CENTERQUARTERLY#55:
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAN VAN STEENWIJK SWIMMER IN FRONT OF MY CAMERA, 1985
GELATIN SILVER PRINT FROM POLAROID POSITIVE/NEGATIVE FILM
THE INTERNATIONAL POLAROID COLLECTION CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 02139
This publication appears on the occasion of the 1993 exhibition Social Studies I Public Monuments, organized by the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, New York. The photography exhibition, Social Studies I Public Monuments (curated by Virginia Rutledge and Sarah M. Lowe) and the accompanying video exhibition, The Price We Pay to Live (curated by James Supanick), will travel to the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, October 7 - November 28, 1993.
The Center acknowledges support from the New York State Council on the Arts Visual Arts, and the Elec• tronic Media and Film Programs, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Organizations, the National Endowment for the Arts Advancement Program, the Polaroid Corporation, the Andre Kertesz, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Polaroid Foun• dations.
This catalogue supersedes CENTER Quarterly #55 Vol. 14, No. 3, 1993. ISSN 0890 4639. Copyright© 1993 the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498. TEL: (914) 679-9957, FAX: (914) 679-6337.
Catalogue essays © I 993, Virginia Rutledge, Sarah M. Lowe, Diane Neumaier, Therese Lichtenstein, Peter McClennan, Kent Rush, Dara Silverman, E.E. Smith, Hanneke Van Velzen, Christian Walker. All photographs and artists' texts reproduced in this catalogue are copyrighted by the artists. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without writ~ ten permission from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. The opinions and ideas expressed in this publication do not represent official positions of the Center.
Printing by Kenner Printing Co., Inc., New York City, U.S.A. Design by Kathleen Kenyon. Text proofreading by Joan Munkacsi. Composition by Digital Design Studio, Ruby, New York.
The CENTER Quarterly distributor is Bernhard QeBoers, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07110.
STAFF:
Executive Director, Colleen Kenyon; Associate Director Programs, Kathleen Kenyon; Executive Assistant, Lawrence P. Lewis; Program Assistant, Derek Johnston. Volunteers.John Dydo; MarkJargow; David Karp. Interns, Christy Green; Liz Lageunesse.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
Susan Fowler-Gallagher, Debra Goldman, Ellen Handy, Rollin Hill, Colleen Kenyon, Ellen K.Levy.James Luciana, Elliott Meisel, Marc Miller,Joan Munkacsi, Richard Platt, Alan Siegel, Robert Stang. FilmAdvisors:John Pruitt and Peter Hutton.
ADVISORY BOARD:
Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Martin Bondell/J ulie Galant, Ellen Carey, Philip Cavanaugh, Allan Coleman, Liza Cowan, Penelope Dixon, Cheryl Finley, Bech Gates-Warren, Howard Greenberg, Sue Hartshorn, William M. Hunt, Norman Jay ltzkoff, Rex Jobe, Greg Kandel, Peter Kenner, Alan Klotz, Ronald Kurtz, Kenneth T. Lassiter, Susana Torruella Leval, Peter MacGill, Robert Persky, Sandra S. Phillips, J. Randall Plummer, Lilo Raymond.
Front cover: Hanneke Van Velzen, Traces of a Western Civilization, 1990 (detail)
Individual catalogues: U.S.A. $5 donation/ $8 postpaid International/ Canada/ Mexico/ $11 postpaid
4 VIRGINIA RUTLEDGE PARTIAL DOCUMENTS:
12 SARAH M. LOWE
SOCIAL STUDIES / PUBLIC MONUMENTS EXHIBITION CHECKLIST&.. ARTISTS' PROFILES
18 DIANE NEUMAIER GENDER POWER DISPLAY
23 THERESE LICHTENSTEIN BEYOND THE FRAME, AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTHA ROSLER
Peter McClennan, Man/Sunflower, 1990 Ektacolor print, 40x30"
INTRODUCTION
Historically, one dominant photographic practice has located an intersection between subject and style in some idea of "the street." Street photography is conventionally understood as the documentation of life enacted on the public stage, for which the street itself serves as a paradigm. Its style is "straight," with the unmanipulated black-and-white silver print operating as the sign of photography's ability to record the given of the social scene.
But of course, the photograph's relationship to the "real" has been intensively scrutinized. Working against the modes of traditional documentary and photojournalism, the artists included in the exhibition Social Studies I Public Monuments continue the deconstructive exploration of photography's tendency to efface the ways in which it imposes structures of meaning upon its material. While their use of manipulated imagery and alternative processes challenges the status of the photograph as transcriptive document, their blatantly subjective views of the street subvert claims far the transparency of truth. A concern with the mediated, and mediating, nature of photographic representation is central to each artist's work.
