Photography Quarterly #65

This publication appears on the occasion of the 1995 program The Cultured Tourist, organized by the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY. The photography exhibition, curated by Leslie Tonkonow, is accompanii,d by a video exhibit curated by Ardele Lister.

MISSION: The Center for Photography at Woodstock provides an artistic home for contemporary photographers with programs in education, exhibition, publication, fellowships, and services which create access to professional workspace, nourishing responses, and new audiences. The Center acknowledgessupport from the New YorkState Councilon the Arts, the NYSCA Electronic Media & Film Program,the National Endowment for the Ans, and ExperimentalTelevisionCenter Ltd. Electronic and FilmAns.

STAFF: Executive Director, Colleen Kenyon; Associate Director, Kathleen Kenyon; Assistant Director, Lawrence P.Lewis; Program Assistant, Kate Menconeri. BOARD OF DIRECTORS: Sheva Fruitman, David Hall, Rollin Hill, Kenro lzu, Colleen Kenyon, Arie Kopelman, Rebecca E. Lawton, Ellen Levy-President, James Luciana, Joan Mack, Tanya Marcuse, Kitty McCullough, Elliott Meisel, Marc Miller, Jose Picayo, Lilo Raymond, Ken Shung, Alan Siegel. ADVISORY BOARD: Norton Batkin, Ellen Carey, Philip Cavanaugh, Susan Ferris, Cheryl Finley, Julie Galant & Martin Bondell, Howard Greenberg-Founder, Sue Hartshorn, Bill Hunt, Greg Kandel, Peter Kenner, Peter MacGill, Ann Morse, Sandra S. Phillips, J. Randall Plummer, Ernestine W. Ruben, Kathy Rutten berg, Julie Saul, Susana Torruella-Leval. ARTS ADMINISTRATION INTERNS: David Karp, Lorin Loffredo, Kelly Rebeiro. WORKSHOP ON-SITE MANAGER: Fawn Potash. INTERNS: Judi Esmond, Vanessa Holtgrewe, Steven West.

PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly#65, Vol. 16 No. 4, lSSN 0890 4639. Copyright© 1995 the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498. TEL: (914) 679-9957. FAX: (914) 6796337. Email: CPWphoto.@aol.com. All photographs and texts reproduced in this Quarterly 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 written 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., NYC. Editing and design by Kathleen Kenyon. Assistant Editor: Kate Menconeri. Text proofreading by Joan Munkacsi. Copy editing by Teri Roiger. Composition by Digital Design Studio, Kingston, NY. The PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly is distributed by Bernhard DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 071 IO; Desert Moon Periodicals, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Fine Print Distributors, Inc., Austin, Texas.

SUBSCRIBE: To receive the PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly four times a year, become a Subscribing Member. U.S.A. $25 annual fee/ Canada & Mexico $40 / International $45. An index of back issues is available-free-upon request. Memberships are tax deductible to the extent of the law. The Center is a 50J(c)(3) charity.

CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS

February24 - March 3 / , / 996

FAMILIAR RELATIONS curated by Larry Fink. An exhibition examining visions and experiences of family relations: affinity, ancestry, class, race, intimacy, fellowship, and the home. This show will travel to England.

SOLO: GAY LEONHARDT. A painter and collage artist, Leonhart shows computer generated images.

FRONT COVER: © 1989 Tim Maul, Castle Hotel, Dublin, Cibachrome print

ot TJontent.s

the cultured tourist max becher & andrea robbins / tseng kwong chi / jeffrey kane / tim maul / vik muniz / andrei roiter / beat streuli / anne turyn

GYnttoauction

As I read the catalog essays, a sentence flashed across my mind.

Tournev to the Center of the Earth. " 0

A movie I'd seen as a child was my memory of travel.

Eight years old watching: floods, rock avalanches, smoke, heat, salt, phosphorescent pools, darkness, luminous algae, wind, giant mushrooms, flesh-eating dinosaurs, magnetic forces snatching away gold, storms, an underworld ocean, a sunken city, a volcanic chimney, a red reptile, landslides, explosions, earthquakes, lava

"I am the owner of this domain. "

"You are trespassers here."

Now at forty-four (and renting a video) the film still holds fascination.

New destinations are foreign, frightening, and enlightening.

A happy ending. The expedition is rescued.

Travelers are celebrated; "the spirit of man {woman} cannot be stopped. "

[Journey to the Center of the Earth, A color film of Jules Verne's story starring fames Mason, Pat Boone, Arlene Dahl© 1959, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.]

t: Andrea Robbins & Max Becher, Colonial Remains, Luthem Church, Liideritz, 1994, Ektacolor print, 18x23"

(Courtesy Basilica Fine Arts, NYC)

b: Vic Muniz, Memory Renderings, 1995 line offset on card stock, 4x6"

Yi;he ?JuLtureB C°(;Jouri.st leslie tonkonow

@II ~enter 6occi}Jlwtoqrapliyat OOoo?Jstock(@lve,vd}!Jork)exhibition,(S)ctober - :;lJecember1995.~1aator: .;/:die qj;o11kono1v I @llrtistJ:@4'tax e7Jecliei & @1/n?Jcead/lobbim, Y!;muJ@!Xivonlj~!ti, ci}e66rey@'}{.ane,Y!;im@lUaul,GJJ-;k@4'tuni;z,@/ln?JreiGfJ?oiter,e7Jeat @)lreuli,@/LnnfY!;ut11n.

"The

personal appropriation

of cliches

is a condition for the spread of cultural tourism." - Serge Daney 0 >

Before the end of the last century making photographs was an activity practiced by professionals, scientists, and wealthy amateurs able to indulge in an expensive and timeconsuming hobby. Photographic explorers such as the Bisson Freres from France; Frances Frith and Samuel Bourne from Britain; and William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Carlton Watkins in the United States lugged view cameras, enormous glass plates, and all manner of apparatus for developing and printing photographs (as well as for eating and sleeping) to Mont Blanc, the Rocky Mountains, the Egyptian desert, and the farthest corners of India and Asia, producing visual records at once fantastic and newly fathomable. That which previously could have only been imagined from diaristic writings or romantic notations in pencil and paint was now made real.

While potentially able to effect understanding of cultural differences, the photograph also emphasized the gap between the familiar and the other; it became a fetish in the contemplation of the exotic and was often used in the service of colonialism. Photographs were trophies and souvenirs. The nineteenth-century "grand tour," for example, was memorialized in elaborate albums that elite travelers might purchase upon completing a journey. These albums contained prints of general interest, including such architectural wonders and monuments as the Pyramids, the Sphinx, or classical ruins, reminders of both the recent and ancient past, which were ennobling by association.

Two technological advances in photography during the 1880s-the invention of the handheld, self-loading camera and the industrialization of film processing and printing-radically changed the function of the medium in society by allowing almost anyone to make pictures. At roughly the same time, the invention of the combustion engine rendered travel affordable for the middle and working classes, and it became a desirable pastime for the newfound leisure that was also a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.

The birth of photography in the mid-nineteenth century not only anticipated the emergence of tourism as a widespread social practice but also enabled its existence as an economic force throughout the world. The power of the photographic image to ignite desire was significant in this development, but it was also indebted to the increasingly popular practice of photography, which engendered ritualistic behaviors (such as lining up for group pictures) that enforced the cohesion of the nuclear family while producing documentary evidence of that body within society. Taking photographs, usually by the breadwinner/father (although disseminated throughout the extended family by the mother), was therefore a positively valued activity that, while approximating work, could be performed while not working. Susan Sontag has commented that: "Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. "(2)

If the most basic social function of photography in the last one hundred years has been to preserve important moments of family life, this virtually universal participation in imagemaking, which starts at birth, would naturally have an effect on artists for whom producing images is a vocation. Many contemporary artists acknowledge their use of photography

Bisson Freres, Le Mont Blanc 1861, albumen print, 9'/, xl5 1/," (Courtesy ZabriskieGallery, NYC)

within its traditional practice as a social convention. @!) e 66i e y @fl{,an e, for example, makes portraits of real tourists on vacation which remind us of the ritualistic behavior associated with amateur photography. @// n n e u i 1;fn deconstructs the evidentiary power of vernacular photographs in a series of deliberately staged tourist "snapshots" from an imagined, apocalyptic future.

Don DeLillo's observations on tourism remind me of two artists who live and work in transit, @/2 n fJ re i <::fl? o i t e r and @!7J e a t @5t r e u t i.

''I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agree(Jble about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You 're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought . There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event. •~3)

Roiter is Russian but lives in Amsterdam and New York. Streuli is Swiss but maintains a permanent home in Di.isseldorf and temporary ones in New York. While tourism is the operative metaphor for Roiter in both his life and art, Streuli is a kind of postmodern flaneur, a Baudelairean "perfect idler and passionate observer," for whom it is "an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng . "(/4)

I think of both as artist/nomads, grandsons of the postwar intellectual adrift in the beatnik pursuit of authenticity; the heirs of Sartre, Camus, and the rootless anomie expressed in Wim Wenders films of the 1970s, minus the angst and alienation. Both artists serve up fragments of global culture in an increasingly homogenized world.

