This section consists of various reviews of assorted exhibitions, photo books and books on, and about, photography.
The writing on photography in Australia is primarily within the perimeters of art history, and there is both i little cross over between art history and criticism or philosophy of art in general, and little writing on photography in Australia either in terms of criticism or aesthetic philosophy.
Theoretical activity in art history had been displaced in empiricist practice in art history. Empiricists often refer to the procrustean bed of theory. Theoretical questions are not a part of art history, despite bits and pieces of theory — eg., formalism– being snipped out of context and recombined, trivalized and implied in various ways in art historical writing that is usually premised around periodization and stylistic analysis.
Hence the emergence of the “new” or revisonist art history that is critical, engaged, historically grounded, fueled by the emerging voices of hitherto excluded constituencies.
Reviews of books elsewhere
These books provide some background to photographic culture.
Helen Ennis Photography and Australia (Reaktion, 2007).
A review of David Campany, Photography and Cinema, London (Reaktion books), 2008 by Alexander Streitberger in Image + Narrative, March 2009
Review of Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009
Mathew Biro, Review of “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before” by Michael Fried
Short Reviews
These are more in the way of notes that may develop into posts.
Susan Bright, Art Photography Now (2005, Ist edition Thames & Hudson)
Susan Bright’s book Art Photography Now caught my eye as I thought that it would help me to understand what the contemporary art photography meant, as distinct from a modernist or postmodernist photography. ‘Now ‘ means this time, this period, this age, ie., contemporary. This is the art photography of our time — the early 21st century. As the contemporary comes after, and eclipses, the modernism and postmodernism period styles in art history, the contemporary becomes a field in art history.
So what does the contemporary mean or stand for or refer to? How is the contemporary as a period style different from those historical ones in the past especially modernism renewing itself? Are there any commonalities? Does the contemporary have a mode of non-personal perception, ie., a particular buried mode of seeing the world different to that of other period styles?
Period style is central to art history. Heinrich Wölfflin in his The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art, which is a foundational document of the discipline of art history, identifies period styles with historical modes of seeing. Every epoch sees things with its own eyes, a worldview that expresses a different orientation toward the world. Alois Reigl in Problems of Style defined style as collective perception of reality as meaningful cultural form that includes the individual artist’s will to form (Kunstwollen). Art is essentially historical given art’s tendency to change and transform throughout time.
Both Hans Belting in The End of the History of Art? (1983) and Arthur C. Danto After the End of Art Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1995) argued that some momentous historical shift had taken place in the productive conditions of the visual arts in the late 20th century (circa
1989, 1990, and 1991) even if, outwardly speaking, the institutional complexes of the art world — the galleries, the art schools, the periodicals, the museums, the critical establishment, the curatorial –seemed relatively stable.
Bright, an independent curator now based in London, explores contemporary art photography by breaking photography down into the following genres: portraits, landscape, narrative, object, fashion, document and city. In each of these sections, she supports her discussion by providing details of the work of a few of the contemporary Euro-American photographers who exemplify this contemporary genre and their comments about their photography. Surprisingly, there is an emphasis on large format photography.
The assumption of this survey is a linear art history in that the contemporary comes after modernism and postmodernism — ie., the history of art as a unified phenomenon. Her argument is that photography is no longer the humble servant to art and that contemporary art in modernity has become increasingly photographic. The latter term includes both photographers and artists using photography. The Introduction offers a standard account of the history of photography and writings on photography in the 20th century in the context of the emergence of the anxiety of digital technology taking us away from reality, the questioning and critique of the medium itself, the emergence of postmodernism and the post-medium condition. Bright does say that the urban landscape has become synonymous with contemporary art photography.
This is essentially a pictorial compilations accompanied by minimal text and brief artists’ statements. Despite the book having a substantive reading list of writings on photography, contemporary art photography for Bright means little more than art photography that is happening now (ie., what a collection of selected artists are doing today). This is a truism that fails to account for contemporary art’s relation to modernism and postmodernism. Art history assumes that modernism, postmodernism, contemporary are different in terms of modes of seeing, and that the contemporary represents a distinct way of thinking about history in postmodernity. Is the contemporaryDespite the book having a substantive reading list of writings on photography, contemporary art photography for Bright means little more than art photography that is happening now (ie., what a collection of selected artists are doing today). Does anything link the collection internally, or is it just a heap?
Yet art history assumes that modernism, postmodernism, contemporary are different in terms of modes of seeing, and that the contemporary represents a distinct way of thinking about history in postmodernity. Is the contemporary a rupture or part of the continuous unfolding process? However, there is no critical engagement by Bright with what contemporary means after the demise of modernism and the dissolution of postmodernism in the 1990s. Is the contemporary as “the art of today” a rupture with the historical past, or part of the continuous unfolding process? There is no critical engagement by Bright with what contemporary means after the demise of modernism and the dissolution of postmodernism in the 1990s. We just have a pluralism of different photographers organized by genre.
We can add that the period of Bright’s contemporary arts is one marked by globalization, neoliberalism and the art market, the new digital communication and information technologies of the Internet, a spectacle culture, global warming and the re-emergence of a philosophical aesthetics. These are the productive conditions of the contemporary visual arts and they particularize the pluralism of the contemporary to the extent that to be contemporary minimally means not being perfectly in tune with our times, but minimally having some distance from the present and being critical of it.
Theoretical art historians such as Terry Smith have started to identify the currents within the contemporary. These currents or shapes as flows moving through the contemporary include a renovated modernism of the big names enabled by the institutional power of the big art institutions; a postcolonial current (identity and nationality), outside the Euro-American centres, a hybrid, co-operative, small scale localism about place and being utilizing digital platforms.