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Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Introduction
Burning with Contingency
1
One
Material Witness
31
Mel Bochner Takes Photographic Measures
Two
Pressing the Point
79
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Bruce Nauman Performs with and against the Frame
Three
Everyone Who Is Anyone
119
Douglas Huebler and the Social Capacity of Photography
Four
This Is Not to Be Looked At
169
John Baldessari and Photography’s Insistent Visuality
Epilogue
Credibility Gap
215
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
223
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225
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List of Illustrations
Figure I.1. Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970.
2
Figure I.2. Cover of Life magazine, May 15, 1970.
7
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Figure I.3. John Paul Filo, [Mary Ann Vecchio grieving over body of college
student Jeffrey Glenn Miller shot by National Guardsmen during an
antiwar demonstration, Kent State University, Ohio], May 4, 1970.
Figure I.4. “A Boy Who Was Just ‘There Watching It and Making Up His
Mind,’” Life magazine, May 15, 1970.
Figure I.5. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series: Helium; 2 cubic feet was returned to
the atmosphere. Mojave desert, March 5, 1969, 1969.
Figure 1.1. Mel Bochner, Surface Dis/Tension, 1968.
Figure 1.2. Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily
Meant to Be Viewed as Art, installation view. Organized by Mel Bochner
at the School of the Visual Arts, New York, 1966.
Figure 1.3. Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily
Meant to Be Viewed as Art, installation view. Organized by Mel Bochner
at the School of the Visual Arts, New York, 1966.
Figure 1.4. Mel Bochner, Do I Have to Draw You a Picture?, 2013.
Figure 1.5. Walker Evans, Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936.
Figure 1.6. Edward Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963.
Figure 1.7. Mel Bochner, 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams, 1966.
8
10
13
32
35
36
40
42
43
45
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Figure 1.8. Mel Bochner, H-2, 1966–67.
47
Figure 1.9. Frank Stella, installation view of the exhibition Frank Stella, 1970.
48
Figure 1.10. Mel Bochner, Viscosity (Mineral Oil), 1968.
52
Figure 1.11. Mel Bochner, Grid (Shaving Cream), 1968/2003.
53
Figure 1.12. Mel Bochner, Singer Lab Measurement (#2), 1968.
58
Figure 1.13. Mel Bochner, Singer Lab Measurement (#1), 1968.
59
Figure 1.14. Mel Bochner, Singer Lab Measurement (#4), 1968.
59
Figure 1.15. Mel Bochner, Singer Lab Measurement (#3), 1968.
59
Figure 1.16. Mel Bochner, Singer Lab Measurement (#5), 1968.
59
Figure 1.17. “Death Found Him from This Window,” page 32H, Life magazine,
Copyright © 2020. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
November 29, 1963.
Figure 1.18. Mel Bochner, Surface Dis/Tension: Blowup, 1969.
Figure 1.19. Mel Bochner, Measurement: Room, 1969.
Figure 1.20. Mel Bochner, Measurement: Shadow, 1969.
Figure 1.21. Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913–14.
Figure 1.22. Mel Bochner, Actual Size (Face), 1968.
Figure 1.23. Mel Bochner, Actual Size (Hand), 1968.
Figure 1.24. Mel Bochner, Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), 1970.
Figure 2.1. Bruce Nauman, Studies for Holograms, 1970.
Figure 2.2. Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972.
Figure 2.3. Bruce Nauman, Composite Photo of Two Messes on the Studio
Floor, 1967.
Figure 2.4. NASA lunar orbiter, view of earth from the moon, August 23, 1966.
Figure 2.5. Brassaï and Salvador Dalí, Sculptures involuntaires (Involuntary
sculptures), 1933.
Figure 2.6. Man Ray, Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Notes),
1920.
Figure 2.7. Victor Burgin, Photopath, 1967–69.
Figure 2.8. Bruce Nauman, Flour Arrangements, 1966.
Figure 2.9. Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in the Studio, 1966.
Figure 2.10. Will Kuberski, Vietnam Zippos at a Barcelona Flea Market, 2011.
Figure 2.11. William Wegman, Photo under Water, 1971.
Figure 3.1. Douglas Huebler, 1/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global, 1971.
Figure 3.2. Douglas Huebler, 2/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global, 1971.
Figure 3.3. Douglas Huebler, Truro Series #3, 1966.
Figure 3.4. Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global, 1971.
Figure 3.5. Douglas Huebler, 25/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global, 1972.
Figure 3.6. Douglas Huebler, 633/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global,
1978.
Figure 3.7. Douglas Huebler, 598/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global,
1975.
Figure 3.8. Edward Steichen, page 182 from exhibition catalog for The Family
of Man, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955.
x
61
63
64
65
67
71
71
73
85
87
97
98
100
101
102
104
108
110
115
120
122
124
126
128
130
134
137
Illustrations
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Figure 3.9. Edward Steichen, page 178 from exhibition catalog for The Family
of Man, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955.
139
Figure 3.10. Douglas Huebler, 19/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global,
1971.
140
Figure 3.11. Cover, LIFE magazine, June 27, 1969.
145
Figure 3.12. “Vietnam: One Week’s Dead,” LIFE magazine, page 24, June 27,
1969.
146
Figure 3.13. Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #101, West Germany, March 1973,
1973.
157
Figure 3.14. Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #28, Truro, Massachusetts, 1970,
1970.
