Depiction Document Pictures / Post Internet Art

Let's start with a picture.

And a quote 

Dutch artist Eric van Lieshout: “I couldn’t care less what people call it, as long as we can do what we want.”

Though they are both photographs, the picture and document are very different arguments.  It can be tempting and confusing to compare them on the grounds that indeed they are photographic images. I thought I would want to suggest that for each to be most realized they must, by perforce, be antagonistic. That is to be most realized each most announce itself as one or the other. 

Let's take the deadpan aesthetic strategy of imaging photographs in the service of conceptual art. A Ruscha would defeat itself as a picture, as a tableaux, as an image of absorption, however we want to define these last three terms. The Ruscha photograph must be a fact. And imaging it as a picture would take us away from our sense in seeing it as an image of something just there, ordinarily seen and most banal. 

Pictures we may think should not be banal. If we think of the picture tradition coming out of the French Salon academies, pictures were viewed with certain criteria and had certain proscriptions. Look at this image below. It seems equally mundane as the above images.

Here is the artist Jeff Wall in front of his picture, The Destroyed Room. Note the scale of his pictures and how he proudly stands in front of these rather monumental works wherein Ruscha lies on the ground acknowledging us slyly covered in copies of his small incidental artist books.

Behind him is The Destroyed Room and the light from the ceiling not seen in the first image is shown here and this and the illumination from the light box gives the picture an appearance of more depth. Each of his pictures are of a fairly large just over 7x5 feet and they alone. 

Speaking about this picture he has said.

My first pictures like The Destroyed Room emerged from a re-encounter with nineteenth-century art’, Wall has said. Here, the work in question is The Death of Sardanapalus 1827 by Eugène Delacroix, which depicts the Assyrian monarch on his deathbed, commanding the destruction of his possessions and slaughter of his concubines in a last act of defiance against invading armies.

Wall echoes Delacroix’s composition, with its central sweeping diagonal and sumptuous palette of blood reds, while acknowledging its staged atmosphere by re-composing the scene as a roughly fabricated stage-set, absent of any players. ‘Through the door you can see that it’s only a set held up by supports, that this is not a real space, this is no-one’s house,’ he has commented. Though clearly a woman’s bedroom, the cause of the violence is unexplained, leaving the viewer to speculate on the sequence of events.  (1)

In the tradition of salon history paintings, Wall's pictures are constructed as singular moments. Unique narratives. Particular events. The narrative coms before the picture. It is the sayable that's made visible.  It a play then staged. 

Ruscha's images follow one after the other, made for a book, The Strip, it is a typology of a urban landscape and their industrial forms. A much wryer version of the Becher's typologies.

“In 1966 Ed Ruscha photographed the ‘Strip’ – the notorious stretch of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood – by attaching a motorised Nikon 250 camera to the back of his truck, shooting in real time while driving up and down the two-mile stretch. Using a mechanical device to take the photographs brought the objectivity he had been aiming for in earlier books. The length of the roll of film dictated the books final form, a concertina that unfolded to a length of twenty-seven feet and revealed an exact model of both sides of the street,” (Richards, M. 2008, p.44).

“Ruscha has said: “I’m looking at it [the Strip] almost like an anthropologist, or a geologist. I’m as interested in some of the less obvious things … People look at the buildings and say, ‘What was that building before?’ Well, what about the sidewalk in front of it, and the curb that surrounds it, and embankments here and there? I’m trying to look at the whole picture.” (Ed Ruscha cited in Richards, M. 2008, p.46).


Interesting both of this works were made as artworks and to function in there discourses. Here are two images from 'Learning from Las Vegas.'

and here from a work from Sophie Calle. 

This is a two-part framed work comprising photographs and text. In the upper part, the title Room 47 is printed below a colour photograph of elegantly carved wooden twin head-boards behind a bed covered in rich brown satin. Below it, three columns of italic text are diary entries describing findings in the hotel room between Sunday 22 February 1981 and Tuesday 24. In the lower frame a grid of nine black and white photographs show things listed in the text above. This work is part of a project titled The Hotel, which the artist has defined: 

On Monday, February 16, 1981, I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6, the job came to an end. (Quoted in Calle, pp.140-1.) 

