Un pic de avangarda

Excerpt
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Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.
That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Branislav Dimitrijevic Works-of-Art vs. Artefacts

1. In 1911, the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later Le Corbusier) hit the road to visit many parts of Europe that he marked on his map either by I (Industry), K (Culture) or F (Folklore). As all parts of France and Germany, and most parts of Central Europe had been marked with Is or Ks, the further East Le Corbusier went the more the letter F appeared. When he came down to Belgrade, he was disillusioned by "this ridiculous capital, dishonest, dirty and disorganized", but attracted by exquisite pots, costumes, carpets and musical instruments he encountered in the Ethnographic Museum. By following the origin of some of these objects he found himself greatly enjoying the countryside and the authentic, "natural society", coloured by "Tzigane" music, ruby-red wine and chamomile fragrance. The folklore he appreciated signified for him the celebrated defence "from the invading and dirty Europeanization". These comments warned about the perils of modernization in regions still unprepared for it, and where the folkloric, ethno tradition, appears to be the only authentic culture capable of producing cultural value. In the course of the 20th century the distinction between inauthentic, imported modernist culture that produced local simulations, and the authentic, pre-modern, ethno-culture, influenced the generalised reading of culture in the Balkans, as if there was no universalist potential of Modernity, and as if there could be no Modern art produced in economically under-developed countries.As a consequence, the works of art (which usually means paintings, sculptures and other works produced within the framework of "Western" modernism) were not ascribed any international market value, but as artefacts ("man-made objects charged with cultural meaning and offering indications on a larger cultural situation"), they were considered quite valuable. This has created tensions that are still shaping decisions on the value of works to be shown in artistic context but coming from economically underdeveloped societies. To illustrate this, one can evoke the almost proverbial figure of the Western curator traveling to economically underdeveloped countries (usually classified under geographic terms as are "the East" or "the South") and trying to find art for some exhibition in the West. This curator, if traveling to Africa for instance, would meet two types of art, as it was nicely put by Igor Zabel:
One was the product of Western-influenced intellectual elites, of people who considered Western forms in society, economy and also art to be universal. The curators from the West, however, could hardly see "authentic" art in these works. Most probably, they understood them as provincial copies of Western originals; but for them they were non-authentic not only because they were copies, but also because they were signs of loss of the roots, traditions, and thus the very identity… It is not a surprise then, that they preferred artists who were openly using the "indigenous" traditions; for them this was the genuine, real African art. Local intellectuals ("Westernizers") were, of course, shocked: for them, these works were extremely bad, non-authentic folklorist art, a false, nostalgic image which does not correspond to the reality of the developing, modern Africa any more. Under these circumstances, to be progressive means to be "inauthentic", whereas to be locked within ethno-myths means to be "authentic". As this tension was recognized, the curatorial tendency has recently been to reconcile this division and to combine both aspects in order to create new artistic value. This tendency marked also the recent interest in the Balkans and their culture. If we take for example exhibitions like In search of Balkania (curated by Peter Weibel, Eda Cufer and Roger Conover) in Graz (2002) or Blood and Honey (curated by Harald Szeeman) in Vienna (2003), there has been an ongoing perplexity between expectations of "art-ness" (a search for works of art that fit the "standards" of the West, with its historical narrative and market elaboration) and expectations of "ethno-ness": a search for authentic artefacts that reveal the mythical status of this region as defined by the very titles of these exhibitions. As Balkania is a desired mythical territory (unavoidably resembling Ruritania from the novel, and later the film, The Prisoner of Zenda ), we enter the site of imagination that situates political and historical conditions as meta-political and meta-historical. Blood and Honey - the meaning of two Turkish words, Bal and Kan, that are allegedly the etymological root of "Balkan" -, again turns this region into a realm of the myth, that serves as an archetypal "explanation" of that frightening combination of ongoing conflict and violence (as if this is reserved exclusively for this region and not an overall condition of humankind) and sweetness of fantasy of some lost Arcadia. Both exhibitions and their politics of display are attempts to locate the potential market value of art practices coming from this region by exploiting the trends of commodification of ethno as cultural genre.Like the young Jeanneret, curators coming from developed market-economy countries have usually been fascinated not so much with art works that they encountered (seen as more or less successful "copies" of Western Modernism), but with manifestations of ethno-culture that coloured and made exciting their visits. Jeanneret's fascination with 'Tzigane' music is now standardised, and the most internationally successful cultural products exploit this fascination: films by Emir Kusturica or music by Goran Bregovic. The same applies for 'authentic' living environments that combine mise-en-scene of pre-modernism with mise-en-scene of legacies of real-Socialism. The desired objects are those that illustrate the overall cultural condition, but made and presented in the field of art. This has produced the situation in which the figure of the artist is seen in accordance with the dominant mode of an "art-works producing subject", but his or her product is taken under consideration as an artefact. I think that this distinction is crucial. The core of this perplexity is in the very status of modes of display structured in Modernism and the colonialist legacy that is now questioned but still instrumental in processing cultural value.

