As President of the Telefónica Foundation, presenting Telefónica’s recently created Contemporary Photography Collection is a great satisfaction to me for several reasons, which I would like to outline.
First, because it promises to be a collection with a broad scope, given that it aims to reflect the change in the paradigm of visual culture that has taken place over the last few decades, wherein photography, in particular, has become an instrument of artistic value, acquiring consciousness of its expressive capacity and of its value as an activity of representation, subverting the very codes and languages employed by the medium.
Secondly, this new Telefónica collection makes manifest our continued determination to promote a line of corporate collections shaped by contemporary art. We are aware of the fact that collecting XX century art is a new facet of Spanish culture and that by staking on a photography collection in an institutional framework, we are filling a significant void in the artistic patrimony of our day.
It is worth pointing out how, thirdly, the creation of this collection has been guided by a coherent concept of selection, and a will to include a broad range of artists who have contributed to the establishment of the groundwork for contemporary photography on an international level. From this perspective, the Telefónica Art Advisory Committee has played a significant role in obtaining the selected pieces, in accordance with the general criterion that had been defined beforehand. I would like to express my gratitude to its members for the dedication and effort they have demonstrated.
The real challenge for any collection is the one before us now, its public exhibition. I truly hope that the creation and development of this collection produced by the Telefónica Foundation receives praise from the critics and the approval of society.
César Alierta
President of the Telefónica Foundation
On the birth of a collection
María de Corral Ló pez-Doriga
To collect is to select, to take a stand, to accept the risks implicit in trying to demonstrate a particular vision of a given time and to offer that vision to an audience for it to be construed. It is an endless writing, reading and rereading of history, a will to commit oneself to art and a possibility of sharing a view of the world that artists alone can provide.
Collecting may be an institutional, corporate or personal activity and it is undoubtedly one related to its leading players, for, to be sure, all collections have names behind them, although these may be either personal or collective.
Collections have their strengths and their weaknesses; they are full of experimental endeavours, attempts and successes, diverse proposals, in their languages as well as their contents, and they exude and convey the difficulties of something that is contemporaneous with us. They comprise moving works imbued with artistic tension alongside others whose value lies in their having borne witness to a certain time period in art. Collecting always implies a dose of adventure, for there is no existing formula for determining when something will continue to be valuable many years in the future, except perhaps enthusiasm about art and the conceptual rigour of its authors.
The collections of corporate foundations are usually affected by the evolution of the economic, political and human contexts in which they are situated and their destiny depends on their being managed by innovative people who are capable of taking risks, since a collection presupposes bias, subjectivity and utopia, and artistic life develops over a long period of time, whereby, supporting the collection essentially implies giving it time, in addition to many other things. Indeed, a collection can define or set apart a specific institution in comparison to all other existing art institutions.
Occasionally, the collections of corporate foundations may be considered the poor relatives of institutional ones, possessing neither the legitimacy nor the authority of the museum funds, nor reflecting the personality or the originality of private collections. The privilege of the collections of private foundations is that their nature can be freely determined, while conserving the ethics issuing from museum regulations, yet liberated from the encumbrance of bureaucracy. Hence their creators are granted a priceless freedom allowing them to invent new modes of collecting.
The works presented in this catalogue constitute the beginning of a collection about artists who are producing mainly photography-based art. Their pictures say nothing new about what photography itself is or may be, but instead, they tell us much about what the current artistic experience is, within the context of contemporary culture.
These artist-photographers are no longer simply operators with cameras photographing the world for passive spectators. In fact, the role of recording and documenting has been passed on to other media, such as video or digital photography. Their works cannot only be looked at one after the other in a book, but need wall space, an experience of confrontation on the part of the viewer; they resemble painting, without necessarily imitating it and yet, like painting, they need space, to be contemplated from a distance.
This incipient collection conveys a great deal of plurality regarding mental structures and it gradually introduces the spectator into a new universe, which is neither the real one nor a fictional one, nor a representation, but the reality of a vision.
During the early seventies, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, and toward the end of the decade, artists such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Josefph Kosuth, Hans Haacke and Dan Graham began to employ photography as a medium, in other words, as a means of information and as document, yet always utilizing it and justifying it as ‘food for thought’, as Albert Oehlen put it.