In the tradition of the traveler who reports what he sees, Roiter's images are filtered through language-his own reductivist vocabulary derived from geometric forms: A circle becomes a head, a globe, a potato, an eye, all signifying "obscure knowledge"; a square is a window, a flag, a camera, luggage, referents of the "obscure image"; the triangle, a pyramid, symbolizes a "tourist's tent," fire, or mountains, meaning "hierarchy, concentration."C 5l

In 1988 Roiter left Russia for the first time to spend three months in Brussels. When he returned to Moscow, he experienced a kind of reverse culture shock, which he describes as having revealed "a distant view of my own culture. "l 6l He has been traveling ever since, collecting images like souvenirs of his own life. Andrei Roiter's tourist persona abnegates the self-deprecation in distinguishing between one who tours, a mindless site-seer, and one who travels, the analytical sight-seer.

Streuli's works are about the process of seeing as one moves through the flux of urban life. His photographs, in opposition to the purposeful gaze of "the decisive moment," articulate the random glance. They are public art-dislocated visions of street life in anonymous international cities, enlarged to almost cinematic scale. He often contains them in oversized Plexiglas boxes that reflect light and the viewer's self-image like storefront windows. Streuli's is an externalized art of constructed banalities. It is about being everywhere but nowhere in particular.

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption ... isfundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. "m --Guy Debord

By reducing an image to an abstraction (shadows and lines on a flat surface), the photograph intellectualizes experience, psychologically distancing the viewer: Seeing becomes reading. Desire is incited through depiction as well as omission. (Barthes talks about this in relation to pornography.) I try to imagine going to a place that I have not already seen in pictures. Instead of desiring to see because of photographs, I want to see what has never been photographed. I want to be astonished by the unphotographable.

While the hierarchy of "acceptable" subjects in art is constantly changing, the avant-garde imperative has rendered necessary that which society has always deemed intolerable. Because of photography and its ability to masquerade as truth, increasingly extreme visualizations of the horrific and the uncanny become acceptable, thereby limiting the ability and perhaps the need for art to be shocking or offensive. Perhaps, now, to truly astonish is to examine that which one sees every day but never bothers to look at. i m @JUau I, who for the last twenty years has created an art of the unnoticed, taking photographs of "the things between the things we see," does exactly this. He exemplifies in the inverse what Pierre Bourdieu has called "the touristic attitude, "in which one escapes "one's inattentive familiarity with the everyday world, an undifferentiated background against which the forms

b:

eJ try to imaf!ine f!Oinf! to a place that eJ have not alrea'8y seen in pictures.

t: Jeffrey Kane, The Four Member Family in the Celestial Room in Salt Lake City, Utah, I985, gelatin silver print, 9x9 11

Anne Turyn, Untitled, Snapshotsfrom the FuturePassed, I 988, Ektacolor print, l 4x 18"

momentarily separated from every day preoccupations stand out. From that moment on, everything becomes a source of astonishment. "(8)

The deliberate banality of Tim Maui's pictures of flat objects and undistinguished places, a kind of visual equivalent of white noise, makes the viewer aware of the profundity of that which is "uninteresting." It recalls James Coleman's isolation of utterances (urns and uhs) between spoken words in the recordings that accompany his slide projections.

The title for this exhibition comes from an autobiographical short sto1y that Tim Maul wrote a few years ago that later formed the premise for an eponymous installation piece. In the story (as in fact), a "cultured tourist" (Maul) visits a Schwitters exhibition in a New York gallery. On a scrap pasted into one of the collages, he notices a nearby address and is inexplicably compelled to search it out. Although the building has been torn clown and the street number no longer exists, he locates the spot and takes a picture. The sto1y, as Maul describes it, is about someone at loose ends who finds his destination.

Tim Maul recently told me that he takes photographs of places in order to forget them. This brings to mind a quotation from Kafka in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida: "Wephotograph things in order to drive them from our minds. "(9l

Once an image has been "taken," it can be tossed away, its regenerative energy dispelled. Detachment (de-attachment) occurs. Many of Tim Maui's images are made during trips-a state of non-belonging, either moving toward or away from his destination. While he may adopt the attitude of the "cultured tourist" in his project, his product is the opposite of the tourist photo. Tourists take pictures of places to prove that they were there-to own the experience of place. Tim Maul disowns it. He uses his camera to exorcise the particularity of a place. Photography carries him (and by extension, the viewer) into a neutral zone in which the horizontal stripes on the bedspread in a Parisian hotel room become more photographable than the complex web of the Eiffel Tower.

The photograph provides an excuse for forgetting. Emotions evoked by a picture in the mind's eye can change if a photograph exists. Conversely, mental images of photographs can persist in memory concordant with fact. Were we really there, or do we just remember having seen this place in a picture? In contemporary American culture, which supports the constant manipulation of information through the media, we have a syndrome dedicated to false memory. Truth has become a relative value. In Cameralucida, Roland Barthes writes: "The photograph does not call up the past. . . . The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what J see has indeed existed. »ooi

Barthes's comments seem archaic in light of the current truth crisis in documentary photography. @/2 n fJ i ea el? ob bins and @41/.ax <::f)J e ch e i examine the interrelationships of photography, memory, and history in their collaborative practice. Their work is informed by an interest in the relationship of tourism to colonial history and related issues such as displacement, imperialism, genocide, and economic oppression. Within those interstices they have explored the notion of "transportation of place" (how one place assumes the character of another based on the imposition of geographic memory) in series of photographs made in locations such as Luderitz, Namibia (a town in Southern Africa that retains the aesthetics of its nineteenth-century German colonizers) and Holland, Michigan (founded by Dutch settlers in the last centllly, now exploiting that heritage commercially through the importation of windmills, tulips, etc.).

Benjamin Buchloh posits Robbins and Becher's project outside of the liberal tradition of "concerned" social documentary photography as well as the impassive archive of their generational predecessors-a1tists working through the historical aegis of Neue Sachlichkeit photography, including Bernd and Hilla Becher (Max Becher's parents) and their students, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky, among others. He writes: "Their work seems to specifically pose the question concerning the 'limits' of historical representation: the peculiar logic of admission and repression that had governed the work of the previous generations and the complicated relationship between selective disavowal and memory in photography in general. "0 n

This can be seen most clearly in a recent series of photographs made at the site of the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. For Robbins and Becher, Dachau (erected as a prototypical camp) represents the paradigmatic inversion of colonialism, the occupants having been removed from their homes, stripped of all outward manifestations of cultural and 6

JI!)achau, sanitize'a 6oi its cuiient visitin9 populace, symbolizes the con6lict 06 9eo9iaphic memory.

t: Ttm Maul, Bed, Hotel, Paris, I 992 Cibachrome print, 191/, x I 2 1/4''

6: Andrea Robbins & Max Becher, Execution Range and Blood Ditch, Dachau, 1994, Ektacolor print, 18x23" (Courtesy of BasilicaFine Am, NYC)

spiritual memory and history, and transported to a location that was constructed to exist ••outside of society. Their decision to work there was made after lengthy discussions, several years after their first visit. They decided to photograph the camp in color in bright sunlight, not only to avoid the cliched emotional pallor of black-and-white, but to emphasize the fact that their photographs are about Dachau today, evidencing not so much what happened there but how those in the present choose to deal with the weight of the past.

The subjects of many pictorial representations of concentration camps are the prisoners themselves, depicted by their very absence. The subject of Robbins and -Be~her's pictures of Dachau is the process whereby history has been assimilated through sublimation, repression, and revisionism. They show us the camp as it now exists-a k'ind of cemetery of the human spirit, a phantom zone that signifies historical blight but survives as a tourist location, attracting curiosity-seekers as well as students, pilgrims, and penitents.

Many German cities bear the erasures of historical memory, faint traces of swastikas still visible on the facades of some older public buildings. In these photographs of Dachau one is struck by the antiseptic quality of the buildings and surrounding landscape. The realization that bodies once dangled from the same trees or that a flower bed has filled a ditch once used to collect the blood and bodies of prisoners who were lined up and shot against a barbed-wire fence, now obscured by lush shrubbery, is chilling. Dachau, sanitized for its current visiting populace, symbolizes the conflict of geographic memory.

The tourist industry is the capitalization of cultural memory. The creation of tourist sites, based on historical appropriations (e.g., Colonial Williamsburg, Mystic Seaport, etc.) reinforces a nostalgic attachment to common history. Dean MacCannell has suggested that tourism is an attempt to "discover or reconstruct a cultural heritage or a social identity .... Sightseeing is a 1'itualpe,formed to the differentiations of society. "02 >

In photographic self-portraits made from 1979 until his premature death in 1990, Cus P n 'l @7{,1v on ff 9fJ /1 i analyzes the semiotics of the touristic ritual in relation to personal, cultural, and socio-political identity. These self-documented performances recall Michel Foucault's notion of the subject as object, wherein "the subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. Ibis process objectivizes him. '~13>As both subject and object, Tseng's surrogate self, a kind of Chinese Everyman, costumed in the uniform of the Cultural Revolution, is dissociated from the European and American sites where he appears. In the photographs there is always a struggle for primacy between persona and place, creating an intellectual tension that carries his work beyond irony or the camp celebration of a vernacular tradition. The series as a whole is a serious nod at the history of the medium from the nineteenth-century tradition of the intrepid traveler/explorer to postmodern critique.

