Another Avant-garde: Directions and Inflections from a Western Point of View

1. Artists Using Photography

Thinking about photography’s boom in the art world and market in the last three decades of the twentieth century, one could think that it was also a triumphant entry into the sacred halls of the large museums of the world. In reality, however, it was an entry through the back door, and a protracted one at that. Since its invention in the 1840s, photography was widely available in commerce and for personal use, and a standard tool for painters and sculptors. In the second half of the nineteenth century, bourgeois amateur photographers called pictorialists promoted photography as an art form, yet by following the stylistic demands of painting. Only the avant-garde photographers of the Interwar Period (1918–1939) explored the aesthetics of the medium itself, championing new angles, motifs and techniques to create a New Vision onto the world. Through voluntary and forced emigration during the political upheavals in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, their lessons spread over the entire world. Similarly global in scope and rising in the 1950s, Subjective Photography promoted the formal and expressionist qualities of photography. Also from the 1950s onwards, Street Photography and Straight Photography gained recognition. The former, influenced by celebrated figures, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, focused on the striking beauty of the “decisive moment”, the latter abandoned the idea of composition and a clear authorial style. Both, however, retained the principal value of photographs—which they called records, snapshots, or documents—that lies in their authenticity and factuality that most faithfully represented reality. However, these important movements stayed within a certain radius, having their own exhibition spaces and formats, particularly books and magazines. Artists were artists and photographers were photographers. It was not until the 1970s that these two categories began to overlap, when artists turned to photography and photographs were hung on the walls of museums. This crucial moment is the point of departure for this exhibition, which seeks to elucidate the manifold strategies pursued by artists using photography.

Among the existing uses of photography and newly developing art forms in the 1970s, artists understood photography in different ways. Most of them were not photographers at all, but took advantage of the factual character of the photographic image as they needed documentations of their performances, environments, and Land Art pieces. The actual artwork remained the intervention or action, the photograph was but a means to an end, or to speak with the influential nineteenth century French art critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, still a “servant of the sciences and the arts.”  For another group, indeed an entire generation of conceptual artists, art was no longer bound to an object, but to an idea. This theory and practice of Conceptual Art was hugely influential, as it liberated the arts from any aesthetic or physical prerequisites—everything could be art, and in its most extreme reduction, there was nothing at all. In this moment of the complete dematerialization of art, photography entered the museum, and it did so ironically by being the only but necessary material trace of this art which claimed to be immaterial.

At the same time, artists took a close look at images, how they were made and what they were to mean. They reacted to the overabundance of images produced by magazines, television, film, and advertising. Rather than creating new images and attempting at the most faithful rendering of the world, which had long been the driving force of the visual arts, appropriation and subversion became the principles for artists making images about images.  As the US-American art critic Douglas Crimp wrote for his seminal exhibition on what he called the Pictures Generation: “While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it. It therefore becomes imperative to understand the picture itself, not in order to uncover a lost reality, but to determine how a picture becomes a signifying structure of its own accord.”

Again, artists pursued different ways to reveal the logic of images. Partly deriving from Conceptual Art, partly from poststructuralist theory, artworks were increasingly shown in complex series and accompanied by text. The single image was under suspicion to say not enough or too much, full of ambiguity that masks political and capitalist propaganda. For artists using photography, it was furthermore important to distinguish themselves through this additional work from photographers, who were still in a different place in the art world of the 1970s.  Photographs, either taken by artists themselves or appropriated from mass media, served as illustrations for larger inquiries into the effects of images in society.

Besides the sociological approach there was a much more practical interest into the technical processes of photography. While the avant-garde of the 1920s experimented with the visual language of the camera, artists in the 1970s scrutinized the workings of the apparatus itself and the developing of the picture in the darkroom. Their photographs are not to be meant as illusions to be decodified, but as visualizations of what the camera actually does. Through their experiments, in line with the rise of analytical philosophy and the linguistic turn of those years, they tested the limits of mechanical recording and reproduction, ultimately producing works that represented neither the world nor politics, but their own creation.

The 1970s were, in all this variety of practices and theories, carried by an avant-gardist spirit. First, through the self-reflexivity of artists and their work, and second, through their historical self-awareness. They thought about what art means in their time, but also in a larger scheme of art history. After what Arthur Danto called the “end of art,” that is, everything can be art if it is embedded in the art world, artists were compelled to produce artworks which reasserted the very existence of art.  What may sound counterintuitive in the wake of Conceptual Art is in fact a consequence of it, allowing a new freedom of creativity and creation. Photography was a primary medium with which to pursue this openness, and to both re-materialize the work of art and interrogate its internal workings. Hence, the critique of the image in the 1970s gave rise to another point of inflection, from deconstructing to reconstructing pictures.