Since the decade of the eighties, imaging possibilities have expanded enormously, giving rise to a separate civilisation; the camera’s vision is different from human sight and, in many cases, the reality shaping our perception nowadays is that of the image in all its forms.
Our world is subjected to such an avalanche of images, through all the means of communication, that we are under the impression that there is an attempt to silence and fragment the emotional density of the aesthetic imagination.
The beauty that these artists try to create can never be a discovery, a miraculous gift, but must be elaborated, constructed, made explicit through a specific and precise process. They are rather like builders who have their rules and the need to create a syntax. On a principle of sorts, they have shunned spontaneity and lyricism, running the risk of seeming rigid and thereby creating new images; not only renouncing the illusion of being objective witnesses, but also deploying an instrument that permits the reconciliation of fiction and captured reality, thus establishing a new conception of reality.
The American presence in the Collection of the Telefónica Foundation focuses on the meaning of art in the age of mass media consumption and on the meaning of representation in that art. It addresses the signs and symbols defining contemporary culture in the United States: the stream of images from film, billboards, magazines and television. Imagery that has come to represent a new reality in its own right, a reality that we intend to assimilate and imitate in our own lives.
This presence begins with John Baldessari and his use of direct shots taken from television or film stills and used as a narrative form, thus helping to establish photography as an independent vehicle of representation.
Later, artists such as Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince are to incorporate in their works symbols, pictures, slogans and stereotypes that pose questions about the social context in which words and images serve to manipulate us. They idealize their models to the point of making them unreal, constructing imagery with characters that have become mythic. They use artifice in order to achieve plastic effects. They are conscious of their role as vehicles, rather than the end of a discourse.
Richard Prince re-photographs pictures printed in ads, newspapers and magazines, creating a new story and a new meaning for them. His photographs project the fascination with the very presence of the personalities, due to the mechanisms of advertising, such as in his series on cowboys, where he uses the models from the Marlboro ads.
Louise Lawler explores how the forms of presentation and the context of an artwork contribute to its meaning and significance, in other words, the factors determining the definition art receives in culture.
Cindy Sherman is interested in investigating how our personalities and our humaneness is affected by the entertainment industry that urges us to identify with fictional characters and events, parodying the stereotypical roles of women and continuously using herself as model.
Within the American presence in the collection, Allan Sekula’s work seems to embody a documentary or journalistic approach when it is actually a representation of specific social relations with references to political, social and economic questions.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs are constructed with considerable dramatic tension. The pictures are conceived as scenes, as the framework of actions as they are taking place. They force us to discover urban traits such as the alienation of everyday life, the distance between people and the falseness of stories and realities.
The presence of German photography in the collection consists of artists who are heirs of a tradition initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century by August Sander and resumed in the sixties by Bernd & Hilla Becher, teachers at the Düsseldorf Academy, who had students such as Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Günther Förg, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte and Andreas Gursky.
None of these artists resort to the already existing flood of commonplace imagery from the media, as is the case of the Americans, but instead they all create their own images in which they show us something that exists and that one must learn to discover, something beyond the visible. The untrained viewer might reproach them for a morbid predilection for frozen, dehumanised forms and spaces. A pathos of emptiness, an absence that produces effects of fascination. These artists prefer lucidity to astonishment, humour to irony. They are photographers of a built, existing world; in their works, they portray streets, houses, facades, building complexes, isolated constructions, interiors and landscapes. Every detail in their images is clearly visible, but stripped of its daily function, of any sense of attachment. Each element has been registered by the mechanical eye of the camera with equal objectivity. They are sober and realistic images, without any symbolic loftiness or metaphorical intensity. The deliberate absence of people in most of them demonstrates their will to analyse the urban space rather than the social character.
These two building blocks are the fundamental pillars upon which this incipient Collection of the Telefónica Foundation is based. Additionally, the foundation has acquired works by other artists who, through their photography, manage to bring us to the limits of the sensitivity of our age and to broaden these limits with their artistic proposals. At present, the collection includes pieces by John Coplans, Helena Almeida, Olafur Eliasson, Gabriel Orozco, Vik Muniz, Hannah Collins, Per Barclay, Jeff Wall, Andres Serrano, Wolfgang Tillmans, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Marina Abramovi´c, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sabine Hornig, Esko Männikkö and Francis Alÿs.
With the revitalisation of this new facet of collecting, the Telefónica Foundation is merely continuing the concern it has always shown for the art world throughout its different mandates.
I believe that eighteen months is a short time for a collection, certainly too short to assume any maturity or to attempt to meet all the expectations. A collection must undergo many phases of growth before it is consolidated. A collection is a commitment that does not intend to be a universal truth, but rather the fruit of a critical consideration of contemporary creation.
The results of this year and a half shall not be seen for a long time. From the outset, the purpose of the collection has been an engaging search for important and essential works, unquestionably based on the subjectivity of the acquisitions committee.
I have always believed that a society, if it is alive, ought to seek knowledge of the formal characteristics, the artistic presuppositions and the aesthetic preoccupations of its contemporary artists.
Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”, (1931).
Their approach implied that photography had not yet become “avant-garde” in 1960 or 1965, despite the epithets being casually applied to it. It had not yet accomplished the preliminary auto-dethronement, or destruction, which the other arts had established as fundamental to their development.
Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference”, (1995).
The antithetic of photography as art (1st milestone)
We could start by endorsing a paradox: while aspiring to seem (even to be) “artistic”, photography has not been able to reach that status with full legitimacy -except in the form of a depleted, imitative and very often even cornily aestheticised artisticity- and it has only begun to obtain said status (de jure and de facto) when it, on the contrary, has fallen into the hands of those who, through its use, work above all on the radical questioning of the very artistic condition of their own practice. In other words, and all conclusively, if photography has managed to become another art form (like the other forms thus recognised) this has occurred only when it has adjusted its own course to the rest of the avant-gardes. And how else?
Prior to the uses the second avant-gardes make of it, it is true that photography existed almost entirely detached from the inner “drama” in which the rest of the arts were submerged, fervently dedicated to the self-questioning immanent of their own field. This is easy to forgive -but cannot be forgotten. After all, it is true that photography arose in a field (of language usage) discovered not long before, and it is therefore reasonable to excuse the fact that for so many years, so many decades, its characteristic declarative possibilities alone were explored, seeking first of all to aestheticise and “ennoble” the field, also claiming for itself the recognition other practices received. The problem is that if at this point those practices were still worthy of such recognition, it was then only due to the irrepressible work of auto-dethronement they had been exercising for a long time -work it was still far from initiating, as it was still headed in the opposite direction, that of self-affirmation, consolidation, becoming recognized.
We know then where to begin: the day some artists -I do not say photographers- deployed the camera to go even further in the job of dismantling their own practice. Some to record their volatile sculpting occupations, others to document strikingly unmemorable actions, others merely to point out the existing simplicity and still others to record the mere being there in time. For example, Vito Aconcci walking down the street and clicking his shutter at regular intervals of time and perhaps space, Hamish Fulton mapping out his tedious possible walks; the Bechers to catalogue the innumerable non intended anti-monuments produced daily by industrial architecture, Gilbert & George to convert themselves into a singing sculpture, Baldessari to record the -icon-media- saturated landscape of our ordinary life, Dan Graham to take a statistical inventory of the new types of American home-sweet-homes, Chris Burden so that his aiming a gun at a plane flying overhead would not be forgotten, as the shot he had someone take at his own body could not be forgotten, and the causes making it irrefutably legitimate, if not necessary. In all of them, photography does not exist in itself, for itself, in the least, but rather in order to allow another work, another meaning to become visible or comprehensible therein. Something that was either already in its exteriority -and of which it would be a mere trace or sign- or had been created for the purpose of producing a specific, precise, calculated meaning -photography as a record of an extremely powerful writing in action, in time, as an extensive dominion of an irreverent and unstoppable grammatology of the event.
Kodak does 90%.