Perhaps the confusion of picture and document emerges from photography's coming after painting and wanting to be painterly or have a certain formal 'beauty.'

The picture above from Steigliz and the one below Cartier Bresson. 

Or maybe it's as simple as certain photographers going back to the idea of large scale images, in the tradition of salon pictures. 

Compare the scale of the work of Cartier Bresson and Steiglitz.

But this would deny a key idea of these photographers which has to do with the staging of the photograph.  And that is this idea of absorption and this is 

'the subject’s intentional relation to its world and other subjects is already quite complicated just at the level of the paintings, for we are dealing with so many levels of attention:  subjects in the painting and their objects and world, painter and depicted scene, painter and painting, beholder and scene or intentional object of the painting, beholder and painting, and so forth.19

I will limit this discussion to absorption/theatricality issues as they touch on depictions of human beings at work in the world [or asleep in it] and/or with others.) What Fried has discovered by collecting these paintings and analyzing them together is that so many of these painters were in effect “painting,” attempting somehow to capture such forms of mindedness as their principal object, that they were trying to demonstrate that forms of engaged, absorbed mindedness (and so a kind of genuineness or authen- ticity) were still possible.20 I am suggesting that such an enterprise must be a response of sorts to a growing suspicion that they were not possible, that there were ever fewer areas of human life not regulated by socially nor- malizing expectations, fewer objects that could engage such absorptive attention. 

The absorbed characters in such paintings are still acting intentionally and purposively but in a way that does not seem reflexively guided by some notion of how one ought to do that, how others expect one to act, in the way Boucher’s characters seem to be thinking, “Ah, this is the pose one should strike as the god of light! Don’t I look wonderful?” 

Finally, we should also note something Fried himself stresses, that such attempts are part of a narrative of decline and loss. The claim is that the evolution of painting in France between the start of the reaction against the Rococo and Manet’s seminal masterpieces of the first half of the 1860s, traditionally discussed in terms of style and subject matter and presented as a sequence of ill-defined and disjunct epochs or move- ments . . . may be grasped as a single, self-renewing, and important respects dialectical undertaking. 

(In the conventional, everyday sense, no one is more aware of another than when one is trying to ignore that person. The irony here is of course of a piece with Diderot’s famous paradox of acting, how such sang-froid is required for the genuine [seeming] display of passion.)21 In painting the absorption strategy is instead a way of addressing such a beholder, a way considered ontologically more fundamental than theatrical appeals to external spectators.22 This painterly suggestion of a mode of presence by the “supreme fiction” of absence is all obviously a fragile pictorial fiction and sometimes depends on reception conditions and historical sensitivities that the artist has no control over. 

Diderot, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Heidegger, Cavell— all inherit in one way or other (even if some would reject the explicit terms) some aspect of this notion of freedom as self-identification, authenticity, or embodied life, as well as, with varying degrees of explicitness, some sense of why such a free life would be so valuable—that some such attainment is an ur-condition for anything else being of value, significance, salience. (Again: nothing can be of significance for me unless it is, to me, a condition not met if my life is not, let us say, intimately my own.) And for all of these thinkers, the violation of this condition not only amounts to much more than an individual’s lack of integrity but, as Rousseau first prophesied, can come to characterize a whole form of life as such, such that perhaps un- avoidable violations of this kind of integrity amount to an entire form of life.