2. A Lesson in Looking

Whether it was the irony of history or part of the life cycle and meanderings of art history: many artists chose photography to escape painting, but it was precisely the direction in which photography returned in the 1980s. Technical experiments gradually exhausted themselves, and the dry sociological analyses lost viewers increasingly drawn into the attention economy. New possibilities to produce large prints, in color, offered a more sensual experience and the reinvestment of the picture plane.  After the conceptual and linguistic turn followed a visual turn, which was nonetheless critical of society and the arts. It is a recourse to older strategies to create new tensions. The properties of the medium (as a recording and describing device) were paired with other art forms, such as theater, which propelled an inventiveness of staging and fabrication. Photography became figurative again.

The work Picture for Women (1979) by Jeff Wall is a case in point in this regard: starting out with smaller conceptual works, he successively turned to large format pictures presented in light boxes known from street advertising. Thereby, his works reference multiple media in one: photography by way of their making, painting as a historical model, sculpture in their physical presence, film in their narrative, and television with their glow of light.  This complexity met the progressive attitude of the 1970s, yet also gave new importance to picture-making itself. In contrast to the often small-format or page-based works, appropriated mass-imagery, and text-heavy series that preclude the “long look,”  Wall created photographs for the wall that solicited a longer examination on the part of the spectator. Yet far from yielding a purely decorative effect, he enmeshes his critical position toward the world. As the title makes clear, Wall takes up the feminist discussion of viewing relationships in Western art history, most prominently voiced by British film theorist Laura Mulvey. Women, as she described, were mostly relegated to a passive position of being looked at.  By including himself rather awkwardly in the picture as the photographer and by presenting the scene in a mirror that directly implicates the viewer in this triangle of gazes, Wall foregrounds these dynamics and creates a moment of “unease.”  In other works, the artist also thematizes the capitalist world order and the transformation of all kinds of living conditions in the world of commerce. In this thematic sweep, he updates Baudelaire’s idea of the painter of modern life and continues painting after the end of painting.

Wall’s and other artists’ work on the internal logic of pictures recurs to the concept of antitheatricality, which originated in French painting in the mid-1700s. As US-American art critic Michael Fried states, figures in pictures were meant to appear genuinely absorbed in their depicted activities, unaware of what surrounds them. The people often turn away from the spectator, being painted from the side or the back, since any hint at this scene being staged for an audience—a theatrical display—was considered by contemporaneous critics as a major fault in the composition of the painting.  This concept was opposed and transformed by photographer-artists in the 1980s who consciously employed antitheatricality in their works. They constructed images in a way that appeared to ignore the spectator, as painting once did, while at the same time acknowledging the very fact that their works only exist because of an artworld that looks at them.  In various instances, these artists draw attention to this form of construction in their frontal view on scenes that immediately clarifies the presence of both the artist and their audience, and by including, as in Picture for Women, the camera in the picture. Clearly revealing these conventions of artistic genres and photographic posing, these artists make work about the very act of looking: “Spectatorship and spectacle are their subject matter.”

The format that affords the space for contemplation, that draws the viewer in and at the same time manifests itself as an artwork through its size, is the tableau. The “large, still image,”  whether documentary in origin or elaborately staged, has its own internal logic based on the organization of its depicted elements. It does not depend on textual descriptions, nor on further knowledge about outside events or its contingent exhibition context, but offers the viewer in itself all the necessary information to comprehend the image. It is, as US-American curator Peter Galassi writes, “a timeless, self-sufficient image—a world in itself.”  

While the tableau exploits photography’s illusionism to create these worlds, it always presents itself as a fabrication and a picture plane. The work of artists like Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth is exemplary for this double bind. In Struth’s museum photographs, the narratives and illusions of the paintings on the wall are repeated in the photograph’s own construction. Painting and photography appear at once equal, almost merging into a continuous picture plane, which, however, is immediately disrupted by the self-referential presentation of images that are made to look at. Every identification of the viewer with the scene in the painting or the photograph is revealed to be a “pictorial fiction.”  Thomas Ruff’s portraits, either in a modest format or drastically blown-up, carry this thought to its logical end. The expressionless faces of the sitters merely conform to a photographic convention, yet reveal nothing about the persons. They seem not even to engage in a relationship of gazes with the spectator, as if the camera and the print built up an insurmountable wall. The picture becomes pure surface, a monumental manifestation of and challenge to the concept of the portrait.

