Sympathetic Materialism: Allan Sekula's Photo-Works, 1971–2000
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Sympathetic Materialism: Allan Sekula’s Photo-Works, 1971–2000 by Benjamin James Young A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Judith Butler, Chair Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson Professor Ramona Naddaff Summer 2018 © Benjamin James Young, 2018 Abstract Sympathetic Materialism: Allan Sekula’s Photo-Works, 1971–2000 by Benjamin James Young Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, Chair This monographic dissertation analyzes the photography-based artwork of Allan Sekula (1951–2013) by focusing on the contested status of the human figure in his works made from 1971 to 2000. The first part situates his photography within a struggle over documents and documentation in Southern California during the Vietnam-War era, showing how his early works engage not only with the use of photographic documents by conceptual art, but also with activist antiwar journalism in underground newspapers as well as surveillance photographs and mug shots made by the police. In addition to exploring evidentiary photography’s role in both art and politics, the dissertation also investigates how Sekula adopts a performative model of portraiture that acknowledges the social relations and material infrastructure that allows for picture-making to take place, especially the relation between viewer and subject. It contextualizes this performative portraiture as partly a struggle over realism that rejects photorealism in painting while adopting Brechtian aesthetics in photography. The second part explores how Sekula revives the neglected genre of the group portrait, contrasting his works that depict crowds of workers or his own family with the representations of public life by both the business corporation and liberal social documentary. It argues that Sekula’s artworks ultimately aim, through their use of sequential montage, or the quasinarrative sequencing of multiple still images, to make visible transindividual forms of social life. It shows how Sekula’s works weave together singularity and collectivity in ways that contest the usual partitions of social and economic life, especially the global division of labor, which he addresses in his late works that document maritime space, containerized shipping, and the political and spatial changes wrought by globalization. It concludes by demonstrating how Sekula’s practical aesthetics involve a documentary ethic of responding to the given that is implicitly in tension with the iconoclastic model of ideology critique at work in many of his critical texts. This documentary ethic can be described as what Sekula called “sympathetic materialism,” an ethico-political orientation of sensitivity, receptivity, or exposure to bodily vulnerability and suffering that goes beyond the iconography of labor and Marxian politics with which he is commonly associated. 1 For my parents i TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii NOTE ON THE TEXT v LIST OF FIGURES vi INTRODUCTION The Traffic in Photographs 1 Part I: The 1970s CHAPTER 1 Documents and Documentary: Photography between Art and Politics 13 CHAPTER 2 From Figurative Realism to Performative Portraiture: Photography between Painting and Cinema 62 CHAPTER 3 Arresting Figures: Untitled Slide Sequence (1972) and Aerospace Folktales (1973) 90 Part II: The 1990s CHAPTER 4 Globe: Fish Story (1988–1995) 117 CHAPTER 5 World: Waiting for Tear Gas [White Globe to Black] (1999–2000) 130 CONCLUSION Critique, Praxis, and the Documentary Ethic 157 FIGURES 163 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, I thank my dissertation committee for their willingness to engage with this project and for their thoughtful responses: Judith Butler, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Ramona Naddaff. I especially thank Judith Butler for swooping in at a dark moment to set things right: she saved the day, and I am tremendously grateful for her patience and support over the years. This project began under the advisement of Kaja Silverman and Anne Wagner, and I thank them for their early encouragement and, along with T.J. Clark, for having served on my exams committee. I have learned from them all. I have also learned much from, and been intellectually, morally, and politically sustained by, my cohort of fellow graduate students at Berkeley, including, in no particular order, Erica Levin, Danny Marcus, Michelle Dizon, Andrew Weiner, Diana Anders, Nima Bassiri, Yves Winter, Lily Gurton-Wachter, Trevor Paglen, George Ciciarello-Maher, Anne Byrd, Paul Haacke, Julie Napolin, Kris Paulson, Brad Rogers, Keerthi Potluri, Brooke Belisle, Alice Kim, Mike Allan, Gabrielle Demeestere, Julian Myers, and Damon Young. My time at Berkeley was also enriched by Jennifer Bajorek while she was a visiting scholar, and I’m grateful for our continued discussions about photography. I’m also happy to have continued to debate photography’s role in contemporary art in ways that touched on this project with Andrew Weiner