Words Without Pictures
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WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES NOVEMBER 2007– FEBRUARY 2009 Los Angeles County Museum of Art CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Charlotte Cotton, Alex Klein 1 NOVEMBER 2007 / ESSAY Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be? Christopher Bedford 4 NOVEMBER 2007 / DISCUSSION FORUM Charlotte Cotton, Arthur Ou, Phillip Prodger, Alex Klein, Nicholas Grider, Ken Abbott, Colin Westerbeck 12 NOVEMBER 2007 / PANEL DISCUSSION Is Photography Really Art? Arthur Ou, Michael Queenland, Mark Wyse 27 JANUARY 2008 / ESSAY Online Photographic Thinking Jason Evans 40 JANUARY 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Amir Zaki, Nicholas Grider, David Campany, David Weiner, Lester Pleasant, Penelope Umbrico 48 FEBRUARY 2008 / ESSAY foRm Kevin Moore 62 FEBRUARY 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Carter Mull, Charlotte Cotton, Alex Klein 73 MARCH 2008 / ESSAY Too Drunk to Fuck (On the Anxiety of Photography) Mark Wyse 84 MARCH 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Bennett Simpson, Charlie White, Ken Abbott 95 MARCH 2008 / PANEL DISCUSSION Too Early Too Late Miranda Lichtenstein, Carter Mull, Amir Zaki 103 APRIL 2008 / ESSAY Remembering and Forgetting Conceptual Art Alex Klein 120 APRIL 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Shannon Ebner, Phil Chang 131 APRIL 2008 / PANEL DISCUSSION Remembering and Forgetting Conceptual Art Sarah Charlesworth, John Divola, Shannon Ebner 138 MAY 2008 / ESSAY Who Cares About Books? Darius Himes 156 MAY 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Jason Fulford, Siri Kaur, Chris Balaschak 168 CONTENTS JUNE 2008 / ESSAY Minor Threat Charlie White 178 JUNE 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM William E. Jones, Catherine Grant, David Campany, Charlotte Cotton 188 JUNE 2008 / PANEL DISCUSSION The Value of Photographs Paul Graham, Soo Kim, Anthony Pearson 204 JULY 2008 / ESSAY Process, Content, and Dissemination:Photography and Music Charlotte Cotton 216 JULY 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Edith Marie Pasquier 244 AUGUST 2008 / ESSAY A Picture You Already Know Sze Tsung Leong 250 AUGUST 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, John Lehr, Karen Hellman, Joshua Chuang 262 SEPTEMBER 2008 / ESSAY Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture Marisa Olson 274 SEPTEMBER 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Jacob Ciocci / Donald P. Grady 285 OCTOBER 2008 / ESSAY Abstracting Photography Walead Beshty 292 OCTOBER 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Gil Blank, Miles Coolidge, Karl Haendel, Zoe Crosher, Anthony Pearson, Jason Smith 316 OCTOBER 2008 / PANEL DISCUSSION A Picture You Already Know Amy Adler, Alex Slade, Penelope Umbrico 343 NOVEMBER 2008 / ESSAY Photography and Abstraction George Baker 358 NOVEMBER 2008 / DISCUSSION FORUM Moyra Davey, Hito Steyerl, Mark Godfrey, Johanna Burton, Tom McDonough 379 NOVEMBER 2008 / PANEL DISCUSSION Why Photography Now? Harrell Fletcher, Leslie Hewitt, A. L. Steiner 398 DECEMBER 2008 / CONVERSATION Allan McCollum, Allen Ruppersberg 416 CONTENTS FEBRUARY 2009 / CONVERSATION Sharon Lockhart, James Welling 443 CONTRIBUTORS 473 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 500 DESIGN NOTE 501 -- QUESTIONNAIRE responses appear occasionally throughout the text. INTRODUCTION WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES was conceived as a year- long project with monthly themes that were formulated by an editorial team in tandem with contributors to the wordswithoutpictures.org website. The aim was to create spaces where thoughtful and urgent discourse around very current issues for photography could happen. Each month, beginning at the end of November 2007 and concluding in November 2008, an artist, educator, critic, art historian, or curator wrote a short, un-illustrated and opinionated essay about an aspect of photography that, in his or her view, was either emerging or in the process of being rephrased. Each essay was available on the website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on the specific topic. Over the course of its month-long “life,” each essay received invited and unsolicited responses. The essays were proposals, from which the respondents picked up and created new strands of inquiry, thereby dem- onstrating the multidimensionality of each topic. Wordswithoutpictures.org’s discussion forum functioned as a very slow and considered form of weblog, with long posts from people clearly invested in and willing to engage with the issue at hand and to develop the scope of the discus- sion in meaningful ways. Similarly, a series of panel discus- sions were hosted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during the course of the year as a way of bringing the conversations off-line and into the space of the museum. The live discussions were a chance to further explore some of the site’s themes with a diverse group of contemporary artists whose