159
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Figure 3.15. Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece #34, Bradford, Massachusetts,
December 1970, 1970.
Figure 3.16. Douglas Huebler, Location Piece #17, Turin, Italy, 1973, 1973.
Figure 3.17. Douglas Huebler, Duration Piece #15, Global, September 1969,
1969.
Figure 4.1. John Baldessari, An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer . . . ,
1966–68.
Figure 4.2. John Baldessari, Artist as Renaissance Man, 1966.
Figure 4.3. John Baldessari, Evidence (Bowl Handed to Helene Winer, Dec. 1,
1970), 1971.
Figure 4.4. John Baldessari, Rolling: Tire, 1972.
Figure 4.5. Andy Warhol, Foot and Tire, 1963–64.
Figure 4.6. John Baldessari wearing a Born to Paint jacket, 1968.
Figure 4.7. John Baldessari, This Is Not to Be Looked At, 1966–68.
Figure 4.8. John Baldessari, The Spectator Is Compelled . . . , 1967–68.
Figure 4.9. John Baldessari, Wrong, 1966–68.
Figure 4.10. John Baldessari, Wrong (Version #2), 1996.
Figure 4.11. John Paul Filo, [Mary Ann Vecchio grieving over body of college
student Jeffrey Glenn Miller shot by National Guardsmen during an
antiwar demonstration, Kent State University, Ohio], May 4, 1970.
Figure 4.12. John Baldessari, Wrong eraser, produced by the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 2010.
Figure 4.13. Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), Plate 26 from The Disasters
of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra): “One can’t look.” (No se puede mirar.),
1810–20, published 1863.
Figure 4.14. Installation view of John Baldessari, Pure Beauty at the Tate Modern,
London, 2010. Left: John Baldessari, Commissioned Painting: A Painting by
Hildegard Reiner, 1969. Center: John Baldessari, Commissioned Painting:
A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A. Right: John Baldessari, Commissioned
Painting: A Painting by Elmire Bourke, 1969.
Figure 4.15. John Baldessari, Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Green Beans,
1971–72.
161
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165
170
175
178
183
185
187
189
192
193
195
196
196
198
203
211
Illustrations
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Figure E.1. Taryn Simon, Classified “Spare Parts” Deal, Oval Office, White
House, Washington, D.C., United States, May 16, 1975. Part of the
Paperwork and the Will of Capital series, 2015.
Figure E.2. John Baldessari, Goya Series: There Isn’t Time, 1997.
218
220
Plates
Plate 1. Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970.
Plate 2. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Oriel Window, South Gallery, Lacock
Abbey, 1835.
Plate 3. Mel Bochner, Surface Dis/Tension: Offset (RB), 1968.
Plate 4. Mel Bochner, Color Crumple #3, Color Crumple #2, 1967 (remade 2011).
Plate 5. Mel Bochner, Transparent and Opaque, 1968.
Plate 6. Abraham Zapruder, Frame no. 313, Zapruder Film, 1963.
Plate 7. Bruce Nauman, Finger Touch with Mirrors, from Eleven Color Photographs,
1966–67/1970.
Plate 8. Bruce Nauman, Finger Touch No. 1, from Eleven Color Photographs,
1966–67/1970.
Plate 9. Bruce Nauman, Eating My Words, from Eleven Color Photographs,
1966–67/1970.
Plate 10. Bruce Nauman, Coffee Thrown Away Because It Was Too Cold, from Eleven
Color Photographs, 1966–67/1970.
Plate 11. Bruce Nauman, Coffee Spilled Because the Cup Was Too Hot, from
Eleven Color Photographs, 1966–67/1970.
Plate 12. Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, from Eleven Color
Photographs, 1966–67/1970.
Bruce Nauman, Bound to Fail, from Eleven Color Photographs, 1966–67/1970.
Plate 14. Bruce Nauman, Drill Team, from Eleven Color Photographs, 1966–67/1970.
Plate 15. Bruce Nauman, Waxing Hot, from Eleven Color Photographs, 1966–67/1970.
Plate 16. Bruce Nauman, Untitled (Potholder), from Eleven Color Photographs,
1966–67/1970.
Plate 17. Bruce Nauman, Feet of Clay, from Eleven Color Photographs, 1966–67/1970.
Plate 18. Douglas Huebler, 81/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global, 1973.
Plate 19. Douglas Huebler, 330/Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global, 1974.
Plate 20. John Baldessari, The Backs of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from
Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, Calif., Sunday 20 Jan. 63, 1963.
Plate 21. Ronald L. Haeberle, Group of civilian women and children before being
killed in the My Lai massacre, March 16, 1968.
Plate 22. John Baldessari, California Map Project, Part 1: California, 1969.
Plate 23. John Baldessari, Aligning: Balls (Version B) (detail), 1972.
Plate 24. John Baldessari, Pointing: Circle, 1999 (photographed in 1969).
Plate 25. John Baldessari, Pointing: T.V. Set, 1999 (photographed in 1969).
