Critical Fragments: Documentation

“Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography per se. To hear the artists tell it, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. Time and again artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation.”(1)

As ironic as it was necessary, the photographic archiving of conceptual art provides a test case for documentation as a separate and relevant critical issue. When conceptual artists began to consider what it is that artists do, their consequential investigations lead to exercises in information theory and epistemology, measurements and statistics, actions and situations. All this knowledge produced “documents” that embodied the art but not the “art” itself. This premise would become a conceptual dictum of such pervasive and evidentiary power that few academic overviews of conceptual art do much more than re-state this mantra of “art is the idea not the object.”

Within its limited aesthetic, object production was a low priority for conceptual artists. However, some conceptualists realized that other than following Fluxist maneuvers of indexical, momentary events that may or may not be witnessed, their documentation of staged actions and situations would be easily photographed to provide documentation. This gave rise to a term known in art theory as “de-skilled” photography. This early photographic documentation of conceptual art, without aesthetic pretense or intention, has been lifted from its down-played status through an elegant sleight-of-hand by museums and curatorial practice. Museums have manipulated these conceptual art photographic documents as “fine art” in their own right, and represent it through accepted formalist language previously established in the appreciation of “high art” photography.

In a cobbled-together exhibition currently at the Whitney Museum, we see the “greatest hits” of “Photoconceptualism” as represented in work by Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham and others. Apparently the curators propose that these photos yield a double-appreciation as photographs that may be superficially pleasing as objects as well as manifesting a concept. Matta-Clark, Smithson and Bochner can be eliminated from such a theory, as their photos clearly represent first order documentation of other work, i.e., a “cut,” a “Mirror Displacement” and a book about photography.(2)

Nauman and Graham fare better as “photoconceptualism” since their work really has little to do with formalistic issues such as framing or tonality. Graham’s selection, in fact, has been excised from his well-known “Homes For America” and loses all potency of context. Nauman’s multiple examples either visually document his fascination with pun (“Waxing Hot”) or dead-pan actions (“Burning Small Fires”). They provide an expanded methodology of “documentation” as we simultaneously view them as conveyance of the idea and address how documentation may function critically and not aesthetically.


Image: “Burning Small Fires” (1968); artist book; © Copyright 2006-2009 Bruce Nauman / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

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1. Soutter, Lucy. “The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography”, Afterimage, March-April, 1999.

2. Charming as it is, the questionable inclusion of Bochner’s book demonstrates the curatorial haste of this show; notes about photography by famous people are not exactly photographs: “Bochner’s handwritten quotes on the power of photography are attributed to such indisputable sources as Marcel Proust, Mao Tse-tung, Marcel Duchamp, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It turns out that Bochner has made up three of the quotes, although he never reveals which ones.” “Persuasive Images: Selected Works from the Art Collections at the University at Albany”, University Art Museum, Albany, 2000, 12.

Critical Fragments: Anonymity

“In all respects the traditional artist devotes himself to the good of the work to be done. The operation is a rite, the celebrant neither intentionally nor even consciously expressing himself … [W]orks of traditional art, whether Christian, Oriental or folk art, are hardly ever signed: the artist is anonymous, or if a name has survived, we know little or nothing of the man. This is true as much for literary as for plastic artifacts. In traditional arts it is never Who said? but only What was said?”(1)


The necessity of establishing a relationship between an artist and artwork became significantly more focused when paintings became portable. The advent of easel painting signaled the beginning of artworks traded as a commodity that was readily identifiable with an artist. Thus, the identification of individual artists with an artwork recognizable by a subjective style helped solidify the ready exchange of paintings.

Clearly the seduction of fame stoked the exchange value of art. Coomaraswamy notwithstanding, we would be unworthy lovers of art if we were not able to rattle off names of major artists by gazing mere seconds at the referent paintings or sculptures.

Like many institutions during the 1970s, the art world was given a brutal critique. Having undergone over one hundred years of excessively focused attention on the mystique of the artist - whose guise was often paired conveniently with “movements” by critics, i.e., Fauvist, Impressionist, Bohemian – it was understandable that young practitioners took a dim view of the commercial aspects of art marketing. These conceptual artists eliminated the making of objects as their concepts began to designate what medium or form would become the carrier or conveyor of the idea.

It is remarkable to consider now that conceptual art was once persona non grata in the commercial art world. Eventually, with increased critical support through essays and lectures by art theorists (and artists themselves – a welcome attitudinal change from the AB-Ex position of “the work speaks for itself”) commercial galleries would acquiesce to critical pressure and begin showing these text-based works, de-skilled photographs and sometimes even anti-aesthetic objects.

The possible use of anonymity as an additional way to address issues of fame as a capitalist construct was side-stepped by most conceptualists; given the opportunity to pair their name with a gallery was a nice substitution for having a recognizable “style.”