The title of this show refers to the dual aspect of the works exhibited. Both studies of social life and monuments to the artists' engagement with "public" issues, the works gathered in Social Studies I Public Monuments share the subject of the street as actual and symbolic public space. Among the questions raised are: What are the demographics of the street-how is the street organized in terms of class, gender, race, and ethnicity? How is that organization represented? Who is the audience for that representation-who constitutes the "public?" How is the street negotiated as a field of cultural representations or a site for public spectacle? We believe these questions are particularly relevant to this historical moment, when public discourse is largely a matter of images.
In addition to cataloguing Social Studies I Public Monuments this publication includes an interview with Martha Rosier, whose work has been enormously influential on contemporary art and critical practice. We also reproduce selections from Diane Neumaier's phototext project that examines how gender systems are reinforced and reproduced through visual display.
-Virginia Rutledge and Sarah M. Lowe, Curators and Guest Editors
VIRGINIA RUTLEDGE
is an art historian who lives in New York City. She writes on visual representation and censorship. SARAH M. LOWE
is a writer and art historian, who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is co-curator of Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer (October, 1993) and curator of a forthcoming retrospective of Tina Modotti's photographs (April, 1995).
PARTIAL
DOCUMENTS: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY ON THE STREET
Virginia Rutledge
A poster on a public bus-stop shelter reproduces a photograph of a small child. le is a scantily clad, dirt-smudged child, who scares solemnly out and up at me in the manner conventionalized by UNICEF and CARE. There's my cue: this is no Sally Mann photograph; this is a child of the "Third World." Standing alone in what looks like jungle, she clutches a cheap plastic doll whose literal whiteness contrasts sharply with her brown skin. Abject poverty is on display here.
The focus of chis photograph is sharp but not unnaturally so; the lighting clarifies forms without dramatic effect. Though undoubtedly staged to some extent, the image claims authenticity through the self-effacement of its "straight," documentarian approach. Incidental visual detail is abundant. What is lacking is any information specific to the child's circumstances. Given the visual codes in play, I am surprised to find no text relating what are apparently the degraded conditions of her life. No direct appeal is made to my humanitarian impulses; no 800 number is listed for phone-in
charitable donations. Instead, on a bright green rectangle artfully placed within the field of the image are arrayed these four words: "United Colors of Benetton."
What does this photograph promote, exactly?
In America, Benetton sells sweaters from a chain of retail clothing outlets designed as upmarket versions of the ubiquitous GAP. For well over a year now, the Italian corporation has solicited attention using a high-profile and presumably successful campaign of advertisements which feature no Benetton products, just the company's trademark logo superimposed on a series of reportage-style photographs of nightly news stories: a devastating flood, a terrorist firebombing, the overloading of a refugee ship ...and most provocatively, a death from AIDS. Yee no source for any of these photographs is identified; the images are captioned only with Benetton's corporate tag. It is therefore possible chat the Benetton poster child described above is in actuality a wellpaid model. But the authenticity of this photo-
graph, its statu as a document, is not likely to be questioned. This picture is familiar. The ad trades with confidence on the viewer's knowledge chat some needy child exists "out there." Precisely where is irrelevant: no child's welfare is really at stake. No one is being asked to act in response to chis image-except to shop Benetton.
How does Benetton figure chat the ( mis)appropriacion of documentary photography or photojournalism will serve its corporate interests? "United Colors of Benetton"-who does this ad address? What image, what fantasy, does the Benetton consumer invest in?
My "problems" with the Benetton ad are among those chat trouble traditional documentary and mainstream photojournalism themselves: the problems of the photograph's authoritative status as transcriptive document, of representational conventions and protocols, of photography's dependence on contextual frame and a presumed audience for it meanings. 1
Clearly the authority of both photojournalism and documentary photography is based on the medium's indexical relationship to the "real" world "out chere"-the straight photograph is understood as a record of a given. Notwithstanding the considerable differences between chem, a shared feature of traditional documentary practices such as Jacob Riis's, or later Lewis Hine's, or Dorothea Lange' , is their reliance on this understanding of photography to evidence the reality of the adverse conditions under which their subjects labored, and the dismal circumstances of their lives. It is a loosely defined genre, but documentary
photography is primarily viewed as factual, even when it is motivated by impassioned advocacy. Yee as photography critic and art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out, documentary's very constitution as a discursive cacegory-"objective" photography-as opposed to ocher kinds of photography-invi tes the question: "How is documentary thought and what ideological work is it performing?"2
Traditional documentary aims to establish the humanity of its subjects, to rouse public indignation and propagandize for the betterment of social conditions. But who is its public? Certainly the audience for documentary is different from the documentary subject, highlighting the problem of who speaks for whom, to whom, why. According to artist and writer Manha Rosier, "Documentary photography has come to represent the social conscience of liberal sensibility presented in visual imagery."3 Yet this presentation does not necessarily lead to social change. On the contrary, what Rosier characterizes as "victim photography" further exploits the relative lack of power of those photographed, who typically are in less advantaged situations than those who possess the means of representation. Regardless of the photographer' intentions, an uneven distribution of power is reinscribed in traditional documentary's hierarchical subject/object relations, which occlude the documentary subject's point of view. The subject photographed is "victimized" twice-first by economic, social, and political circumstances, then by being represented as an object for the spectator.