thinking and engagement with the medium of photography reflected differing viewpoints and practices. These events often resulted in the invited guests and mem- bers of the audience travelling offsite to a local diner where the discussions were continued late into the night. The project facilitated conversations and discussions between a variety of people who might otherwise not come into contact with each other. The project aimed to be as inclusive as possible so as to create a space where artist 1 writings, critical examinations and informal commentaries could intersect. Thus, the tone of the writing varies from the informal and conversational to the creative and academic. It was our feeling that if we are to honestly talk about the state of photography in our contemporary landscape, it is imperative to reach across disciplinary boundaries. Students, photographers active in the commercial sector, bloggers, critics, historians, artists of all kinds, educators, publishers, and fans of photography all came together to consider the issues at hand. At every level of the process we aimed to remain accessible, acting as facilitators, instigators, and participants. In addition to the live panel discussions we organized a series of longer, mostly undirected conversations between artists, two of which are included in this volume. At the same time, we asked Lester Pleasant to send out question- naires with a small number of pertinent questions about the contemporary experience of photography to people working in the photographic arena. A sampling of these questionnaire responses appear sporadically througout the book. We initiated public and private conversations be- tween artists that revolved much more broadly around what it means to work with photography at this present moment. Running alongside wordswithoutpictures.org was its sister site, pictureswithoutwords.org, which used a continuous word counter to generate abstract pictures configured by the multiple uses of particular words and allowing us to ultimately include a particular form of picture-making in our consciously un-illustrated endeavor. One of the challenges of the project was the question of how to translate the experience of the web and live conver- sations into book form. The editorial process attempted to preserve as much of the informal, loose, and lively nature of the discussions as possible in accordance with the tempo- ral experience of the project, while striving for a satisfying after-the-fact experience. For the most part, the publication follows the chronology of the project as an organizational 2 INTRODUCTION model. We hope that the reader will have the flexibility to choose to experience the content as it unfolded this past year, or to select discrete sections of focused inquiry. The book includes all 12 essays, a selection of the responses in the discussion forums, excerpts from a series of related panel discussions, two conversations between artists, and selections from the responses to the questionnaires. All of these manifestations of WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES are summarized and compiled in this book, and we hope that the project will continue to be a stimulus to thinking about photography today. We want to thank all of the people who gave up their time to get passionate, speak plainly and openly, and to participate in this record of what some of us were thinking about photography over the past year. Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein 3 27 NOVEMBER 2007 / ESSAY Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be? CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD With medium specificity a passé historical concern confined chiefly to the pages of art history, it may seem prosaic and anachronistic to question the position and relative validity of a single medium—photography— within the world of contemporary art. In addition, the same question may seem patently irrelevant to those who might justifiably point out that many of the most eminent, critically lauded, and well-collected artists of the twen- tieth century—Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cindy Sherman, and Andreas Gursky, to name a few—all use the camera as their primary instru- ment. Furthermore, the status of photography as art is rarely drawn into question, and the market currency of the medium is beyond dispute. But does it necessarily follow that the fundamental ontology of photography as a practice has been fully interrogated, understood, and integrated into the discourse of contemporary art, assum- ing its rightful place alongside traditional media such as painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as new media such as installation and video? In other words, does photography exist as photography in art history and criti- cism today? And if not, why not? Is photography—and by derivation photography criticism—all it can be? Not surprisingly, one of the most astute theorizations of this quandary was offered—albeit obliquely—by 4 ESSAY / CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD