- liz wells, editor |Firs published 2008 hy Rothe HT Neve Fetter Lane, London ECAP AE Simltancowsly published in the USA anal Casa by Ronthege 29 West 35th Steet, New York, NY 19001 outage wn inp ft For 8 Francs i Sndivial hapir tel aloes Typeset in Pexpot al Bell Gothic by Hioronce Proxietin b., Stonegh, Devon Printed ae bos in Great Bet hy T] Inerrational Led, Padstow, Coral Al ight escrvee. No part of this ook maybe reprinted or rept te bled in any for by any strani, wnechaneal, or othe means now know a reser invented, nel 1 photocopying and revoning, Boeish Birr Catan Pubcon Davo Avent Luby of Cony has ben applet lor reenrdl for this book sass fn th Bish Sabrary Gauging in Pabionion Data ISHN 0615. 24660-1 diy ISBN 0-415. 24661.% (phleChapter 18 Andy Grundberg THE CRISIS OF THE REAL Photography and postmodernism Disney is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in Fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding Lave na longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a qaustion af a false representation of reality (leology), but af eoneealing the foes that the real is no longer real on Bandeillard! T2785 ween & CONDITION in the ae tht for many bth ‘confusing and irritating a condition that goes by the name of postmodernism. But what ddo we mean when we call a work of art postmodersist? And what docs postmodernism mean far photography? How docs it relate 10, and challenge, 0 tradition of photographic practice as Beaumont Newhall has so conscientiously deserihed if?” Why are the ideas and practices of postmodernist art so unsettling to cour traditional ways of thinkin we are to understand the st larger art ward What is postmodernism? Is it a method, like the practice of using already exist? lan attitude, like irony? Is it an ideology, like Marxism? Or is i a plo hatched by a cabal of New York artists, dealers, and turn the artavorld establishment and to shower money and f «call definitions that have heen proposed, and, like the blind! men’s deserip. tions of the elephant, they all may contain a small share of truth, But as | hope 40 make clear, postmodernist art «id not arise in a vacuum, and it is more thon merely a demonstration of certain theoretical concems dear to Qventieth-century These are questions that need to be examined it its relation te the nel critics, designed to over ame on those invalvod? This essay & the tke pve of ee autho abu, Cae ofthe Ret (New Yarks Apri, 1980}. Waly appeais tna sanlly revel yorsion in Pho its Pteration Slace F946 (Nes Yok Abert: Poesy 1387)that the nunding alation, ology), villarel? nany is both smvodlornism «l what does hallenge, the snscientiously unsettling t + examined if lation 10 the g images that sn? OF isi ose involved? tens descrip Las Thope to tieth-century prem, 1998). ew THE CRISIS OF THE REAL 165 Intellectuals. I would argue, in short, shat postmadernism, in its art and its theory, isa rellection of the conditions of our tim One complication ip arriving at any nest definition of postimoxternism is that i means dilferent things in different artistic media, The term first gained with urreney in the field of architecture,’ as a way of describing a turn away from the hermetically sealed glass boxes and walled concrete bunkers of modern archit ture. In coming up with the term postmodern, architects hal a very specific and dearly dfined ingot in mnind: the “less is more" yeduetivism of Mies van der Rohe anal his disciples. AL first, postmodernist in architecture meant eelveticisns: the use of stylistic flourishes and decorative ornament with a kind of carefice, slapdash, and ultimately valuc-feee abandon, Postmodernist architecture, however, combines old and new styles with an almast hevlonistic inten y. Freed of the rigors nf Miesian design, liberty to reintroduce precisely chose elements of architectural syntax that Mies had ged fron the vocabulary: historical allusion, metaphor, jokey illusionism, spatial iguity. What the English architectural eritie Charles Jencks says of Michael Graves’s Portland build is true of postmoslern architweture as a whole: Ie is evidently an architecture of inclusion which fakes the multiplicity of differing “demands seriously: ornament, colour, representational sculpture, ueban morphology and more px ly architectural demands such as struetore, space Marchitecture's postmedernism is involved with redecorating the stripped-down eke ments of architect iL modernism, thereby restoring some of the emotional com and spiritual capacity thatthe best buildings seom to have, the postmodernism ce is something else. Modern danee as we have come to know it consists of a tradition extending [rom Loie Falley, in Parisin the 1890s, through Martha Graham, in New York in the 1930s. As anyone avho has seem Grahar : emotional, subjective expressionism is a hallmark of modem dance, albeit within 3 technically polished framework, Postmodernist lance, which dates fiom the exper imental work performed at the Judson Church in New York City in the early 1960s, \was anc! is ap attempt to throw off the heroicism and expressionisan of modernist dlance by making dance more vernacular. Inspired by the pioneering