If this is so, it might support the suggestion that the threat of theatricality stems primarily from the deteriorating sociality of the common world in- habited by painter and subject (where one means by such a deterioration something quite specific, as I try to show below). When such sociality is by and large restricted to what could be called I-We relations, with an ever more powerful, supervisory, punitive We, and without much in the way of I-you, the temptation to theatricalize, to compromise with such a new form of power, is nearly inevitable and has to make its way into traditions of paint- ing, just as much as it has to inspire rejections of such compromising, ul- timately self-undermining strategies. But, in Hegel’s terms, these initial rejections, the search for absorption, are understandable “indeterminate negations,” fantasies of self-identification and absorbed peace that represent more counterfantasies of escape than markers of a possible new form of life. '

Let's take a look at such a picture.

Picture for Women 1979

Picture for Women was inspired by Edouard Manet’s masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergères 1881–2. In Manet’s painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet’s barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer’s role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet’s painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

Jeff Wall 
Picture for Women 1979
Transparency in lightbox 1425 x 2045 mm
Cinematographic photograph

Collection of the artist. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
© The artist

The seam running down the middle of the photograph is apparent in some of Wall’s large-scale pictures, where two pieces of transparency are joined. The fact that it serves as a reminder of the artifice of picture making is something that Wall has come to appreciate: ‘The join between the two pictures brings your eye up to the surface again and creates a dialectic that I always enjoyed and learned from painting…a dialectic between depth and flatness. Sometimes I hide it, sometimes I don’t’, he has said.    (from the tate guide)

I want to understand then, that the idea of the picture we have been talking about is not simply the posed and unposed, the found and the made, but the relation of the subject to the photographer, how the subject is seen. 

How then to think of the staging or construction of photographs as pictures, documents, objects in the tradition of paintings, in the tradition of the white cube, of stock photography, to look like art on line. 

I will leave you with some pictures.  

Storytelling underlies all l4 images in this quietly brilliant series created by one of America's most celebrated and influential photographers. Triggered in 2008 in reaction to the crashing banks, growing despair, and end of the Bush era, DiCorcia responded with East of Eden, a series referencing John Steinbeck's novel of the same name, set in California in the early 20th Century, which in turn parallels the Book of Genesis, with references to Cain and Abel and The Fall. DiCorca lays biblical references onto mundane scenes and characters choreographed to suggest good and evil in incongruous situations.

Of all the scenarios, the recent Cain and Abel is most theatrical. Two gay men wrestling — or embracing — on a bed are overlooked by a naked, pregnant woman representing Eve.

A photo from DIS's online project "Competing Images: Art vs. People," 2012, showing a model in front of Katja Novitskova's Innate Disposition,2012, digital print on plastic cut-out display; at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

In the spring of 2012, Agatha Wara, then an MFA student at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies, organized an exhibition at Bard's Hessel Museum of works by Si-Qin and Katja Novitskova. Si-Qin showed a series of Nike bags strung from pillars by straps extended to their maximum length, along with two identical diptychs of a blonde model's beautiful face, cut along the vertical axis to emphasize slight asymmetries. Novitskova showed cardboard cutouts like the ones seen in stores, but instead of portraying celebrities or junk-food mascots they depicted tropical birds and jungle creatures, as well as a couple of anonymous black people. This weirdly racist touch seems even more odious if you're familiar with the intellectual context constructed around Post-Internet art in Si-Qin's neo-Darwinian writings that use evolutionary biology to justify both eugenics and Nike's popularity. Among his essays is "Stock Photography as Evolutionary Attractor" (2013), which describes the social and cultural specificities of modern capitalism as the natural order of things—an appeal to the absolute beauty of money, power and porcelain-skinned women.

Wara invited DIS—the collective behind an eponymous online magazine that treats art as a lifestyle brand and fashion photography as a form of Conceptual art—to organize a photo shoot at the museum. Social ties and creative collaborations have connected DIS to Post-Internet art. Si-Qin even published his essay on stock photography in their magazine. Post-Internet art ordinarily purges its white cubes of people, preferring to use passively predictable plants as a representation of life. (Sad-looking ferns have become a Post-Internet stylistic trope.) But DIS, in keeping with its lifestyle magazine mission, is constantly asking how humans contort to fit, or fail to fit, the values of fluid image economies, especially in the fashion industry.