In the recent shift to a more socially engaged art, photography becomes the logical medium for exploring issues of cultural identity and its relation to the processes wherein information is created and received. Each of the artists in this exhibition exposes the socially driven uses of photography as practiced at its end-game stage; a time when: "Tbe crisis of photographic truth-claims culminates currently in the realization that with the emergence of digital and electronic image production, even the last residual confidence in photography's access to tbe 'real' bus vanished. "0 •l

Advanced computer technology and the "information superhighway" have already rendered newspaper "photographs" obsolete, so it is easy to anticipate the day when tourist shots will consist of electronic pulses transmitted via computer to TV monitors at home. In an essay entitled Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia, John Frow discusses the various functions of photographic images in sustaining the touristic experience of the real, noting that: "Two related systems of representation-the postcard and the souvenir-complement photography's function of authentication. '~1s>

Last summer I traveled to the Pacific orthwest for the first time. Driving from Seattle to Vancouver, via the Olympic Peninsula, the snow-covered crest of Mount Baker, looming out of the distant mists, remained in view almost to the Canadian border. On the way back to Seattle, I decided to detour to the summit of the mountain. I stopped to look at a glacial pool at the foot of one of the smaller white-capped peaks. The sun was brilliant in the cloudless sky, and the mountain was reflected perfectly in the glassy stillness of the water. My immediate impression was of the generic glossiness of Technicolor-it looked just like a postcard, the sublimity of nature giving way to Hyperreality. Because of photography it was impossible for it not to.

OOeie me ieatty theie oi Bo me tust iemembei havinlj seen this place zn a pictuie?

t: Beat Streuli, Untitled, (New York I 991/93 ), gelatin silver print in plexiglas, 54x83"

b: Tseng Kwong Chi, New York, New York (Statue ofLiberty), 1979, gelatin silver print, 36x36" (Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, NYC)

In his project entitled Memory Renderings, i k @Jiu n i:,; not only analyzes the phenomenology of the postcard but also examines how certain places become part of the collective imagination through their prior existence as photographic images.

Working from memory, Muniz makes small drawings of famous tourist sites-the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, and the Pyramids of Egypt-that he knows principally from having seen them in books or in the media. Photographing the drawings slightly out of focus in order to lessen the evidence of his own hand, he produces a set of picture postcards to be displayed in a standard commercial rack. By reproducing sites that already exist as mnemonic cliches, Muniz reminds us of the visual stereotypes that influence the way we perceive and experience the world, speaking to the preconceptions that account for the element of disappointment in many touristic encounters.

The photographic postcard signifies a complex network of public and private meanings. It is a published and therefore public image in which the private vision of the photographer is used by the tourist to validate his own privileged status by communicating private messages in public through the mail ("Wish you were here"). Photographic postcards, which have been distributed commercially in large numbers (at first as actual photographic prints on postcard stock) since the turn of the century, objectify experience on a grand scale. In addition to serving as vehicles of communication, they are, as souvenirs, catalysts for group and individual memory. The multiple-image postcard fold-out can be seen as the modern version of the nineteenth-century travel album. The World-Wide Web, transmitting digital "snapshots" instantly from laptop to laptop via the Internet, can be seen as the postmodern version of the postcard.

Rosalind Krauss has written about how the first photographs made by travelers became art through a revisionist process of historical theory.° 6l Imagine a future in which the last photographs will be made by artists, traveling within the discursive spaces of theory and memory.

- © 1995 Leslie Tonkonow

c!!f7ootnotes

1. "Falling out of Love," Sight and Sound, vol. 2, no. 3 (London, July, 1992)

2. "Plato's Cave," On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: 1973).

3. 7be Names (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1982).

4. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," Selected Writings on Art and Artists, ed. P. E. Charvet, 1972.

5. Joshua Deeter and Andrei Roiter, An Inside-Out Life: 7be Conversation as Fiction (Middletown, CT: Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, 1995).

6. Ibid.

7. 7be Society of Spectacle.

8. Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside, 3rd. ed., (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

9. Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981).

10. Ibid.

11. "The Architectural Uncanny in the Photographs of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher," in Andrea Robbins and Max Becher (Kortrijk, Belgium: The Kanaai Art Foundation, 1994).

12. 7be Tourist: A New 7beory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1989).

13. "The Subject and Power," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York & Boston: The New Museum/Godine, 1984).

14. Benjamin Buchioh, op. cit.

15. October 57, Summer, 1991 (Cambridge and London: MIT Press).

16. "Photography's Discursive Spaces," in 7be Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge & London: The MIT Press, 1985).

,;./!eslie '{'i;onkonom currently is ::;!Jirector oj the e))aula 7;}ooper J#atiery anB the jormer 2Jirector oj 2abriskie J#atiery both in @l'Jem J}-ork 7;}ity. '{'i;onkonom is a mriter anB inBepenBent curator. @!}ter exhibition @!Uultiple @xposure: y';;he .f}roup p'7Jortrait in p'7Jhoto'#rapli/j, orf/anizeB jor e}nBepenBent 7;},uators, e}nc., is tourin9 in the oU.g. anB 7;}anaBa. e))revious curatorial mork inciuBes shoms at dl?,eal @/!;rt OOays, @!}tartjorB, 'T~onnecticut, y';;he C§lements: @'}ex, p7?01itics, @!Uone/j anB d/?,elitjion, anB p7?ublic Sl;iscourse. '{'i;onkonom has authoreB articles zn rz/)ournal ot J(lontemporary @!/;rt anB JO@!Ua'#a:,;ine.

e}Jhoto{jt:aphic po.stcaifJ.s ... obiecti'/Jy experience on a {jtanfJ .scaLe.

t: Vik Muniz, Memory Renderings, 1995, line offset on card stock, 6x4 11

b: Andrei Roiter, from Ten Color Snapshots, 1994, Ektacolor print, 6x4"

<y;;iaveter ingrid schaffner

@/!bout tivo years a90, GJrofJ.e aton9 with my Dau9lzter anfJ. lier frienfJ. to the coast anfJ. we sam tourists. C[i;lzere's not muclt GJcan say about tl1em. C[;;l,ey aU iookefJ. iDenticai. -Carolyne Chute, 7beNew YorkTimesOp-Ed page, August 25, 1995.

Having just touched down at Orly outside Paris, Audrey Hepburn turns to h~r companions in the movie Funny Face to voice a modern form of anxiety, which might be called Fear of Tourism. "Do we look like those people who run around gaping all day?" she asks. No, her companions assure her-"Can't anyone believe we're here to work?''---they do not. But when the alleged business travelers bump into one other on top of the Eiffel Tower, the embarrassing secret is out: "We're simply tourists." They confess to the dilemma of all travelers who dread being identified with an invasive class of people Henry James once described as "vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. "

The artists in the exhibition The Cultured Tourist show no such signs of snobbery. They declare their status with reverent still-lifes of motel rooms and monumental portraits of anonymous crowds-both the special havens of the tourist in motion. The stereotype of photographers may call for someone dressed in safari-like khakis with a multi-pocketed vest and loads of equipment draped around their neck. But these photographers seem more apt to be sporting souvenir tshirts and carrying small Instamatics. Isn't there something wrong with thispicture? Aren't all photographers travelers: artists whose vision sets them apart from the tourist masses? On second thought, isn't a camera the tourist's most indispensable accessory? Clearly, the implications of the artist-astourist are more far-reaching and intricate than might at first be assumed-upsetting standards as basic as temperature.

Within Le Systeme des Objets, Jean Baudrillard included a measure by which to gauge the temperature of things. According to this thermometer, the photographs in this exhibition register on the chilly end of the spectrum. Such a reading may seem perfectly in tune with the nature of their medium: a mechanical mode of producing images that is quintessentially modern, or cold. On the other hand, given that their ostensible subject is travel, the fact that these photographs neither

adventure seems antithetical to their underlying content. This coolness takes on an added degree of strangeness, considering the fact that since its infancy the art of photography has been devoted to the activity of travel, so that in a historic sense these photographs are as curious as tales of childhood told without any hint of nostalgia.

