decay # 30 ~ on liking real life
Friday, May 1, 2009 at 10:15AM 
Rotten crab apples • click to embiggenIt has been opined, somewhere by someone (I forget), that one of the problems with criticism (to critique) is that critics often appropriate that which they are critiquing. As far as I can determine, what that means is that the critique of whatever becomes more important that the whatever that is being critiqued. In essence, the critics steal the show.
IMO, that is exactly was has happened to the medium of photography, Art Division. The academic lunatic fringe has appropriated the medium of photography by decreeing that concept - the idea behind the image, not the image itself - reigns supreme. In simplest terms, it doesn't matter what you picture as long as the concept / theory behind it interesting (aka, obtuse, arcane, self-referential art theory). Or, in other words, the words that can be written about a picture (better yet, a body of work) are much more important than the picture(s) itself.
This state of affairs is way whacked.
If all of this tenure-tract, publish-or-die, closed-loop-self-stimulation, theoretical-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin bloviation were confined to the "hollow-ed" halls of academia, wherein they all talked to themselves, the world would be a better place. But nooooo - as these pinheads have swarmed over the curatorial class, they have slowly but surely appropriated the museum/gallery world and shaped it into their own ego-centric version of what matters.
In stark contrast to this academic mania, the former MOMA photography department curator, John Szarkowski, was an accomplished picture maker in his own right. Without a doubt, for him, pictures, not picture theory, mattered most. That is not to say that he was a picture-is-just-a-picture guy - his visionary promotion and elevation of Eggleston, Shore, Winogrand, Arbus, Friedlander, and many other "postmodern" picture makers belies than notion. But, nevertheless, he demonstrated time and time again that he really liked pictures.
In fact, Szarkowski's tenure at MOMA was viewed as flawed by some precisely because he deliberately avoided exhibiting the work of most, if not all, of the emerging darlings of the academic photo-theorist world. Case in point, while he could hardly have been unaware of the one-million-dollars-a-picture darling of that world, Jeff Wall, Wall's work never graced the walls of MOMA until after Szarkowski's departure. One could legitimately think that part of Szarkowski's decision not to display Wall's work was based on Wall's statement that one should, at all costs, avoid picturing anything that one actually cared about - you don't want any of those pesky personal feeling about a subject to get in the way of photo theory.
In any event, as far back as 1967, writing in his introduction to the New Documents exhibition, Szarkowski stated:
Most of those who were called documentary photographers a generation ago ... made their pictures in the service of a social cause ... to show what was wrong with the world, and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right ... A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy - almost an affection - for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors,as a source of all wonder and fascination and value - no less precious for being irrational ... What they hold in common is the belief that the commonplace is really worth looking at, and the courage to look at it without theorizing. - all italic and underline emphasis is mine
It almost seems that Szarkowski's "without theorizing" was a prescient / pre-emptive strike / warning against academic lunatic fringe photo-theorist tsunami that was incubating - one might even say, "festering" (like a boil) - just below the surface of the times. Did he understand that an infectious pandemic of photo-theory criticism would soon begin its relentless spread of appropriation in order to gain mastery over a medium of which none were actual practitioners?
Quite frankly, this situation reminds me of our current economic crisis - a crisis fermented and driven by economic theorists from the halls of academia - pinheads who never actually practiced any "economics" themselves and, much to our dismay, upheld the theoretical concept of economics over its everyday all too human practice.
A pox on all of them.
BTW - how many of you consider yourself to be "new documentarians"? That is, picture makers directed toward the idea that you "like the real world", that "the commonplace is really worth looking at" and that it is "a source of all wonder and fascination and value".
And, most critically, that if you have "the courage to look at it without theorizing" you might even have the ability to "know it".
decay
Reader Comments (7)
I certainly would place myself in that group (though I'm not sure that "new documentarian" is the term I would use to describe myself).
I'm also convinced that if more people would wake up and look at the real that any number of our most pressing social issues would be solved. If only because by looking at real life these issues would become unavoidable.
Is there a middle ground with this theorizing stuff? Can you love the real world, still think about it and yet keep your feet firmly planted on the ground?
The theorist nuts could pin their theorizing on anything. That is all their doing, using photography to pin some thinking onto. They don't seem to care about photography much if at all. They could pick any cultural object to dull with their blathering. I think they pick art because there is an audience and an academic structure to utilize. They could just as easily blather on boringly about a car or a toilet I suppose. Why do they have to pick on our medium?
I guess I have become a "new documentarian" by discovery. I didn't set out to become one, or didn't find the theory interesting and then begin to follow it. I came to this point by exploring the world around me photographically. I started out wanting to be a "nature photographer". Now I document the world around me, closest to me. I found that there is as many photographic opportunities around my town as anywhere else, and I don't exactly live in a wilderness.
I think Szarkowski didn't exhibit Wall's work because he thought it overrated. After all he did demonstrated time and time again that he really liked pictures.
Your photography is great, but your repetitive sarcastic and biting remarks about academia are very revealing personally. What is all that anger really about -- surely academia isn't all that bad.
Reality. Definitely. See the thing. Photograph the thing. Look at the photograph of the thing (yeah, I know - I just added another thing-layer).
Most art theory, especially the post-modernist stuff, is...um...well...crap (see yesterday's example). Silly. Nonsensical.
Anybody remember "The Sokal Affair"? A brilliant send-up of post-modernist theorizing and its total lack of anything resembling intellectual rigor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
I came across this today:
"The photographs are, Szarkowski demonstrates, 'elastic' but poised, focusing on 'unconsidered details' and 'the chance encounters of things,' but showing finally 'a new kind of order within chaos.' He admires both Atget's intense, relatively straightforward attention to the physical beauty of the world — both its shapes, often revealed in freshly seen juxtapositions that have a unity notwithstanding, and the light that discloses these forms — and his reluctance to assign large meanings to his subjects. Atget's pictures are thus recognized as a supreme expression of most photographers' instinctive faith — a belief in the significance of specific scenes, a significance fittingly matched to the unique power of the camera for precise transcription — and a hesitancy to theorize, a disinclination encouraged by the resistance offered from such fully recorded specificity." (emphasis mine)
It was taken from a review that Robert Adams wrote of The work of Atget, Volume Four: Modern Times by John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg.
I thought it was appropriate to the discussion at hand.
I'm in Bill's camp - much as I want to photograph "nature" I'm not surrounded by it. But there is interesting stuff around. My approach is "look, this appealed to me because it's intersting/quirky/humerous, I think you'd like it." Few meanings, just stuff that I see.