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Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960S

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Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960S 6 Text and Image:Rereading Conceptual Art In 1969, the artist Douglas Huebler famously asserted,“I use the camera as a ‘dumb’ copying device that only serves to document whatever phenomena appears before it through the conditions set by a system.No ‘aesthetic’choices are possible.”1 Likewise,Ed Ruscha,discussing the images in his 1960s’photo books, disclaimed any relation to art photography, insisting that “they are technical data like industrial photography . .nothing more than snapshots.”2 Such statements are not atypical. The view of photography they ad- vance,as a seemingly neutral means of recording information,underlies much art of the 1960s and 1970s.This turn to photography was part of an over- arching tendency to use mechanical recording and reproduction technol- ogies—tape recorders,video, Xerox machines,and so on—to make art.Such technologies promised a machinelike impersonality and distance from con- ventional modes of self-expression.This adoption of indexical models in turn greatly impacted the use and function of language in this art. For as we will see, in the shift to media- and information-based paradigms, words often moved from instruction, description, and record to a more conventional, if also ambivalent, status as caption.Yet alongside this more familiar text-image relation, a different logic emerged in which language became subject to the form of the archive or catalogue. Viewed from the present-day art world, where monumentally scaled color photographs seem poised to displace painting as the most visually spectacular and commercially successful artistic medium,it is hard to imagine the radical promise and threat that photography seemed to hold in the 1960s. Works by artists such as Huebler, Ruscha, Vito Acconci, Victor Burgin, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman not only pushed photography to a new Chapter 6 Figure 6.1 Graham, Homes for America (1966). Courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery,New York. 214 Text and Image 215 Chapter 6 centrality in visual art practice but also adopted its quasi-mechanistic means of image making in order to disrupt the very position and status of the pre- cious, unique, and handcrafted art object. Using the camera as a simple tool for accumulating images or documenting actions, 1960s’ artists generated models of photography not assimilable to existing traditions of photojour- nalism or art photography.While photographs were used to document all manner of performances,land art,and site-based projects,it was through what came to be called Conceptual art that the most systematic work with and on photography occurred, as artists adopted it as a means to move beyond the object to work directly on representation and cultural sign systems. Embracing the flat look of amateur, snapshot, and industrial photogra- phy,these conceptual uses of photography implicitly posed themselves against the canon of Modernist “art photography” that was being institutionally codified at the same moment.This high art lineage sought to legitimize pho- tography by grounding it in traditional aesthetic values of originality,creative self-expression, visual splendor, and technical virtuosity. Countering these terms almost point by point, 1960s’ artists embraced the photographic docu- ment as a straightforward means of presenting information, a “‘dumb’ copy- ing device” that could presumably be employed by anybody.As critic John Roberts observes, in opposition to “the concurrent development of photo- graphic modernism . conceptual art openly embraced photography’s func- tional and anti-aesthetic character, whereas Modernism actively suppressed this through aestheticism”—even if, in most cases, this functional or infor- mational look would strategically be severed from any actual social or peda- gogical function.3 With the exception of Graham’s magazine works, Roberts notes,“the opening period of conceptual art embraces the culturally disrup- tive function of photographic reportage only to withdraw it from the social world.”4 Although the self-referential and self-critical aims of much 1960s art ini- tially precluded the direct depiction of political events and issues,photography nonetheless offered a means to reengage with the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s—not only through the referentiality that photographic images inevitably entail, but also through the ways in which photography provided a tool to investigate the worlds of image culture and the mass media. The 216 Text and Image photographer and critic Victor Burgin recalls his turn to photography as grow- ing directly out of his disenchantment with the perceived isolation of art: Photography offered a window on the world ...a window through which you could punch a hole in the gallery wall and bring into the gallery issues that had previously been considered not proper within the gallery....I think it’s hard to imagine how shocking it was to see writing and photographs on gallery walls in the late sixties.5 Burgin’s reference to writing here is not incidental. Indeed, it was this linking of photography to language that marks the crucial innovation of Conceptual art. In countless late 1960s’ and early 1970s’ projects, photogra- phy appears with language as a kind of dyad:text and image (a perennial pair- ing that later resurfaced in so much “postmodern” art of the 1980s). This pairing, of course, was by no means new or unprecedented. Since the rise of the illustrated press in the early twentieth century, the joining of words and photographic images has been among the core elements of modern visual culture. In almost all public uses of photography—printed matter, books or magazines,posters,publicity,and even cinema—photographic images appear with language, as caption, headline, surrounding text, intertitle, or spoken voice-over or dialogue.This relation, however remained repressed in mod- ernist photography (with the exception of photomontage-based work), and ignored in critical and theoretical models that sought to understand the “purely visual” world of images as operating according to fundamentally dif- ferent laws from those governing linguistic materials. Against such approaches, Burgin would later argue that although photography is a “visual medium,”it is not a “purely vi- sual”medium . .even the uncaptioned “art”photograph,framed and isolated on the gallery wall is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.6 217 Chapter 6 During the 1960s,critics such as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco proposed that photographs be read as discursive and rhetorical, as forms of coded mes- sages that could be analyzed according to quasi-linguistic models.In Barthes’ analysis, not only does language work to attach cultural “connotations” to “denotational” photographic images but the repetition, sequencing, and or- dering of images creates meaning contextually and contiguously, in ways somewhat analogous to the syntactic arrangements of words.7 This interrelation between language and the photograph is central to 1960s art, and many of the theoretical models that emerged at the time.Yet its complexity remains little explored. One of the paradoxes of this period is that while in rapidly diffusing semiotic and structural models, photographic images—along with much else—came to be understood as structured “like a language,” in visual art, language in many cases would be used “like pho- tography,”as if it too could serve as a neutral recording apparatus,document- ing the results of a preexisting system.Thus, the work of artists like Acconci, Hamish Fulton, and Kawara as well as the group Art + Language is full of typewritten lists and tables that use words and numbers to catalogue their experiments and investigations. Part of the enormous productivity of this period came from artists’efforts to bring together heterogeneous and even in- compatible models, translating gestural and pictorial approaches from paint- ing,or performance or process-based approaches from sculpture,to the forms and materials of print culture.The instrumental uses of photography and lan- guage as tools for other types of projects helped to dislodge both media from their conventional functions and genres, and set them into new types of rela- tions with each other. Perhaps more than any other artists associated with Conceptual art, Huebler and Burgin produced systematic and sustained bodies of work that juxtapose texts and photographic images. Through a comparison of their projects, we can trace a crucial shift from a perceptual and phenomenologi- cal analysis (emerging out of minimal sculpture) to an overtly semiotic analy- sis (engaging with the forms of media culture). This historical trajectory moves from the classic period of New York–based conceptualism to its re- ception and gradual reformulation in Britain in the 1970s, where Burgin’s efforts to go “beyond conceptual art” led him and other artists to participate 218 Text and Image in more avowedly political projects of feminist critique and media activism, and embrace the semiotic and psychoanalytic modes of “film theory” that would come to be associated with the London-based Screen magazine. Yet,to understand the stakes of this shift—and also appreciate some of what is lost in this shift from perceptual to semiotic models—we need to consider their work in context by outlining some of the conflicting imperatives evident during the formative period of conceptual practice. The Look of Information Around 1966–1968, just before
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