Jean-Luc Goddard
“You push the button, we do the rest”. Perhaps, in the well known slogan that advertised the instamatic, we could situate the basis of the serious conversion of photography into an efficient technology for artistic use. It often happens that the discovery of the possibilities of a new medium occurs only with the manifestation of a second invention, of a “complement” that territorializes it on an improvised stage. Michel Serres demonstrated this for example regarding the connections between the compass and the calliper for the Chinese. MacLuhan insinuated this in a certain way when he suggested that every medium produces only the truth of its predecessor. But this insinuation seems to us to be overly historically oriented, overly Darwinian. Perhaps what we wish to say is something simpler: that without a second derivative device, the first can hardly be effective -socially or anthropologically-; with respect to technologies, it is certainly always advisable to come in second.
As far as photography is concerned -although we would surely say the same about film, video or computers- the invention is the basis of the possibility of the globalisation of its use (super 8 for film, domestic equipment for video, PCs for computers), what makes it authentically revolutionary. Naturally. Isn’t it logical that the most revolutionary profile of a technology of symbolic production be precisely that which asymptotically approaches the possibility that the potential universe of the enunciators and that of the receivers (of those who consume and produce the founding, symbolic tales) coincide some time? Wouldn’t that perchance be the authentic “ideal communication community” and the dream of realising it the best utopia to which any medium could verify its interest in the transformation of a declarative space?
Photography is thus a shifter, like one of those transitional technologies capable of establishing an efficient crossroads between separate, disjunctive registers. Barthes situated the condition of the potential of any code, of any language, in the existence of that type of operators. Without a shifter permitting the channelling of the intensities put into play, any system would be orphaned, and could never exercise the representation of another, stand for another, resonate with another. And this is what the artists of conceptualism find in photography: a shifter that de-orphans a system -that of art- to channel it onto another -that of things real. Photography is that primal topology in which a universe of closured language about itself, about its own autonomy, interrupts overflowing onto the world, onto what exists. Hence, it is not surprising that photography becomes accomplice to a radical adventure -that initiated by the second avant-gardes- against the formalist enclosure that had entrenched art in the autonomy of its own space. Indeed, it finds therein the mechanism necessary for leaping beyond its disciplinary closure, the pole-vault with which to rejoin the world, to initiate its return to reality.
Photography is there in order to bring it back, like a primal adventure crowned in the culmination of an endogenous process of auto-dethronement. Thanks to this -let us say that thanks to its contribution to the culmination of the avant-garde process of self-criticism- photography becomes a tool of the art trade -and precisely due to the efficiency of its anti-artistic, antithetic function. It therein adopts, finally, the declarative logic as well as the symbolic practices of its age. Finally.
Digitisation and narrativity (2nd milestone)
The shifting of this small story in a second phase may be situated, once again, due to the efficiency of a “second” technical development, in this case that which displaces the horizons of making photography from the optical-chemical factory to the digital post-factory. The irruption into the photographic field of the potentialities of digital imaging (in the capture processes as well as those concerning retouching, postproduction and finally printing and distribution of the images) doubtless implies enormous consequences. Consequences not only of an instrumental or functional nature, but strictly linguistic and structural, capable of altering the very “language” of the practice. The main one being: that photography no longer deals with an imaginary time-instant (the instant achieved by Cartier Bresson) but instead reveals itself related to the image-time, bearing witness to the transient, temporal character of the very image produced. If we had to summarise it into one single, simple statement, we would say that due to the impact of digitisation, photography is cinematised.
Let us consider this process in two steps, following the logic of a double take (to use a term that coincidentally stems from the cinematographic field). The first takes place in the external orifice that relates photography to the world, in a new way, as in an uneven continuity. To be sure, the “capture devices” still distinguish two aperture regimes -two modes of working on the shuttering- of the recording device. One of photographic capture and the other video-graphic. But in reality, both regimes are the same, it is just that the first one is a cut-out use of the second, a sustained under-use. In short, in the digital capture device, photography has already in fact become a video still.
Then we are no longer dealing with a sequenced succession of photographs (frames) that allows a clumsy reconstruction of the passage of time in the image (as occurred with the cinematographic capture device). On the contrary, due to acquired habits of perception, there is still an anthropological interest in cutting into supposed time-instants that is continuous time, unfolding (and is perceived as such by the capture device, by the digital camera’s eye). In other words, simply, time, real time.