Y!;he c£J)hotorp;aphec as Y!;caveLec

The early masterpieces of a new medium-John Thomson's photographs of the Far Eastern Orient, Maxime Du Camp's of Egypt, and Samuel Bourne's of India-portray the first photographers as travelers. These men humped cumbersome and delicate equipment on difficult journeys to little-known lands, sometimes risking their lives to capture images that had never before been taken as photographs. For the first pictures of the temple ruins of Cambodia Thomson made a treacherous journey, much of it on elephant-back, through the Siamese jungle, where he contracted and barely survived malaria. Once at the ruins, an infant technology required his daily presence in an infernally hot, dark tent in order to prepare glass plates by submitting them to a series of chemical ablutions. Like his colleagues in other parts of the world, who were also battling physical discomforts and extremes in heat, wind, and dust, Thomson was a combination hardy traveler/keen explorer/inventive scientist/enlightened artist: in short, a specimen photographer.

cast nor bask in the warm glow of

Reinforcing this image on the receiving end was the passive recipient of the photographer's work, the Armchair Traveler. For a minimum investment in an album of commercially reproduced images, stereograph cards, or lantern slides, this person could experience travel without any more hardsh)ps than might be occasioned by a lumpy pillow or draft in the room. But these travelers were no couch potatoes. In exchange for their "intelligent and appreciative attention, "the Keystone View Company promised viewers that they too could "enjoy the thoughts, sensations and emotions of the traveler." 0 J Through careful study of the company's mass-produced pictures of the world's wonders, they might even: rf!i}Jecomethe YflraveLefJ @411.an I 'C;he e}nteltii;;ent dl<ra!Jer I 'C;lze Wn!Jerstan!Jinf! ~istener I 'C;he e}nterestinf! @Speaker.

This challenge to adventure, with its emphasis on education and self-improvement, finds its origin in the genesis of all modern travel, the Grand Tour. During the eighteenth century, when it was unusual for people outside the aristocracy to embark on a journey for reasons other than work, an extended tour of the continent was requisite to the wealthy man's education_(Z)According to custom, at about age seventeen the young man would set out in the tow of a tutor, whose job it was to teach his client something of culture. A second version of the tour would be undertaken by the gentleman some years later, this time alone, with the aim of learning something about life. (For this purpose, phrase-books instructing gentlemen on how to cruise for sex in foreign lands were quite popular.) When he reached twenty-one, it was time to return home, get married, and settle down. However, by the nineteenth century, with increasingly industrialized forms of transportation and a burgeoning bourgeoisie, who possessed both the time and money to climb on board, the exclusive nature of the Grand Tour changed rapidly.

y;;he e})hotor;Jt:aphei as y;;ouli.st

Paving the way for the first tourist masses were photographers, who found an ideal subject in the Grand Tour. An audience (and potential market) had already been captured by such Romantic poets and writers as Lord Byron. (In 1809 Byron, who dubbed himself a "Levant Lunatic," was admired by a fellow traveler in the Mediterranean, "inhaling, as it were, poetical sympathy from the gloomy rocks. "<3J These artists had as good as framed the pictures of the places that tourists would seek out as destinations in their travels. The photographer merely had to go and take the picture.

But it wasn't always easy to find what people expected to see. The image of the Orient conjured in literature and painting, for example, demanded seraglios and slave-markets packed with scantily clad European-style beauties. But the photographers who traveled in search of these subjects found that they were far more readily constructed in the studio, with pillows, feathers, and professional models, than documented in the streets and bazaars of North African cities. On the Continent the photographer faced a somewhat different set of expectations. Inspired by Edmund Burke's famous treatise on the sublime, people had been traveling to the Alps since the mid-eighteenth century in order to experience it. The thriving tourist industry that had fast taken hold there also made for a less-than-picturesque spectacle of hotels, restaurants, spas, scenic outlooks, and trams, to say nothing of the attendant human traffic. Here, it was the photographer's job to crop evidence of tourism out of the picture.

These are the images-mass-produced and widely disseminated-that tourists traveled to see and, later, technology permitting, reproduce in their own vacation snapshots. As the first wave of camera-clutching travelers, the first photographers might also be considered the original tourists. Perhaps, then, it comes as no coincidence that the word "tourist" gained its modern meaning in near parallel to the early history of photography. Up through the eighteenth century the words

c;}t mas the photO(jlaphei's zob to crnp evi'iJ.ence ov tourism out ov the picture.

THE KEYSTONE TRAVEL SYSTEM Brings the World to Your Home

"tourist" and "traveler" were synonymous with one another. But as the Grand Tour, fueled by photography, developed into a popular escapade, the traveler and the tourist parted ways, leaving a gulch of snobbery in between.

@Pte !);!) not tlzinlc of lzimsetf as a t0t1rist; lze mas a tz:ave//e,:. -Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, 1949

While travelers journey alone, tourists move en masse. They march from hotel to cathedral, from shop to spa, from railway station to scenic spot, rarely looking up from their guide books, never straying from the beaten path nor tarrying along the way. Always susceptible to side trips, backtracking, or sudden stopovers, the traveler's journey expresses freedom and independence. It takes time-years, maybe a lifetime-to experience. In a forward-rushing

Keystone View Company, Meadville, Pennsylvania, promotional literature, ca. 1920, l lx8 1/2", Keystone-Mast Collection. (Courtesy CollectionCalifornia Museum of Phowgraphy,Universityof California, Riverside)

.- economy of motion, the tourist's itinerary makes spurious stops at preplanned destinations. To deliver the tourist back home within the week or month, the itinerary cannot allow for the whims, discoveries, and chance encounters that travelers go out of their way to accommodate. And though tourists might fancy themselves travelers, true travelers take pains to avoid any association with tourists. "Tbe tourist, " Evelyn Waugh wrote, "is the other fellow."

@)impty Y!;ourists

That, in any case, is how the traveler sees it. But in keeping with new standaKls of travel, it is the tourist who seems best equipped to navigate the mediated landscapes of today's worlds of signs. In these realms, the traveler appears suddenly antiquated, elitist: an old colonial whose trophies are as moth-eaten as they are unimpressive. Likewise, the definition of tourist as the traveler's nemesis seems equally inadequate. The works in this exhibition offer contemporary insights into the identity of the tourist, backing tourism, not travel, as an ideal cultural practice.

Focusing on viewers-as opposed to the view-Tseng Kwong Chi and Jeffrey Kane take pictures of tourists, which in the case of the former also happen to be self-portraits. For several years Kwong Chi performed a postmodern version of the Long March. Dressed in a Mao suit and wearing reflective sunglasses-which blind his eyes from view-the artist traveled throughout Europe and the United States. Taking pictures of himself at one tourist site after another, Kwong Chi stands out as spectacularly alien as John Thomson in China must have a century ago. The tension between site and see-er in these photographs exaggerates to a ridiculous, almost poignant, degree the impossibility of what all travelers seek-interaction with the foreign. Kwong Chi makes conspicuous what all travelers carry, and tourists cling to--an index of culture, of language and customs, which throws all others cultures into relief, and impossibly out of reach.

As he travels from the Eiffel Tower to the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, the methodical diligence of Kwong Chi's project suggests what labor tourism can be. When faced with the chores of achieving one's destination, the holiday turns out to be no vacation. It's work battling ticket lines, finding a place on the bus, viewing the Mona Lisa, getting something to eat, making a schedule of carefully planned stops, and, most importantly, getting that perfect picture.

Today one would no sooner go on holiday without a camera than an eighteenthcentury traveler would undertake his first Grand Tour without a tutor. (In the earlier days of photography, when the camera was a cumbersome, expensive piece of equipment, the opposite was true. The average person would be as apt to lug one on vacation as take an x-ray machine.) At the same time that cameras became smaller and cheaper, so did travel become more affordable and accessible. Together the two became ubiquitous in modern life, spawning a mutual love affair to which Jeffrey Kane, a vacation-voyeur, makes himself privy. Kane haunts tourist sites, waiting for groups to form and start making their vacation snapshots. This is the artist's photo opportunity. He steps in and offers to perform the favor of taking a picture with their camera in exchange for being allowed to take their picture-the same picture-with his. The apparent ease with which tourists submit to Kane's seemingly intimate proposition suggests how ingrained the routines of posing and picture-taking are to the vacation experience.

In contrast to Kane's posed subjects are the figures who drift into range of Beat Streuli's camera. His pictures are grainy, purposely casual. They epitomize the point-and-shoot technique of amateur photography, and in so doing, capture the tourist gaze. As in Kwong Chi's pictures, it's an image of alienation, but one that seeks and finds empathy in the profound anonymity of the crowd. Susan Sontag has likened early photographers to the jlaneurs of Paris, calling the camera an "extension of the eye of the middle class flaneur." By further extension, these most modern of citizens might also be considered early tourists-solitary walkers who, unlike the traveler, whose hubris it is to participate, actually savor the distance and spectacle of the passing scene.

Tourism is predicated upon movement, with fleets of airplanes, acres of beds, and bales of ribbons of freeways to keep its clientele aloft and well-rested'while abroad. Paying tribute to this industry are Tim Maui's beatific photographs of its conveyances and accommodations. The slow lighting and exquisite stillness of these images may seem at odds with the transient guests, whose hurried pace they are intended to service. On the other hand, perhaps such tenderness is due the railroad, a mode of travel that is gradually growing obsolete, and the remaining small hotels, which have yet to fall prey to conglomeration.

t: Ingrid Schaffner, Tourist Sign at the Louvre (Courtesy the author)

b: Duane Hanson, Man With Camera, 1991, mixed media on polychrome bronze 49x32x36", (Courtesy Marisa Del Rey Gallery,NYC) Photo credit: Michael Korol

And where do tourists go? One popular destination, as Colonial Williamsburg and other places that have been pinched and frozen into particular time zones suggest, is the past. Pitching this conceit foiward are Anne Turyn's "snapshots," which imagine tourism in the future. Most sites look pretty well blasted-a family outing might involve going downtown to see where the poison cloud once hung, or a jog along the superfreeway. What's remarkable is the size of snapshots in the future: The tiny products of the first Brownie cameras (little dots, no more than an inch in diameter) have evolved into big luscious Cibachromes. With sly humor, Turyn's tourist photographs imply that although the future might not be much to look at, the pictures will sure be good.