2.When taking an example of Mark Rothko's legacy (his works were dispersed in a great variety of art museums so that as many people as possible would have access to them), Mieke Bal argues the following:
The dispersal of the works of a great innovator of Western art seems to represent the exact opposite of the concentration of "ethnic" art in Western museums under the deceptive denominator of "artefacts". Yet … this dispersal has something in common with the colonialist legacy of the ethnographic museums. What happens when works like Rothko's figure, ideally, in every art museum of the world is that a single meaning, a particular aesthetic conception, one concept of what is "art", is repeated and thereby somehow imposed in many different contexts. Thus an essentialist and centripetal idea of artistic value is produced or at least underwritten by a seemingly generous gesture. For those who believe in Rothko's greatness this may be self-evidently right and no problem at all. But that self-evidence is precisely the issue… Semiotically speaking, this omnipresence of Rothko sustains a particular strategy of cultural imperialism, namely repetition. Indeed, by the repeated encounter with the same style or concept, the public is bound to get used to the idea which the particular work represents.
What is at stake here is first of all an analysis of the ideological distinction between ethnographic and art museums. The ethnographic museum collects artefacts, man-made objects charged with cultural meaning and offering indications on a larger cultural situation. The art museum collects works of art that are viewed as "standing for an aesthetic", they are "considered metaphors, transferring their specific aesthetic to the one current sufficient to make the work readable, but readable as art, regardless of what it could tell us about the culture it comes from." The ethnographic museum is reserved for art that does not have any ultimate historical meaning, that is "out of the pale of history" (Hegel), and that is based upon the notion of difference. The art museum is based on recognition and sameness. Regardless of cultural contexts, it produces a single meaning. The fact that modernist art is still viewed as incomprehensible for many museum visitors bespeaks the very symptom of the Modern Art museum: the works collected and exhibited do not indicate relations between a culture and its artefact, but act as against it, in the province of the personal story of an author or of an "universal" story of aesthetic and its development. The art context generates the revival of ethnographic colonialism through re-affirming the anthropological notion of "cold cultures" that try to preserve their cultural identity by constantly reproducing the past. "Cold cultures" may have now reached the stage of producing works that might be situated in the known history and in the museum that will define something as art.
The distinction between ethno and art is maintained when applied to products of Western culture. It is almost impossible to persuade, say, a Swiss artist, that his art should be read through analysis of traditional (authentic?) ethno environments represented by cows on high mountains and cuckoo clocks, i.e. this may only happen if he or she is deliberately playing with this myth. Yet Balkan artists have to play with their myths in one way or another if they want to be interpreted at all. As a reward they are institutionally elevated into an art context and not presented in an ethnographic context that they would presumably find inappropriate or even offensive. Again there is only one figure of authorisation here: the curator. And there is only the aesthetic criterion (taste) that remains instrumental in proclaiming an artefact as a work of art. In this signifying chain, it is the curator/ ethnographer that extends the traditional role of connoisseur whilst new artefacts are added and classified in accordance with the ideology of celebrating difference, otherness, and exoticism. The contemporary art curator elevates cold artefacts into warm works of art.