4 objave kasneje in je leta že konec. Sem prišel nazaj v Brighton samo da se preselim, potem grem pa domov za celo poletje afne guncat.
Spodaj je najtežji esej, ki sem ga kdaj koli napisal. V bistvu sem pisal samo o dveh slikah, ampak se samo sliši lahko. Gre se pa o alegoriji, postmodernizmu pa o Stezakerju (ki je letos nominiran za Deutsche Borse photography prize) in Richardu Princu,...
Če koga zanima:
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Prince uses photographs that he confiscates from everyday circulation. He then re-photographs and thus re-contextualizes. According to Owens, allegory occurs whenever one text is doubled and that the text should be read through another (for instance Old Testament should be read as a preconfiguration of the New). But in the case of appropriating art, due to its structure, allegory occurs in itself and is internalized. Or in other words, ‘the signifier is like a pointer, and the signified is what gets pointed to[5]’. The obvious ‘meaning’ (red rose = love) or the signified part of the sign is ignored. Our attention is focused on the signifiers within the image. There is a territory within the structure where the true latent allegory specific to appropriation art has to be discovered in analysis of the image’s nature itself. Newman[6] specifies this as an internal doubling (re-photographing the reproduction from a magazine) and endless displacement of its origin (removal of captions and titles). By doing that, in this particular case, he has made the image anonymous. The fundamental function of a photographic camera to eternalize a memory and the function of representation are consequently denied. Newman argues that it becomes something like an ‘anonymous memory’ – or the memory of anyone.[7] Or as Solomon-Godeau cited Linker[8], he produces ‘a real without origin or reality’. By that they mean that the image does not contain any memories. The viewer is the one who has the memories to pertain to the image.
Spodaj je najtežji esej, ki sem ga kdaj koli napisal. V bistvu sem pisal samo o dveh slikah, ampak se samo sliši lahko. Gre se pa o alegoriji, postmodernizmu pa o Stezakerju (ki je letos nominiran za Deutsche Borse photography prize) in Richardu Princu,...
Če koga zanima:
Allegory in appropriation art
Allegory is one of the most
universally used devices in literature and, more importantly for this essay, in
visual arts. Allegory is spread across all forms, genres and can appear in
different modes. Historically allegories allowed for
institutions such as Christianity to translate
pagan symbols and traditions into their religion. Similarly, Renaissance
artists used their own allegorical code of depicting symbols that suggested
conventional appearances and attributes of them. The whole allegory foundation
of Western world leans on Plato’s theory of appearances with higher meaning.
Likewise the definition of allegory, as suggested by Macey, is a form of
narrative or a visual image whose literal or obvious meaning masks one or more
other meanings. [1] Owens
argues with approval, and claims that the function of allegory was and still is
to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear. Allegory
is, therefore, the mediator between past and present and translates what would
in other way disappear. Critically, allegory was for the last two centuries perceived
as an outmoded, exhausted device; a matter of historical but certainly with no
critical interest, Owens cites Borges.[2]
The complexity of contemporary work produced with new technologies, ideas and
approaches restored and refreshed interest in allegory for artists as well as
critics.
Wells argues that, ‘Due to the
development of information networks on a global scale, which allowed capital,
ideas, information and images to flow freely around the world, weakening
national boundaries and profoundly changing the ways in which we experience the
world’,[3]
in the 1970s, a new trend of appropriating art emerged. It may be viewed not
only as one of the strategies of work in postmodernism but also the very
‘language’ in which the postmodernist debate was conducted, says Evans.[4]
The first exhibition of New York appropriators was put together by Douglas
Crimp. The ‘Pictures’ exhibition in 1977 was highly influential and trend
setting for many artists. They showed works of Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine,
Robert Longo and Philip Smith. The approaches of these artists to the image had
much in common with that of Prince and Stezaker, who were not included, and
about whom I am going to write about more in depth later in the essay.
John Stezaker and Richard Prince,
both born in 1949, were two of the artists in late 1970s that started to look
at historical and critical conventions of modernism and questioned it with new
approaches that consist of re-photographing, appropriating and re-using imagery.
Throughout this essay the main focus of analysis will be on Richard Prince’s
Untitled (Couple) (fig. 1) (1977) and John Stezaker’s Mask LXV (2007).