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Plate 13.
xii
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Introduction
Burning with Contingency
One searing summer day, a shirtless man lay on a sandy beach, an open hardcover
book face down on his chest. He is the embodiment of leisure in the glare of the midday sun. The circumstances surrounding this moment are unknown—the banality
of it all easily dismissed. And yet, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the ordinary act
I am describing forms the basis of a widely recognized work of art, one half of a
now-famous photographic diptych, canonically situated within the parameters of
conceptual art, created in 1970 by the American artist Dennis Oppenheim. Though
inconspicuous, at least at first glance, this image signals many of the issues that preoccupied conceptual artists in the late 1960s and which continue to elude historical
accounts in the present. Titled Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, the typewritten text that Oppenheim includes in the gap between the images ostensibly provides enough information to situate the where and the what: Reading Position for
Second Degree Burn. Stage I, Stage II. Book, skin, solar energy. Exposure Time: 5 hours.
Jones Beach, 1970 (Plate 1 and Figure I.1). Presented with the straightforwardness expected of documentary photographs, the image’s relay of information is nonetheless
somewhat deceptive. Despite the long-winded title, a missing link in this recipe-like
reportage sequence remains: why did he do it?
1
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Figure I.1. Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970. Two-color
photographs and black-and-white text drymounted on museum board. Frame (each [black
wood]): 41 ⅛ × 61 ⅛ × 1 ½ inches (104.46 × 155.26 × 3.81 cm). Image (each): 40 × 60 inches
(101.6 × 152.4 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of the artist.
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Much like cosmetic before and after shots, the second half of the diptych shows
perceptible differences from the first, changes the viewer assumes have taken place
in the intervening interval. In this photograph, the protagonist, who is the artist
himself, reveals a painful sunburn covering everywhere the book was not. His fair
skin has become bright red. Where the book had been we find a stark absence. What
can we make of this? It seems to be an inside joke,1 perhaps a playful conceptualist wink toward the interrelation of text and image that was gaining currency as an
artistic practice at this juncture. It brings to mind the art historian Douglas Crimp’s
characterization of the central dilemma and virtue of performance art at the time—
the ways in which art was preoccupied with being “in a situation” and “for a duration.” As Crimp says, “You had to be there in the seventies.”2
We were not there on the beach with Oppenheim, but we have the photographs.
Now they are faded to a nostalgic warm tone that characterized late-sixties and
early-seventies photography, a coveted look currently obtainable through filter options on apps like Instagram. In Oppenheim’s photos, however, the images are literally and figuratively sun-drenched. Time has taken its toll, and both the changes
between the moments captured in the image and the context of the present need to
be distinguished. The innate strangeness of these images is further compounded by
the existence of multiple versions of this same piece, each with its own slight variations. The question of what these photographs bear witness to endures. There is
something both compelling and frustrating about this mise-en-scène. Oppenheim
chose to document the effects of spending five hours lying in the sun in a very
particular and somewhat peculiar way. There is something reminiscent of a crime
scene in these images, with his body giving the impression of a corpse and notable traces of movement in the sand between the two photographs. Pictorially the
foreshortening and Oppenheim’s flowing Renaissance-style locks cause Reading
Position for Second Degree Burn to somewhat absurdly resemble Andrea Mantegna’s
renowned example of the humanist construction of space in his fifteenth-century
painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ (circa 1480–1500). The sand emulates the
drapery, and uncannily both subjects even possess the same facial hair. Such a morbid comparison seems incongruous given the assumed low stakes of Oppenheim’s
performance, yet there is something to it, something oddly captivating in its formal
echo. That same year, for the Information show at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, John Baldessari proposed displaying an actual human cadaver imitating the composition of Mantegna’s Dead Christ behind a monocular peephole.
Though ethical and legal restrictions prevented Baldessari from doing so, both artists, Baldessari and Oppenheim, allude to the contemporary conditions of morbidity and spectatorship in and around 1970. If Kynaston McShine’s preface to
Information’s exhibition catalog is any indication, these conditions were at once abstract and imminent:
If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend who is being tortured;
if you are one in Argentina, you probably have had a neighbor who has been in jail
Introduction 3
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for having long hair, or for not being “dressed” properly; and if you are living in
the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities,
in your bed, or more formally in Indochina. It may seem inappropriate, if not absurd, to get up in the morning, walk into a room, apply dabs of paint from a little
tube to a square of canvas. What can you as a young artist do that seems relevant
and meaningful?3
Copyright © 2020. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
For Oppenheim’s part, in place of the pleasure commonly associated with sunbathing, we instead have the suggestion of sacrifice and the evidential body.4 Oppenheim’s
photographic documentation of what could tentatively be called an event thus sets a
series of conundrums into motion, which begin to surface, emerging slowly and then
poignantly like the sear of a second-degree burn.5
Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn encapsulates the ambivalence and contradiction of the moment and, by extension, of the documentary capacity of the photographic medium. The title of the protagonist’s tome is boldly emblazoned across the red cover in classic gold typeface: tactics, vol. ii.6 The book
admits itself as the sequel to the original, echoing once more the logic of the multiple
and the sequence. The spine is more difficult to decipher, but on closer inspection
reads cavalry/artillery. It is a borrowed library book, tattered from circulation,
held by multiple anonymous hands. The subject of the book alludes to absurdly
anachronistic means—how relevant are cavalry to military strategies in 1970? The
very summoning of tactics also calls to mind the question of holding ground or gaining territory, defense or conquest.
Searching this piece, one clue seems to dominate and underpin its internal logic:
photography. In these photographs the artist has demonstratively and excruciatingly
turned his own body into a photograph. The viscerality of the photograph is materialized as epidermis, as the sensitive surface of the body mimics the sensitized
surface of the photograph. Oppenheim described this process by reference to the
pigments of painting, stating: “I could feel the act of becoming red.”7 The literal solarization of his body, its burning, provocatively replicates the photographic process.