accomplish ments of Meree Cunningham, the lancers of the Juulson Dance Theater — who included Trisha Brown, Lucinda Chills, Steve Paxton, and Yeanne Rainer — based their movements on everyday gestures such as walking and turning, and often ‘listed the audience or used untrained walk-ons asclancers, Postmodern dance eli inated narrative, reduced decoration, and purged allusion — in other words it was, and is, not Jar removed from what we call modern in architecture, More nit dance has been replaced in vanguard circles in New York by an as-yet-unnamed style that socks £0 reinject clement of biography, narrative, and political issues into the structure of the dance, Husion and decoration and difficult dance steps in she process. I is, in its own way, exactly what postmodern rally this esthetic of postmorle vitalize the art form through inclusion rather than exclusion, Cl postmodernism is used to mean something very different in dee than i€ dees in166 ANDY GRUNDBERG architecture, The same condition exists in music, and in literature ~ cach defines its postinodernism in relation to its own peculiar modernism To edge closer to the situation in photography, consider postmodernist as it is constituted in today’s art world — whieh is to say, within the tradition and prac: tice of painting and sculpture, For a while, in the 1970s, it was possible to think tl postimodernism as equivalent to pluralism, a catchword that was the art-world equivalent of Tom Wolle’s phrase “The Me Decide.” According to the pluralist, the tradition of modernism, from Paul Cévanne to Kenneth Noland, had plumb tuckered out had, through its own assumptions, run itself into the ground, Painting was finished, and all that was left to do was either minimalism (ywhich no one much liked to look at) or conceptualism (achich no one cauld look at, ity goal being 10. avoid producing still more art “objects’). Decoration and representation were out, eye appeal was suspect, cmational appeal thought sloppy if not gauche Facing this exhaustion, the artists of the 1970s went off in a hundred direc tions at once, at least according te the pluralist model, Some started making frankly decorative pattern paintings. Some made sculpture from the carth, or from abandoned buildings. Some started using photography and video, mixing media and axlding to the pluralist stew, One consequence of the opening of the modernist gates away that photography, that seemingly perennial second-clyss citizen, became 4 naturalized member of the gallery and maseum circuit, But the main thrust was that modernisin’s reductivism — or, to be fair about it, wher was seem as modernism’ reductivian — was countered with a flood af new practices, some of them clearly antithetical to: modernism, But was this pluralism, which is no longer much in evidence, truly an attack ‘on the underlying assumptions of modernism, as modernism was perceived in the mid t0 late 1970s? Or was it as the critic Douglas Crimp has written, one of the morbid symptoms of moderism’s demise’? According 10 those of Mr, Crimp’s itical persuasion (which is to say, of the perstision of October magazine), post modernism in the art world means something more than simply what comes afer modernism, It means, for them, an attack on modernism, an undercutting of its asic assumptions about the role of art i the culture and about the role of the artist in yelation to his or ber art. This undercutting function has come ta be known as “Weconstruction,” a term for which the French philosopher Jacques Derrida is responsible,” Hehind it Tes a theory about the way we perceive the world that is both rooted in, and! a reaction to, struecturalismn Suructuralism is a theory of language and knowledge, and it ts largely based on the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course i General Linguistics (1916). Ue is allied with, if not inseparable from, the theory of semiotics, ar signs, pioncered by the American philosopher Charles 8. Pierce about the same. time. What structuralist linguistic: theary and semiotic sign theory have in common is the belief that things in the world ~ literary texts, images, what have you ~ do not wear their meanings con their sleeves, They must be deciphered, oF decoded, in order to be understood In other words, things have a ‘deeper structure’ than common sense permits us to comprehend, and structuralism pusports to provide a method! that allows us to pene= trate that deeper structure, Basically, its method is to divide everything in two. It takes the sign ~ a word, Tanguage, oF an image, ar even a pair al women's shoes and separates iTHE CRISIS OF THE REAL 167 into the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signifi "The signifier fs like a pointer, and the signi fied is what gots pointed to, (In Morse code, the dots ancl dashes are the signifiers, | and the letters of the alphabet the signifieds.) Now this seen i pot exactly simple. But 8 pretty reasonable, if ‘ucturalism also holes that the signifier is wholly arbitrary a convention of sovial practice rather than a universal lave The in practice tefore structuralism ied part of the sign, and concentrates hin any given work. In a sense, it halds that the instead, it finds its territory within the structure of thinys — henee the name structuralism mnores the ‘meaning, or the sig ‘on the relations of the signifies w Some of the consequences of this approach are detailed in ‘Torry Fagleton's book Literary Theory: cn Inteduction: i: First, it does not metter tn structuralism that [al story is hardly an example of great literature. ‘The method is quite indilferent to the cultural value of its abject Second, structualism is a caleated affront to common sense... He does not take the text at face valucy but ‘displaces’ into a quite different kind of object. Thin, ifthe partic ular contents of the text are rephiceable, there is a sense con say that the ‘content of the narrative is its structure.® We might think about structuralism in the same way that we think about a soviology, in the sense that they are pscudo-seiences, Both attempt to find a ration alist, scientific basis for understanding human activities social behavior in sociology’s case, writing and sp ch in structuralism's. They are symptoms of a contain historical desire to make the realm of human activity @ bit more nat, a bit c more calculable, Structuralism fits into another historical process as well, which is the gradual placement of our faith in the obvious with an equally compelling faith in what is not obvious in what ean be unco ed or discovered through analysis, We might date this shift 10 Copernicus, who had the audacity tw claim that the earth revolves around the sun even thot giv it is obvious to all of us that the stn revolves around the earth, and does so once a day. To quote Eagleton: Copernicus was followed by Marx, who claimed that the true signifi «ance of social processes went on “behind the backs’ of individual agents, and after Marx Freud argued that the real meanings of our words and actions were quite imperceptible to the conscionts mind. Structuralism is the modern inheritor of this belief that r it, are discontinuous with each other.” ity, and our experience of Poststructuralism, with Derrida, goos a step further. According 10 the post siructuralists, our perceptions only tell us out what our perceptions are, not about the true conditions of the work. Authors and a th meanings through their intentions; instead, the makers clo not control ‘meanings are undercut, or “deconstructed,” by the texts themselves. Nor is there any way t0 atvive at the ultimate" meaning of anythi ig Meaning is shways withheld, and te believe the opposite is tantamount to mythology, As Eagleton says, summarizing Dervis168 ANDY GRUNDBERG [Nothing is ever fully present in signs: sis an illusion for me because oF] can ever be fally present 40 you in what I say or write to use signs at all entas that divided and never quite at one with isell. Not only am made out of, rather than merely Jea that fam a stable unified entity meaning is always somehow dispersed, yy meaning, indeed Dut me: since language is something 1 a convenient tool Lise, the whole id must also be a fietion. . . «It is mot that F can have gets distorte pare, unblemished and refiacted meaning, intention or experience which then ocause language ie the very ait T boy the flawed medium of language ished! meaning oF experience breathe, Lean never have a pure, unblen at all." ‘his inability to have 'a pure, unblemished meaning or experience at al sy L ine of the art we call postmodernist, And, T would crines most contemporary photography, explicitly land it is the crisis which photog: would submit, exaetly the pre add, its the theme which charac or implicitly. Calling ita “theme’ aphy ane! all other forms of at face in the | But once we knovy postmodernism’s thes LU Linder avhat guise des it appear in pi snceivesd in the art workd of the 19 swe can say quite blithely that postnaodernist nist art, In Ipet, we could even concede that inst “Took? as part of Its diversity is perhaps too bi late twentieth century ‘tical underpinnings, how are we to itunes? HE wwe return to reengnize in ar 0s namely, how postmodernism was first eu under the banner of pluralism art that looks like any postmovdomnist art could incorporate the mod vas ever satisfied with pluralism as a concept ailing style, but it does not describe ing escape moe But this pinpoints exactly why no one ir may well deseribe the absence ofa single prev ree of anything, A eritical concept that embraces everything imaginable fs nos ef mc a The etal eheory descondd fom struc djing nat postnatal a souk Tok ss Pees potmosernn et of ths Hoga ent ot hat post wr ts epposiion ean be cone 10 way 8 has @ much better chance af Dut even with that there is some Ii modernist art be opposition counter to the modernist tradition, and for ws comter to th woos, lee to the ere: jcve that postmodernist art thers ion of the modernist ‘of Western culture, which, the theory traelition in the fist place. These sanse critics hel fore must debunk or “deconstruct” the ‘myths’ of the dhe individual subjeet (‘the myth of orig ims are hest accomplished ~ that is, ment ancl autontomous individual ality’). Cthe myth of the author") and oft Bat when we get to the level of how these svhat style of