Traveling back to our past, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher visit the concentration camp at Dachau, outside Munich. Haunted by violence, this site defies all expectations of travel and leisure. A product of the tourism of war, this preserved death camp lacks even the graces that battlefields and cemeteries find in the landscape tradition of parks and architecture of mourning. There is no such solace here. When the photographers' camera comes to rest on images of lamps and drains, corridors and ditches, their neutrality seems only exacerbated by the disturbing context. This muteness is expressive of the greater inability of the memorial to pay tribute or perform an epitaph, as even the moral purpose of "reminding" seems lost in this empty, empty place.

Memory makes for busy traffic in the tourist trade. There is historic, or collective, memory, on which the heritage industry banks. And there is a more personal kind, which tourists invest in every time they leave home in search of the experiences that will fulfill vacation fantasies and produce happy memories. (Though the former rarely occurs, fortunately the latter almost always does.) This is the purpose of the souvenir, a mnemonic device to remind us of our lapses out of work and into adventure once the routines of the homefront have been restored. Two of the most popular forms of souvenirs, postcards and snapshots, are the subject of Andrei Roiter and Vik Muniz's work.

A Russian artist who divides his time between Amsterdam and New York, Roiter considers himself a perpetual tourist. His annotated snapshots subvert the usual scrapbook narrative of things done and places seen into an ongoing record of the confusion incurred over customs and struggles with language that tourism entails. Acutely aware of these travails, Roiter's travelogue also deals with some of the more subtle frustrations of travel. What at first glance resembles a postcard of a tropical paradise turns out to be a snapshot of a palm tree in a supermarket parking lot. The caption, MY TOURIST SELF, makes no delusions over the photographer's identity nor over the disappointing reality of most travel experiences.

Postcards capture the views that prolong the tourist gaze. With his forged souvenirs, Vik Muniz tests a hold on memory that proves to be so strong as to supersede the need for experience in the first place. "Letyour postcards do the traveling/or you," his photos suggest. Stacked into a rack, each represents one of the drawings that Muniz made from memory of a major tourist attraction. These wonders, including the Taj Majal and the Pyramids of Egypt, are for Muniz sites unseen. And yet, his representations are picture-perfect testaments to the indelible stamp tourism, together with photography, has made on contemporary culture.

In the era of its dawn photography, like most new technologies, was greeted with hopes and claims for a better tomorrow. Accessible to all, and making all accessible, it was hailed as a democratic medium. An early tract beamed: "Your sun is no parasite. He pours his rays as freely into the cottage of the peasant, as into the palace of the peer. "(4) Something of this promise seems borne out today with the camera making every traveler a tourist.

- © 1995 Ingrid Schaffner

© n tJno le s I I would like lo thank Elizabeth Boyle for contributing her skills as photo-editor.

1. Keystone Viewing Company advertisement, circa 1920, reproduced in "Guide to Collections," California Museum of Photography Bulletin, vol. 9, no. 1/2, 1989, p. 58. 2. cf James Buzard, The Beaten Track, European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 3. Quoted in Hugh Tregakis, Beyond the Grand Tour, The Levant lunatics (London: Ascent Books, 1979), p. 70. 4. From an essay of 1846 entitled "Daguerreotypes," quoted in "Guide to Collections," CMP Bulletin, op. cit., p. 40.

t: Tourists Viewing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre (Courtesy the author)

b: Andrei Roiter, from Ten Color Snapshots,1944 Ektacolor snapshot, 4x6"

GYntp:i'iJ@Schaffner is an independent curator and writer, currently working on an exhibition about the American dealer and collector Julien Levy. Her writing has been published in: ArtForum, Parkett, Art in America, Art &Antiques, Sculpture, Artscribe, Arts, and Flash Art. Schaffner has curated exhibitions Like Young: Twelve New York Painters (The Carnegie Museum of Art, PA) and Chocolate/ (Swiss Institute, NYC).

~o-morrom-morromtana

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines "tourist" as "one who makes a tour for pleasure or culture."

The sign read, "Tourism is Culture." Several summers ago I was changing. trains in Massy, a suburb of Paris. I was on my way to the Cartier Foundation to visit my friend Beat Streuli, who was doing a residency there. I was regretting the decision to leave my camera back at the hotel, for the train station was a modern wonder; certainly the shape of things to come. Like a lot of people I know, I hate being seen anywhere with a camera. As I sought out my connecting train, I composed a merry little techno-tune in my head. Tourism .lliculture. I was in to-morrow-morrowland. The future of Europe is a mall. The first thing Beat asked me when I arrived was, "Did you change at Massy? Wasn't it great? Like walking around inside a giant Jeff Wall!" Or a giant Streuli, I thought. Bear's work, for me, preserves that jet-lagged moment during that drive from the airport when you realize that here is like eve1ywhere else.

By the year 2000 tourism will be the world's largest industry. I generally think of tourists as regular folks who take highly structured vacations, traveling in groups and making the most of the limited time off. one of the people in this show [The Cultured Tourist] are regular folks. In certain circles the subject of tourism is enjoying a kind of vogue, usually accompanied by discussions of "inside" and "outside" in relation to certain types of photographic content. This is somewhat important to this exhibition because I believe that the artists represented are neither "inside" nor "outside". That is, we're told to feel okay looking at, say, Nan Goldin's work because she's on the "inside." This is her milieu of friends she's taking pictures of-she loves them; they love her. Similarly, Robert Mapplethorpe really loved black men. Andy Warhol said that Pop Art was "liking things, "and I have grown to believe that we make our best art about things we genuinely like. Perennial outsiders could include photographers like David Hamilton or Jock Sturges; it's fun to imagine them weasling their way into peoples' lives in pursuit of their obsessions. A recent "outside" example is Andres Serrano's Budapest pictures. As I gazed at the beautiful Cibachrome of a prostitute performing oral sex on someone, I thought, here's just another way for some person to be used, by some "artiste." Maybe the key thing to "inside/outside" is whether you can tell if someone is being used or not. Diane Arbus is an interesting exception, walking the line. She photographed nudist families nude but, upon occasion, Arbus exploited an unsuspecting subject.

"My favorite thing is to go where I've never been." - Diane Arbus in conversation with Walker Evans.

Cameras, along with the world, are shrinking. The photographic industry panders to what "real" people want now. As I write this, Kodak and Fuji are duking it out for America's shelf space. Photography as the byproduct of travel exists in a myriad of forms. I remember visiting the photography auctions and being taken with a set of books containing images of the Grand Tour circa 1870, stored in their own ornate system of cabinets. Kind of a "take the tour and get the books and cabinet for free" deal. A Provincetown whale watch that I

e7Jy the year 2000 tourism mitt be the mod'iJ.'s tarr;Jest in'iJ.ustry.

C?i;he artists represente'iJ. are neither 11 insi'iJ.e" nor " • () " outszue

Slide A; Barbara Bloom, On Tour, 1981 (Courtesy Jay Gomey, NYC)

participated in offered an edited video of the day's sightings; "please leave credit card information as you disembark." When my in-laws visited last year (I live in lower Manhattan), I was stunned by the sophistication of their camcorder, which was continually in use. One half of Bill's face was a whiter shade of pale as a result of his nonstop recording. So do they actually sit around a~d watch what they tape' Not often, I was told. One of my pet theories is that camcorders (while nicely capturing the many U.F.O.'s that flit bashfully across our nation's skies) have killed pure video art by making the technology accessible, but that's another essay.

True tourist photography is not a critical practice. It never makes fun. The guilt attendant to photographing certain people and places never kicks in with true tourist photography, because true tourists ("t-ts") are always on the "outside". Always. There is no familiarity or "getting to know you" period in "t-t" photography. This tourism is about giving up control, going where you're told, dumbing down, and seeing the sights. What constitutes a "sight" depends on the individual and upon what the place he or she is visiting has decided to offer. What countries do to attract tourists involves complex issues of representation and a lot of socioeconomic theory that I am unequipped to discuss. I know that when most Americans travel, they want to visit a theme park, where one is seamlessly inserted into a schedule of sights and experiences. The photographs taken there are destined for the office, den, or refrigerator door. No critique, guilt-free documents of where they went and proof that they were there. Victor Burgin noted that in producing his early photographic and text works, his Hasselblad was worth a year's salary of most of his subjects. And after several hours of shooting in, let's say, a textile mill, he alone was free to leave. "T-ts" are always free to leave, while what they photograph, be it in Ireland or Jamaica, remains fixed.