At the same time, we can say that regarding the digitised image capture device, the difference between photographic and video cameras has been nullified. And simultaneously, to be sure, there is no essential technical difference either between photography and the moving image of film. Conclusively, a photograph is a single frame film (a film still) a video of one single frame.
In the realm of digital imaging -of course. What has been overcome: that absolute burn-out caused by excess (exposure time to) light on the film. Now, a continuous and endless flood of light is perfectly tolerable: the same ordering of digital data that, pixel by pixel and line by line, inform (the inexhaustible) hard drive of the sequence of the passage of time, frame by frame.
What happens on the other side of the lens, of the shutter, is no longer a mute and blind ‘camera obscura’ like an absolute and nocturnal non being kept in ontological silence until the very moment in which the event takes place and is struck by the capture (thus creating awareness). Instead, it is rather that sort of damp and fluid mirror that connects with an infinite pantographic network, a dot-matrix underworld to which a continuous and unstoppable flux of information (of consciousness, of knowledge) constantly arrives and is constantly sent back. Another side of reality that interferes with it incessantly, not like a separate setting for the representation but like a heated rhizome that continually disperses and redistributes the flow of information that the world is (as far as it can give of itself).
Imagine our world raised above an underground network of infinitesimal channels that could be accessed from a no less infinite number of drain-orifices, through which every place would be profusely interconnected and interacting with every other. It is this -matrix- and not that of the camera obscura or the representational space turning its back on what is happening that is prefiguring our way of knowing and relating to the world. Hence the artist of our time can no longer be Leonardo or Velázques. Who then?
Take two, the second scene of this new and displaced milestone: that turning the computer itself into a re-camera, an active background, a workplace. The backroom where the “capture” is re-cooked, enlarging its event time, Indeed, we are no longer dealing with the retention and memorisation of “only” the time it occurs while the camera traps it, “interiorising” it. The time afterwards also counts now, the time of retouching and recombining: now this is also an event time, an expanded time that novelises photography, transforming it into image-time.
In the manner of a second shutter, indeed, the work digital imaging makes possible -due to the efficiency of the current software, of digital imaging programs- historises the tale that the photograph, then, narrates (and not only describes or shows). With the conversion to digitisation -which adds a second lab time, for all computers are actually labs- photography expands in an internal time of the tale. It becomes a cinematographic space, habilitated to tell something is already, and of itself, happening in time. Its horizon of radical expression then is no longer the infinitesimal, narrow time of the instant. Instead, photography thus emerges as a historical setting, a course, a tale.
The potential of saying something else -the process of allegoresis- characteristic of the avant-garde is traditionally dependent on a process of fragmentation and set-up (the classical procedure characteristic of the collage) through which, by juxtaposition of elements belonging to different times and places, other times and places are inlaid in the singular temporality of a precise place and time (that of the picture). Thanks to the declarative aperture which that process introduces, not only can the picture incorporate its own internal temporality, despite the static, immobile nature of the surface, it can also become critical. Indeed, by mounting those different fragments, a narrative is produced that no longer speaks only of the existing world, making the picture a sparse mirror of what it is, but at the same time permits the artistic work to de-conceal what that reality covers up and announce other possible worlds. This process is that which introduces potentials of critique, of reflection. And it is, at the same time, that which renders the image temporal -by sequencing it through the multiplicity of the times to which each incorporated fragment originally belonged.
In the photographic field, this process was initially developed with a formula very similar to the other representative arts, by way of photomontage (consider Heartfield, for example, and the significant critical potential of his political allegoresis). What the procedure made possible by all the post-productive work provided by the computer has meant has been an exponential multiplication of the possibilities of this procedure. And in all directions: in other words, both gauging the potential of a narrativity whose condition is, of course, the telling device’s inward shift toward temporality, and that of a critique which spills forth in that “compound” character of photography turned narrative field.