art might achieve these ends ~ we encounter critical dis ambiguity ‘Sine concept of postmodernist style fs that it should consist of a miature of ation on the medium as and 40 on. For hs, oF combine rmoddernism’s fetishistic concent media, thereby dispellin message painting about painting, photogeaphy about photography txample, one could make theatrical paintings, oF filmic photograph lary to this suggests that the use of so-called pictures with the written word. A eorolh alternative media anything other than painting on ¢ isa hallmark of the postmodern. This isa view that actually Tifts photog its traditional second-class status, and privileges it as the medium of the anvas and sculpture in metal phy up from 1THE CRISIS OF THE REAL 169 And there is yet another view that holds that the medium doesn't matuer at all, that what matters is the way in which art operates within and against the culture is not defined in relation to a given medium e.g. culpture — but rather in vela tion to the Togical operations on a set of cuttural terms, Jor which any medium photography, books, ines on Still, there is no denying that, beginning in the 1970s, photography ¢ As Rosalind Krauss has writen, ‘Within the situation of postmodernism, walls, mirrors, ot sculpture itself — might be used. «8 position of importance within the realm of postmodernist art, as Krauss herself observed,” Stylistically, if we might entertain the notion of style of postmodernist art certain practices have bo these is the concept of pastiche, of assembling one's art fram a variety of sores ‘This fs not done in the spirit of honoring one’s artistic heritage, but neither is it dome as pi Consumer Society” n advanced as esientially postmodernist. Foremost among oily, As Fredric Jameson explains in an essay called ‘Postmoxlernism and Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar oF unique style, the ‘wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language; but {isa neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody" ulterior motive, satirical motive, without Jaughter, without eat sll Intent Feeling that there exists something normal compared to whieh what is being imitated Js rather comic, Pastiche is blank parody, paredy that has lost its sense without the Pastiche can take many forms; it doesn’t necessarily mean, for example, that fone must collage one’s sources together, although Robert Rauschenberg has been cited as-a kind of Ur-postmodemist for his combine paintings of the 1950s and phovocollages of the carly 1960s."* Pastiche can also be understood as 2 peculiar form of mimicry in which a simultaneous process of masking and unmasking occurs, ‘We ean see this process at work in any number of artworks of the 1980s. One ‘example ia 1982 painting by Walter Robinson titled Revenge. The fist thing to be said about Revenge is that it looks like something out of a romance: mag something in the tradition of Picasso or Rothko. It takes as its subject a rather cll femme fara, andl paints her in a rather dabaed, trative manner, We might say that it adopes the tay, male dominated discourse of eae sewalty as found at the lower septhy of she mass nor rity tnt oro po he ttn meting mo interne] inconsatecis, its inadequacies, falls, ts stereotypical unvealty Other examples can be found in the paintings of Thomas Lawson, such as his 1981 canvas Barterad to Death. Now noxhing in this work which depicts a blanlly 4quizricalchik’s face in almost photo-realist style ~ prepares us in the least far the Utle Baiterad to Death. Which is very much 10 the point: the artist has used as his souree for the portrait a newspaper photograph, which bore the unhappy headline Uhat 6 the painting’ k of banality, but that mask is broken by the ttle shifted onto a whole other level of m The painting wears the ma ng just as it was170 ANDY GRUNDBERG when it appear inthe newspaper. So this painting perhaps tells us something aboot nipulate “ohjectivity,” but it also speaks the ways in which newspapers alter oF m to the separation between style and meaning, smage and text, object and intention act of donning a mask it unmasks ~ oF, in Derrida’s n today's visual universe, In the terminology, st deconstructs ng, a certain self-consciousness it paintings lke artist There is, it goes without sa ie not a self-conseiousness that promotes an identilication with & Velanquicz's fas Meninas, Rather, ax Mark Tansey’s that these, but it in any traditional sense, a8 in » Sasa Sontag (1982) makes explicit, i isa se-conseiousnes presentation, of the carnera’s role in painting Homa promotes an awareness of photog Creating and dlsseminating the ‘commodities’ of visual culture This self-conscious awareness of being ‘of the contemporary photography that has come to ina camora-haseel and camera-bound cealture x an essential featur Jernist, In Cindy Sherman's well-known series United Fil Sule, he called poste lossy is used) as the mode! from which the artist for example, the 8-by-10-inch gl manulaetures a series of masks for herself Tn the process, Sherman unmasks the The stilted Conventions not only of fil noir but also of woman-as-lepicted-objec the depiction of women