In all this art historical debate, the specific qualities of photography were of utmost importance. Artists using photography reinstated the artwork as an object and a picture, as well as its relation to and impact on the real world. They stayed away from the “dissolution into a pure imaginary world (illustrative inventions, endless quotations, neopictorial kitsch) by integrating a descriptive or factual dimensions, by affirming the presence, and actuality of the picture,” as the curators Jean-François Chevrier and James Lingwood stated in the catalog of their influential exhibition Another Objectivity.  By constructing and describing space through photographic mimesis and through monumental presentations in the exhibition space, artists like Hannah Collins, John Coplans, Suzanne Lafont, and Patrick Tosani preserved a formal rigor without reducing the pictures’ content. They abandoned the ambiguous empathy of humanist photography from the 1950s to the 1970s and exchanged the supposed naturalness of photographic representation of the world for a deliberate artificiality. Their images appear cold and detached in comparison to the colorful advertising and television of their time, and just as much in regard to today's social media imagery. Yet precisely because of their sobriety, they take the subjects of social and political images serious. In their sober and philosophical transformation of humanist photography, they were and are still offering a moment of reflection.

Chevrier’s and Lingwood’s selection of works, as many other exhibition projects at the time as well, was limited to Euro-American artists. In retrospect, this appears utterly incomplete if considering the many artists working on similar questions in the very same period in various parts of the world, such as David Goldblatt in South Africa, Carlos Leppe in Chile, or Zhang Peili in China. Despite the different cultural contexts—some connected more than the other—, the interrogation of the photographic image evidences affinities and structurally similar movements, above all the attempts to break new ground and take photography seriously as an autonomous artistic medium. These parallel developments are visible in such supposedly mundane subjects like pictures of friends and family. The works of the Germans Anna and Bernd Blume and the French Suzanne Lafont and Patrick Faigenbaum enter into a serendipitous dialog with the series My Parents by Song Yongping. Across geo-aesthetic borders, photography transcends the classic family album and speaks about the human condition and provides the aesthetic form for the walls of major museums, just like classical painting.  

3. The Continuing Moment of the Avant-Garde

The principle of avant-gardes is commonly based on novelty and originality, on a radical break with preceding artistic values and practices. In this exhibition we present ‘another’ avant-garde which does pursue new ways, but simultaneously looks back on art history. It reiterates and finds new itineraries for the fundamental question of what art is. Even artists, such as Sherrie Levine, who seek to abolish the once avant-gardist ingenuity of the artist, his creative gesture, and the sanctity of the unique art object, point out and inscribe themselves in a genealogy of recurring topoi; in her case, by pirating photographs and realizing historical repetition through mechanical reproduction.  

In light of these continuous responses and inventions to picture-making, the presentation of Another Avant-Garde emphasizes that experiments of the 1970s were necessary to understand the capacities and specificity of photography—lessons which artists then synthesized in the aesthetically very different grand tableau. In yet another point of inflection, presented as an epilogue in the exhibition, the leading artists of our time are no longer drawing on the primacy of the “large, still picture.” Their references are much more diverse and hybrid. Wolfgang Tillmans negotiates the obsolescence of analog media and new digital forms of communication, Eric Baudelaire takes a collaborative approach to explore global geographies, and aaajiao challenges the accessibility, visibility, and circulation of online images. Thus, they continue to interrogate the potential of the photographic apparatus and image, singling out individual aspects of creation and presentation and reassembling them into new relations and objects. As in the previous moments, it becomes clear that it is not the parameters of art that determine the photographic work of the current avant-garde, but that artists apply the mechanisms of photography onto art.

In its composition, this exhibition recapitulates and recalibrates the discourses of Western art history, but also tries to lay the foundation to go beyond this scope. While the majority of works are by US-American and Canadian, French, and German artists—well represented in the collection of the Centre Pompidou—it also opens a window onto other photographic circles around the word which went through very similar developments, be it Cameroon, Japan, and particularly China. The present overview can be but fragmentary, as many strands of photography are certainly underrepresented. Moreover, its temporal framework is to be taken as a rough guidance, as artists around the world responded to artistic challenges in different moments and diverse cultural and political contexts. Yet, as this seemingly eclectic presentation of works demonstrates, the diverse photographic strategies are not bound to a style or chronology, but tools that artists have continuously and freely taken advantage of, be it in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or today. Ultimately, what all the share is the experience of cross-continental exchange in an ever-more connected art world, the effects of globalization on local economies and politics, and not to forget, the increasing flood of images that shapes our everyday experience around the world. By presenting exemplary paradigms of photography, this exhibition invites reflections on further connections within the multi-faceted history of the avant-garde.