One artist in particular who purposely sabotaged his “stardom” was Christopher D’Arcangelo. In the late 1970s, D’Arcangelo used “utilitarian carpentry” as his art practice, making “works” characterized by the “input of labor and materials rather than by any phenomenal aspect they might possess.”(2) In “Thirty Days Work”, D’Arcangelo built an anonymous wood stud and sheetrock wall for a 1979 show at 84 West Broadway, New York. This otherwise nondescript wall was not identified as his.(3)

The practice of making art ought to bear no allegiance to one’s subjective ego. In its emphasis of concept over object, conceptual art may have re-introduced this egalitarian fascination with anonymity. What better way to heighten the theoretical focus than to eliminate the putative “self” behind the work. The conception then becomes more an ethereal thought that floats in the minds of both artist and viewers; “artworks” as ideas that launch discourse through intellection.


Image: “A Brief History of Art”; from Suicide Blonde.
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1. Coomaraswamy, Ananda. Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, New York, 1956, 39-40.

2. Crow, Thomas. “Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art” in Art After conceptual Art (A. Alberro, S. Buchmann: eds.), Vienna, 2006, 62.

3. Ibid., 62 [D’Arcangelo’s willful anonymity was earlier evidenced by his “contribution” to a 1978 exhibition at Artist’s Space where he merely removed his name from the installation, catalogue and from all publicity about the show.]

Critical Fragments: Content

“The seemingly strict separation of the photographic series – buildings not people, or individuals in private not public spaces – thus belies [Thomas] Struth’s larger project of separation. By dissociating the various elements of knowledge produced within each archive and reassociating them in a newly formed complex matrix structure, Struth’s matrix multiplies the important piece of information within each image. Multiplied, those bits of information that had once been used to define the subject of the archive can now be reassembled and contradicted to form other constructs of knowledge. This process of reassociation exposes the inseparability of these constructs both within and between images and archives, questioning the archival categories themselves. […] Acted out by the museum and defined and depicted by these photographs are the operations of archive construction and collecting themselves, and with them, the complex mechanisms behind the construction of knowledge, boundaries, and spaces.”(1)

In contemporary art practice, at least since the pioneering directions of conceptualism and minimal art, there has been a shift in content. Rather than the content being about what is visible or visually obvious in images, sculptural objects or installations, the locus of meaning of an artwork now lies outside these images and objects and instead concerns the social and cultural construction of art. Moreover, the content of a work of art becomes a cipher, a riddle that requires deducing through exterior, supplemental materials and research.

This is the unavoidable conclusion drawn by Nana Last in her astute assessment of Thomas Struth’s photographic practice. The surface content of Struth’s photographs manifest multiple “bits of information” which occupy a position of temporary visual observation. This contemporary avoidance of simple aesthetic pursuits has precedence in conceptual art’s insistence that an artwork’s meaning exists independently of the object and, indeed, even the objects themselves are secondary to the content.

This poses intriguing problems for art criticism. Discernment now is summoned through an understanding of contemporary art history and theory, plus a particular comprehension of the various social and cultural constructions that govern the making and address of art. Apt critics approach images and objects carefully, with a view to their placement within the dominant sociological and cultural narratives. More importantly, critical readings of artworks are influenced by the visual first, yet critics must be wary of the fact that the superficial, surface aspects of the work might misdirect their interpretation. The potential for misapprehension is especially challenging in photography where the “look” of the camera purports to not only embody the “eye” of the artist but to encourage the passivity of the viewing subject. The object photographed can never be assumed to be its content.(2)

Last’s perception of Struth’s “matrix” correctly reads the content of Struth’s art to extend beyond those objects and figures contained with the photographic frame. The essence of his ultimate content remains outside the image but is manifested textually by the information within each of the photographs. Struth’s body of work becomes less about the documentation, less about the archives, than it is about his grasp of the manipulation of visual, archival knowledge by the caretakers of our social and cultural world, the museums. Thus, control of the address of art, how it is presented and represented institutionally, is paramount to its ultimate reception, to its historic validation, and positions it for successful marketing to determine its value, both artistically and commercially.

I would propose that all of the best art encourages a self-reflexivity by both artist and viewing public to consider its presentation and to critique its control by those institutions of visual address. That the nature of contemporary art practice has evolved outside of the image to encompass investigations of art’s construction within the social and cultural spheres is a testament to the issues and concerns of conceptualism.

Image: “Musée du Louvre IV, Paris” (1989); © Copyright by Thomas Struth.

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1. Last, Nana. “Thomas Struth: From Image to Archive to Matrix,” Praxis 7, 2005, 86.

2. “The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the textuality of the photograph itself – substituting passive receptivity for active (critical) reading.” From Victor Burgin’s “Looking at Photographs”, in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley, 1996, 856.