and, stbmissiveness af her subject refers to stereotypes of personal identity, anale oF female. Since ima larger way, questions the whole id she uses herself as hier subject in all her, photographs, we might want to eall these self-portraits, but in essence they deny the sel number of observers have pointed out that Sherman's imagery borrows c universe of fin, television, fashion heavily from the almost subliminal ima, and advertising, One ean see, for instance, certain correspondences nal actual film publicity stills of the 1950s, Bot her ings from the pastas they ate distilatons photography between her photographs pictures are not s0 much specific borraw bf eulturat types. The masks Sherman creates are neither mere parodies of cultural which, pecled back, snight reveal mit to roles nor are they layers like the skins of an onion Hers are perfectly poststructuralit portraits, for th the ultimate unknowable-ness of the I," They challenge the essential assumption of a discrete, identitiable, recognizable author. “Another kind of masking goes on in Eileen Cowin's tableaux images taken since 1980, which she once called Family Docuhanas. Meteled loosely on seap-opera nettes, film stills, or the sort of scenes one fi finds in a Fuaropean phoeo-romon, these rather elegant color photographs depict arranged family situations jn which a sense Cowin uses herself as the foil of the: of discord and anxiety prevails. Like Sherman: wee further, including her own family and, at times, her Wentical piece, and she twin aster, inthe pictures that show us both twins at once, we read the tw as reality and fantasy, as anxious ego and ss rmany of the conventions of familial self fas one; as partieipant and critical superego. Cowin’s work unmasks more important, hey unmask conventional notions of dopietion, but eve interpersonal behavior, op how wwe think we behave and how we are seen by others to behave Lauvie Simmons's photographs are ay carefully staged a8 fabricated, ay direc | Eileen Cowin, but she usually makes use of ening onto a chilling awareness of the disparity torial ~ as those of Cindy Sherman a ininiaturized representations of human beings in equal In hor early doll-house images, female figures grapple somew riniaturized environ hat uncertainty withTHE CRISIS OF THE REAL 171 the accoutrements of everyday midelle-clas lie cleaning bathrooms, confronting slirty kitchen tables, bending over large lipstick containers, Simmons clearly uses the doll figures as stand-ins ~ for her parents, for erself, for caltural moslels as she remembers them Trom the sisties, when she was a child growing ap in the suburbs. She is simultaneously interested in examining the conventions of behavior she acquired in her childhood and in expe e ventions off representations that were the means by which these behavior patterns were ansmitted, As is tr of Ellen Brooks, the doll house imetions as a reminder of lost | innocence , The works of Sherman, Cowin, and Simmons ereatesurogates, empha | the masked oF masking qty of prntvoderniat photographic practic, Oth I photographers, however, make work fat concentrates our attention onthe process of unmasking. One of these is Richard Prince, the leading practitioner of the art of rophotography,” Prine photographs pictures that 1c finds in magazines, cropping them as he secs lit, with the aim of unmasking the syntax of the advertising photog. raphy language, His art also implies the exh oa thata photographer ean find more than enough images already existing in the world out the bother of making new ones, Pressed on this point, Prinew will admit images from the rave material of the physical world he is perfectly content ~ happy, actually = ts repraductions, c image universe: it sug that he hay ns desire to creat Prince is alo a writer of considerable talent, In his book, FMhy 1 Go te the Movies sione, we learn something of his attitudes toward the world — attitudes that are shared by many artists of the postmodernist persuasion. ‘The characters he creates are called “he” or “they,” but we might just as well soe them as stand-ins for the aetist, as his ova verhal masks: Magavines, movies, TV, and records. It wasn’t everybody’s condition bbut to inn it sometimes seemed like it was, and iF yeally wasn’t, that ‘was alright, but it vas going to be hard for him: to connect with someone fF as an example or a version of a lil put together from reasonable matter. . .. His own desires had very little to at least in ddo with what came from himself because what he pat ot part) had already been out. His way to make it new was mate ita and making it again was cnough for him and certainly, personally speaking, alist him And a second passage bvays impressed! by the photographs of Jackson Pollock, but didn’t particularly think much about his paintings, since painting was ther that seemed something they associated with a way to put thing to them pretty much taken cate of They bung the photographs of Pollock ri ‘personality’ posters they just bought, These posters hac! just come out They were black and white blow at least thirty by forty inches, And picking one out felt like doing somethin any new artist should do,172 ANDY