We have the writing of light in the flesh, as his stark tan lines define a rectangle shape,
the standard geometric form of the photograph—another meta-frame within a frame.
In Robert Slifkin’s terms, the second degree is the means by which “the photograph is employed to comment on its own contingency.”8 Describing Oppenheim’s
photograph as an emblematic exploration of the “paradoxical referential capacity
of the photograph,” Slifkin contends that the very idea of the “second degree” has
been fundamental to contemporary scholarship on photography from the 1960s forward.9 In the late 1970s Roland Barthes similarly cautioned against the potentials
of becoming “maniacs of the second degree,” while championing the importance of
deconstructing photographic meaning making.10 Writing about the “manipulation
or theatricalization of the real,” in an essay titled “Shooting America,” featured in
the New York Review of Books in 1974, Susan Sontag also identified the second degree as the modus operandi of photography and, by extension, surrealist practice.
4
Introduction
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“Surrealism lay at the heart of the photographic enterprise itself,” writes Sontag, “in
the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower
but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.” Sontag attributes the
drama she detects in photography chiefly to a straightforward plainness of presentation: “The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naïve—the more surreal
the photograph was.”11 This growing suspicion of the acts of doubling and dislocation inherent to the photographic process forms the roots of postmodern art. It also
forms the impetus for my present inquiry into the photographic conditions of conceptual art. Acknowledging the deceptive capacity of seemingly plain images and
calling attention to their many-layered and often-loaded connections to the complex
and highly contingent contexts in which they emerge are precisely my preoccupation
across the pages to follow.
In a 1995 essay titled “The Second Degree,” James Meyer also emphasized the
logic of reference and removal as an operative principle in conceptual art of the 1970s,
citing Mel Bochner as a critical progenitor. Though Meyer does not discuss photography, or indeed even mention Oppenheim, he nevertheless analyzes “meaning-assuch and the discursive conditions of meaning’s production,” as prompted by seriality (or the one-thing-after-another model set in motion by minimalism), which, for
him, provide the crucial pivot of conceptualism.12 According to Meyer, the “second
degree” stakes out a “less assured position,” in which deliberation is formative to
the notion of conceptual art. I would add that conceptual artists using photography
further expand the boundaries of this indecisive space, amplifying the ways it may
be understood as phenomenologically inhabited by the viewer. I discuss this in more
detail in chapter 1, but for the moment, I return to Oppenheim’s peculiar evocation
of the second degree with these nuances in mind.
The possibility of reading Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn
as an ordinary day at the beach is incredibly vexed. Indeed, it is impossible to know
with any certainty how the piece is supposed to be read. The allusion to the relaxation and escape of beach culture combined deliberately with the graphic and raw
results of reckless overexposure stages an undeniable tension. Oppenheim’s evocation of pleasure and pain might seem masochistic, and perhaps on one level it is.
However, the piece gains resonance and its potential meaning is deepened if we
account for the context of its creation. After all, burning was far from an innocent
act; it was endemic to the anxiety-ridden sixties and seventies, and vivid images of
acts of burning were pervasive in visual culture.13 From the bombing of the Freedom
Riders bus in Alabama in 1961 to Malcolm Browne’s iconic photo of a Vietnamese
monk’s self-immolation in 1963, the documented arson of Los Angeles on fire during the Watts riots in 1965, the frequent appearance of photographs of civilians
burning draft cards, and Vietnamese bodies badly burned by napalm strikes, fiery
tensions were fast becoming ubiquitous, if not normal.
In the mode of a caption, the title tells us that this is June 1970. The spring of
1970 was an exceptionally turbulent moment in American history, a time when the
widespread fear of “becoming red” (communist) lurked beneath the surface, ready
Introduction 5
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to erupt. Beyond burning, becoming red in this context might also be taken as an
allusion to tremendous bloodshed in Vietnam. By 1970 the number of American
casualties exceeded twelve thousand.14 Add to this the monstrous death toll for the
Vietnamese, with more than two million Vietnamese civilian fatalities recorded before the war’s end. On April 29, 1970, the United States began bombing neutral
Cambodia, and hundreds of campuses across the United States exploded in protest.
On May 4, 1970, the National Guard shot and killed four student protesters and
wounded nine others at Kent State University in Ohio. These violent acts have become some of the most recognized events of the time. The photographs of that day are
irrefutably icons of the turmoil of the early seventies. The photos, and the brutality
and anguish they depict, are not the result of a single instance—either one shot of the
camera or of a gun—but a culmination of growing discontent and confusion among
American students about the war in Vietnam.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, by the student photographer John Filo,
of Mary Ann Vecchio screaming as she kneels beside the dead body of Jeffrey Miller,
circulated internationally and remains an emblem of the disillusionment and violence that pervaded the 1970s. Or, what Life magazine decried in its May 15, 1970,
issue as “a symbol of the fearful hazards latent in dissent” (Figures I.2 and I.3). The
interrelated intensity of these two moments—the U.S. invasion of Cambodia (on
the heels of innumerable atrocities in Vietnam, including the My Lai massacre two
years earlier) and the excessive use of fatal force against student protesters exercising their freedom of speech—are inextricably connected. Like Oppenheim’s correlative before and after, they can be understood as encapsulating a cause and effect
sequence, leaving us as viewers with irreconcilable questions that far exceed the
parameters of Oppenheim’s piece.
