Oral history interview with Allan Sekula, 2011 August 20-2012 February 14 Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Allan Sekula on August 20, 2011 - February 14, 2012. The interview took place at Sekula's studio and home in Los Angeles, California and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York and was conducted by Mary Panzer for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Sally Stein, widow of Allan Sekula, has reviewed the transcript. Her corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview [TRACK sekula11_sd_1of4_track01 is a blank track.] MARY PANZER: Okay, all right, here we go. This is Mary Panzer interviewing Allan Sekula at his studio in Los Angeles, California on the 20 of August, 2011 for the Archives of American Art. And this is disc number one. Okay. So, Allan we talked—pay no attention to that. Although we know you're an artist and this is for the Archives of American Art. I would like you to describe to me what kind of an artist you are. Or what your career consists of in your own words. ALLAN SEKULA: Okay, fair enough. Well, I think from roughly 1971 let's say to 2001, I would have probably most readily described myself as a photographer and a writer. And after 2001, I would say filmmaker, photographer, writer. And the writing element, certainly in the earlier years, would have denoted a pretty strong tension between the kind of writing I would do as part of an artwork within an artwork, and writing that was criticism. And since about maybe 1995 or so that difference has shrunk, and I'm doing less writing that I would call art history or cultural history or criticism. Well maybe cultural history, but less formal critical writing, or writing on the history theory of photography, for example, that I'd done previously. So I think there's been a certain— perhaps a closing of the gap between critical writing and writing that might be called part of an artwork. But writing's always been a consistent part of the work. And it's mostly prose writing though the forms of—I think I've partaken of a lot of different modalities of writing from critical essays, to autobiographical texts, biographical texts, texts that entailed type found material based on tape recordings, and transcripts of peoples speech, everyday speech, self-justifying speech if you want, letter writing, prayers, prose poems, polemics. MARY PANZER: Polemics? ALLAN SEKULA: You know I've pretty much felt that there are a whole range of literary possibilities. And that's been, I think, one of my differences with the way language was incorporated into conceptual art, which tended, to my mind, to be rather narrowly either propositional in the motive analytic philosophy, or Wittgensteinian. You know, text like the Philosophical Investigations. Or list like, you know, kind of list writing. You know, which always struck me as a bit impoverished. So I felt like opening up all the possibilities of prose style in a way. And I think— I think by and large that conceptual art, the role of language in conceptual art tended to embrace perhaps not explicitly but that kind of idea of zero degree of stylist writing. And in that sense in following the line that Roland Barthes charts from Le Degré zero de l'écriture. And I was interested in threads of narrative that were older and, you know— MARY PANZER: Ones that are more complicated so I mean this sort of segues into the next question, which is how do you position yourself in relation to say contemporary art? Or who are the artists that are similar to you and word different so that if one was to do an exhibition in 2050 of the artist of a particular era or style, where would your work fit? I mean this a simple minded historical point of view but historians without the benefit of personal or, you know, impersonal relationships are forced to come up with these things. And if you tell them now, they'll have a—they'll get it right. ALLAN SEKULA: Well that's— MARY PANZER: Maybe. ALLAN SEKULA: Okay one could hope. But who knows where we'll be in 2050. Well, I know where I'll be. But, you know, I won't be around but— MARY PANZER: I mean there's Jeff Wall. I mean, and other people have compared your work sometimes to the— Jeff Wall, or even some— ALLAN SEKULA: Well, I think there was a kind of west coast variant of conceptualism that had manifestations in Vancouver, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, and San Diego in the early '70s that were—had certain commonalities and perhaps were different from the conceptualism that emerged in New York around the same time. There may have been more emphasis on narrativity out here in the work of some artists. I mean, Eleanor Antin would be an example. The kind of literary interests that people like Ian Wallace in Vancouver, you know, was a teacher of Jeff Wall's. So we had a key influential figure there. Maybe some of the bay area artists, Howard Fried, Terry Fox, you know, people that were kind of in between performance and a kind of—kind of conceptualist interest. But I—I mean immediate context. So one question is, "Well what was the cohort that I had the time I first started making art?" and the other question is the associations that are made later in one's career, or the associations that are imposed by critics, or by people constructing links between practices. But I guess it's complicated because I think there are various Venn diagrams that you can draw. And one key issue for me was that I guess I came to photography not really as a photographer, you know. And I'd been probably more consistent just to maybe follow on the point—the first point I was making that while I think the styles of writing that have interested me have involved a lot of genre switches, I've stayed fairly close to a documentary mode in the photography I pursued. And that's laid down a kind of baseline for me even if from time to time I've staged images or done things that were records of, you know, obviously staged actions. I mean they might have been documentary photographs but they entailed a certain amount of prearranged fictional staging, let's say. But by and large I'd say that it's pretty strongly running along a kind of social realist line. So I guess I would—whatever my quarrels have been with realism over the years, I see what I do as part of realist legacy because I think in the 19th century realism was a—however much it might have been linked to faulty positivist models of science, for example, [inaudible] idea of the experimental model. It was also realism broadly construed was a democratic current and entailed the appearance of the working class on the historical stage as actors and agents of their own destiny. And I think that's important to remember especially when modernism did a lot to suppress realism and to derogate it. And, of course, realism always crept back into the picture often born by photography or by cinema. And so that would be maybe a first principle for me. I mean, again I'm not giving you names here, associates, but I'd say if I were to chart a broader history, you know, it would go back to figures like Courbet or Corsoro, you know, the turpitude moral of [Honore] Daumier. And I wouldn't be so keen to embrace the Michael Fried high road of Manet Patoyo [ph] flattening. The tableau that have—has been so congenial and bankable for an artist like Jeff Wall, you know. To me it's to be in touch with the popular currents of caricature in the 19th century. And for example Daumier or things that seem like minor currents perhaps in the—in the—in the—in other words I don't—I don't—I don't like the—I don't like the idea of history of modernism that's a kind of victorious you know — MARY PANZER: March? ALLAN SEKULA: March, you know, a la you know a kind of Revel score of modernism marching on to its ultimate dialogical goal because it always seems to me that one's sympathies—I've always felt that it's the underdog currents and the lost currents that are the most interesting and the threads that get dropped. So, for example an artist like Meunier came to interest me in the last few years. The Belgian Courbet—but it turns out he's more Courbet than Courbet because Belgium had an industrial revolution in a much more profound way than did France. And so he confronted the existence of this new proletariat in a way that Courbet didn't, you know, and came up with solutions in sculpture that were pretty interesting. And, of course, get lost because they're seen as particular when—and of course when the same solutions reappear like figure groups with Rodin they become universal and acclaimed.