GRUNDBERG The photographs of Pollack were what they thought Pollick was about, And this kind of take wasn’t as much a position 3 feeling that an abstract expressionist, a TY star, a Hollywood celebrity, baseball great, could easily mix and associ nts or speculations that used to separate their value could now be done away with, T mean it seemed to them that Pollock's photographs looked pretty good next to Steve McQui 1 JFK's, next to Vinee Edwarel, next to Jimmy Piersal's and soon...” a president af a country ated together... and what measurem Prince's activity is ane version ala postmorlernist practice that has come to be called appropriation. In intelligent hands tike those of Prinee, appropriation is ccortainly postion quarters appropriation has gained considerable notoriety, thanks largely to warks like Sherrie Levine's 1979 Untitled (fier Fulward Bewon), for which the artist simply made a copy print from a reproduction of a famous 1926 Edward Weston image (Torso of Neil) and claimed it as her own. It se priation as a tactic is not designed per veo vweek the noses of U «ps direct, emist, but is not the sine quar nan of post-modernism, hy certain ms important to stress that appro- F PP Weston heirs, 10 cr la bourgeoisie, or to test the limits of the First Amendment. It is, rather somewhat crude, assertion af the finiteness of the visual unive should be said that Levine's tabula rasa appropriations frequently depend on (ane) cc, And i their captions, and (twa) a theoretical explanation that une must find elsewhere Those artists using others’ images believe, like Prince, that i is dishonest to pretend that untapped visual resources be found by artists who ean Uien © overdetermined ~ that is, the world already has been glutted with pictures tak the woods. Even if this weren’t the cage, however, ho ane ever eomes apon the woods culture free, In fact, these artists believe, we are still out there in the woods, waiting to 1m to be original. Eor th ods as prisoners of our preconceived image of the wooxls, and what we bring back an film merely neeptions Another artist to emphasize the unmasking aspects Louise Lawler, While perhaps less well-known and publictzed than Sherrie Levine, Lawler exam resourcefulness the structates and contests in which Images are seen, In Laier's work, unlike Levin’, Its postbe to seat least some of its message from the medium itself, Her art-making activities fall into sevctal groups: phmographs of arrangement of pictures made by other, photo graphs of arrangements of pietures arranged! by the artist herself, snd installations of arrangements of pictures, Why the emphasis on arrangement? Because for Lawler — and for all post modernist artists, fi thoir context, especially their relations with other images. In looking at her work. tone often gets the feeling of trying to decode a rchuss the choice, sequence, an position of the pictures she shows us imply a rudimentary grammar or syntax, Using pictures by others Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Sheivie Levine's notorious torse of Neil wes us 10 consider the reverberations between them, that matter the meaning of images ix always a matter ofTHE CRISIS OF THE REAL 173 they present the archetype ofa certain kind of image, Unlike Prince and Lawler, he molds raw mat to be as mundane as crumpled aluminum fail, Jolo, or flakes of dows velvet drape, These pictures look like pictures we have sven - abstractionist photo: pls from the Equivalent school of modernism, for ‘0 embody some essene pramise of emotional expressionism is abvays unfulfilled pictures present a state of contradiction. In expressive terms the to create his pictures, but the raw material he uses is likely th spilled on a of human emotion, In Welling’s work, however, the seein to be ‘about’ something specific, yet they are ‘about’ everything and nothing, olfer the viewer the promise of insight but at the same time reveal nothing except the inconsequence of the materials with which they were made. ‘The Is of the postmodem condition of representation, ‘The kind of postmodernist art Ihave been discussing is on the whole not respon. sive to the canon of art photography. It takes up photography because photography is an explicitly reproducible medium, because it is the common coin of cultural ge interchange, ane! because it avoids the aura of authorship that poststracturalist, ht calls into qu nd seulpture, Phot bn the artist's ves they embody tensions berween seeing and blindness; thy nativations Iscapes, in another abstractions, i still another sense, they thoy painti tion or at least avoids that aura (0 a greater extent than do raphy is, for these artists, the medium of choice it he photographers, or, far most of them, te be allied phy. Indeed, some of th of the photographie wadition, They come, by ard k yocessarily their aim te with the traditions of are photo ig g¢, from another taad: tion, one rooted theoretically in American art criticism since World War Il and one rooted practically in conceptual art, whieh influcticed many of them when they were jn art school. But at feast as large an influence on these artists is the experience of present-day