Yet what happens if we view Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn
as tapping into the crisis of this moment and contending with the increasing normalization of unfathomable aggression, as well as the “hazards latent in dissent”? In
this way, the latency implied by the photographic processes of concealment followed
by development that are pictured within Oppenheim’s piece can be thought of in
tandem with the emergent radical potential of the medium as well as the visceral
implications of latency in everyday life. Though Oppenheim himself was dismissive about the role of photographs, famously denouncing them as “there simply to
indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only
as a residue for communication,”15 he nevertheless acknowledged the tenuous status of
radicality, as well as its contingent and necessary relationship to photography. By reading these images more closely, the possibility of radical art and radical thought, however ephemeral, may still be salvaged. The rawness of Life’s cover image strikes anew
with affinities to Reading Position for Second Degree Burn. Its focus on the body of a
wounded student facing skyward, with an open book visibly discarded to his side,
creates a tragic echo between the two images. Oppenheim’s piece responds both to
the implications of becoming red and to the contingencies involved in being read.
More than a simple insider’s experience of the moment, Oppenheim’s photographs
6
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Figure I.2 . Cover of Life magazine, May 15, 1970. The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.
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Figure I.3. John Paul Filo, [Mary Ann Vecchio grieving over body of college student Jeffrey
Glenn Miller shot by National Guardsmen during an antiwar demonstration, Kent State
University, Ohio], May 4, 1970. International Center of Photography. Gift of Jim and Evelyn
Hughes, 1998 (57.1998).
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lead to provocative possibilities as embodiments of the difficulties of negotiating and
articulating a speech act amid this fraught time. Being a bystander was also a precarious position. In its tagline, Life magazine agonizes over this paradox, mournfully describing one gunshot victim as “a boy who was just ‘there watching it and
making up his mind’” (Figure I.4). Even the iconic photograph by Filo is striking in
its lack of urgency, as students seem to calmly mill about the fallen body. No one
seems hurried, let alone harried (with the exception of Vecchio). Interconnection
and indecision are essential themes in the documentation of both the Kent State
shootings and Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn. In each set of
photographs the bodily risk that comes with indecision and passivity are underscored and documented by the camera. Add to this set of events the largely forgotten
school shooting at Jackson State in Mississippi only eleven days later. On May 15,
1970, police opened fire with more than 150 rounds of ammunition at a dormitory
for female students on this predominantly black college campus. Phillip Lafayette
Gibbs, twenty-one years old, and James Earl Green, seventeen years old, were killed.
The lack of visibility and collective memory of this event speaks less about the lack
of an iconic photograph (for the images of Jack Thornell demonstrate otherwise)
8
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and more to the disturbingly uneven politics of race and the varying valuation of life
in the United States. Such violence became increasingly ordinary, widely perceived
as commonplace. “Being shot is as American as apple pie,” explained Chris Burden,
in an interview with BBC in 2012, as he reflected on his performance piece of 1971,
Shoot, during which he was shot in the arm in a gallery. “We see people being shot
on TV, we read about it in the newspaper. Everybody has wondered what it’s like.
So I did it,” said Burden.
Viewing Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn as a contention
to this mode of growing complacency, as a form of oblique protest, testifies to the
political, social, and aesthetic challenges of this moment, including the difficulties of
bearing witness. Though Oppenheim was not shot, his body is nevertheless used
as a palimpsest that reinforces the logic of the photograph in its documentation of
both pain and ambivalence, as well as in its material presence. Reading Position for
Second Degree Burn calls attention to its own conditions. The artist’s body is posed
as an incarnation or perhaps exaggeration of passive resistance, which is answered
by hostility inflicted on the skin. Oppenheim’s photographs, like most photographs
that come out of conceptual art, present themselves as reticent, as unemotional.
Rather than simple avoidance, this could be read as an engagement with the very
politics of public emotion at this juncture.16 Henry Kissinger, then national security
adviser and instrumental to President Richard Nixon’s Cambodian incursion, succinctly dismissed the student protestors in the aftermath of Kent State, saying, “they
were, in my view, as wrong as they were passionate.” For Kissinger, the expression
of emotion itself was aligned with civil disobedience. Despite the war in Vietnam
raging on through 1975, Kissinger would go on to become secretary of state under
Nixon and controversially be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.
Within the field of art, the succession of movements that emerge after abstract
expressionism in the postwar period returned repeatedly to the conundrum of how
to locate the work of art in the reality of life, not merely aesthetic reality but cognitive and social realities as well. Perhaps Oppenheim’s evocation of the second degree
also points to this struggle—the difficulties of being deeply immersed yet removed.
This line of thinking summons one of the central crises of this age of information: the economics of attention and the waning of will amid a flood of endlessly
eddying media. Upon closer inspection, it becomes unclear whether Oppenheim’s
photographs are indeed documents of a single day. Is it possible he got a haircut
somewhere between the two shots? His tan lines do not match the size and location
of the book in the first image. These photographs prove to be anything but straightforward. As a statement of reflexivity, they demonstrate the ways in which the second degree is characterized foremost by distrust and dislocation.