This revictim ization is abetted by the view-
ing relation structured into the image by the photographic apparatus itself. What appear "given" in straight photography is in truth a highly artificed and constricted view: the photograph's visual command is a pictorial illusion created by the single-point perspectival structure the camera produce . Since chis visual organization aligns the camera and spectatorial eye, the viewing experience psychically confirms a position of control or mastery. This is a position the audience for documentary occupies in "real life," so chat the asymmetrical relations chat supposedly occasion documentary's critique are actually maintained and perpetuated within the realm of representation. In effect, the principal subject of this representation is the spectator, for whom a (relatively better) position is located: "not there." Traditional documentary thus tends, paradoxically, to bolster its viewers' pleasurable sense of entitlement as it feeds us/them paranoia, however subliminally. 4 If traditional documentary supports moralism more often than it does a political program, this is because of, not despite, its historical orientation coward social reform. Although social reform measures are devised as remedies for recognized societal ills such as malnutrition or drug addiction, chis remediation seems inevitably to fall shore of treating the encompassing social system that, for example, sustains an underclass in poverty. Rather than examine their structural or systemic causes, traditional documentary similarly naturalizes unequal social relations and disparities in material conditions. Its realist representational means reiterate, "This is the way things are," at the same time chat chose visual techniques are
E.E. Smith, 4th of July, 1991-92 gum bichromate on canvas, 72x 138"presented as adequate to the situations that documentary wishes to address. 5
Hindered from the outset by photography's privileging of the spectator, traditional documentary's failure to see its own limitations has resulted in a marked impoverishment of representational strategies. Consider the documentary convention of emphasizing the plight of individuals taken to represent the lot of entire groups of others. Social stereotyping is the predictable byproduct. In this regard it may be significant that, while stoic endurance is a recurrent trope, the possibility of selfempowerment is seldom envisioned in traditional documentary, the historical precursors of which include photographic instruments of social control such as physiognomic studies and police records.
Haven't we seen that child in the Benetton ad before? The representational strategies at work there are in fact cliched. And Benetton can't even claim good intentions: the ad does not advance any understanding of the complex problems it has "put a face on"; no intervention in business-as-usual is encouraged. Though apparently fashionable, 6 the social or political commentary offered is specious; activism is reduced to the question of the viewer's empathy. Benetton's serially presented "calamity" ads operate to level and deny the specificity of the extremely various situations they depict (ecological disaster, civil war, the AIDS crisis), thereby thwarting consideration of their causes or redress. People are talking about the ads, but it is their propriety, not content, that is debated. This discussion is not without value, considering that "real" news is packaged under brand names, too: 60 Minutes, 6
The New York Times. But the reminder that all information is slanted by its source, to greater or lesser degrees, isn't Benetton's concern either.
At issue here are photography's instrumentalities, its uses. The instability of photographic meaning is by now a venerable scandal: that a photograph is hostage to its caption, or to the context of its reproduction or exhibition, is well known. 7 In a CARE expose, the photograph of the child in the Benetton ad would surely mean something about her welfare, although even there we could not exempt the image from critiques of traditional documentary representation-critiques that allow us to see how very pleasurable this representation may be. And Benetton knows, pleasure sells. Contained within the frame of advertising, this photograph's meaning is bound to the logic of consumerism: it represents consumption, the appropriation of the world as image. In a period of global upheaval, not to mention recession, Benetton's marketing directors seem to think bad news is good public relationsthe ads vouch that "we're all (United Colors) in this mess together." But the universalized "we" constructed by the ads is in reality an exclusive group, relatively well-off economically and socially. And of course this "we," Benetton's hip target audience, is not an accurate representation of the "general public" addressed via the ads' location on the street (or in newspapers, in magazines, or on television).
So in addition to selling sweaters, what ideological work is this public representation performing? My problem with the Benetton ad with which I began isn't confined to the issue of photographic veracity. We all know
the camera lies. Under pressure from commercialism, from representational critiques developed by feminism, "minority" studies, and postmodernism, and from the realization of computerized imaging technologies, photography's purchase on "Truth" has been roundly shaken. Yet the power of photographic representation to direct our views of self and world has never been greater. Photography is our preeminent visual medium, the dominant means by which images enter and are circulated in the mainstream media and public discourse. Indeed, photography is completely intricated and implicated within our economic, social, and ideological systems, in which images not only advertise, but are themselves commodified, and consumed. Finally, my problems with the Benetton ad have to do with how it represents and promotes identification with a "public" whose privilege is celebrated, not challenged, by the ad's portrayal of what it's like "out there."