Richard Prince’s photograph
Unititled (Couple) consists of a man and a woman cut just above their waists,
with the man on the left and the woman on the right. They both are looking in
to the distance slightly on their right. The man has slightly curved eyebrows as
if the sun distracts his view but the woman’s expression is neutral. He wears a
dark color suit with a blue tie. His left hand is in the lower part of the
image and he stands right in front of the woman. She wears a black dress and
has a black cap with a red rose on her head and she holds man’s arm. Both of
their faces look tanned and shinny, almost sweaty. They stand between two
columns, one to the right of the man and one to the left of the woman. They
seem to be involved in a larger story that is incomprehensible in a single
image. The photograph is 45,5 centimeters high and 59 centimeters wide. The
warm tone most likely comes from the Kodak Ektacolour print, which has a
tendency to become yellowish-brown.
Prince uses photographs that he confiscates from everyday circulation. He then re-photographs and thus re-contextualizes. According to Owens, allegory occurs whenever one text is doubled and that the text should be read through another (for instance Old Testament should be read as a preconfiguration of the New). But in the case of appropriating art, due to its structure, allegory occurs in itself and is internalized. Or in other words, ‘the signifier is like a pointer, and the signified is what gets pointed to[5]’. The obvious ‘meaning’ (red rose = love) or the signified part of the sign is ignored. Our attention is focused on the signifiers within the image. There is a territory within the structure where the true latent allegory specific to appropriation art has to be discovered in analysis of the image’s nature itself. Newman[6] specifies this as an internal doubling (re-photographing the reproduction from a magazine) and endless displacement of its origin (removal of captions and titles). By doing that, in this particular case, he has made the image anonymous. The fundamental function of a photographic camera to eternalize a memory and the function of representation are consequently denied. Newman argues that it becomes something like an ‘anonymous memory’ – or the memory of anyone.[7] Or as Solomon-Godeau cited Linker[8], he produces ‘a real without origin or reality’. By that they mean that the image does not contain any memories. The viewer is the one who has the memories to pertain to the image.
Prince’s work is predominantly
based on still images, but Newman cites Philips’s remarks[9]
that while working at Time Life clipping pages, Prince ‘started seeing
commercial advertisements in magazines as if they were frames from a movie.
He rather re-photographed the
scenes in which he was interested in and did not restage them as Wall or
Sherman were doing at that time. He re-photographed the already staged images,
which have connotations to some unidentifiable cinema or television narrative.
But as still photographs, they do not have the flow quality of a moving image. Therefore,
it is perceived as a fragment, which has a notion of non-presence. This kind of
non-presence can be registered in ‘the-out-of-frame’. Newman argues that this
originates from the direction of the man and woman’s looks. They seem to be
looking at something important for the larger story that they are involved in.
But as a still image, one will never know. So the viewer has to use imagination
or project fantasies to determine the content of out-of-frame. Framing and
therefore excluding something is precisely what the definition of a still
photograph is.
In this way we can say that this
work is fragmented, incomplete and therefore allegorical. Owens says that
‘allegory is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the
incomplete- an affinity which finds its most comprehensible expression in the
ruin, which Benjamin identified as the allegorical emblem par excellence.’[10]
In comparison to modernism, Newman says that ‘there is no way of completing the
fragment by reference to a totality; on the other, the incomplete fragment,
unlike self-sufficient modernist work, necessarily refers outside itself,
discursively and temporally.’[11]
Likewise, John
Stezaker’s work deals with the fragmentary, which will be discussed later. His
image, Mask LXV, consists of two images. The basis represents a black and white
photograph 25,5 centimeters high and 20 centimeters wide. It seemingly
represents a portrait of a woman cut just above her chest. She wears a dark
blouse with a white collar. An artificial light comes from above, which
indicates that the shot was imaginably posed for a glamour shot (the lighting
used for glamour shots called butterfly lighting enhanced the attributes of the
sitter and was popular in early days of black and white films). The background
is blurred but one gets a feeling that it is an interior. The image has a white
frame that looks a bit used and has a sign ‘T.9.’ in the lower right corner. In
dead center, right on the face is laid a smaller photograph of rail track
directed from a tunnel. In the distance is a rocky landscape. This image is in
a standard postcard format and is also in black and white.
As the title suggests, the postcard
on the top of the photograph works as a sort of mask. But the function of the
postcard, due to its content, is to escapade the surface and show what is
behind or beneath it: it opens a space through which one looks. But on the
other hand, Stezaker often cites Canetti’s remarks (as he did in the interview[12])
that the mask conceals more then it reveals. It covers the flow of facial
expression with something fixed and when the viewer encounters the featureless
face, a sense of potential horror is invoked, ‘the mask is meeting with death
in the midst of life’. In other words, the postcard is blindfolding the sitter
and reveals a ‘mask-like’ configuration but the viewer still seeks facial
features. He is engaged to find a face and searches for any lines and
formations that could be perceived in that way.
