SanArt

Ending today at Gagosian is an exhibition exploring the relationship between sculpture and photography. While the photographers here have created sculptural tableaux in order to photograph them, “Untitled (Vicarious): Photographing the Constructed Object” is not about the photographing of sculpture, per se, but in how photography “dematerializes the constructed object.”

Automatically when I read the word ‘”dematerializes” I see a history of conceptual and performance art that photography has carried along since the late ‘60s, and all the burdens of the photograph as a document that go along with it. But this was not the most striking thing for me in this exhibition – more compelling was that sculptural practices in contemporary photography support an absenting of the figure. In this self-portrait by Cindy Sherman, the dramatically intended detail of a gleaming drop of sex takes over the pictorial field to the extent that an exposed vagina is mere background for the grimace of the figure pinned before it. Carter Mull’s photographs of what appear to be salt crystals, jewels, hair, blood and a halloween mask further exaggerate the thematic disappearance of the figure as a scene of a crime.

The absenting of the figure effectively sidesteps a quite different trajectory in the history of contemporary photography, which understands the camera as a technology that frames and captures what is seen. In this trajectory the camera is a prosthetic of vision extending out into the world as a social construct., and the world’s pictures can only offer themselves to view as socially constructed in turn. From here an emphasis has been placed upon the relations between the photographer and her subject, as in ICP’s first triennial in 2003, “Strangers,” and the current exhibition at the Bronx Museum, “Street Art/StreetLife.”

In a shift away from such a reading of the social technology of vision terms for understanding photography are re-orienting towards more traditional interests in medium-specificities, no less social but a different address entirely. I am also reading Michael Fried’s “Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before,” and what he refers to as “new art photography” really begins when it takes its full place upon the wall much in the same manner as painting, and now carries the history of painting along with it.

Sculpture has always lent itself well to photography, notably in the case of Constantin Brancusi. Drawn to balanced instabilities, Brancusi explored qualities of surface and light that could project the substance of his compositions. In “Untitled (Vicarious)” David Smith and Moholy-Nagy are the forebears of a sculptural interest in photography. In Untitled (Tableau), 1933, David Smith violently scratches an eye into the surface of the photograph. Radiating lines expose the pulp beneath the gloss of photography so that the surface is looking back, and in doing so makes the picture.

Contrary to Smith’s attention to the surface, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is drawn to photography for its transparency upon the world. In the 2006 exhibition of Albers and Moholy-Nagy at the Whitney a carousel of Kodak slides whirred and clicked, the projected images only visble for the light passing through surfaces of film. His early color photographs were transparencies, as printing didn’t live up to his standards (it wasn’t until 1973-4 that Eggleston was confident to leave transparencies for the dye-transfer print.) It was when working on constructions of glass and metal that transparency first became for him the essence of a technological modernism. Moholy Nagy believed that modernist transparency could dematerialize sculpture into the motions of shadow and light, ultimately becoming glass architecture.

According to Fried, this sense of photography as ultimately a medium of transparency is what characterizes new art photography – apart from being on the wall as though painting, it has no real interest in the picture plane . Where tenderness (in the sense of both the surface’s raw vulnerability and the care a painter has in tending to this) might have existed for David Smith, in new art photography the surface of the photograph is taken for granted as a transparent screen, “put out of play as a bearer of pictorial meaning.” It is Thomas Demand who best plays this out. Demand describes his own practice as furthered along by what he refers to as the “dehistoricizing effect” of digital media. He is most well known for images of of vacant crime scenes culled from photo agencies – the banality of Jeffrey Dahmer’s vacant hallway, for example, seems to bear no relation at all to the horror of its context. It is a way of screening the viewer’s curiousity out of the scene, without instantiating the pictorial surface itself as an object that faces. Even what is depicted is a paper illusion.