Once over the initial surprise, one can hardly be shocked by Benetton's cynical simulations of documentary and photojournalism. The corporation's aping of "concerned" photographic practice is not all that different from a cooption already accomplished by the artphotography market in its wholesale depoliticization of the social documentary of the earlier twentieth century. However compromised by both its representational strategies and its allegiance to reformism, this photography was nevertheless rooted in some notion of social amelioration, a meaning that is utterly lost in most gallery or museum settings. But this is not to argue that "truthful" documentary is impossible, or that its potential for
Kent Rush, Schertz Embankment, 1987 cyanotype on paper on wood panel, 61 x 126"activism has been completely recuperated. Rather, the Benetton ads and the history of documentary photography's assimilation by a fine art tradition make it clear that in order for documentary to be socially meaningful, its visual forms must be shaped and placed in historical and cultural context by a politics of representation.
Contemporary photographers have been reinventing documentary. In the process of dismantling photography's myths, a photographic art practice has been generated which seeks to represent a multiplicity of relative, provisional, even strategic truths. Thus it is in both senses of the word that the artists included in the exhibition SocialStudiesI Public Monuments produce "partial" documents (partial: not total or entire, not general or universal, incomplete; to be favorably disposed toward, to be predisposed on some question or issue). At the same time that it forwards a critique of traditional documentary, their work attempts a counterdocumentary. This photography's subjects-both the subject photographed and the spectator, the viewing subject-are understood to be constructed in the activity of representation. These photographers put themselves "in the picture": they admit a point of view, and they problematize their positions in relation to what they photograph. They also adopt an oppositional position in relation to certain of their medium's historical uses. Specifically, they contest those photographic practices and genres that purport to
represent "just the facts," when representation itself mediates and shapes our very experience of our selves, in the world.
The exhibition's thematic focus is on the street as a conceptual nexus where social relations as a subject for art, and the art practices of social critique, repeatedly intersect. Throughout modem history artists have signalled their political engagement-or at least their desire to traffic outside the pseudoautonomous realm of aesthetics-by choosing the street as subject or by placing the artwork in relation to the street, literally or figuratively. The works in SocialStudiesI PublicMonuments continue this project by dealing with the street as a symbolic as well as actual space.
The street has symbolic dimensions to the extent that it represents an idea of how the public realm is constituted, or what social relations are or should be. As such it is the paradigmatic site of photographic practices
that undertake to document social life. Of course, traditional social documentary and socalled street photography are practices with different ends, in that the one is meliorative in intent, while the other is ostensibly nonpolitical. Their procedures also differ. Traditional documentary images are composed to communicate an intended social meaning, while street photography proposes that its meanings are largely unpremeditated, framed only by the viewfinder (Robert Frank's work is a remarkable exception).
But what links these practices, and photojournalism as well, is their faith in photographic realism's ability to objectively re-present the world. Not only has this faith been a mainstay of several generations of photography instruction; it also anchors a persistent belief in the straight photograph's purely transcriptive function. In their effort to produce documents that counter the exclusions, elisions, and hidden agendas of much mainstream photography, the works in SocialStudies I Public Monuments challenge the assumptions underpinning this mode of visuality. In many ways the exhibition is "about" photography, but in terms of the medium's historical discourses and functions rather than in terms of formalism (e.g., achieving the perfect print). Means and content are inseparable in this work: formal strategies are presented as a critique of photographic representation itself.
Many of these strategies are shared. In various ways, each of the artists makes use of overtly manipulated imagery to deconstruct
Kent Rush, Garden Ridge Embankment III, I 987 toned cyanotype on paper on wood panel, I 2x42" Peter McClennan, Men/Quilt, 1989 Ektacolor print, 30x40"the conventions of straight photography, or else deploys alternative photo processes, materials, or formats to belie the transparency of photographic truth. Several artists combine these strategies.
For example, in Peter McClennan's work the seamlessness of straight photography is undercut by the manifest operation of collage, an effect produced by the artist's process of rephotographing photographs of sleeping figures excised from their "original" surroundings of New York City streets or makeshift shelters. Relocated to mock-Edenic, often highly artificial "natural" settings, as in Men/ Leaves, these figures satirize traditional documentary's naturalization of victimhood. They also speak to that tradition's inability or unwillingness to confront the failures of social systems, and its resultant emphasis on individual cases-a representational convention indicted by the crucifixion reference in Man/ Sunflower. The artist further engages traditional documentary's objectifying tendencies by courting the criticism that his own photographs are voyeuristic. Yet the experience of these sleeping figures is represented as completely inaccessible to the observer; no look can violate their dreaming.