And with an additional quality that sets the process apart in the photographic field: therein it is possible to erase the “seams” characteristic of the process of the post-montage of the fragments. Therefore, the non-organic and dissonant characteristic aspect of the avant-garde collage-montage stepped aside here for a recovered organic quality. In that step, photography as “critical picture” expanded in an inner time recovers the organic completeness of a pictorialness earned now as legitimate. Then not only the photographer becomes the only legitimate “painter” of “modern life” in our day. Also in that process, a crucial scansion is produced that, in a certain way, leaves time behind definitively -the declarative mode par excellence- of the avant-gardes.
Sight and identity production (3rd milestone)
The world is already too full of objects. Why produce more?
Joseph Kosuth
If we had to choose one single episode as the maximum culmination of the dismantling work carried out by the avant-garde, we would not hesitate to point to its analytical moment: that in which a group of artists takes it upon themselves to introduce into the field of art a breakthrough similar to that which, in the realm of philosophy, meant the definitive abandonment of the “Great Task” of building “World-Views” -replacing it with the more modest one of analysing the language of these, the rhetoric through which those “world-views” are articulated and persuade of their truth. In short, in that process philosophy becomes critical: critical of the (pretensions of truth of the) declared world- views, but at the same time and above all critical of the analytical language (this is what Rorty has called the linguistic breakthrough, in purity), of the language in which they are expressed.
It could be said that the central attempt of the culminating episode of the project of the second avant-gardes coincides in a pantograph mode with that project, shifted into the field of art (in a way that could therefore also be characterised as a linguistic breakthrough). In other words: in its wake, art becomes -or at least strives to become- only and exclusively an analysis of the language of works of art. The avant-garde of conceptualism then becomes analytic, critical self-reflection that, weary of filling the world with “more objects”, proposes to redefine its mission: instead of continuing to manufacture them and to put them on display, it opts to convert itself into a mere analysis of the language with which that particular class of objects we call “works of art” speak, display their own rhetorical quality. This is what “art as idea” ultimately means, or even the proposition “art after philosophy”.
We can state that, in a certain way, in the strange cul-de-sac that fallacy leads to, the avant-garde -the project of immanent self-criticism, of critical auto-dethronement of art- it both culminates and perishes.
One of the most intelligent ways in which the enclosure in this tautological format is untangled takes the form of the self-production of the content by virtue of the structure. Still manoeuvring within the confines of the linguistic breakthrough, it would be easy to find examples, among the foremost post-conceptual generation. No doubt the most accomplished: schema, by Dan Graham (a work that is precisely and only produced in the self-descriptive process, which is no other than that very self-description, and what it produces). The question would be: Does something similar exist in the space of sight?
If that were the case, we would have the basis for understanding where the work can begin in its recording -that of sight- under the conditions of an achieved self-dismantling. A heuristic hypothesis: It is photography -as rhetorical device- that will permit the unfolding (and the gathering of the fruit) of this discovery. And that is what renders it, in our day, so interesting, of such high artistic (or rather, critical) calibre.
In a strange -in its unexpectedness, in the place it is produced- passage, Derrida states that the discovery of the “performative potential of language” is one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century. What that potential implies is precisely the capacity to produce reality, event, by virtue of the act of language, the potentiality of making “things with words” -promises, declarations, excuses, forgiveness, judicial acts, feelings, beliefs, marriages, guiltiness… Could we think that “things”, similar deeds could be produced with images as well -with the visual-? What would these things be and how would they be produced by the visual? Or, in other words: How would its rhetoric operate to make it seem real in that which is produced as phantasmagoria, as speaking act -or more precisely, of vision?
The rhetoric of the self-portrait certainly gives us a clue: it is to the “author” -and as such- to whom the image (his/her own, inasmuch as self-produced as rhetoric effect) bestows entity, reality. In self-portraiture, photography finally ceases to inhabit the world of still-lifes -of the still-life and the sinistroid realism, of Franco-era atmosphere- in order to finally exercise its self-recursive loop, in order to finally lay bare its own structure -as content producer.