Artist/photographers have long mimicked what tourists/photographers do. Often this takes the form of finding some subject and beating it to death over many years. Somewhere along the line (perhaps with Arbus's suburban images) kitsch Americana has become a synonymous staple of much contemporary fine art photography. Personally, I've always viewed it as an elitist, grantwriting, coffee-table-book mentality. Its career advantage is that you become forever identified with your subject. So you become the "roadside-diner-clubguy" or the "lawn ornament-leather-scene girl." Maybe growing up in the fifties soured me to all this, and didn't I say before that art was liking things? Once again, I trust it in Eggleston's Graceland pictures (after all, he's from there) and distrust it totally in Turbeville's recent "distressed" Mexican collages. Too often these photographs adopt the perspective of the smug college kid, who-upon returning home for the summer-finds the routine and rituals of his or her family's life quietly hilarious.

Increasingly, the spectacle of history often disappoints. Two years ago my friend Shane "didn't bother" to photograph the Taj Mahal. A young couple I know found Prague "not great"; experiencing the real gets harder and harder. Camera-laden tourists flock to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the Home Alone house outside Chicago with equal reverence.

I've trained myself not to take "normal" pictures, so basic photographic tasks (backyard scenes and weddings) are hard for me. Also, whenever I'm abroad, I always feel that I'm "re-photographing" everything, that it is already a picture and I'm simply removing some small portion of it. Perhaps, like Jasper Johns's flags and targets, these are generic things the "mind already knows." I'm sure that when you're looking through your camera, the simulated vistas of Euro-Disney and the sun-dappled entrance to Nicole's apartment at 875 Bundy can be easily matched to how you believe they look.

So let's pretend that the rest of this essay is a slide show that you watch. First slide!

@5Li[) e @/2: Barbara Bloom's work embodies the idea of the cultural tourist. In fact, her tombstone (produced as an artwork) reads, "She Travelled the World Seeking Beauty," and she does. Chairs are often featured in her installations and photographs, for she watches the world and, like me, uses a camera to point out some detail thereof. Borrowing the modulated, seductive surfaces of advertising media, Bloom's tourism offers an agenda of irony, privilege, and romance. In 1986 Barbara (in collaboration with Martha Hawley)

C?i;rue tourist photo9raphy is not a critical practice.

eJ 6eet that eJ 'm "re-p ho to9rap hi n 1/1" everythin9 that is aheafJ.y a picture.

Slide B; Lewis Baltz, I I 777 Foothill Blvd, 1995 (Courtesy Janet Borden, NYC)

BLACK SEA DIARY

Slide C; Felix Stephan Huber and Philip Pocock, (book cover), 1993

produced a calendar. Very often, for my art-world generation, single-image photography functions as a substitute for the cinematic experience. In her calendar Bloom "cinematizes" what would have otherwise been generic travel magazine exotica. The photographs illustrating each month are informed by her beloved print ads and the movies, suggesting a year-long road trip for smart people. We're both big fans of annual-report commercial photography: images made by individuals who really work for a living and have specific jobs to do. Tourism, for Barbara, is a peg upon which the expanding wardrobe of her other concerns can be hung.

e5Li'iJee'}J: Negatourism. This photograph is taken by Lewis Baltz. It shows the location of the Rodney King beating by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. It was a commissioned work that was ultimately rejected. It's Nowheresville, a place where you wouldn't want to change your tire. Yet it's a historically impo1tant place, a piece of scenery that played background to events that held tragic consequences. Like Dachau or the Spahn Ranch (once home to the Manson Family), these places are difficult both to visit and to photograph. Only little details seem to convey any sense of horror. Last year I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I found it an exhaustive multimedia history lesson where every penny of the millions spent on it shows. As I wound my way through it, I wondered what my fellow visitors were thinking, particularly since they had just come by the busload from the Air and Space Museum down the road. One of the objects that really held me was a single yellow fabric Star of David. Previously I'd only seen one in photographs.

@:)Li'iJe~: "I am the Passenger, I stay under glass." - 7be Passenger, Iggy Pop.

Black Sea Diary is a book by two artists, Felix Stephan Huber and Philip Pocock. In 1993 Felix and Philip drove from Frankfurt to the Black Sea. Besides the riskiness of car travel across unstable, poisoned lands, what makes this trip memorable is their continuous documentation, employing a digital camera. After a day's shooting, images via laptop and modem would be faxed to the Venice Biennale. Text too; Jack Kerouac would have loved this. As a result of the antique phone systems still in use where they traveled, the images have a seared, garbled, "transmission-look" like National Aeronautic and Space Administration pictures. A masterpiece of slacker tourism. We meet a variety of alternative types and dubious lounge lizards as Felix and Philip manage their way across places that I would never choose to visit. With digital photography in its infancy (goodbye, film'), I regard Black Sea Diary as essential.

@:)Li'iJe:;f): An image by Eric Fischl announcing an exhibition of his photographs (of Riviera beach life, where I assume he gets ideas for paintings). We all know that cracking the photo-world is much easier after you've made it as a painter, but I remain a closet fan of "leisure art," "summer vacation art," "that great place we rented last summer art," and "my circle of beautiful rich friends art." I wonder about picturing a world so out of reach for most of us; is it valuable or decadent? It seems to exist in a universe opposite to that pictured by Nan Goldin,Jack Pierson, and Lynne Tillman. Stiletto heels on one side of the mirror, Topsiders on the other.

@)Ii 'iJe 6: This picture (one of mine), shows the lobby of the Everglades Hotel in Derry, Northern Ireland. Not many people visit Derry or stay at the Everglades, but maybe that will change if the current peace agreements hold. I didn't have to do much here; certain pictures just take themselves. I liked the gift shop display of porcelain, bittersweet symbols of a bygone gentility. One stormy night I organized a photograph out of functionless decor and the bleakest of optimism. I normally photograph my hotel room when I travel, using the camera as a combination holy-water/magic-wand/air-freshening device. When traveling, certain pictures do take themselves. Why?

e)Li'iJP cf/,: In telling the story of oneself via photographs, it's easy to lie, to make yourself look cooler or smarter than you really are. Mythic identities are created by manipulating fact; look at Richard Prince's latest collection of contrived photographs, Adult Comedy Action Drama. Folding one's life into one's art can be a good thing. The Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have been collaborating for sometime, using a variety of media. Spiritual cousins to the Zurich Dacia artists, their objects, films, and photographs are simultaneously mischievous and awesome. In 1989 they exhibited a series

~achau anfJ the @:Jpahn dl?,anch are fJi66icult both to visit anfJ to photof/raph.

eJ photo9raph my hotel room mhen eJ travel, usinlj the camera as a holy-mated ma9 ic-man f)/ air-6resheninlj fJevice.

Slide D; Eric Fischl, Announcement

Slide E; Ttm Maul, Everglades Hotel, Derry, 1992

of Cibachrome prints depicting airport scenes. Like gorgeous deadpan commercial photography, these pictures simulate that heightened "go-go" feeling of first-class international travel. Many artists I know see them as a sly response to life (no matter how brief) in the blue-chip art-world fast lane. It's also kind of fun to try and figure out where they were showing by the airports they were in.

e)LifJ.e ,!!J:"A ghost was hiding in the invention of photography." -Nobuyoshi Araki

Two "foreign" films: in one, an arrogant young photographer indulges himself in an act of spontaneous tourism. Deserting a fashion shoot, he visits a park, where he photographs a seemingly mismatched swooning couple. Later, darkroom magic reveals (within the grainy image) that a body lies and a gunman lurks. In another film, a woman examines a snapshot taken from inside a tour-bus. Looking back at her is herself, her duplicate in the world, crossing a Warsaw square. Adopting tourism, choosing tourism, anytime, anywhere, doesn't necessarily lead you directly to the Twilight Zone. But since I often "play tourist," I recognize that something can take over. Regard your camera as an object other than a camera. Regard it as a psychic geiger counter. Go for a walk and look through your camera while moving it around like the plastic piece on top of a Ouija board. When it stops (and it will) press "shutter release" and advance the film. Repeat until film is exhausted.

@) LifJ.e d}t: "I went to China. I didn't want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great. " -Andy Warhol.

Two formidable constructs engage in a tug-of-war: foreground-a bewigged man, possibly vampiric, probably anorexic; background-a marvel of architecture, designed to keep certain people out. The background always wins. Anyone stepping in front of the camera here gets reduced to the T-word (like standing next to Goofy at Disney World). Andy designed himself to look the same everywhere, like in the David Bowie song, "Andy Warhol looks a scream, hang him on my wall." One of my favorite scenes in the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited is when the Marchmain family sycophant, Mr. Samgrass, shows slides. Supposedly he's been escorting the teetotaling Sebastian on a Mediterranean tour in an attempt to sober him up. Slide after slide is shown depicting Mr. Samgrass standing in front of classic pieces of antiquity. Finally young Cordelia inquires, "But where's Sebastian?" "Oh," says Sammy, recovering quickly, "Lord Marchmain was uh, holding the camera." No he wasn't. He was carrying on. Andy smiles.