In order to subvert them, McClennan chooses to rehearse the visual terms of classic victim photography. Although the artist's subjects are resituated by photographic sleight-ofhand, unmistakable signs of their homelessness remain imprinted on their bodies in postures shaped by contact with the hard urfaces of concrete and asphalt, or, as in Man/Snow (page 12), in shadows cast by fencing or doorways no longer visible in the final prints. McClennan's refusal to put his subjects "in their place" has the effect of forcing the viewer to see social environment, rather than innate nature, as the factor that determines their identification as "street" people. Metaphorically, McClennan's cut-outs enact and represent the literal displacement suffered by his subjects as a consequence of current economic patterns and the urban phenomena of gentrification and redevelopment. In works such as Men/ Quilt, the artist ironically alludes to the "fabric of society" as he attempts to make homelessness visible not as an axiomatic fact oflife butas the productofa particular economy and specific social policy decisions. 8
A metaphor of fabrication is also employed by Hanneke Van Velzen to represent social systems that may not be readily visualized or fully admitted to consciousness, either social or individual. In her Traces of a Western Civilization tiny photographs of isolated figures standing in New York City's underground subway stations are arranged in two separate grids, which segregate the sexes on either side of inscrutable, almost life-sized photographs of the surface of city streets. By manipulating the distribution of her photographs of men and women, Van Velzen "documents" the organization of gender in Western culture, at the same time that she calls attention to how entirely natural gender difference is made to appear in prevailing visual representation. In a form reminiscent of displays found in anthropology museums, the artwork's cage-like wooden construction symbolically concretizes an entrenched gender system that conceals its rigid binarism by presenting the feminine/masculine opposition as purely a matter of nature. Suggestively, the photographer's subjects are apprehended from a position across the train tracks, so that their individual bodies are visually fragmented and "canceled" by obstructive architectural members that support the physical structure of the subway system. By means of this cultivated visual accident that viewers may be tempted to screen from perception, Van Velzen refers to gender as a process that entails continual repression of the "other" gender in the self.
Questions of the erasure or invisibility of "otherness" likewise haunt Christian Walker's Evidence of Things Not Seen, an installation of twenty-five photographs that record AfricanAmericans and Caucasians_'.._always shown to-
gether-on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia. In a parody of the objectivity for which the straight gelatin silver print is a sign, Walker heightens the "blackand-whiteness" of his small, newspaper- or magazine-sized photos by first printing for highlights, and then overlaying the images with black pigment. This creates an exaggerated newsprint-like grain that metaphorically adds "color" to the photographs.
Under the close scrutiny that the intimate scale of the prints requires, Walker's process lends an eerie glow to the white figures in the photographs, while darker figures are merged into the background. Yet seen from the distance needed to take in the installation as a whole, the photographs become impenetrably, and subversively, "black." The work thus refers to racial polarization-pictured in the images as variously obscured, denied, enforced, or resisted-as well as to the domination of mainstream media by racial and other elites disproportionately empowered to control images of the social "norm." By ordering his photographs so that racial difference is always present as a term that must be acknowledged within contemporary social organization, Walker counters the systematic editing of the socially marginalized from the frame of public representation.
The illusory transparency of straight photography is exposed in the work of Kent Rush as well. In his Embankment series Rush instigates contemplation of some of the ways in which photographic meaning is endowed, rather than revealed. Evoking the operation of projection, for example, the "empty" streets and concrete highway embankments that are his subjects metaphorically denote the photograph as a field upon which meaning may be projected-even as these fields are simultaneously presented as already inscribed with meanings. The embankments are them elves legible as signs of human shaping of the environment; additionally, they already bear marks "written" by the processes of engineering and weathering, as well as still more signs of human agency in the form oflitteror graffiti. The photographs thus suggest how their meanings may be specific to the particular moment of their production, and yet continually subject to reinterpretation.
Further, by scratching, abrading, or other-
Peter McClennan, Men/Leaves, 1988 Ektacolor print, 30x40"wise handling the photographic negative or print, Rush mimics and doubles the marks
•• visible in the material matrix of the embankments, poetically obliterating any distinction between the photographic image as transcript and the photographic artifact as artistic expression. The question of a particular photograph's "authenticity" is rephrased, redirected to question the larger cultural meaning of photographic authenticity itself. This questioning is even more insistent in works that serialize an identical and identically handled image, repeating it without variation, as in Untitled (page 13). Rush's photoworks also incorporate references to other aesthetic media and to certain highly recognizable and coded painting styles. For instance, the near abstraction and the sensuously textured monochromatic expanse of the mural-sized cyanotype Schertz Embankment recall both abstract expressionism and color field painting, which have each come to connote deeply personalized expression.
