation about the complex history of the period. Through the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911, Ellen Wiley Todd discussed how photographs of the fire and its victims taken by the Brown Brothers firm helped extend the popularity for the progressive workplace reforms and the organization of unions by the late 1930s. She showed a 1938 Life magazine article on the success of the unions and the lifestyle the unions promoted and how the magazine radically recontextualized a photograph of the fire that had appeared in the New York American days after the fire. Jordana Mendelson outlined the historical lineage of the photomurals of the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. Designed by Josep Renau, the images on the pavilion were intended to promote government reforms, some of which were, at the time, not actually active. She cited Giselle Freund's approving 1938 review of the pavilion, widely excepted by historians, that did not even mention the conflicting political agenda that the murals were serving.

Blake Stimson discussed the political role of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher who describe their repetitive and consistently composed photographs of water towers, that developed in reaction to the humanist photography of mid-century, and reached their pinnacle in the "Family of Man" exhibition of 1955, as "anonymous sculptures," and not as documentary. Caught between the monumentality of the '20s and '30s New Vision and the deflated modernist ideals and through the act of obsessive aestheticization, the work holds a dual position of both liberating and mourning the loss of the adherence of a work of art to past history. In "The Look of Information" Martha Buskirk discussed how digital technology expands the field of photography and showed work by photographers who have been particularly attentive to the physical and coded value of the photographic process, from the 1960s work of John Baldessari and Robert Rauschenberg to Sherrie Levine's mid-80s "Meltdown" series and the recent photograms of Marco Breuer. She suggested that digital technology used by Andreas Gursky intercedes the construction between artifice and reality, likening photography to a decision-making process akin to drawing. The binary code of digital information appears as a radical departure from what constitutes a photograph, but can also be seen as the ultimate moment of destabilization that has been practiced for over 40 years.

The questions following the session focused on how to interpret evidence now that photography as well as history is acknowledged as highly manipulable. More than ever before, it is important for a viewer to ask "what am I looking at?" But the real issue at the heart of the panel concerning the history and future of photographic evidence was about scholarship--not that photography today has become more or less authoritarian, but that the "mobility" of the image demands that critical scholarship be as mobile.

An unrelated but conveniently scheduled event the same weekend was an all-day symposium by distinguished alumni of the graduate program at City University of New York (CUNY). The afternoon session "The Object of Photography," moderated by Romy Golan, brought together the diverse perspectives of Julia Ballerini, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Naomi Rosenblum and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. As Golan stated in her introduction, CUNY produced some of the strongest and most distinctive voices in photography in the late 1970s and '80s. Golan also mentioned the important presence and mentorship of faculty Linda Nochlin and Rosalind Krauss who encouraged a "double endeavor" of history and discovery of new modes of thinking about the subject. Ballerini discussed her engagement with photography as a social and cultural means of producing images and presented a series of questions concerning documentary photography. What does it mean to "bear witness"? How does the critic's biography interact with the subject of study? What does pho tography mean to whom and how do you teach photography to non-academic students? What will be the effect of the digital technology on the shaky status of documentary photography?

Lajer-Burcharth, who writes mainly on nineteenth-century art, presented an intriguing paper on current video installation art about the body and what constitutes the new self. She interpreted Mona Hatoum's images as coming to terms with the otherness of self as something unrecognizable yet with a certain doubt and estrangement. Maureen Conner's represents the failure of ever knowing the body as a whole, and how it is only a fantasy that allows the image of a whole body to be recognized. Lajer-Burcharth's most unique interpretation was of Bill Viola's Visitation (1996) in which she sees the artist's vision as the absent pregnant body of the visitation story, thereby recreating a narcissistic act by needing the female body that Krauss defined in her seminal essay on 1970s video art. Rosenblum, who studied under the tutelage of Milton Brown, described herself as the oldest generational strata of the CUNY alumnae and praised the university for allowing her to study the purpose of photography (even through she had to go to Princeton University to study the history of photography). She mentioned a course taught by Brown that resulted in the class generating "The Modern Spirit," an early multimedia exhibition that included photographs, paintings and drawings and enabled graduate research to manifest itself in a tangible project.

Solomon-Godeau bemoaned the fact that although photography as the object of study has been institutionalized, discursive practices have, in her opinion, not followed suit. She would have thought that the critical work done on photography by her and her colleagues would have at least promoted a retrospective activity. But since it has not, she questioned whether the integration of photography into other academic departments has closed off the discipline from further critical study. As she sees it, the study of photography is either stretched to fit the art historical discipline, as seen in pages of dissertations on Walker Evans, or to the visual and cultural studies model, where it becomes the study of Barbie dolls. In either case the content of the image still counts more than the larger issues of how photography is disseminated and how its system of production and meaning function. The discussion that followed was lively and provoked the ire of several graduate students who insisted that they in fact were d oing critical work. Clearly, there is not only more work to be done, but the current work remains potent, exciting and highly relevant.