introduction Jorge Ribalta The Discursive Space of the Exhibition In the early 1980s, the debate on the discursive spaces of photography and, particularly, on the conflictive inclusion of photographs into the art museum was a crucial issue for the new art criticism and historiography, labelled as postmodernist. For that Frankfurt School influenced criticism (attempting to further and to radicalise the project of a social and cultural historiography of art and photography, of art after photography) it was essential the production of a new historiography not based on authors, pictures or form, but rather on the relevant debates, the means of circu- lation and the public visibility of images; in other words, the genealogy of a specific cultural public sphere determined by photography: a photo- graphic public sphere. During the Cold War, this cultural historiography had been set aside within an artistic discourse dominated by formalism and humanism; it would not surface until the 1970s, in the context of the emergence of the post-68 new social movements. Indeed, it was precisely this problematic inclusion of photography into modern art institutions – due, largely, to photography’s ‘documentary’, mechanical and archival nature, which meant that it had been put to the service of sciences and arts – that made photography crucial to the new criticism. This was so to such an extent that, as Craig Owens pointed out, the new criticism itself was identified with ‘the photographic’.1 The his- toricisation of the visibility of photography in the modernist exhibi- tionary complex became, at that moment, an emerging field, indeed a spearhead, for discourses that attempted to go beyond the formalist par- adigm of modernism. Because photography is archival, industrial and 1. Craig Owens: ‘the discourse in terms of its multiple copies: Craig Owens’, in Craig Owens, in the art world was identified no reflection of originality on the Beyond Recognition. with the photographic…. I mean original, timed with the “death of Representation, Power and Culture the notion of the photographic as the author”, the mechanisation (Berkeley, Ca.: University of opposed to photography per se, of image production’, in Anders California Press, 1992), p 300. theorisation of the photographic Stephanson, ‘Interview with 11 jorge ribalta related to the mass media, it could not be assimilated to modernist notions of autonomous visuality. In this context of the early 1980s, the terms of the debate on photography in the exhibition space were laid out in three seminal essays: Rosalind Krauss’s Photography’s Discursive Spaces,2 Christopher Phillips’s The Judg- ment Seat of Photography3 (both published in 1982), and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s From Faktura to Factography (published in 1984).4 Though very different from one another, these texts, along with a few others by Douglas Crimp and Allan Sekula,5 are an inevitable point of departure for any study of the public visibility of photography in the institutional exhibition space. The study of photographic exhibitions was relevant to the critique of modernism insofar as it showed the exhibition space to be a specific realm for the production of artistic autonomy. By no means free of ideology, the exhibition space was a key means to constructing the bourgeois public sphere – based on myths such as authorship and originality. The work of these critics was a reaction to the quick institutionalisation and aestheti- sation of photography, and its widespread appearance on the art market taking place precisely at that moment. At the end of her aforementioned essay, Rosalind Krauss stated that: ‘everywhere at present there is an attempt to dismantle the photographic archive – the set of practices, institutions, and relationships to which nineteenth-century photography originally belonged – and to reassemble it within the categories previous- ly constituted by art and its history.’6 In a context of regressive discursive practices that often erased the his- tory of the debates on the social function of art (specifically, the inscription of photography into modern art debates), the genealogical or archaeolog- ical study of the exhibition of photography in modernism was one of the primary fronts for the cultural struggles of the 1980s. It was also a crucial form of resistance to the emerging effects of neo-liberalism in the artistic 2. Originally published in Art Labour and Capital’, in Benjamin to Style’, Afterimage, vol. 10, Journal, no. XLII (Winter 1982). H. D.Buchloh and Robert Wilkie, no. 6 (January 1983). 3. Originally published in eds., Mining Photographs and 6. Rosalind Krauss, October, no. 22 (Autumn 1982). Other Pictures 1948‒1968 ‘Photography’s Discursive 4. Originally published in (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Spaces’, originally published in October, no. 30 (Autumn 1984) Scotia College of Art and Design, Art Journal, vol. XLII (Winter [see pp 29–61 of this volume]. 