Alternative photo processes and materials that blur traditional media categories play an even more prominent role in the work ofE.E. Smith, where they announce the subjective aspect of photographic practice. In each of her works exhibited in Social Studies/ Public Monuments, Smith's use of variegated gum bichromate on stretched canvas or paper both recalls the textures and charged psychological associations of gestural painting and forecloses the possibility that her photographs will be viewed as magic windows onto the unmediated "real." Because the contact-printed gum patently rests on the surface of its material ground rather than "in" it, Smith's process blocks the viewer's access to the sense of visual entry and possession that the straight photograph routinely offers. Instead, the dark pigmented gum seems to materialize her images somewhere in the register of memory, or reflection. In dialogue with her work's allusions to the practice and visual styles of photojournalism and street photography, Smith's invocation of personal affect comments on the inevitable skewing of vision that is produced by the photographer's particular take on a subject. Parodying the seemingly unedited "slice of life" presented by street photography or photojournalism, the elaborate arrangement of her multipanel 4th of July questions the objectivity of reportorial photographic practices that may in fact promote ideological values: this altarpiece-shaped work pays sardonic homage to the sacralization of patriotism. The work's multiplication of viewpoints additionally undermines straight photography's assertion of visual command. (The promise of scopic control is similarly emptied in Rush's Garden Ridge Embankment I II, where the spectator is afforded such an upclose view that the subject photographed is rendered virtually unintelligible.)
Smith's use of montage also affirms the artist's presence in the work as its organizing
sensibility. Significantly, it is through their juxtaposition that the halves of the diptych NY, NY take on their meanings. Considered by itself, the left panel might be read as a simple study of architectural decoration, in this instance a white marble statue allegorizing Justice. When paired with a photograph of a crowded street, however, the image begins to resonate with the issue of inclusion in the political process. Thus on one level Smith's work seems to function specifically as a critique of the telling "perfect moment" sought by certain photographic practices; on another level, more profound, her use of montage to qualify and contextualize the discrete elements her works draw together implies the radical
contingency of all photographic meaning. Explor~ng photography's frequent use of captions or other external frames to secure its intended messages, Dara Silverman's work suggests in other ways both how subjective, and how contingent, photographic meaning may be. Story 4 and Story 2 (page 14) are installations of black-and-white photomurals and electric typewriters, in which are inserted sheets of text. These relate the artist's experience of the spaces-a public atrium, an apartment building foyer-depicted in the photomurals. Until they become the subject of Silverman's autobiographical stories, the photographs themselves are uncommunicative; their objective quality provides no clue to the meanings their textual supplements provide. The essential role played by the artist's voice is ironically underscored by the deadpan tone of the narratives, which impersonate a journalistic neutrality.
Silverman's articulation of her personal experience serves also to problematize the hierarchical subject/object relations endemic to traditional documentary. Merging the positions of producer and subject of the work through the text of Story 4, Silverman herself speaks as the "victim" of a case of mistaken identity:
I entered a public atrium carrying a grocery bag stuffed with some clothes I had worn at the gym. I found a chair and sat down to rest. Minutes later I became drowsy and dozed off. I was awakened by a loud clap and a guard telling me that sleeping was not permitted. I straightened up in my chair, placed my bag on my lap and tried to stay awake.
In contrast to McClennan's strategy of recasting traditional documentary representation, but making the same basic point, Silverman's decision not to represent herself visually as subject disdains photography's historical use as physiognomic proof of character, personality, or social "type." Focusing with parodic gravity on a trivial incident, the work documents a misreading, a failure of stereotypical social codes of image and behavior that allows the artist to suggest the gross misrepresentations ultimately constituted by those codes themselves. Further, by recording Silverman's "struggle" to comply with the rules for appropriate behavior in a certain space, Story 4 brings to the fore the role of cultural representation in communicating society's demand that subjects conform to codes of class or gender, or to stereotypical expectations of race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, et cetera.
Shaping their views of the street as public realm, a concern with this role of repre entation motivates the other artists in Social Studies I Public Monuments as well, so that while their work exhibits great variety, their subjects are as interrelated and complementary as their 9
Christian Walker, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1990 installation of 25 gelatin silver prints with pigment and five texts (detail) CourtesyJackson Fine Am, Arlanra, GA Christian Walker, Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1990 installation of 25 gelatin silver prints with pigment and five texts (detail) CourtesyJacksonFine Arcs, Arlanra, GA
formal strategies. ered-"speaking"-electric typewrit-
As does Silverman, Walker em-
• ers effectively recreate an experience ploys text to supplement and, fur- of being "outside" the spaces reprether, complicate his images of life sented in her installations' photomuobserved on the street. Comprising rals. Performing a critique of five groups of photographs, his in- municipal policies chat trade streetstallation Evidence of Things Not
level zoning variances for "public" Seen also includes a separate text amenities, Story 4 reveals how the for every group 8 While each re- space of corporate atriums is in fact counts a fragment of a con versa- privatized, monitored by surveillance tional exchange inflected by racism, cameras and rent-a-cops who restrict only a single voice-not necessar- access on the basis of social signifiers ily Walker's-is quoted, stressing of class. The work therefore reprethe fact chat these social interac-
sents the street as a space where sotions are being reported from the cialization is literally policed. viewpoint of only one of the par-
Like Walker's, Smith's work exticipants. (One text reads: "When
plicicly questions how representations we finally meet, he said, 'I'm sur- of the street function publicly. Both prised, you didn't sound black over
the ghettoization of specific populathe telephone.'" Another reads: tions and their absence from main"The morning after the first night
stream public representation are we spent together he said, 'I can cell suggested in her diptych Chinatown you prefer white boys.'") The texts (page 15), which pairs a severely therefore constitute an acknowl- cropped image of striding but disemedged filter of subjectivity through bodied legs with a still life of objects which viewers are asked co read the
discarded on the street. In NY, NY images. Simultaneously, they are and 4th of July Smith also considers also offered as representations of how the street itself is a privileged types or patterns of social behav- field of visual representations chat ior-each text "covers" five indi-
not only reflect, but reinforce culture vidual photographs but is not (or infrequently, as in the case of "illustrated" by any of them. The guerilla art, critique it). 10 With its ambiguities or even ambivalences
references to drug addiction, Midway consequently engendered are inten-
may be seen as the artist's mordantly tional: in returning some doubt to humorous view of public space as a the texts' ability to "fill in the dizzying array of cultural representablanks" of the images (a function of cions chat one negotiates in some text that documentary has relied i;....