If we wished to imagine that all contemporary art is borne from one modern painting -which is of course Las Meninas- we would say that painting follows the golden thread of the canvas turned around -and therefore consecrates its history to that discovery of its highest destiny in the reverse of the representation. That of photography, on the other hand, explores another thread -when it begins to do so-. That of the mysterious apparition of those producing it, of those painting it, in the picture itself, instilling everything else that appears with truth -by instilling itself with truth-. A figure that thus not only appears there as “any of the world’s objects” but instead to produce itself as a condition of possibility of any other representational production, by virtue of the efficiency of a mechanism that reinforces the credibility -the veracious character- of its position there. As producer of the representation -he is really its first (and perhaps most consummated) product.
- What little Van Gogh wrote about it makes clear that the other was an alcoholic and a republican, or rather, that he said of himself that he was republican, and believed himself to be, and that he was an alcoholic, with a profession of atheism that the absinthe inflamed. (…) He donned a shaggy beard in the shape of an iron plough, a pleasure to paint, a real forest; (…) he seemed Russian, but Van Gogh did not specify whether Mujik or Barín; and in this regard, the portraits are also prone to indecision.
Pierre Michon, Life of Joseph Roulin, (1988)
Revealed in its autopoietic moment, what post-photography would now substantiate would be above all the productive potential of securing the acts of sight (of seeing and letting oneself be seen). Certainly, it would do nothing more here than to absorb the potentials of the self-portrait (let us consider the formidable series of those by van Gogh, for example) but under a special circumstance. That by obtaining it -the quantity of securing provided by the phantasmatic coincidence of the image producer with the subject associated with it- through the measurement of a technical apparatus, the dependence of the artist as self-producing eminent subject is reduced. Or, in other words, that the potentiality of self-production through participation in the visual act is multiplied -and the dependence of the exemplary greatness of the artist as unique self-engendered subject capable of lending the others (even the proletariats, not only the royal families) his identity as if through participation, as if through emanation, only by contagion and acquiescence, is it diffused. In that process, indeed, the you -and I am not referring to the he- manages to return to an I.
If we also wished now, as we have done before, to associate the linguistic deployment of this third milestone -in our short history- with the potential of a “second” technical device, it would occur to us to refer it to the invention of the photo booth as an efficient instrument that allows anyone, any citizen, to make self-portraiture. And in the visual act of doing so, provide her/himself with that added phantom of verifiction (that reinforces the I discussed for being presumed to be the same one saying) in the middle of its sad and insufficient existence as identity, as _self, as “I” and singularity of unrepeatable and fulfilling experience.
It would be easy to underestimate the potential of that mechanism in its vileness, in its ordinariness and generalisation. But we would be wrong to do so: there would never be a history of culture without the comprehension of how and what it serves -for any citizen, for the son of any time- the work of representation.
Look at the series of portraits by Ruff -surely the most forceful and patent singling out of this third moment and all that characterises it. Doesn’t its tremendous force draw precisely on that need (of being an I for anyone) and that efficiency (of the sight to fantasise it)? Furthermore, isn’t it evident that beyond the obviousness that they are portraits of others, of third parties, the structural construction of what is demonstrated takes shape in a form different from that of the self-portrait in technical image, with exactly the format of a precise and magnified photo booth? Imagine them inserting their own coin in the slot. That is how they are made.
What does all this tell us? To be sure, about the tremendous crisis of identity, of individual and authentic life, that afflicts the singulars in modern times. Gursky’s huge anonymous masses speak as much about this as the flat and silent portraits, seemingly without inner life (other than that on the pure surface of their images), of Dijkstra’s or of Ruff’s himself. Of the character totally produced from the subject being -Sherman’s series address this as well- and of the potential of prompting it from the visual, as a more appropriate and forceful form of culture in contemporaneousness (and perhaps we ought to begin then by speaking of a certain visual breakthrough). That this respond to the needs of the consciousness in its time, is not a necessity alone. It is also a hope…
And this is because it is nourished by the fact that in its game, art not only speaks of what each order of the discourse locates by virtue of the internal law of economy -of systematic regulation- but also the way -due to instability, deficiency, absence or incompletion- it is inclined and indicates its falling direction. That of dice that, with each play of man’s existence in the world, are tossed upward… and whose abstract trace in the air of an enigmatic stroke so few moments of attention and report are capable of intuiting, of revealing. Yes, photography learned -a very short time ago- to address that as well...
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