The Vietnam War was popularly referred to as the “living room” war, a euphemism that itself problematizes the politics of proximity and the ways in which the
spectacle of war abroad was witnessed from a second degree via media within the
comforts of one’s home in the United States. An important target for critique in
the act of reengaging art and life was indeed the world in which aesthetic pleasure
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Figure I.4. “A Boy Who Was Just ‘There Watching It and Making Up His Mind,’” Life
magazine, May 15, 1970, pages 36–37. Copyright 1970 TI Gotham Inc. All rights reserved.
Reprinted/translated from Life and published with permission of TI Gotham Inc.
Reproduction in any manner in any language in whole or in part without written permission
is prohibited.
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for its own sake came to be seen as an avoidance of, rather than a contribution to,
understanding reality. As one critic put it, “In a world tossed by a tumult of cognitive reevaluations, from the Cultural Revolution in China to the Black Panther
movement in Oakland, the bestowing of aesthetic pleasure in and by itself seemed
less a contribution to reality than a distraction from it.”17 In the face of widespread
skepticism and the incomprehensible continuation of the Vietnam War, there was a
sense that neither art objects nor images could adequately contend with the reality
of pervasive and escalating violence.
The challenge of combining radical politics with prescient aesthetic strategies thus
posed a related dilemma. This difficulty partly accounts for the admittedly evasive
political positioning in much art of the period.18 As Tony Godfrey opined about
American conceptual artists, “Why, if they were so politically motivated, is there so
little direct reference in their works to the Vietnam War or the student riots in Paris
in 1968?”19 For me, this question contextually singes every work of conceptual art,
blistering through some photographic works and smoldering beneath others.
Read as a statement about suspended contradictions, a way to materially and
conceptually grapple with the anxieties of the moment, Reading Position for Second
Degree Burn is a feat of endurance. It is simultaneously an investigation into duration exacerbated by its photographic information, which documents the boundaries
of both temporal and physical stamina. The second degree can further be understood as a level of questioning—interrogation techniques that are not as intense as
third degree but nevertheless mark the body. Following Marshall McLuhan’s claim
that all technologies are extensions of humans, “medium” here is not limited to the
media of mass communication but expands to include media as inquisitive and experimental extensions of the human body. Medium as information—like medium as
message—is on display. It points to the generally invisible side effects of technology,
including the psychic and social adjustments its users and their society undergo when
they adopt each new form. In part, this exemplifies Anne Rorimer’s perspective on
photography in relation to conceptual art, and the ways in which “the documentary
dimension of a work can be enmeshed with its formal, material, and ideational realization.”20 The camera’s ability to record any scene or scenario appearing in front of
it fuses the performative with the photographic act, underscoring how documentary
practices are often linked to photographic staging.
Through this critical lens, the very status of visuality and representation in conceptual art becomes contingent and contentious. Consider Robert Barry’s Inert Gas
Series (1969), for example, as an attempt to unsettle photographic determinism, challenge the photograph’s documentary legibility, and revise accounts of conceptual
art that attempt to relegate it to an art for art’s sake autonomous sphere (Figure I.5).
Certainly these issues were in the air at the cusp of the 1970s. They were among
conceptual art’s central contributions to resisting conventions and, by extension,
ideologies associated with visibility; conceptual art practices opened a space of potentially productive ambivalence. I emphasize the words potentially and ambivalence
in this formulation because many instances of conceptual art of course also ran the
12
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Figure I.5. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series: Helium; 2 cubic feet was returned
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to the atmosphere. Mojave desert, March 5, 1969, 1969. Courtesy of the
artist.
risk of being reinscribed within the narcissistic loop of modernist self-reflexivity.
Only through the viewer’s active reading can they become something more.
In early March 1969, Robert Barry performed Inert Gas Series / Helium, Neon,
Argon, Krypton, Xenon / From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion in remote
desert locations in Southern California, by releasing various measured volumes of
odorless, colorless inert gases into the atmosphere (including helium, hydrogen, neon,
and krypton). Once released, the gases naturally expanded and dispersed. Barry
then took a photograph to document and ostensibly prove that the action happened.
The attendant pictures show inconspicuous expanses of space, unremarkable shrubbery, a blurry mountain range hovering in the background, and indistinct gravel in
the fore. Noting the leap of faith it takes to believe these documents, Irene V. Small
remarked on how these photographs function as the opposite of bodily evidence.
Instead, they “display resolutely empty landscapes occasionally interrupted by a
ruptured gas vessel to gesture to the material that had been released.”21 Moreover,
despite the dominant claim to understand a project such as Barry’s as definitively
dematerialized, the artist cleverly subverts this misunderstanding through the emphatically visual and admittedly material means of photography. As Janet Kraynak
summarized, through “a seemingly ironic gesture, the work entailed a philosophical
and ontological question regarding the very nature of materiality.”22
Beyond seeing these photographs as tongue-in-cheek plays on the limits of visibility, on what we cannot see despite the photographic evidence, these seemingly
banal images of the Mojave Desert may offer something more complex and indecisive. For one thing, they bear a remarkable resemblance to—and seem to anticipate
Introduction 13
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some of the problematics enmeshed in—the practice of documenting land art. For
example, a work such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) in New Mexico
seems uncanny in this regard. De Maria’s technocratically grandiose project, four
hundred stainless steel rods gridded in the high desert, vanishes in front of the camera, becoming nearly imperceptible. That is, unless lightning strikes. This limitation of the photographic image as an effective vehicle to understand the piece, and
even the artwork’s marked dependence on conditions outside its own control, calls
attention to what is actually caught in, and suggested by, the picture at hand. The
photograph becomes a site/sight itself.23 Consider Barry’s qualifier, “Inert.” In terms
of gases, it describes a substance with a perceived lack of participation in chemical
reactions. We might also think of an association to the notion of human inertia—as
in apathy or inaction—the tendency to remain unchanged. The plainness of the photographs presented suggests as much. But if we consider the other valence of inertia
in physics, denoting driven force and constant velocity, contentions and oppositions
begin to surface about the photograph and the material contained therein. Though
there may be a “perceived lack of participation,” immersion and propulsion exist
simultaneously.