Critical Fragments: Style

“In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through their aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute. To this extent the claims of art are always also ideology. Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure, in which the style of the great work of art has always negated itself, the inferior work has relied on its similarity to others, the surrogate of identity. The culture industry has finally posited this imitation as absolute. Being nothing other than style, it divulges style’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy.”(1)


Whether this is “social hierarchy” or critical hierarchy remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the casting of style as the great secret of visuality is seductive. The absorption of art by the dominant discourse (the mainstream) is what Adorno and Horkheimer speak of as a “promise,” a teasing dream of capitalist fulfillment, supported through the culture industry’s use of the ideology of style.

The existent order (the art world) retains its power through a calculated dispensation of success (financial, critical, historical) that is further bolstered by the misapprehension within the ranks of the culture producers (visual artists) that art is measured by “harmony” or “unity of form and content.” It is these kinds of aesthetic quests that will result in inferior art that desires only a “similarity to others.”

To negate these traditional conceptions is to deny the damages that are inherent in the search for a “style.” To reject style altogether is to embrace failure on many levels; chiefly those attributed to financial success but certainly encompassing the nature of creation itself with the ever present possibility that risks taken become failures realized.

The necessity of re-positioning art practice as capable of revealing these kinds of “truths” remains the single most worthy endeavor of the producer of culture. Absolute allegiance to imitative style, however sanctioned as a certainty for financial success within our embattled art market, risks much more than a simple loss measured in capital.

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1. Adorno, Theodor / Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, (Translator: E. Jephcott), Stanford, 2002, 103-104.

Collage: the Stuff of PoMo

Administrator's Note: One of my Corcoran College undergraduates wrote the following essay on collage as “the reproduction and recontextualization of signs.” The student has requested me to list the author's name as “Yon Zois.”

I asked Zois for permission to post the paper here because of its fascinating theories on visual art expressed as “message” and a novel (if somewhat brutally cynical) depiction of the malevolent inclination of that message. The assaultive aspects of representation are too often critically neglected and Zois suggests interesting possibilities for further investigation of the “dominant discourse” of media communication. For within the verbal structure of semiotics lies an implicit coercion that Zois reveals to be a profound interpretive mode for considering visual art as postmodern address.
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“[Collage is] an organization of already organized elements.” - Damien Hirst


Quoting others’ words in one’s own writing is in tune with the current western system of communication (a system that creates systems). Why say it in your own words if someone else has already said it more concisely, more elegantly, and above all—first. Enter Postmodernism. The gaseous, multi-generational sensibility called an “era,” in which its inhabitants can no longer look up toward a brighter future because they finally realized that they’ve been standing on what they’ve been smelling—the enormous mound of shit called civilization.

Arguably realized anywhere between 1965 and 1985, postmodernity, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature),” or it can be “of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language.” Postmodernism is, more importantly, a rejection of the specialization and elitism that defined the Modernist culture of the earlier part of the twentieth century, abandoning its hierarchical and polar (i.e., black and white) characteristics across the board of life (from politics, to art, to philosophy, etc). With more grey area came more complexity and nuance, more nooks and crannies, more niches and places for social deviants and outsiders to camp out and oftentimes institutionalize themselves, creating both alternatives and contributions to the mainstream cultural milieu. Postmodernity’s primary visual mode is that of appropriation, sampling and referencing, visually constituting the praxis of collage, décollage, in its three-dimensional form: assemblage, and in its most refined form: bricolage.(1) This paper will be exploring postmodernity, using collage (as metonym for our larger collective sensibility or outlook in today’s world) as its vehicle, complete with 4-wheel-drive and fuzzy dice hanging from the extra-large rear view mirror.

A bitter alcoholic named Guy Debord once wrote:
“The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, gives the best possible metaphor for the life of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and modification, and this under whichever of its forms it may appear. Only so long as it is paid for with money, as a status symbol of survival, can it be worshipped fetishistically. […] The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history able to justify itself by the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heatwave.”(2)

He was speaking about the 1965 Watts riots in LA. Three years after that, 1968 erupted in uprisings all over the world that amounted in a shift in the consciousness of an entire generation of people. It proposed a severe and total threat to traditional top-down structures of all kinds, though the world still had its lines in the sand, (like the cold war) it amounted to nothing less than the beginning of a new era in cultural production and theory. The appropriation and recontextualization Debord was writing about was the realization of the theoretical tenants of collage; theft as a bi-product, and more importantly a reversal of the effects of the “society of the spectacle.” He was very receptive in finding the art in the everyday (or in this case its antonym).

The “yBa’s,” decades later, knowingly played into the very same spectacular economic system in which their choice of media (collage, assemblage/ready-mades, and appropriative art) was a critique of. Damien Hirst bypassed the antiquated authority of the art critic toward “popularist mediation” in which everyone was their own critic.