Post-Internet defaults to an art about the presentation of art, playing to the art-world audience's familiarity with the gallery as a medium or environment for art, as well as with the conventions of presenting promotional materials online.

Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem to know what "Post-Internet" means today but are unable to articulate it with much precision. "I know it when I see it"—like porn, right? It's not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex—renders it lurid. The definition I'd like to propose underscores this transactional sensibility: I know Post-Internet art when I see art made for its own installation shots, or installation shots presented as art. Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online: photographed under bright lights in the gallery's purifying white cube (a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop.

Supporters of Post-Internet art might say that it's not the gallery that really matters but the shot of the work there, like a shot staged in a photographer's studio. But staged photography often disguises the shoot's environment, or transforms it. Post-Internet art preserves the white cube to leech off its prestige.

David Robbins was a popular teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) until his retirement a few years ago, attracting students with ideas about audience engagement and the possibility of a "conceptual art for the masses," which he called "high entertainment." He collected these thoughts in an "online book" of that title, published in 2009. For Robbins, art is an area of cultural activity distinguished by systemic self-reference; if entertainment appeals directly to its audience, Art (his capital "A") is a "satellite," receiving signals from individual artists and beaming them back to viewers, who can receive them only if their perceptual faculties are properly attuned. That is, audiences for Art have to be looped in to the self-referential game, a process that has traditionally required trips to art institutions and formal schooling. Robbins uses the term "platforming" to describe how artists can disrupt this model, reaching receptive viewers put off by the high barriers to entry into the institutional art world. He names the gallery as one platform, but includes it on a list among the radio show, the TV variety show, the magazine and "a certain kind of website (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace . . .)."

Consuming Post-Internet art most often means browsing artists' websites, which may be the optimal space for encountering the work. I recently came across an installation shot of Hhellblauu (2008-12), a work by Kari Altmann that I'd previously seen installed in a group show at Envoy Enterprises on the Lower East Side in the summer of 2010. In the gallery it looked like nothing—a dingy wading pool filled with water, where some prints of the Paramount logo and other found images on chunky foamcore floated about and piled up at the periphery. It did nearly nothing to attract my attention when I saw it in the gallery; it was just an inexpertly assembled installation by an artist who made more compelling work online. But when I saw the documentation I did a double take. The colors in the image—especially the sky blue named in the title—were intensely vibrant compared to the dull ones I remembered. The water in the pool seemed to create a viscous distance between the floating prints and the base upon which the pool rested, a platform that had looked flat when I saw it in person. In short, this bad installation suddenly looked like a good one, thanks to the way the lens of the camera and the lights worked on the materials when Altmann took the photo.

And Simon Denny 

Denny’s work often refers to the psychology and abstract language of the new media economy, invoking "clouds" of big data and the constant pressure to "update” our lives. He typically finds the sources for his work within the materials, advertising, and packaging produced by technology and media companies, and often deploys graphic interfaces borrowed from commercial display to highlight connections between the utopian goals of the new media economy and those of historical modernism.

Denny’s work has explored the culture of internet-technology firms, technological obsolescence, corporate culture, and contemporary constructions of national identity. He is interested in innovation as a driving force in business, in the rhetoric of Silicon Valley and tech start-ups, in technology’s role in shaping global culture and in the ways information is controlled and shared. He explores these ideas in installations that combine sculpture, graphics, and moving images. 

“All you need is data” teeters on the cusp between art and life and reminds me of a useful maxim, evidently about art, from the Dutch artist Eric van Lieshout: “I couldn’t care less what people call it, as long as we can do what we want.”

I confess that I tend to care what people call “it.” I value the distinction between art and life, and find that blurring them doesn’t necessarily do either category any favors. But that’s another article. Mr. Denny’s work is unusual because it works exceptionally well both ways, as art and as something more like life.