For the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, states of aesthetic ambivalence such as the
cute, the zany, and the merely interesting productively expose the crucial and pervasive role contradiction plays under the “hypercommodified, intensively informated
and networked, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.”24 These states
of ambivalence that avoid conclusive aesthetic judgment bear particular meaning
for a consideration of conceptual art, when it is precisely the indefinite category
of the “merely interesting” that so much art of the 1960s and 1970s grappled with.
This vexation with being between states is nowhere more visible than in artwork
that uses photography as its vehicle. Viewed in this light, Barry’s title takes on new
resonance and is perhaps suggestive of the potential of conceptual art more broadly:
From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion. Though frequently presented in
photographic form as an objective statement of facts, conceptual art effectively problematized the very possibility of either objectivity or fact.
Sontag influentially acknowledged in the early 1970s the ways in which “the
practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything could be
made interesting through the camera,” simply by virtue of being chosen and photographed. Her damning conclusion was that “this quality of being interesting, like
that of manifesting humanity, is an empty one.”25 Still, it bears asking, to what extent
did a lack of decisive interest also result from the ever-growing ubiquity of reproduced images, and what are the limits of photographic interest on its own terms?
Arguably, in part, “what makes photography uniquely powerful is its ability to express the difficulty—physically, psychologically, emotionally, and aesthetically—of
the act of seeing.”26 I would add the act of conclusively understanding, let alone
knowing, to the list. In this way, the photograph is indeed marked by its unavoidable
contingency.
14
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An analysis of the category of the merely interesting “indexes situations of suspended agency,”27 in other words, equivocal affects that call attention to a lack of
aesthetic power or impact. Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn
promotes this kind of deferment and contingency. Furthermore, by virtue of their
ambivalent ineffectuality, such works of art reveal social conflict through their state
of indecision. While the merely interesting might be a weak judgment, it is nevertheless provocative to consider how the proliferation of artworks—characterized as
both “mute and indicative” at this juncture—denies the wonder of categories such
as beauty and the sublime, in favor of courting deliberate boredom. They also imply
“that there is more to see than can be seen, that we have recognized something
portentous but at the same time are not sure what it is.”28 Stage 2 in this epistemological sequence engenders a series of discursively powerful questions, including,
again: why?
This book is an attempt to grapple with this question. In the following chapters, I analyze the use of photography by select American conceptual artists of the
late 1960s and early 1970s in hopes of deciphering the ways in which—despite their
frequently banal appearance—the artworks are neither autonomous nor neutral to
their context, or to their documentary weight. Indeed, by degrees, each of these photographs marks the burn of its skeptical emergence. As photographs, they frustrate
the desire to interpret their meanings as obvious or transparent—they affect a tone
of distance while asking to be considered “close to the skin,”29 and thereby offer a
way to ply apart the complex ambivalence and upheaval of the period itself. Deeply
enmeshed within the tumult of their moment, such images leave us pondering the
indisputable impact and contingency of one’s own reading position.
Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art is the first
single-author book-length study of the unique relationship between photography
and conceptual art practices in the United States during the late 1960s. Although
many scholars concur that photography became visible as the preeminent medium
of contemporary art beginning in the late 1960s, there is little consensus or in-depth
study as to how this came about or what is at stake. My aim is therefore to provide a
much-needed assessment of the theoretical and aesthetic implications of this historical metamorphosis. I theorize “contingency” in my account in order to address the
often contradictory, yet highly deliberate, uses of the medium of photography in and
as conceptual art. Exploring early instances of conceptual art in this context, I focus
on the intersecting dimensions of materiality, performativity, the social, and visuality, as they resonate specifically and formatively in photography. Taking cues from
specific works of art, each chapter demonstrates an act of concentrated visual attention, and, through close readings, I argue for a critical reassessment of the ambivalence proffered by both the appearance and the content of much conceptual art. In
so many cases, in ways sometimes subtle and other times absurdly overt, conceptual
artists emphasized the gaps between appearance and reality, interrogated the status
of the work of art, and engaged the photographic as a way to call attention to these
Introduction 15
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concerns. From beneath the surface of the image or beyond the photograph’s frame,
the tumult of the Vietnam era—including its profound and irrevocable social, political, and visual effects—emerges repeatedly and is given new analysis in my study. In
this way, my methodology is contextualist and, by extension, revisionist.