Stezaker built over the years an
enormous archive of film stills, old images, postcards, etc. that he later recycled
for the series Masks. He purposely used images of less known film stars (because
they were cheaper than films stills of famous actors[13])
and less known touristic places to get rid of all the implications that suggest
the content. Owens[14]
links the trend of archiving and reusing to allegory. The clearing of the
image’s resonance, significance and thus meaning immediately causes an
emergence of a desire for the image to be directly transparent. But as a
fragment, likewise Prince’s work, the image just induces with a meaning, it is
enigmatic. Therefore Mask LXV can be categorized as a surreal image. Firstly, it
is important to note that Stezaker is renowned to have great knowledge about
Surrealist photomontage. In the talk[15]
he even admits that the first Mask he made is surreal. Due to this fact, we should define his work
with David Bate’s help. Secondly, we have to recognize what a surrealist image
is. Bate[16]
proposes that, ‘the surreal is semiotically speaking, a signifying effect, the
confusion or a contradiction in conventional signifier-signified relations in
representations and where a meaning is partially hidden, where the message
appears ‘enigmatic” regardless of how it has been produced.’ Further on he
continues by distinguishing three groups of photographic signifying functions:
Mimetic, Prophotographic and Enigmatic. For us, most seemingly fitting is
Enigmatic:
Here the signifying
plane of the photograph itself has been disrupted, not just a gap opened between
signifier and signified, not an explicit intervention and signifying contradiction
(oxymoron) introduced into the signifier itself. Exactly what is being
communicated, ‘signified’, is not clear; it has become opaque, ‘enigmatic’. No
longer purely mimetic, the photograph confuses the usual status and conventions
of a photographic image with respect to reality. Introduces fantasy.[17]
In comparison, Richard Prince and
John Stezaker share many resemblances as well as differences. Generally, they were
born in a generation of appropriating artists whose art imply the exhaustion of
modern imagery. They suggested that modern world circulation of images has more
than enough to satisfy artist’s needs and they do not wish to make more,
because they doubt they can make it more interesting.[18]
What made Stezaker and Prince distinct in Appropriation art is that they wanted
to break free from text. ‘Whereas Prince left his images as they were, simply
framing out the text, Stezaker most often made a programmatic use of the cut
and collaged different images together.’[19]
But their purpose was the same - they tried to expose the real image and to
reintroduce pure image. Stezaker says, that captions (text) ruin the ambiguity
of an image by limiting all the possibilities that an image might insinuate. The
reason why they confiscate imagery from everyday circulation Grendberg vividly
describes:
‘For them,
imagery is now overdetermined – that is, the world already has been glutted
with pictures taken in the woods. Even if this weren’t the case, however no one
ever comes upon the woods culture free. In fact, these artists believe we enter
the woods as prisoners of out preconceived image of the woods, and what we
bring back on film merely confirms our preconceptions.’[20]
In wider discussions, Prince and
Stezaker are closely associated with photographic practice. Stezaker’s work is
now even in an enormous photography exhibition in Saatchi Gallery in London (25
April to 22 July), which just mirrors the contemporary perception of
photography that is more and more accustomed to a less photographical and more ‘curatorial’
approach. Strangely enough, only Prince can really be defined as a photographer
in this duo. His photographical approach is unique in a conventional
photographical sense, but on the other hand, Stezaker’s approach is
‘cameraless’ (maybe his modern futuristic successor would be Mishka Henner). Compared
to other appropriators Stezaker argues that he is unique in his intention and
approach. He regards himself more as a ‘collagist’ and he does not like the
term ‘appropriation art’. He uses Blanche who argued that the imagery should
not be related to the culture, but it should be an exile from reality. He
questions why are artists dutiful to reflect the environment (which is the
imperative of appropriation art).
Evans[21]
in his text acknowledges seven different groups in Appropriation art: Agitprop,
The Situationist Legacy, Simulation, Feminist Critique, Postcolonialism,
Postcommunism, and Postproduction. Stezaker and Prince can be found in the
group titled Simulation. Evans says that this group is most regularly
understood, cited and represented as a representative of appropriation art. The
group is gathered together around texts of Jean Baudrillard, and the likes of
Levine, Barthes, Crimp, Owens and Newman.