For people who frequent galleries and museums, it has a fairly high art quotient — and I.Q. — in the ways it builds on Conceptual art, appropriation art, relational aesthetics and institutional critique in its presentation, design and subject matter; its ancestors include all kinds of environmental art, from the ’60s Happenings to the installations of Cady Noland and Martin Kippenberger in the ’80s and ’90s.

1.
Jeff Wall Room Guide 1 Tate 

2.
Ed Ruscha

3.
The Hotel   Tate

4. DiCorcia

5. Karia Altmann

6. The Perils of Post Internet Art

7. Simon Denny

8. Simon Denny

From Depiction to Event, From Posed to Unposed and Back

A thrust of contemporary art can be described as unbounded by the reign of depiction and marked by continued openness; to forms, materials, situations and contexts. In this sense the art practitioner works to situate the possibility of art, to invent its possibility, to put under the aegis of art, all forms and situations.  Her role is to produce the very event of art. 

Where and when does art happen? How do artists understand that they are inside the event of art, that indeed they are making art?  

In his essay, Depiction, Object, Event Jeff Wall gives a very exacting and concise history of the reductive program of conceptual art that then leads perhaps surprisingly to an extraordinary opening to the possibilities and forms of art. 

I hope to give you a sense of how to read or take pleasure in some of these practices by seeing them as setting up the very event of art.  But such an event must create a memory for itself. 

Images give us a complex of clues to begin to explore this idea of art as event. For these images are not the work of art themselves. They're simply documents and documents can be anything but simple. 

Numerous artists will use the photograph as documentation of actions. The are not constructing the event of a picture, but using photography to document an event.  

There is no interest per se in light, in the inherent nature of the optics of the camera, but the action in front of the camera. The camera is like a mobile stage. It delimits any space for action. It turns everything into performance. 

When I spoke about the post conceptual image, it was with this idea of the image that situates itself, and its making in the expanded realm of art that comes from understanding of the advance of the readymade and the second avant gardes of minimalism and conceptual art. It knows that the possibility of art is everywhere and that is art is creating the event. 

There is in this a modality of being in the world where life forms and art forms intersect each other, become each other. 

Photography here is performance, a body in space, in the social, in the realm and discursive of the everyday photographic. A sculpture of chance, indeterminacy, instructions, restraints and repetition,  a kind of happening.

Art is an event of materials, audiences, institutions, cultural practices, representations – and artists situate, displace and refigure all of these to create the event of art.

Contemporary art is an event of thought and practice and the pleasure of it is taking that event with you in life. This is not to say that the realm of depiction and objects does not still rule the the global art market but that the self-critique of art used in your experience of the world opens self and social understanding. 

The artist moves between maker and conceiver of situations, from the creation of objects or tableaux, to instructions to be carried out by visitors, the performance script as an art form, instructions for fabrication, the trace and its supplement, exhibition as instructions and objects. Depiction and events. 

The Arrangement is the Picturing

Yesterday I spent the entire day sending psd files back and forth with Laumont Labs for printing selections of a new series of works, PICTURES for the upcoming Select Art Fair here in New York. If the fair or exhibition was in Shanghai we would and have been printing there.

This was the case with the picture you see below from the series Anatomy of Pictures.  It's titled, Uncovering Rock Crystal Skull, Date Unknown, and standing next to is curator, gallerist and long time friend Mathieu Borysevicz who founded and runs Bank in Shanghai.

To make this work and others in the series (a word I want to talk about in another post) I used photography but it's not about photography. I simply used photography to take the picture of what I had done, placing elements of shell and crab on this work with an unknown author. The idea of the work of art in the making of this skull most likely had no meaning whatsoever. This is a work that you can think of in terms of Walter Benjamin's aura. All that this work was about, its use, beauty (to me, this term), its meaning is lost. 

It all started when I found the book Voices of Silence in the Wellfleet library in Cape Cod. Below is its author Andre Malraux standing amidst all the reproductions int book. 