peril. Embodied most prominently in upon since Riis's tract How theOther
Dara Silverman, Story 4, 1991 monuments, memorials, and the Half Lives), Walker questions how installation of photographic mural and typewriter with text, 90x52x48" myriad forms of advertisement, these individual identities are patterned on cultural by strict gender categorizations. Perhaps even representations are publicized also in signage, models. The work also addresses represen-more unsettling are Rush's visions of public architectural programs, the spectacles of pacation's role in identity formation by bringing space as dystopian, a notion strengthened by rade or demonstration, and so on. One of the into view the fact that the mainstream media the Embankment series' poignant allusions to crucial functions of these representations is of constructs a falsified picture of society by sup- landscape tradition. Although the structures course the production of an idea of "the pubpressing certain representations-for example, Rush photographs are vital to distribution sys- lie" itself. Fierce struggles over symbolic conof interracial sexual relationships, or homo- terns, the street is nevertheless pictured as trol of the street attest to the social and political sexuality. 9 Determining to photograph mixed- evacuated, reminding the viewer of how mod- stakes involved here. 11 Photography is obvirace or same-sex couples on the street, then, em architectural forms and urban planning ously instrumental in conveying many of these Walker reorients street photography's ethno- have helped reduce the contemporary public representations, as is wittily demonstrated in graphic practice by producing images that docu- arena to the space of the television screen. Smith's 4th of July. In chis work, which unites ment alternative possibilities for social McClennan and Silverman focus more di- a formal and thematic critique of the issues relations. reedy on the demographics and organization central to Social StudiesI Public Monuments,
The dual project of critiquing and re-imag- of the public space represented by the street. the artist notes the powerful and insidious ing photographic representation of social life For viewers inured to the sight of homeless ways in which cultural representation operates as symbolically represented by the street is people, either on the street or in mainstream on the individual psyche. Peering through camcarried out with similar implications for change representation, McClennan's large, intensely eras and video camcorders, onlookers at chis by Van Velzen and Rush. Van Velzen's Traces colored photographs force the re-recognition parade of nation record the spectacle for home of a Western Civilizationmanipulates a view of chat the physical space of the street is a wholly consumption; standing at the edge of the street, the public space of the subway to represent a inhospitable "home." Insisting that the viewer the viewing subjects are represented asso many largely invisible aspect of the social system imagine a society reorganized to provide hous- photographic places. It is only by examining itself. Playing off the actual character of the ing for all, McClennan's photographs provoke our own relation to cultural representation, subway-a public resource chat one pays to rather than manage anxiety, disclosing the the artist suggests, that we will avoid reproducenter, accepting its regulations and physical figure of the homeless as the embodiment of a ing its blind spots. discomforts-the artist implicitly critiques the perceived threat to established social order. In psychological and social constrictions imposed a related manner, Silverman's audibly pow- So far as it addresses representation's 10
contested relation to truth, the work in Social StudiesI Public Monuments squarely faces its own historical moment. More elliptical is its critical position in relation to art's cultural context. Predictions for photography's revolutionary social potential were scaled back
1. The classic critique of traditional documentary photography is Martha Rosler's "in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography),"originally published in 1981. A revised version of this essay is included in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meanirn;i: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA, and London: M.I.T. Press, 1989). Another excellent discussion of documentary practice and its history is Abigail Solomon-Godeau's "Who is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography," first published in 1986 and reprinted in her book Photography at the Dock· Essays on Photographic History Institutions and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Both of these essays have greatly influenced my thinking here.
2. Photography at the Dock "Introduction," p. xxviii.
3. See "in, around, and afterthoughts," in Bolton, Ib.e Contest of Meaning. Rosier goes on to say that she believes another kind of social documentary can and should be made.