Prince’s and Stezaker’s work embody
principal ideas of postmodern use of allegorical devices. Both can be discussed
through the framework of allegory, defined in a ‘postmodernistic’ approach,
which occurs in the images itself. Their work is not self-sufficient; it is in
a way incomplete. Prince’s dead-pan approach to dissection of modern aesthetics
of magazines can leave the viewer confused, maybe empty. His work should be
seen in a series so that it has the potential to invoke question about everyday
imagery used as readymades, and for this essay most importantly, for allegory. Only
with repetition can a series of images attract one’s attention to the nature of
images and not their pure content. Stezaker’s work is more engaged with certain
time and space: his images originate just before his birth. Even without any
texts or captions, his work resonates something nostalgic, something known, but
when everything put together so strange and unique.
Prince’s and Stezaker’s work was
essential in defining appropriation art and it’s critical space as well as
attracting attention of the art world. Their old work still resonates today and
is still very popular. It is shown and acknowledged in photographic group shows
and awards (like Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for which Stezaker was
nominated) that are less photographic (in ‘drawing with light’ sense) than
ever. Their work evoked new thoughts about photography and stated debates about
new ‘isms’ in regards to modernism and postmodernism. They also triggered the
emergence of new critical theories about allegory and how does it occur in
confiscated images. Their approaches and seemingly easy methods profoundly
complicated how we percept allegory in postmodern art. Their impact on photography
is deep; it allows using new technologies and images, that are more concerned
about the actual image not the technical aspect of the photographic apparatus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bate, D. (2004) Photography and Surrealism, I.B. Tauris
Bate, D. (2004) Photography and Surrealism, I.B. Tauris
Evans, D. (ed.) (2009) ‘Introduction//Seven Types of
Appropriation’
Herrmann, D. (2010) ‘The Third Meeting’ in John Stezaker,
Ridinghouse
Kemper Art Museum. (2012). Panel Discussion with John
Stezaker. [Online Video]. 01 February. Available from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFcH3R2mLw
Macey, D. (2000) The Penguin
Dictionary of Critical Theory, Penguin
Newman, M. (2007) Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) Afterall
Books
Owens, C. (1980) ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory
of Postmodernism’ in Bryson, S. et. al. (eds.) (1992) Beyond Recognition,
University of California Press
Wells, L. (2009) Photography: A Critical
Introduction, 4th edition, Routledge
[1] Macey, D. (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of
Critical Theory, Penguin
[2] Owens,
C. (1980) ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’ in
Bryson, S. et. al. (eds.) (1992) Beyond Recognition, University of California
Press
[5]
Grundberg, A. in Wells, L. (ed.) (2003) The Photography Reader, Routledge
pp.167
[6]
Newman, M. (2007) Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) pp.67
[7]
Newman, M. (2007) Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) pp.12
[8]
Solomon-Godeau A. in Wells, L. (ed.) (2003) The Photography Reader, Routledge
pp.161
[9] Newman,
Michael (2007) Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) pp.60
[10] Owens,
C. (1980) ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’ in
Bryson, S. et. al. (eds.) (1992) Beyond Recognition, University of California
Press pp.54
[11]
Newman, M. (2007) Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) Afterall Books pp.60
[12]
Herrmann, D. (2010) ‘The Third Meeting’ in John Stezaker, Ridinghouse pp.43
[13]
Herrmann, D. (2010) ‘The Third Meeting’ in John Stezaker, Ridinghouse pp.42
[14] Owens,
C. (1980) ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’ in
Bryson, S. et. al. (eds.) (1992) Beyond Recognition, University pp.54
[15] Kemper
Art Museum. (2012). Panel Discussion with John Stezaker. [Online Video]. 01
February. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFcH3R2mLw
[16] Bate,
D. (2004) Photography and Surrealism, I.B. Tauris pp.22
[17] Bate,
D. (2004) Photography and Surrealism, I.B. Tauris pp.28-29
[18] Kemper
Art Museum. (2012). Panel Discussion with John Stezaker. [Online Video]. 01
February. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFcH3R2mLw
[19] Newman,
M. (2007) Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) Afterall Books pp.12
[20] Grendberg, A. in Wells L. (ed.) (2003) The
Photography Reader, Routledge pp.172
[21] Evans,
D. (ed.) (2009) ‘Introduction//Seven Types of Appropriation’ pp.18
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