life itself, as perceived through popular culture TV, films, adverting, PR, People making. remain quite happily corporate logois gazine in short, the entire industry of mass mean im Ehope L have made clear so far that postmaesnism means something eillerent *s and painters, and that it also has different meaning applications depending on which architect or dancer or painter onc is Histening to. And J hope that 1 have explained som of the critical issues of postmodernisny a8 they have mado themselves manifest im the art world, and shown how thes fisues are embodied in photographs that are called postmodernist. But there Yeonins, for photographers, still another question: "What about Heinccken?” That Js to say, didn't photography long ago become involved with pastiche, appropri tion, questions of mase-medtia representation, and so on? Wasn’t Rohevt Heinecken rephotographing magavine imagery, in works like die You Rea? (Fig. 18.1), a8 easly 25 1966, when o clarify the relationship between today's art workd-derived postmodernist Photography ane what some feel are its undersung photographic antecedents, we ied to consider what | would eal photo To do this we have to define photogeaphy's modernism icharel Princ was still in knickers? yphy"s inherent strain af postmodernism th-contury esthetic which subseribes to the concept ofthe ‘photographic and bases its critical ju ‘utes 4 good photograph accordingly. Under maderian, as it developed over the Modernism in photography is a te monis about what const174 ANDY GRUNDBERGTHE CRISIS OF THE REAL 175 course of this century, photography was held to be unique, with capabi for verisimilitude beyond those of painting, seulpture, description and a capaci printenale past tense here partly asa matter of convenience, to separate modernism fram post ‘modernism, and partly to sugge 1's current vestigial status) the notion that painting should be about painting, seulpture about sculpture, photography about shotography. IT photogeaphy were merely a description of what the pyramids along the Nile looked like, oF of the dissipated visage of Chases Bauelelaire, then it could hardly be said to he a form of art, Modevnism required that photagraphy eutivate the photographic indeed, that i€ invent the photographic — se that its legitimacy would not be questioned Ina nutshell, two strands Alfred! Stic im, Modernism in the visual arts valved (Case the oF any other med 1 mood it’s American Purian and Lisa Moholy-Nagy's European experimental formalism — conspired to. cultivate: the photographie, and together they wave the shape of madernism in Ameriean photog raphy. Moholy cedlacation in Amer practically invented photographic having founded the Institute of Design in Chi 1930s, As the heritage of Sticg ago tn th itvian Porism andl Moholy’s revolutionary formalism developed and coalesced over the course of this century, it came 10 represent 1. Ironically, however, just at the moment when this chim was coming to be more fully eecognized by the art world — and 1 refer to the building of a photographic marketplace in the 1970s - the ground shifted tunilerneath the medium’s feet photography"s claim to be a moclern Suddenly, it seemed, artists without any allegianee to this uadition were using. photographs and, even worse, gaining a great deal more attention than traditional photographers. People who hardly seemed t be serious abot photo medium — Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Lucas Samaras, William, W Haxton, Robert Cumming, Bernd andl Hilla Becher, David Hockney, ete., ete were incorporating it into their work or using it plain. ‘Photographic ness” was no longer an issue, once formalisn's domain in the art world collapsed. ‘The stage was sot Tor what would come next; what came next we now call postmodesnism."* Yet tone can see the seeds of a postmodernist attitude within what we think of as American modernist photography, beginning, [ would argue, with Walker Evans. However much we admire Evans as a documentarian, as the photographer of Je: Us Now Praive Famous Men, as a ‘straight’ photographer of consielorable For gence and resourcefulness, one cannot help but notice in studying his work of the 1930s how Irequently billboards, posters, road signs, and even at are found in his pictures. It Evans's images are merely self-referential — that they are there to double us back and bring us into cropped-from-a raphy as a swan, David is possible ta believe, as some have cont ied, that these images within awareness af the act of photographing and the two-dimensional, rger-context condition of the photograph as a picture, But the are ako there as signs. They are, of course, signs int nion of acculturated imagery. In « ¢ literal sense, but they are also signs of the yrowh shows" us that even in the dirt-poor South, images of Hollywood glamour and ‘consumer pleasures ~ images designed 19 ereate desire — were omnipresent, ‘The as the Golden Nehi sign Evans pictured say, in its time, ax much a universal Arches of hamburgerland are today176 ANDY GRUNDBERG Evans's attention to signs, and to photography as a sign-making or semiotic medium, goes beyond the literal, As we can see in