On a flight back from Dublin last April, Aer Lingus provided me with an in-flight video of Manhattan's places of interest. It was an upbeat moving postcard of Central Park, Chinatown, department stores, and wholesome nightlife. The city I live in doesn't look like that. I wondered if all airlines do this. What must Aeroflot's new Russia look like? Being a tourist orders your time and what you photograph. Most artists (who do what I do) seek the opposite; we want fluidity and space. Carrying a camera allows one to play a variety of roles - voyeur, industrial spy, cub reporter, or even tourist. When the above-mentioned arrogant young photographer leaves a fashion shoot, on the way out he grabs his jacket. I strongly recommend that you regard that jacket as my tourism. You can choose to wear it and leave home any time you want.

''@/Uy mork is about Locatinr;; myseLf 'e,9 mas there then. eJ sam this; eJ sam that.' @very roLe ot tiLm eJ expose mir;;ht be a movie. @!UY. cinema is the chain ot plwtor;;raplis 9oin9 oackmarfJ. into tlze past. cJ stiLL photo9raph the thin9s oetmeen tlze thin9s me see, out nom eJ photo9i:aph to tor9et taster."

- © 1995 Tim Maul

~im @l/tauL has hafJ soto exhibitions at @/lit 7iJity (el'Jd}J7iJ), 121 /jalteiy (ef})eL9ium), /jaterie ef})renfJa OOattace (7iJanafJa), the (()uharfJ /jatlety (greLanfJ), el?,eaL @/!;rt OOays (7iJonnecticut), anfJ the @/Uatrix /!Jaltery (7iJaLijornia). @litauL is workin9 on a coUabotative sounfJ/ima9e piece with the composer ef})en e/'JeiL anfJ on an exhibition oj new photor1raphs 6or the ef})etsy @jeniot /jaltery in e/'Jew d}Jork. cf}t.e Lives anfJ works in @/iianhattan.

@A;Boptintjj touiism, choosintJ tourism, anytime, anywhere, Boesn 't necessarily teaB you Birectty to the Yt;mititjjht 2one.

Slide F; Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Untitled, 1989 (Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, NYC)

Slide G; Tim Maul, Untitled, 1995

Slide H; Tim Maul, Andy Smiles, 1995

..?oontact ~ones' ardele lister

~itJeo <§xhibition I curateB by @/l;rBeLe d!,ister I 7tenter 6or c9)hoLotjraphy at OOooBstock, ~em J/-ork I (!)ctober - ~ecember 7 995.

artists: juan downey, philip mallory jones, ken kobland, lynne sachs & dana sachs, eder santos, gina todus

exhibition: The Laughing Alligator, Wassa, Moscow X, Which Way is East, Europe in 5 Minutes, The Travel Log

"Instinctively I pointed my camera at my potential assassin as if it were a firearm, with that aggressive gesture, that imaginary threat which we video artists use as a warning that the camera also is a dangerous weapon ... "

- Juan Downey, Laughing Alligator, 1979

"Pigeons could be either Rio de Janeiro or Venice" -from Eder Santos's Europe in 5 Minutes, 1986

Juan Downey, 1979, The Laughing Alligator, video still. (Courtesy ElectronicArts lntennix, NYC)

When Juan Downey, a Chilean-born American, and his family embarked on a journey to live with and document the Yanomami in the Venezuelan Amazon in the midseventies, portable video recording equipment had been available for under a decade. Only a small number of very curious, committed individuals even knew this hardware existed. As touted by its champions in the counterculture, this equipment would democratize the media, put the means of production in everyone's hands, and be a key part of a genuinely representative, interactive media culture. The abundance of energy and belief in what these individuals were exploring and making was a potent accomplice to the technology. In addition to its image-making, painterly qualities, video as a portable, single-channel medium facilitated new kinds of representation from previously unheard voices, experimentation with narrative structures, and with the hierarchical structure of filmmaking itself.

In the early days of videomaking, artists lugged around a considerable amount of equipment, comparable to the heavy view cameras the first photographers used. "Portable" meant you could take it around (as opposed to giant studio cameras on locked-down tripods recording on two-inch-wide tape) but you would carry at least three cases with connecting cables and heavy batteries.

So when Juan Downey was shooting Laughing Alligator, no doubt his camera equipment and related paraphernalia occupied much more space than the Hi-8 camera Ken Kobland took to Moscow. As a medium for artmaking, video has existed for just over twenty-five years. The hardware has changed dramatically, now sleek and compact, available everywhere, and it is used by many more people than artists. Has the software undergone changes too? Has the programming become unified and smooth? 0 J Has the availability of sophisticated, and relatively inexpensive, editing equipment altered the style of productions? Has the representation of ourselves or others shifted as a direct result of the changing equipment?

"Everything attests to the fact that video is more deeply rooted in writing than is cinema, that it gives real life to Alexander Astruc's prophecy hailing [after the war] the birth of an avant-garde he defined as the age of the 'pen camera'."Raymond Bellour, Video Writing czJ

Meanwhile, in the 1960s and 1970s, on another front, in the academy, deconstruction took root at the base of the canon. And some of the same socioeconomic conditions that fostered the radical changes among young people contributed to the phenomenon of mass tourism. The very same images and ideals which were in the process of critical examination by intellectuals and artists were being fetishized and commodified by the tourist industry.

A masculine heroic discourse of discovery, domination, and intervention is evidenced in four centuries-worth of published, independent travel writing. This provides an interesting parallel by which to examine strategies for representation in travel film and video. With these media we are able to see how different approaches not only provide an image of the other but also an image of the I/eye who sees, and subsequently writes or speaks.

By the 60s and 70s the historical distance between describer and described, seer and seen, shortens and sometimes vanishes. "The whole seeing project is destabilized. "<3J The agendas of empire building and maintenance have disappeared, leaving an emptiness that is slowly filling with the sounds of more voices, different voices, voices that have appropriately clamored to be heard. There is a certain contemporary logic to these pen camera videos-they pick up where travel writing as a vital genre leaves off.

Video production dealing with subjectivity has burgeoned in the last decade, with work that foregrounds, for example, hybrid identities and gender politics, as we reexamine who we are at home.

We turn our attention, in ~ontact c2.ones'(§})ifJeo,to how cultured tourists see outside their own places, their known worlds. Is there a solid self and other in these works, or are the boundaries permeable? What is the significance of Ken Kobland's use of you, I and we as almost interchangeable pronouns in his narrative? Is the work an attempt to locate the maker's seifin the other? Are subjects of the Contact Zones'tapes empowered, instrumental, and comfortable in front of the camera? Or are the subjects anxious?

@An emptiness that is slowly 6Ulin(jJ with the soun'fJ.s 06 moi:e voices, 'fJ.i66ei:ent voices, voices that have appi:opt:iately clamoi:e'fJ. to be heai:'fJ..

© l 990, Ken Kobland, Moscow X, composite video still frames. (Courtesy EAi)

From whose point of view is each video shot?

Who speaks for whom in these works? There's a Chilean-American speaking with and for the Yanomami tribe. An American makes a work about her trip to China even though she didn't take a <;amera. There's an African-American whose tape depicts an African village but includes some footage from Baltimore. An elegy created in the last days of Moscow's communist dream-in-dissolution was made by a now-grown child of the cold war. Two American sisters, one a photographer and tourist in Vietnam the other an American living in Vietnam, have different ideas about portraying that co~ntry in moving pictures.

Do we ask the same questions of an artist whose tape was made in 1979 as we might ask of one whose tape was made in 1994? Would our skins have bristled in 1979 when Juan Downey's narrative referred to his subjects as primitive? Do we bristle now? Is the video artist a hero filled with a sense of ownership (as those painters, writers, and photographers of old) or an uncertain witness? How do these artists handle beauty-by conventional or unconventional standards? Do video makers avoid it, utilize it, revel in it?

Do each of these tapes reflect a unified voice or is the work polyphonic? What, if any, of these combinations of words, sounds, and images, can we, should we take as believable? Have we become anxious viewers?

I chose works for this exhibition out of a number of compelling possibilities. Each of the show tapes demonstrates an aspect of the genre as it loosely falls into categories; for example, transnational music video (Wassa). One of the pieces speaks eloquently and humorously of the difference between a tourist's video/film and that of a cultured tourist's (Europe in 5 Minutes).

Whether the work was made in 1979 or 1994, each artist has had to navigate in difficult terrain. They are confronted (consciously or unconsciously) by television's and Hollywood's hegemonic representations of other cultures and places, and images of travel photography and travel writing. These media refer to the political and cultural history of the corresponding period.

With all that baggage, the condition of solitude in the context of a foreign land mirrors the making of independent video at home or abroad. These men and women with movie cameras (a nod to Dziga Vertov) have made works that are personal, unique, sometimes funny, and critical.