and Trevor Paglen. Also at Berkeley, professors David Bates, Pheng Cheah, Whitney Davis, William Fitzgerald, and Martin Jay helped shape my understanding of many of the issues covered here. I thank in particular professor Todd Olson for pointing out the relevance of Alois Riegl to Sekula’s work. I also thank the administrative staff in the Rhetoric Department who, over the years, have done the work that allowed me to continue at Berkeley, especially Maxine Frederickson, Marcus Norman, and Isabel Seneca. I thank professors Marianne Constable, Karen Feldman, Michael Mascuch, and James Porter for their advising and administrative help, and Samera Esmeir and Anne Walsh for contributing to the heady intellectual and political ferment during my time there. My time in New York before and after Berkeley has been both intellectually and personally enriched by Nathaniel Farrell, Yates McKee, and Walter Johnston, and I thank them for their continued friendship, intellectual companionship, and encouragement. Advisors at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, Ron Clark, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalyn Deutsche helped shape the earliest outlines of my graduate work, and I am grateful for their support and to be able to remain in dialogue with their important work. In addition to the many artists around the ISP from whom I learned greatly, I also acknowledge the lively exchanges with Jill Dawsey and Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz that continued long after I first met them there. Another crucial space for working at the intersection of art and politics has been 16 Beaver. I’m grateful for the hours with friends and strangers I spent there, and especially to Rene Gabri, Ayreen Anastas, Benj Gerdes, and Jesal Kapadia, both for sustaining such a utopian space while it lasted, and for our continual discussions. The writing of this dissertation was both interrupted iii and enlivened by time spent organizing with the Arts and Labor working group of Occupy Wall Street; I thank all those I met through A&L who helped illuminate the difficult intersection of theory and praxis. Also in New York, Anjuli Raza-Kolb, Genevieve Yue, and Kate Stanley each sustained this work, just by their friendship, in different ways. Tom Keenan has been a model of scholarship, theoretical rigor, and pragmatic engagement with media and politics, and his friendship and support over the years have been invaluable. I am also grateful to the editors of Grey Room, past and present, who have allowed me to serve as managing editor, a professional position that allowed me to finish writing this project and that also provides the continual intellectual stimulation of publishing cutting-edge research: Reinhold Martin, Branden Joseph, Felicity Scott, Tom McDonough, Karen Feldman, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Eric C.H. de Bruyn, Noam M. Elcott, Byron Hamann, John Harwood, and Matthew C. Hunter. Also in New York, I thank the librarians at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York Unversity, and at the New York Public Library, especially Ryan Haley, formerly of the fine arts desk there. I was lucky to be able to meet with Allan Sekula and consult materials in his studio prior to his death in 2013, and I remain grateful for the generosity he showed in speaking with me and making his work available for study. After his death, Sally Stein has been equally generous in providing access to his archive, and I especially thank her for her support at what was such a difficult personal time for her. This project has since been touched not only by her considered handling of the archive, but also her thinking and writing about photography. Ina Steiner of Allan Sekula Studio has been equally indispensable in providing images and information, and I’m grateful for her work and broad knowledge of Sekula’s oeuvre. I also thank fellow Sekula scholars Marie Muracciole, Hilde Van Gelder, and Jeroen Verbeeck for invitations to present my work in public forums, and the ensuing discussions they have generated. Finally, I thank Chelsea Haines for her limitless patience and inexhaustible moral and intellectual support, which has allowed me to complete this project. She has lost much in the past year, and I hope this small gift portends a brighter future to come. I am certain her brilliant intellectual fire will continue to light the way. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, for their patience, quiet encouragement, and understanding, and for all they have given me over the years. iv NOTE ON THE TEXT I consulted the archive of Allan Sekula while it was still housed in his studio in Los Angeles—and, in a sense, before the materials therein were institutionally codified as an archive. Most of the materials have since entered the special collections of the Getty Research Institute as the Allan Sekula Archive, which is still being catalogued at the time of writing. His estate, the Allan Sekula Studio, retains copyright over the images by Sekula and from his archive that are reproduced here.