Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (You Are Not Yourself), 1981
Private collection, courtesy Skarstedt Fine Art, New York
This letter from Philip Smith should be widely distributed. Also: Douglas Crimp's take, and Barry Schwabsky's piece in The Nation...
via Art in America:
Setting the Record Straight
The following letter from artist Philip Smith arrived at Art in America' s offices on June 11, 2009.
Dear Art in America:
As
one of the five original artists in the seminal 1977 "Pictures"
exhibition, I read with great interest Jess Wilcox's interview with Mr.
Doug Eklund regarding his "Pictures Generation" exhibition at the Met. [See "The Pictures Generation: A Conversation with Douglas Eklund" published in Art in America's online edtion on April 21, 2009.]
In the interview Mr. Eklund explains my omission from the show by
stating, "When I reviewed [Philip Smith's] work for this show, it
seemed not strong enough to be included ..."
The truth is
Mr. Eklund never contacted me or any of my representatives regarding my
archives from the period. It is unclear as to what work he actually
reviewed to make this sweeping judgment. If, in fact, my work was "not
strong enough to be included" how did I ever end up in the original
"Pictures" exhibition, much less the over 100 exhibitions since 1977
that have also included the Whitney and Beijing Biennials?
Had
Mr. Eklund contacted me, I could have provided him with hundreds of
examples of photo-based work that include slide-shows and photo-works,
as well as photo-based paintings, drawings and sculptures from the
period, all in accordance with the "Pictures" aesthetic.
What
happened with regard to my omission from the "Pictures Generation"
exhibition has set off alarm bells with various critics. Most notably,
Holland Cotter wrote a front-page Arts section article (May
31) on this issue titled, "Cultural History is Being Written and
Revised, Right Before Our Eyes. It Can Be a Disturbing Sight." In the
article Mr. Cotter writes about the "Pictures Generation,"...The
show...as history has problems. The most obvious of them is factual.
Of the original five "Pictures" artists, only four are acknowledged.
No work by Mr. Smith is on view; his name is mentioned only once in the
catalog. His portrait has effectively been removed from the hall of
fame ... In the interest of accuracy Mr. Smith should have been
included in the Met show. As it is, his absence turns historical
record into invention ..."
In the The Nation, Barry
Schwabsky also expressed his concern regarding the omission of my work.
"... Smith, by the way, has gone missing without the slightest
explanation ... it's unfortunate that a reader of the catalog
(co-published by the Met and Yale University Press) might easily not
realize he had ever been included."
Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine,
posted on his Facebook page, "... one wonders why Philip Smith was
excluded from the Met show when he was in the original "Pictures" show
... it's annoying how so many curators mindlessly buy whatever
party-line they're sold." {more}
As you can see, I am not the
only one puzzled by Mr. Eklund's inexplicable curatorial decision to
ignore my work and my influence. Even more bizarre is the notion that
artists not related to the ‘Pictures' aesthetic were pressed into
service by Mr. Eklund. As Martha Schwendener reports in The Village Voice, "Eklund admits, many artists, when contacted, refused to identify themselves as ‘Pictures artists'."
One
cannot help but wonder why the Met so obviously chose to rewrite art
history and produce an historical survey damaged by flawed scholarship
and for what reason.
I have had the pleasure of being reviewed in A.i.A.,
and would greatly appreciate it if you would consider an examination of
what really took place in the creation of the "Pictures Generation.'"
Apparently, there is much more to this story than has been publicly
discussed.
With warmest regards,
Philip Smith
via CultureGrrl:
Q&A with Douglas Crimp: Responses to the Met’s "Picture Generation" from the Group’s First Proponent
By Lee Rosenbam{excerpt}
April 30, 2009
[...]
The person I was most interested in hearing from is curator/critic Douglas Crimp, who was a seminal figure at that moment of contemporary art history and is now an art history professor at the University of Rochester. It was he who first identified the affinities of this group of artists and their creative progeny as a new, important development, when he curated and wrote the text for the 1977 "Pictures" exhibition that provided the seed from which the Met's show grew. The enduring influence of that small show and the Crimp's related essay far exceeded expectations when the display of five artists---Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch and Philip Smith (the last of whom has been snubbed by the Met's show and catalogue)---opened at Artists Space, a feisty alternative venue in New York.
Having been told at the press preview that Crimp himself was present among us (although all public remarks came from Eklund), I cornered him (as luck would have it) in front of works by his favorite artist in the show, Louise Lawler, whose reputation may get the biggest boost from this Metropolitan Museum exposure.
In the spirit of "Pictures," I'm appropriating Crimp's comments for my own work. (I'm the "Q"; he's the "A.")
Q: What's your take on the Met's take on a subject in which you had been so involved?