the images he inehuded in Areriean Photograps, and in their sequencing, Evans was attemptin photographs. He in fact created an evoc Ametican, Read the way one reads a novel, with each page building on those that came befbre, this symbology describes American experience ax ne other photo- to create a text with his ve nexus ol signs, a symbology of things graphs had done before, And imagery plays a role that can only be described as political, The America of American gery play ly P w experience Evans's opus describes is one in which Photographs bs governesl by the daminion of signs A similar attempt to create a symbole statement of American bik in Robert Frank's book The dineriams, Frank used the aute metonymic metaphors of the American cultural condition, which he envisioned every bit ay pessimistically as today’s postmorlerists, While not quite as ubsessive about commonplace or popular-culture images ax Evans, he did conceive of imagery asa text ~ asa sign system capable of signification, In a sense, he gave Evans's take fon life in those United Stat The inheritors of Frank's and Evans's photograph as a social sign and what has been interpreted to be their skeptical view imple, despite having earned hile and the road as gacy adopted both their of American culture. Lee Friedlander’s work, far es arepy tation as formalist in some quarters, largely consists ofa critique of our condi In bis pict amavingly compact commentary on the role of images in the late twentieth century (Hig, 18.2), Natural site has become accultrated sight, Man has carved the moun in his own image. The tourists look at i¢ through the intervention of lenses, like the photographe loubling the condition of photographie appearances, and i is famed, eropped by the windows, just like a photograph. Although Friedlander took this pieture in 1969, well before a connect photography and postmaderaisn, itis more than a modernist explication of photographie sell-referentalty: | believe it also functions evitically in a post motlemist sense, Ie could almost he ased as an illustration for Jean Baudrillard's os depraved cities iis itto death Mount Rushoore, South Dakora, we fine an himself, The scene appears only as a relleetion, mnitroring or yyone thought to apocalyptic sta he heavenly fire no longer 8 rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, puttin The photograph suggests that our image of reality is made up of images, Lt makes ph ont, ‘For d the dominion of mediation ‘We might also look again at the work of younger photographers we are accus tomed to Consivler John Pfahl’s 1977 image in, Ivor the series Altered Landscapes. Plabl uses his irrepressible hinking of as strictly modernist Moonrise over Pie humor to mask a more sctious intention, which is to call attention to our absence ‘of innocence with regard to the landscape. By intervening in the land with his partly conceptual, partly madeap hag but t another photograph, Ansel Adams's Au evidence of the postmod of tricks, and by veferent onrise over Hernandez, Pfabl supplies n condition, It seems Impossible to clainy in this day and ng. ws not to the seene itsell wge that one can have a direct, unmediated experience of the world. All we see is seen through the kaleiedoseape of all that we have seen before, So, in Fespanse to the Heinecken question, there is abundant evidence that the phoog rhie tradition Incaxparates the se its late ibility of postmodernism withTHE CRISIS OF THE REAL 177 Figure 18.2 Lo Prtlander, Mom shies, Sour Dorn, 1969, Coumtesy a the sats and lrg, San Franch, or high modemist practice, This averlap seem te appear nat only in photography but in the painting and sculpture tradition as well, where, for example, ane ean see Rauschenherg’s work of the 1950 and 1960s as proto-postmodem, or even aspects of Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol's silkscreen paintings based an photographs." Not only id Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and others break with Abstract Expressionism, they also brought into play the photographic and the idea of pastiche as artistic practic te secs unreasonable to claim, then, that postmodernisos in the visual arts necessarily represents a clean hrcak with movdernism — that, as Douglas Crimp has writen, "Post-Modernisn can only be understood ax a specific breach with Movdoymism, with those institutions whieh are the preconditions for and which shape the discourse of Modernism," Ines, there is even an 1 that postmod rns ynextreably inked with modevnlsm ~ an argument advanced most radically by the French philosopher Jean Frangois Lyotard in the book The Pounnale Condon: A Report on Kowledge: What, then, is the Postmodern? .., Ie is uncloubtedly a part of the modern, All that has been received, if only yesterday... must be suspected. What space does Cévanne challenge? ‘The Impressionists What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cézanne's. What presuppo- sition does Duchamp break with in 19127 That whieh says one must snake 4 painting. « «el work ean become modern only if i inst postmodern Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the ascent state, andl this state is constant.™