~au9hin9 &/;tli9ator by juan downey 1979, 27:00, color video distributor electronic arts intermix, nyc "Merging the subjective and the objective, the autobiographical and the anthropological, Laughing Alligator is a highly personal observation of an indigenous South American culture. Recorded while he and his family were living among the Yanomami of Venezuela 0976-77), this compelling work distills Downey's search for his own cultural identity and heritage through the encounter between the western family and the so-called primitive tribe. Challenging the anthropological view of the Yanomami as violent cannibals, Downey focuses on the tribe's myths, rituals, and ceremonies, documenting funerary rites in which tribal members eat the pulverized ashes of their dead to ensure their immortality. Subverting conventional modes of ethnographic documentary, Downey participates as an active presence ... creating an interactive dialogue between artist and subject and addressing his own 'yearning for a purer existence.'" (eai catalog)

Before his untimely death Juan Downey produced a major body of work that interweaves a sophisticated multicultural discourse with an idiosyncratic search for identity. Merging the subjective and the cultural, the diaristic and the documentary, Downey investigates the self thro1;tghthe historical texts of western art and culture and the tradition of his native Latin America. Subverting documentary and narrative modes, his densely layered works are infused with rich intertextual analyses, associative pictorial metaphors, and collage-like, nonlinear strategies. A native of Chile who came to New York in 1965, he focused his work on two major series, one of which was Trans Americas (of which Laughing Alligator is a part), merging autobiography and anthropology in what he

calls an "attempt to recuperate my culture. "He was a professor of video and architecture at Pratt Institute, New York City.

OOassa by philip mallory jones 1989, 3:15, color video distributor eai

Shot in Burkina Faso, Wassa (which means "come out and play") is a transcultural video that unfolds with lush imagery and the evocative music of Moustapha Thiohbiano. Jones creates a dreamlike vision, capturing the vibrancy and sense impressions of the every day. This rhythmically textured work is part of his exploration of African diaspora culture through nonverbal storytelling and a transcultural language of sound and image construction-the development of codes based on what he terms "emotional progressions and an African sensorium."

Philip Mallory Jones has been active in video since the early 1970s. He considers "the screen as a canvas rather than a window" for exploring ways of telling stories through sensorial and emotional experience. He was founder and executive director of Ithaca Video Projects, a pioneering media arts center, from 1971 to 1984, and director of the Ithaca Video Festival from 1974-84. Mallory Jones's videotapes were the subject of a 1990 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Institute for Studies in the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

@!Uoscom eX by ken kobland 1993, 57:00, b&w/color video/film distributor eai "Moscow Xis part personal diary and part city symphony. Photographed in the fall of 1990, it is essentially a meander through Moscow on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire. A rumination on the terrible uncertainly inherent in societal change, read on the face of a city long used to being between perestroika and the abyss." (eai catalog)

Since the 19 70s Kobland has been producing independent film and video works, including collaborative projects, with the Wooster Group, an avantgarde theatre company which employs film and video in its productions. Through metaphor, provocation, and association, he often explores the historical meaning, critical context, and received notions of a particular scene. He writes: "I 'dream' a place ... The work is principally about reflecting on the meaing of a site; historically, psychically, and physically. It's about the saturation of place. The place in our heads and the place on the ground." Koh/and spent 1986-87 in Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship, and has travelled to Eastern Europe several times. He teaches at Princeton University in New Jersey.

OOhich OOay is (§ast by lynne sachs in collaboration with dana sachs, 1994,33:00, color video distributor women make movies, nyc

" 'A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.'-Vietnamese parable. Bolex in backpack, filmmaker Lynne Sachs travels north from Saigon to Hanoi with her sister, Dana, a journalist living in Vietnam. Together they create an exquisitely photographed and poignantly narrated travel diary with the filmmakers' personal reflections and their childhood remembrances of the war as televised. More than a search for traces of the Vietnam war, Which Way is East also is an evocative study of Vietnamese culture and the distinctive experiences of two women travelers." (Women Make Movies catalog)

A 1979 graduate of Brown University in Rhode Island, Lynne Sachs traded her history degree for a Bolex camera. After moving to San Francisco in 1985, she got a masters in cinema from San Francisco State and a Masters in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Since then she has worked her way from office temp and sound technician

© 1986, Eder Santos, Europe in 5 Minutes, video still

(Courtesy EAi)

tofilmmaker and lecturer. Lynne Sachs's work has been shown in festivals from Atlanta to Oberhausen.

(§urope in 5 @/Uinutes by eder santos 1986, 13:57, video distributor eai

"This fragmented documenpry/fiction uses a tourist's travel recordings to illuminate what Santos terms the domestic language of Super-8 film and the politics of cultural documentation. Super-8 footage shot and narrated by a seventy-eight-year-old Brazilian tourist-shaky scenes of Paris, Rome, and London-underscores how image-making technologies reduce cultural experience to sightseeing cliches and familiar milestones.

Intercut with the travelogue 'home movies' are filmmakers and other media professionals who talk about the art of working with Super-8." (eai catalog)

Eder Santos is a Brazilian videomaker who creates poetic works that merge the cultural, the personal, and the technological to reinterpret motifs indigenous to Brazil's African, Indian, and European heritages. Santos is acutley aware of the socioeconomic relation of technological media and cultural representation: "I have never lost sight of the fact that I am using a technology rather foreign to my city and country .... As a consequence I always attempt to use our own cultural elements." He is a founding member of EM Video, an independent video production company. Santos's works have been widely shown in exhibitions and festivals, and broadcast internationally. His work recently was seen in a Video Viewpoints evening at the Museum qf Modern Art, NYC (eai catalog)

Yi;he Y!;iavet c£op/ by gina todus 1994, 15:00, video distributor gina todus

The Travel Log is the first episode in a suite of works titled, The Travel Log and Souvenir~/ Was Really There. Each episode represents an attempt to reinstate experiences of travel in the aftermath of the trip. The Travel Log uses banal tourist descriptions and frenetic Super-8 footage to launch the viewer into an epigrammatic recreation of the artist's stay in Taiwan. What the journey-in-retrospect called into question for its maker, the tape calls into question for its viewers. Through a combination of minimal text and deliberately hard to watch footage, Todus poses ontological questions about what we know and how we know it. She compels us to examine the foundations of what can be trusted in the imagery we see.

Cina Tod us is a video maker whose primary interest is in the documentary mode. Her fascination with the genre borders on a sincere interest in creating informative pro-active works that consider the precarious nature of the relationship hetween the art.isl and audience. This is the first in a series of works dealing with this subject matter.

- © 1995 Ardele Lister

<dJootnotes

1. This notion of "smoothness" in television is discussed in David Antin's article: "Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium", published in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John Hanhardt, Rochester, NY, Visual Studies Workshop Press and Peregrine Smith Books, 1986. pl52.

2. Bellour, Raymond, Video Writing, Illuminating Video, Aperture/BAVC, 1990, p421.

3. Pratt, Mary Louise, imperial Eyes, 7'i·avel Writing and Transculluration, Routledge, NY, 1992, p225.

@/I, r fJ et e ,;I!is t Pr has been making film and video work since 1975. She also written extensively on art and media, and in 1978, founded and edited The Independent, the publication of the Foundation for independent Video and Film. She has curated video exhibitions at the Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn; at The Forty-Ninth Parallel Gallery, and at the Simon Watson Gallery in New York. Her videotapes, which have garnered awards in international festivals, are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), The Beaubourg Centre (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada. Ms. Lister is a professor at Rutgers University in the Visual Arts Department, Mason Gross School of the Arts.

address correction requested CPW'sNYCStudioTour Seriesbegins Monday, February 19, 6 - 8 pm with WilliamWegman. Call CPW for information 914-679-9957.

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<iJ)lzotofjtap/ts by Gfl?iclzaifJ .;/!ope;z, @!Ji. @Soto?3entei @SJw1v(S)ctobei- ,,;;!Jecembei7995

d/?iclzarrJsees his pei:sonalexperienceif6 clzi/rJlworJ sexual, plzysicat, emotional, anrJsphitual abuse as a "micwco.smif6 tlie cli.sisif6 abuse tl1at a<61Jlict,s our .societyanrJit,smost valuer) institutions: the 'Jamily anrJthe 'Jaitlzcom1mmity." <§acltplwtorrap/1 is a celebration ofj tlie rJif!nity anrJ pteciousness ofj clziLrJhoorJanrJ a challenre to an'f!_act if6 violence committerJarainst this saaerJtrusl 9;;/ieexliibit calls to those 1vlzoclwo.seto if!nore 01: rJenytlte 'Jact tl1at some 3,000,000 chilrJren(eaclzyeai: in tlte li/ltniterJ @States)are the victims if6abuse anrJl!efjlect.

LOPEZ is managing director of Lopez Salpeter and Associates. A participant in the American Institute of Graphic Arts Mentor Program, Richard serves on the Board of Advisors of the New York Software Industry Association, Inc.; the Fashion Institute of Technology; and the Human Connections Institute. His work has been recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Federal Design Council, and the publications Art Direction, Photo/ Design, Graphis, and Print.

© 1994-95, Richard Lopez, from Seriesof Mosaics ten pieces each in a

surpass all medium-format and many 35mm cameras: In technology, capability, qual/ty.

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