The images in this book were silent to me. I could not see them with my eyes and so I went about to place on over a hundred of the reproductions natural elements. 

The works collected by Malraux and presented in his book, he thought of as an Imaginary Museum, a museum without walls. 

I could not read the book. I read it but it alluded. So I had to touch it with the sensate part of me. 

Malraux would arrange his pictures again and again and again. I know this all too well and made my own museum without walls called The Esthetes.

A museum is as telling for what's not there as much as what is there.  I like the image of absence of things. 

Here, a set of images stating everything about this post. 

Below an image of an idea that has alway intrigued me. It's an image of a system to arrange and to see the surface of two dimensional space that presents images, texts, any elements on a page on a screen.  The single image demarcating fig or figure followed by a number comes from the brilliant poet and artist Marcel Broothaers. I turned it into nine images in rows and columns. 

and into a film. 

It's made from photographs. For a period I made a good many films from photographs. You may recognize some of the images. And some I write about in another post. 

A picture is an arrangement of elements. The arrangement is the picture. These are photographs of such arrangements. Photography has the great utility to be a sort of Xerox machine, a copying machine. There is nothing here particular about light. It's really about copying or recording an event that happened elsewhere to possibly become everywhere.  That's what's at the heart of mechanical reproduction. We would call this today, the desire to 'share'.  To record, to disseminate, to share. 

Not now, but in another post, I want to talk/write about how to make an image speak. And how the method of the figure you see above in the image and system of Broodthaers can do that. 

The figures. Think of the figures as those elements, a fantastic word in itself, and how they are arranged to make an image. Figures all in the same image. 

This is one of those files I was sending back and forth to Laumont today. Where Malraux is montaging his images, placing one next to another in sequence, I am layering my images, placing them in one picture plane. This layering is an arrangement in depth.  It's a seeing through time. An accretion of time. Not one moment and then the next. But a moment becoming a next, begetting the next. It's odd because its done with digital but its very analogue. 

Here the image is not an instant in time by the arrangement of varying times. 

Perhaps the most iconographic image of contemporary art today are the Spot Paintings by Damien Hirst. And so dots and this beautiful reproduction of an Icon from a time long forgotten, an aura far-far away. 

Above an image of Buddha with two versions of the Last supper, the Dance of Life and the anonymous mask of Guy Fawkes as shown in the Bank Gallery last month in Shanghai. 

The arrangement of pictures in depth and transparency gives us a different figure of the image than montage. It is not so much collage nor side by side but a window through time seeing one thing through another and another. 

Just as Malraux arranged his images, so that he could see them, one next to another and then another and then this one, next to this one and then that one, next to that, on and on and on, endlessly, we arrange ours not so much side by side though we do that, but one on top of another and one behind another, arranging time, arranging pictures, arranging our perceptions. 

The image is no longer on the substrate of a negative, but a digital file, more ephemeral than ever, yet more ubiquitous then ever. Such images are accessible instantaneously; copy, paste, layer.  Everyday what was once the poor image, the low-res image is being res'd up, but where do they come from, what are their titles, their meaning, authorship, context. These images are free floating and unnamed, splice into new networks of meaning, re-inventinved, becoming something entirely other and yet carrying something forward to be recognized through some unintended contact. 

The Anatomy of Pictures was a tactile search for the materiality the objects and images Malraux has collected,  a desire to better sense the silence of the reproductions in his book by bringing to them everything that was organic.

To understand or communion with them by touch. 

PICTURES was working with pictures, a desire to bring pictures in conversation with others pictures.,not images of objects but images made to function as pictures.

The idea of an atlas of pictures, like Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas or more recently Gerard Ricther's, Atlas, bringing pictures together to form an ongoing imaging of the world is what all of us are do today. 

But of course each of our arrangements is a different sense of the world.  What is in all these books. 

What will these paints paint. 

What do these photographs tells us.

What is love, art, life.

1

Malraux 

2.

Broodhaers