User:Lucian Wester/Annotation The Impossible Document

Annotation

Photography, iconophobia and the ruins of conceptual art. By John Robberts

Ad the foundations of conceptual art lies the conflict between iconophobia (the fear of images) and iconophilia (the love of images) that can be traced back to the Enlightment.

Paradox: ‘Linguistic or analytic conceptual art was largely an attack on the primacy of the visual, yet the majority of the forms which went heading of conceptual art were photographic, just as analytic conceptual art was mediated through photographic reproduction’. (John Robberts 1997 p.9)

For conceptualist photography was a way reproducing situations and making images without the modernist conventions and orthodoxies surrounding the pictorial image making. They where not interested in photography as an entity in itself, they didn’t tried to make photography a self-conscious medium.

The conceptualist tried to install a new self-criticism, one without the notions of good taste and aesthetic sensitivity and with the ‘negative critique of the avan-garde’ (John Robberts 1997 p.11)

‘This move from is to why derives its content initially from two sources: linguistic philosophy’s emphasis on matters of truth as matters of sense and context, and minimalist sculpture’s recognition of the importance of context as a means of ‘seeing’ the artwork.’ (John Robberts 1997 p.17)

Through analytic conceptualism the spectator would be ‘woken up out of his Modernist sleep’ and be intellectually challenged to think and image a piece of art.

‘In a crucial way it (photography) reconnected art to the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’’ (John Robberts 1997 p.24)

Photography in the late sixties was still struggling to be recognized as fine art. But this struggle had no meaning to the avant-garde conceptualist artist who started to use photography for the fact that it was used by many amateurs and thus something ‘ordinary’, the anti-aesthetic. In opposition to the pictorial fine art photography that tried to be accepted to become Art.

‘.. conceptual art openly embraced photography’s functional and anti-aesthetic character, whereas Modernism actively suppressed this through aestheticism. As such this re-introduces the distinction between Modernism as a practice of self-reflection on the formal limits of a medium and the avant-garde as a theory of positional negation.’ (John Robberts 1997 p.25)

The indexicality of a photograph is something that is problematic for the Modernist photographer because of the self-reflection, for the early conceptual artist the indexicality of photography is something interesting to work with because they are not interested in pictorial images but in the representation of the real. Because the early conceptualist came from different backgrounds they were used to use photography as a tool for documenting their work in studios and galleries. For example Bruce Nauman who used to be a sculptor started using photography for documentation but soon realized it could also function as an tool for documenting conceptual ideas as in for example ‘self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966’ wherein he shows himself as being a sculpture.

(A small idea that popped-up when reading the text was that: in a sense conceptual art is becoming even ‘better’ over time because we cant in lots of cases see or experience the ‘original’ work of art, the only way we can reach them is trough reading text and looking ad documents like photograph. We have to imagine the work of art, because in its original context it is gone and maybe therefore more accurate or closer to initial conceptual idea?)

Tracey Warr talks about photographic documentation (of performance art) in terms of the 'icon' in this interesting essay: Warr, Tracey, 'Image as Icon: Recognising the Enigma', in Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance, George, Adrian (ed.) (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2003).

Worth checking out maybe?
Some questions I had are: how does this relate to your own work? Would be useful to be illustrated with some examples that show why these quotes are interesting to you, or what they mean for practical work in your opinion