James Gaywood breaks down the mechanics of the act of “collage” (or the reproduction and recontextualization of signs) as used by the “yBa’s” as such:
“[…I]n the context of postmodernism, art production invokes the cultural superimposition of reproductions, where what is signified can only refer to a sign itself (in essence Baudrillard’s ‘simulacrum’), disengaging the object from any historical precedent, engendering the justification for a multi-variety of surface interpretation.[…] Since transgression is confused in postmodern situations where the abolition of the subject renders a ‘sense of loss’ rather than an access to structural cohesion apocalyptic rather than generative the appropriation of signs engenders postmodern pastiche: ‘art as a complete imitation of objects incurring the loss of its (structural) sign function.’”(3)

To approach this from a societal standpoint, this process is undoubtedly intertwined with issues of identity. An indicator of this dilemma is illustrated by the proliferation of graffiti and illegal public art. Because of its illegality, the participants of the culture(4) oftentimes use self-ascribed nicknames as their nom de plumes creating a persona based on artistic skill and risk taken to write these names on appropriated spaces. The format of these names originally imitated that of the signage of commodities/advertisements, with high contrasted colors and other techniques to be easily noticed by the untrained eye (though evolved from there into its own coded signage). By imitating the language of advertisements for self-promotion, the result incurs “the loss of its (structural) sign function.”

All appropriative acts presuppose hierarchical systems of ownership based on class and/or social status (which in most countries is often based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, physical ability, etc), or more specifically habitus as referred to in the Gaywood article. But to delve deeper into the intricacies of the visual language of collage, we must examine it in terms of a verbal language.

Roman Jakobson, a linguistic semiotician, dissected the process of communication and came up with six necessary parts of a speech event. [Editor's note: see Jakobson's Communication Model.] A mugging is a good example we can use to illustrate Jakobson’s six communicative functions due to the dynamic nature of the coercive speech event (the elementary modus operandi for modern societal control).

Jakobson defines the addresser as the member of the speech event who sends “a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE” (the artist). For example, the addresser might make the threat/offer “give me your money or your life,” implying that choosing neither is a non-choice. The addresser’s proposition is not enough to determine whether or not a statement is coercive; we need some account of the addresser’s emotional state as well.

The addressee is the recipient of the message in the coercive speech event (the viewer).

The message in the speech event is the particular content delivered from the addresser to the addressee. In the case of coercion, the message can be literal and spelled out, as in the case of “Give me your money or I will kill you,” or it can play upon the poetics of language.

Context may be understood as the socio-cultural and spatio-temporal “referred to” in the speech event.(5) The spatio-temporal context in a coercive statement may be important if the speech event takes place in a threatening environment where no one is around to intervene or there are limited means of escape from the addresser. Further, the meaning of the harms delivered in the message from the addresser and their interpretation, as potential harms by the addressee are dependent on context (for example how wealthy or physically fit the addressee is).

Jakobson defines contact as “a physical channel and psychological connection between addresser and addressee.”(6) The contact between them might add a particular nuance to the coercive message not visible in the verbal. If the addresser brandished a knife and grabbed the arm of the addressee, for example, she might not need to verbalize the complete imperative choice. She might verbalize the words “give me your money,” while implying “(if you do not give me your money, I will cut you with this knife).” Similarly, if the coercive message were delivered over the phone, the addressee might not feel as restricted by the conative function of the coercive proposition, as they may be in a more secure environment or a great distance from the would-be coercer.

The final function we may use in analyzing a speech event is code. Jakobson defines code as a patterned shared system of language that during a speech event is “fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee.”(7) Codes may be broadly understood as “a group or set of signs” that give individual signs values or meanings through relational properties.(8)

Jakobson’s six communicative functions offer us insight into the intricacies of communicating signs and symbols. It’s a dissection of that unseen layer of the process toward meaning, and consequently the processes of appropriation and recuperation (both methods of redefining signs). Collage is merely the experimentation and examination of the effects of context of images, signs, symbols, and in a non-art sense: of people and ideas.

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1. Bricolage, in this writer’s opinion, amounts to a more “refined” (conceptually, not always aesthetically) postmodernist mode because of its emphasis on context and place when choosing materials, instead of the more retinal criteria used for classic collage like that of Picasso or Schwitters.

2. Debord, Guy. The Decline & Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy, Paris: Internationale Situationniste, 1966, 99-100.

3. Gaywood, James. “yBa As Critique, from Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 93.

4. Yes, cultures sprout even around the senseless act of spraying ridiculous nicknames on things that don’t belong to you… ah, postmodernism.

5. Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings: Linguistics and Poetics, 1990, 73.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures, 1993, 51.