Stills, Tony Shafrazi (February, 1981

Put the Furniture in Storage STILLS, TONY SHAFRAZI (FEBRUARY, 1981)

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MATTHEW S. WITKOVSKY There was a movement toward calculated and subversive subjectivity in Europe in around 1970 in the form of antics, cavorting—or just cutting up. The tongue-in-cheek photo works of Ger van Elk or Sigmar Polke, Annette Messager’s slyly feminist albums, or Christian Boltanski with his invented stories of childhood—a grand gesture of refusal of the seriousness of art. Sarah didn’t address subjectivity that way at all. She thought that it should be a fully serious theme. It was a new move in art and one that countered all this other (“objective”) seriousness that had reigned in New York from the early 1960s: the Green Gallery, Don Judd boxes, to Kosuth and his grand philosophical ideas. Sarah deeply understood that tradition and its contents, but she said there needs to be a different voice. Part of that was the feminist voice, part was a way to reintroduce the human subject at the most profound level of a conversation about what art can be in our time.

SARAH I was looking at newspaper images for two years. I wanted to get closer to the image— how do images affect us psychologically, emotionally, politically? I was interested in exploring the narrative capacity of photography—the fact that you can’t tell looking at these people in mid-air whether they’re trying to save themselves or they’re trying to kill themselves. You don’t know what happened; did they live or did they die? And you can’t tell because there is no textural caption included in the artwork.

MATTHEW S. WITKOVSKY Sarah was a great writer. She helped found The Fox. She was hanging around with very logorrheic people, people for whom a long discourse is what you do in the morning before breakfast. She could work with that. At the same time, Sarah could see the meaning that just grabbed you before you even got to it.

SARAH I showed Stills in a temporary gallery that Tony Shafrazi had on Lexington and 28th. I don’t know where he was sleeping—he put all of his furniture in storage and just turned his apartment into an art gallery.

MATTHEW C. LANGE Shafrazi saw the work in progress and invited her to show with him. It was a very casual approach and he gave her a quick deadline to meet. Moreover, he had real space limitations. Sarah decided to make the prints six and a half feet tall.

MATTHEW S. WITKOVSKY The conceptual generation was preoccupied with having things at actual size. Actual size was a phrase in the early ’70s, and had to do with whether an image could be the thing that it purported to represent. In Stills, the works are not the size of the “original”—the newspaper picture—but instead more or less the actual size of the viewer, and of the falling subject as he or she would have been in life. A six-foot-tall image is like a person. This equivalence between the beholder and the falling person is physical—it pulls at you in a visceral way. Sarah would never stop being intellectual, but she saw and exploited the power of the visceral reaction, of an emotional and intuitive response. Verbalization wasn’t your first thing. That is a really key, signal development in art making at the tail end of the 1970s.

MATTHEW C. LANGE Stills was made at a point where her relationship with Joseph was coming to an end and her relationship with Amos was beginning. I would imagine it was a tumultuous time; a little bit of a free fall.

Installation view: Stills, 1980; exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in February, 1981

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