A: There's been an uptake of the "Pictures" exhibition that's continued for about 32 years now. It's been a very long process of being tied to this moment and that little exhibition that I did at Artists Space. I guess at this point I can say I'm pretty detached from it. Of course I'm also extremely attached, but I'm detached insofar as I've watched the process of something I did and a couple of texts that I wrote become a part of history. I've realized over time that you can't control the way history is made.
Q: If you could control it, how would you do things differently than this [the Met's show]?
A: I have no interest in controlling. I did something: I did a little exhibition; I wrote a text; I rewrote the text and published it a couple of years later in "October." It had effects. A lot of it is very gratifying to me. A lot of the attention has been paid to that little exhibition, but also to what I wrote about a group of artists and a phenomenon.
It's been interesting to see how much that has had an effect and I guess it has proved to me that all of us who participate are making art's meanings---the viewers of art, the critics of art, obviously the artists and the museums that make exhibitions---all of these constitute meaning in works of art. Meanings don't inhere in the objects themselves. They actually have to do with reception.
Q: Are the meanings that you see here different from the meanings that you intended back then and the meanings that you would attribute to these things now? How does your perspective differ from the point of view reflected in this exhibition?
A: It's not so much about my being married to what I thought then. I don't even know what I thought then, because I thought so many many things subsequently. It's more about what I think now.
In what Doug [Eklund] was just saying [in his remarks to the press], he gave a certain amount of attention to the importance of women and I think that has to be really emphasized. In his first wall text, he mentions feminism but then he goes on to define the influence of feminism as something like, "It doesn't matter what the gender of the artist is." [The wall text stated that feminism "made it possible for woman artists to define themselves as artists who happened to be women."]
I think that's NOT the lesson of feminism. The lesson of feminism is in the kind of art that's being made and the kinds or propositions that were being made through the art---the critique of originality, for example, which is something I already argued for early on with respect to Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman. I think that's a feminist perspective and that is a crucial aspect of this formation of artists. I didn't recognize that at the time.
I don't think that the work of Louise Lawler---probably the artist I feel closest to, in relation to my subsequent work---can be understood without taking account of second-wave feminism.
Louise Lawler, "Pollock and Tureen," 1984, Metropolitan Museum, image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures
Q: Do you have a more political take on all of this than we're seeing here?
A: I don't know, but what struck me about the Sarah Charlesworth piece is that it actually was not just a photograph but [related to] a particular political event [the kidnapping by the Italian Red Brigade of Prime Minister Aldo Moro]. I'd have to read the catalogue to know how he [Eklund] is dealing with the politics of it. [Eklund sticks with how "conceptually astute" the piece is. It shows photographs that appeared on various newspapers' front pages on the day when Moro's hostage picture was published. His image is the small one on The Times; second from top on The Guardian.]
Sarah Charlesworth, "April 21, 1978" (detail), from the series Modern History, 1978, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
Q: What do you make of Philip Smith's absence from the Met's show?
A: He was not so much of the group, of the social world, of the people who formulated this. He's gay and this [the Met's show] is a very straight configuration of artists. I don't know what's happened to him, career-wise. It's a slightly touchy subject: I think Philip is upset, reasonably.
What's more interesting is that four of the five continue to be artists that we think about. [Crimp also noted that he himself had omitted Smith and added Sherman in his second essay on "Pictures," published in "October" magazine. Eklund later told me that he had made a "curatorial decision" to exclude Smith: "I didn't respond to his work strongly enough to include it."]
[read on...]
Big Camera, Small Camera, by Laurie Simmons, 1977
A Million Little Pictures: The Pictures Generation Revisited
By Barry Schwabsky
This article appeared in the June 1, 2009 edition of The Nation.
{excerpt}
"On Saturday, September 30, 1967," as artist Robert Smithson was careful to specify, he embarked on a trip from New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal to his hometown. He was about to undertake what in his now-famous text he would call "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey." (It's not clear whether the piece should be called an essay or a story; perhaps it's best to call it an artwork made of writing and pictures.) The monuments in question were things like concrete abutments for a highway under construction and a pumping derrick connected to a long pipe. As he stepped off the bus at his first monument, a bridge connecting Bergen and Passaic counties across the Passaic River, Smithson noticed that "Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an overexposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a series of detached 'stills' through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank."