1983), and ‘Traffic in 1982); reprinted in Rosalind 5. Particularly texts by Douglas Photographs’, Art Journal, vol. Krauss, The Originality of the Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old, the 41, no. I (Spring 1981). Also rele- Avant-garde and Other Modernist Library’s New Subject’, original- vant are several texts by Abigail Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: ly published in Parachute, no. 22 Solomon-Godeau, including The MIT Press, 1985), p 150. (Spring 1981), and by Allan ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed: Sekula, ‘Photography Between Radical Formalism from Weapon 12 introduction sphere, whose symptoms included the return to painting, the revitalisa- tion of the market as a cornerstone of artistic debates and the depolitici- sation of the art scene. While Krauss and Phillips assessed the modernist museum’s assimila- tion of photography in their texts, Buchloh reconstructed the course of El Lissitzky’s exhibition paradigms from the late 1920s during the Soviet debates on superseding bourgeois artistic autonomy and the experiences of productivism, that is of an art subsumed in industrial production, the mass media and State propaganda. He critically formulated how the artis- tic paradigms that arose from the Soviet Revolution – from the particular interconnection between the artistic avant-garde and the political avant- garde that occurred in that context – were the true engines of twentieth- century modern art. This was the case, he maintained, despite the fact that the historical account of the Soviet experiences of the 1920s had been largely obscured and repressed for a number of reasons, including the recomposition of cultural geopolitics during the Cold War. Even today, that essay by Buchloh, the critic who most incisively con- demned the regressive nature of mainstream art from the early 1980s,7 is a milestone in studies on the relationship between the photographic doc- ument, the avant-garde and propaganda; it made way for a new approach to the study of the Soviet avant-garde. The same year Buchloh’s pub- lished From Faktura to Factography, he also wrote an essay on the contem- porary work of Allan Sekula and Fred Lonidier discussing the current relevance of the Soviet debates from the 1920s in terms of the photo- graphic practices of the 1980s. That text connected the new photograph- ic documentary practices, embodied by those two artists, with Soviet fac- tography and the classic debates on realism, and examined the potential for resistance and opposition still inherent to art.8 Document, Persuasion, Propaganda Before turning to what concerns us here – mainly, tracing the evolution of a certain dynamic conception introduced by El Lissitzky of the exhibition space on the basis of the use of photography – it is necessary to briefly 7. See particularly the essay (Spring 1981), pp 39‒68. Ideology (New York: The New ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of 8. ‘Since Realism There Was… Museum of Contemporary Art, Regression. Notes on the Return (On the Current Conditions of 1984). of Representation in European Factographic Art)’, in the cata- Painting’, in October, no. 16 logue of the exhibition Art and 13 jorge ribalta review some of the conditions of the photographic document as a tech- nology of visual persuasion. In his classic study of American documentary culture in the 1930s, William Stott describes social documentary as a genre geared towards persuasion and towards educating the public on what should change. As such, that genre aimed to produce social effects; it was propagandistic, even in a culture and era that rejected propaganda: ‘Though the people of the time hated the idea of propaganda, propaganda was in fact their common mode of expression.’9 The premise for the persuasive or propagandistic nature of the social documentary is the ideology of photography as a universal language. This idea goes back to nineteenth-century pioneers of photographic criticism, like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Francis Wey, and extends to twentieth- century authors, from the reformist Lewis Hine working at the beginning of the century, to André Malraux and his post-war musée imaginaire constituted of photographic reproductions. It also includes Soviet and German critics working in the 1920s and 1930s. In a context dominated by the positivist philosophy that underlays the ideology of the modern capi- talist (that is, liberal-industrial-colonial) State, photography promises a utopian means of universal communication, a sort of ‘pre-linguistic lan- guage’ unhindered by social and cultural differences (at least starting with the introduction of the positive-negative methods around 1850 and thus with the possibility