4. Drawing on feminist film theory's analysis of the gaze, we could say that this pleasure yielded by traditional documentary representation would also be available (albeit in a colonized form) to those who fantasize identity or are in complicity with documentary's presumed audience.
5. Granted, it is difficult to envision how to represent something like, for instance, speculative manipulation of the housing supply. Countering a normative use of real estate photos (the sales pitch), Hans Haacke addresses this problem in Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings a Real-Time Social System as of May 1 1971 (1971 ). For discussion of this artwork see Rosalyn Deutsche, "Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate, and the Museum," in Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke· Unfinished Business (New York and Cambridge, MA: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and M.I.T. Press, 1986). Work such as Haacke's
long ago, but the fundamental problem of circulating workespecially "political" workremains. Setting aside the occasional pornography, flagburning, or sacrilege contro11ersy, with its achievement of aesthetic status photography has won the sustained attention of only a small audience, a "public" that is otten charged with cultural elitism. Shows like Social StudiesI Public Monuments exhibit irrepressible tensions. How to minimize or subvert the aestheticization conferred by the institutional frames (including curating, criticism, and journal publishing) that render art visible? How to avoid recuperation within the cultural system that politicized art attempts to critique? The hope is that these tensions are productive. This photography promotes a critical spectatorship that will extend beyond art to cultural representation at large.
Many thanksto SarahM. Lowe, Lori Minnite, and, especially, Martha Buskirk, for their help with this essay.
-Virginia Rutledge, 1993
(and Martha Rosler's, notably) serves as an important model for several of the artists included in Social Studies I Public Monuments.
6. Capitalizing on growing concern with global issues, many advertisers lately have been massaging the selfimage of the socially progressive. Exceptional among these companies is the Body Shop, whose corporate policies are designed to further environmental and social goals as well as generate profit. Nevertheless, the Body Shop's ads can be as questionable as Benetton's on representational grounds. An example is the "TRADE NOT AID" ad, which appeared in Body Shop store windows early in 1993. Here the "thumbsup" gesture made by a picturesquely painted Kayapo Indian signs the one-way "exchange" of culture that is forcing the Kayapo to industrialize in order to "preserve" their lifestyle, which is threatened by destruction of the Brazilian rainforest.
7. Recent American history provides a notorious example of the power of captions and contextual frames. Consider the image of the 1991 beating of Rodney King recorded on hand-held videocamera, a document of life on the streets of Los Angeles which seemed initially to possess a self-evident meaning: police brutality. Yet the image of King subdued was provided with quite different meanings following its decontextualization through the mainstream media (especially television, where violence of many degrees and kinds, both real and simulated, is staple broadcast fare) and its simultaneous recontextualization through the dominant cultural discourse of racism.
8. The title of Walker's work additionally qualifies its meaning by referring to a text, James Baldwin's Ib_e Evidence of Things Not Seen· An Essay /New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985).
9. Although popular Hollywood films like the 1992 Ib_e Bodyguard evince great fascination with the prospect of (heterosexual) interracial love, these relationships still
E.E. Smith, Midway, 1991, 38x24", guff1 bichromate on paper
seem to pose a serious threat to dominant culture. While the romance of the characters acted by AfricanAmerican Whitney Houston and Caucasian Kevin Costner is played for big box-office, no committed relationship between them will be countenanced. The murderously sharp sword that is the central prop of a fraught and unintentionally hilarious exchange between this contemporary Tristan and Isolde may in fact be taken as the film's emblem.
10. Guerilla street art is typically produced anonymously and/or collectively, and from a strongly politicized, oppositional position. Feminist issues and the AIDS crisis are the subject of much of this work, which appears most frequently in the forms of posters and peel-off stickers. These are often applied to preexisting public representations, especially ads and "public service" messages, in order to unmask or subvert their endorsement of class, race, or gender bias, homophobia, or other cultural "values." Street art per se is beyond the scope of this essay, but two publications which document works produced by AIDS activists are Douglas Crimp's AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990) and Public Art Issues. Robert Knafo, ed. (New York: Public Art Fund, Inc., 1992).
11. These struggles take as many forms as there are representations, whether we are talking about displays of advertising, public art, the zoning of "red light" districts, or maintenance of neighborhood landscaping. When any representation is officially sanctioned or disseminated through the mass media, the social ante is upped substantially, and representation can become a fulcrum for political action. Examples are the contest over media coverage that occurs whenever pro-and anti-choice demonstrators meet, or the controversy surrounding the granting of permits for New York City's St. Patrick's Day parade, whose traditional sponsors continue to exclude gay and lesbian Irish who have petitioned to march since 1990.
Hanneke Van Velzen, Traces of a Western Civilitation 1990, (derail) sepia toned gelatin prints, gelatin silver prints, wood