Writing in a tone derived in part from the deceptive objectivity of the French nouveau roman (he quotes from Mobile, Michel Butor's collage-travelogue of the United States) and in part from British new-wave science fiction (he entertains himself on the bus ride with the New York Times and Brian Aldiss's dystopian sci-fi novel Earthworks), Smithson evokes a vacant reality made only of "memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures." Critics fascinated with Smithson's apparently post-Duchampian idea that banal objects become art simply by being looked at a certain way--that "a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance," as he would write a year later--have often overlooked the way Smithson framed his saturnine view of postindustrial culture through the eye of the camera. His alienation allows him to perceive that things, made or natural, are mere photographs of themselves, and that these photographs are essentially "stills" excerpted from the film that is time. Rereading "The Monuments of Passaic," one begins to wonder whether the grainy snapshots with which Smithson illustrated his text are secretly not photographs of the monuments but in fact the monuments themselves. It is clear that, for him, the image is always of something that was already an image. Artists have perennially had the feeling that they are merely the channel for something that is already art, but Smithson's notion of sunlight pitching images into his eye through the camera is a peculiarly gnostic or paranoid version of it, with a visceral punch characteristic of a contemporary of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 35, so he could hardly have been part of the exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Pictures Generation 1974-1984" (through August 2), which is devoted to a loosely knit group of artists mostly born ten to fifteen years after him--the first wave of baby boomers, if you like, the first generation to grow up with (black-and-white) TV. And Smithson is barely even mentioned as an influence on this group in the extensive catalog essay by the exhibition's curator, Douglas Eklund, who imagines Smithson as an artist of "cataclysmic processes and sublime vistas of the natural world," as distinguished from these younger artists who were more immersed in "the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines, which to them constituted a sort of fifth element or prevailing kind of weather." Eklund nominates Smithson's contemporary John Baldessari, a smaller artist but a legendary teacher, as the Pictures group's honorary chef d'école. Yet Smithson's ghost lingers everywhere in the show, and as ghosts tend to do, it lingers mostly to reproach. What a work like "The Monuments of Passaic" shows so clearly is that, for Smithson, nature and the image-apparatus were one and the same, and to see is always to see a mediated image. Some of the works in "The Pictures Generation"--most of the best ones--are based on the same premise. But too many of the artists really do seem to have believed, as Eklund does now, that their work should be concerned with "media culture" as a self-contained area of investigation, and their work is all the narrower for that.
"The Pictures Generation" takes its title from a famous exhibition of 1977--famous in the sense that many more people remember it than ever really saw it. The original "Pictures" took place at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space, in New York City, and it was further publicized by a couple of articles by its curator, the critic Douglas Crimp, published in Flash Art and October in 1979. Of course, the Met show is far more than a rerun. Crimp exhibited the work of just five artists (Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith), whereas Eklund's "Pictures Generation" encompasses nearly thirty--among whom Smith, by the way, has gone missing without the slightest explanation. There's nothing wrong with that in itself because Smith's work, a more traditional kind of painting, really does seem to have been on a different track. But it's unfortunate that a reader of the catalog (co-published by the Met and Yale University Press) might easily not realize he had ever been included.
That's just one example of how Eklund, having amassed a vast amount of information on his artists and their milieu, has organized it haphazardly. The catalog is a rarity in being blessed with an index, but if you look up "Pictures" in the index, you will find, perversely enough, multiple references to "artists not included in" the 1977 show but no entry to point you to a page that says who was included. Basically, though, Eklund's loose-knit Pictures generation mainly comprises two distinct groups of artists. One consists of former students of Baldessari's at Cal Arts who had moved east to New York. The other group, less academic in formation and more working class in origin, had gathered around the artist-run space Hallwalls in Buffalo before migrating downstate. There, both groups gravitated to Artists Space and the downtown art and music scene, and some of the artists began to show with the commercial gallery Metro Pictures, which was co-founded by the former director of Artists Space, Helene Winer, in 1980. Its opening was immediately and presciently seen by the critic Robert Pincus-Witten as "definitely" marking "the death of the '60s" (as though the intervening decade had merely been an extension of it).
Pincus-Witten's judgment should raise suspicions when we read Eklund's summation of what constitutes the rough unity of the Pictures group: "They synthesized the lessons of Minimalism and Conceptualism in which they were educated, with a renewed (though hardly uniform) attention to Pop art because it chimed with the new, media-driven world they had inherited." Maybe, but if all that was at stake in the work of the Pictures generation was an effort to tie up a tidy little semiotic package out of the unruly and contradictory impulses of an older generation, it's not likely anyone would be taking the trouble to re-examine their work today. Opening the exhibition up to encompass so many artists was a good decision in that it helps re-create a sense of context, but a more stringent selection focusing on, say, nine central figures--Brauntuch, Goldstein, Levine and Longo plus Louise Lawler, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and James Welling--would have allowed for more specificity. One might then have said that the Pictures group had gleaned from the Minimalists and Conceptualists a sense that art should assume an incommunicative, pugnaciously neutral stance--that it should throw down the gauntlet of its own incomprehensibility. The public's inability to find anything to see or any evidence of work or meaning in, say, a row of bricks by Carl Andre might be repeated in its encounter with Levine's photograph of a photograph by Walker Evans or one by James Welling showing some crumpled foil. But this willingness to use recalcitrant inconsequentiality to frustrate the viewer's desire might be all they have in common.