Fried rejects the notion that Demand’s photograph has anything to do with the fact that he was trained as a sculptor. It is the controlled intention behind each detail that makes the difference for him, and he refers to Baudelaire, who described the difference between sculpture and painting in 1846:

Sculpture has several drawbacks that are a necessary consequence of its means. brutal and positive like nature, it is at the same time vague and eludes one’s grasp, because it presents too many faces at once. It is in vain that the sculptor strives to put himself at the service of a unique point of view; the spectator, who revolves around the figure, can choose a hundred different points of view, except the right one, and it often happens, which is humiliating for the artist, that a chance illumination, an effect of lamplight, reveals a beauty which is not the one he had thought of. A painting is only what he wants it to be; there is no other way of looking at it other than in its own light. Painting has only one point of view; it is exclusive and despotic: and so the expression a painter can command is much stronger.*

Demand’s KFC, above, is “there for us” behind the transparent screen of photography, but it is in the absolute control of the artist. Further, the cuts that are visible do not make of this a seamless entry into a world, but a scene cut away from our own, riven throughout by the artist’s intent.

Like sculpture, photography is known for being prone to the vagaries of detail, and is valued for this. Based on my experience there is no question that what distinguishes a still photograph from film is that there is always that one detail that will sit with you in a way that it can’t in film, and I’m convinced that drawing attention to this is why the archivist-photographer Allan Sekula will show a series of slides via carousel. At issue is the value that one gives to what Roland Barthes referred to as the punctum, an absorbing detail unplanned by the artist and entirely personal to the viewer. That the character of such details is an issue for contemporary photographers is clear in the work of Anne Hardy, who in the photograph above depicts a space completely handed over to an obsessive cataloguing with its own private logic, of no sense to us but doing its best to saturate the room with intention in every detail.

Fried offers another example of how photography excludes the viewer in Sugimoto’s Seascapes, an installation of which is currently on view at Gagosian’s 21st St. location. In “Untitled (Vicarious)” Colors of Shadow: 1015, 2004, makes a degree of autism visible with regard to Fried’s understanding of Sugimoto’s work. Sugimoto rented an apartment in Japan, and had expert plasterers sand and polish down the walls, so that every detail has been smoothed out. Only the wooden floor gives away the fact that these fine grays have been photographed with color film. Exhibited with this series of photographs at Sonnabend in 2006 was a sculpture by Robert Morris, four grey cubes from the center of which one could stand – the furthermost sides of these cubes were at such an angle that you were effectively at the center of a truncated pyramid, and felt very positioned by it. That the gallery saw such resonance between Sugimoto’s photographs and a minimalist sculpture is not simply because of abstract minimalist forms they share. In “Untitled (Vicarious)” I was struck by Sugimoto’s framing. While so much care has been given to sanding these walls down in order to remove the arbitrary effects of light, the print itself has been laid over a bumpy surface, capturing a light not permitted by the depicted surface. Further, Sugimoto very intentionally uses a glass that reflects the lighting of the gallery in green. Not only is the artist drawing attention to the surface in relation to the space outside of it, but Sugimoto also draws attention to the entire space of the gallery from the beholder’s point of view as reflected by the framing glass. For a photographer who describes his work as a sculptural practice, a matter of chiseling space, such invitation to the arbitrariness of light in our own space and the denial of it in the photographed image is crucial to extending and putting to the test the ontological claims of medium-specificity that Fried holds dear.

By Catherine Spaeth

* Oeuvres Completes, paris, 1961, pp. 943-4, as quoted in Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, Yale, c. 2000, p. 62-63.
Image Credits: Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1992, © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York;Carter Mull, Sumere…Sumptuary, 2004,© Carter Mull. Courtesy of the artist and Rivington Arms; David Smith, Untitled (Tableau) 1933, © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,Untitled, 1940’s, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery; Thomas Demand, KFC, 2007, Courtesy of Gagosian; Anne Hardy, Untitled VI, 2005, Courtesy of Gagsosian Gallery; Hiroshi Sugimoto, Colors of Shadow 1015, 2004, “© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”; Honore Daumier, Salon of 1857, “Sad Countenance of sculpture in the midst of painting.”