Rosalind Krauss “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View
Some quotations/paraphases to identify her argument as it is developed, and some additional observations and comments of my own.
Of the two versions of O’Sullivan’s image, they belong to two separate domains of culture. The lithograph belongs to the discourse of empirical science – presumably the museum of the title. The photograph operates within the aesthetic discourse – the space of exhibition.
The space of exhibition was constituted in part by the continuous surface of wall. The gallery wall became the signifier of inclusion. Ipso facto if a photograph was hung on a gallery wall it became art?
The gallery wall can be seen as constituting in itself a representation of “exhibitionality”. Horrible argument based on a made up word! This smacks too much for me of sterile theory and, frankly, art-bollocks. I certainly do not feel it usefully adds to or advances the argument. In any event, even assuming that there is some validity in the argument (on which I have no more to say for the time being), I struggle to see how it can properly apply today. The dominant mode of displaying and viewing photographs is not now the exhibition. Rather it seems to me it is the internet: Instagram, Flickr, individual photographer’s websites, and so on; and books and zines. Increasingly photographs are not viewed in a public space but, as with the stereographs, in a private domain, albeit not one entirely free from distractions. An argument that suggests a photograph is art because it is displayed in a gallery setting does not really work when the photo is not so displayed and, what is more, when in the domain of the internet it does not for the viewer, and might not anywhere, have any physical existence (if for example the photographer has not printed it). Whilst the argument might have had some validity in 1982 I certainly do not see that it works today, is outdated and simply too narrow.
Landscape (in the sense of landscape painting?) transformed into a flattened and compressed experience of space, voiding perspective, a single painting becoming a representation of the very space of exhibition. serial landscapes mimed the horizontal extension of the wall or expanded to become the absolute size of the wall, synonymy of landscape (the painting) and wall. This constitution of the work of art as a representation of its own space of exhibition is what we know as the history of modernism.
Within what discursive space does the original O’Sullivan function? The aesthetic discourse and it is itself a representation of the plane of exhibition. Is this a retrospective construction designed to secure it as art? For my part I find it hard to escape that conclusion. The modernist argument (if Krauss’s formulation is correct, something I cannot comment on at the moment) makes the work of art something of a solipsism, arguably not itself a work of art. I really struggle with that.
Referring to Galassi: “The object here is to show that photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition.” The perspective so prominent in 19th century outdoor photography (“analytic”) was fully developed within the discipline of painting. Therefore, photography is not simply the child of technical rather than aesthetic traditions. Viewing the evidence on the gallery wall we have no doubt Art (capital A!) was intended and represented in the painterly analytic perspective.
Doubt is then cast on this by a discussion of stereoscopy and the difference between landscape and view, the latter term most often being used by photographers; questions of “authorship” and copyright – mostly vested in the publisher rather than the photographer; and modes of viewing – private and cut off from other visual stimuli as opposed to pictures hung in a gallery – and modes of storage – cabinets rather than open walls. More consistent with the museum than the gallery.
This argument is developed by a consideration of the work of Atget, with a discussion of what constitutes an artist and, particularly, that artist’s oeuvre, concluding in Atet’s case that his work amounts not to an oeuvre but to a catalogue. HIs work is not art belonging in the gallery, but a number of typologies that are more at home in the museum.
There is a passing mention of the selective roles that are played by archives. A more interesting an informative, possibly simply because it is the primary subject of the article, I think is Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert’s “Photographic Ecosystems and Archives” which shows how different meanings, values, can be assigned to material within an archive depending upon how it is arranged, presented, chosen, by whom, and for what purpose.
Ultimately the thrust of Krauss’s argument is that early landscape photography belongs in the archive, in the museum, rather than the gallery, and that there is a continuing effort to dismantle the archive and to reconstitute the work as art, on a par with landscape painting.
A general observation: I find this sort of debate about whether or not photography – in its broadest sense, not just in the limited context of portrayals of landscape – is art or not pretty sterile and largely unhelpful, at least so far as developing my own work and voice is concerned. It is interesting, I suppose, from an historical point of view but I do not find it practically helpful now. Take for example the work of the Bechers: at one level it can be seen as purely typological, a catalogue of examples of particular subjects, but at the same time it is art because of the intentions of the makers, the way the work is organised and presented, and so on. It is both, though not necessarily at the same time, in the same place, or for the same people or purposes. It also serves to maintain my general mistrust of and impatience with “theory”, particularly that of modernist theorist who write ad nauseam about the medium while in the process holding it in low regard and often attacking it in sometimes strangely intemperate terms. I have commented on theory before and am not going to repeat myself here!
One last point. The course book refers to a “rebuff” – presumably a rebuttal or a riposte rather than a brushing off – of Krauss’s argument by Tod Papageorge. Whilst his book of essays is mentioned the particular one (or more?) that deals with this is not cited. Unfortunately it appears that this book is currently out of print. It is available second-hand but only at prices that are very significantly in excess of the original cover price – not everyone can afford to be laying out substantial amounts of money in this way to address what might actually be quite a peripheral point. It does not appear in the UCA on-line library. For the time bing therefore I am going to have to pass on this source.
https://www.academia.edu/37955088/Photographic_Ecosystems_and_Archives
https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/lklichfall13t/files/2013/09/Krauss.pdf
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