Why does photography emerge as a vital and disruptive tool for new art making
in the 1960s, especially for a group of artists who had no particular background or
training in photography? In varying ways, these artists performed conceptual explorations into the formal conditions and limits of photography, probing an aesthetic of
indeterminacy, a complicated sense of temporality, and an interest in how meaning
itself is created and disseminated. The ideology of capital “D” “Documentary” photography (understood traditionally as providing intelligible insight into significant
moments), and the notion of the “document” (as reliable evidence), played central
roles in this investigation of photographic meaning. For these and other reasons
explored over the following chapters, conceptual art’s epistemological questioning
of the photograph continues to resonate in the present—as attempts to delineate and
search for the possibility of “truth” and meaning persist—in an era overwhelmingly
defined by hypermediation and visual anxiety.
During the 1960s and 1970s, photography was not yet firmly established as an
artistic medium. Debates over what criteria could allow it to conform to modernist ideals despite its indexical reference to the world—versus how it could sidestep
or even overturn the dominance of modernist aesthetics—characterize this period.
Photography’s ascendancy throughout the late twentieth century and its current
privilege as a dominant art form derive partly from the central role it played in the
practice of conceptual artists. For these artists, photography offered a discursive
space and a way to problematize “documentary” assumptions. I am intent on how,
since the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists have pressed and pulled the photograph’s
status as a document that invariably records the existence of something before the
camera, as well as the often evasive difficulty of determining what that subject is.
The impasse and occlusion created by the mutable material presence of the photographic object can perhaps be as valuable as the assumed alliance of information and
clarity. Indeed, in suggesting an open-ended inquiry, conceptual artists’ “motivated
and arbitrary” use of photography may also be viewed as an anti-authoritarian gesture through its resistance to closure and an emphasis on contingency. 30
At the outset of Camera Lucida (1980), in his personal quest to deduce “what
Photography was ‘in itself,’” Roland Barthes immediately marks the photograph’s
inevitable yet evasive contingency. In his estimation, this peculiar quality sets the
photograph ontologically apart from all other images. Beyond noting that “the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially,” Barthes
explains that “it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and
somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography).”31 The photograph’s idiosyncratic ability to assert its image as reality while remaining open to
endless alterations in meaning through its relationship to the world outside the
image manifests in all photographs. In this way, photography can be both disarming
16
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and unpredictable. The ways conceptual artists approached the photograph shares
much in common with Barthes’s view of contingency.
Conceptual artists were not the first to doubt the status of the “real” in photography or to investigate the medium’s flexibility in an artistic context. Precedents
in the photographic activities of the historic avant-garde, particularly in Dada and
surrealism, were incredibly influential and play a key role in the narrative to follow.
The work of artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Frank, and
Walker Evans laid important groundwork for thinking through the photograph’s
social and aesthetic relation to everyday life. Issues of photographic mediation and
materiality, as well as a complicated engagement with the dialectic of immediacy
and deferment, recur across the work of these photographers. These precursors
spurred conceptual artists to test the extent to which photography was (or was not),
in Barthes’s terms, “wholly ballasted by the contingency of which it is the weightless,
transparent envelope.”32
In reconsidering the uses of photography under the aegis of conceptual art in
the late 1960s, I analyze photography’s agile challenge to epistemological limits. I
also examine how, despite persistent claims about the medium’s imagined inherent
indexicality, conceptual artists emphasized experience over exactitude and doubt in
place of certainty. Moreover, I argue that photography was crucial to the very notion
of “conceptual art.” Focusing on the work of Mel Bochner, Bruce Nauman, Douglas
Huebler, and John Baldessari, each chapter delves into the significant role of photography in the practice of these artists, and how their turn to photography at this
historic juncture marked specific anxieties surrounding art making in the late 1960s.
How is it, for example, that at the very moment dematerialization was proclaimed
as the dominant mode of contemporary art, conceptual artists were proliferating the
use of photography, a medium partly defined by its capacity for multiple reproduction and the possibilities of mass dissemination?33 In fact, many artists at this time
disavowed the role of photography as completely ancillary to the artwork itself. Yet
it is precisely in this historical moment that photography was established as art in
unprecedented, unforeseen, and enduring ways.
This book addresses the irreconcilable tension between dematerialization and
materiality as one of the central paradoxes of photography in relation to, and as,
conceptual art. Moreover, through close readings of select works of art, I demonstrate how the changes instantiated by artists at this sociopolitical juncture reveal
stubborn beliefs in the photograph while taking the medium to task. Exploring conditions as varied as materiality, performativity, sociability, and visuality, conceptual artists reinvigorated the entwined fields of photographic history and art practice in ways that remain vital in the present. Acknowledging the many correlations
between photography and conceptual art brings to light much larger implications.
It attests to the ways photography irrevocably altered the fields of art and art history. Indeed, despite the fact that the history of photography often continues to be
relegated to a subfield, I argue that the conditions photography brings to bear on
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viewership and imaging perforce compel all art historical accounts to thereafter also
be photographic history.
Through photography, numerous conceptual artists destabilized the major systems of representation in the late sixties by accentuating the importance of ideation
without renouncing the value of bodily experience. By making what were largely
considered actions rather than objects, these conceptual artists used photography
to register a statement against materialism and commodification. Doing so was also
a way to investigate how aspects of the performative were essential to the notion of
art and central to the pivot of photography. Ultimately, my critical consideration of
the photographic conditions of conceptual art traces the movement away from the
study of objects and toward a performance of effects in the late sixties. In this way,
Documents of Doubt is as much an analysis of the photographic conditions of conceptual art as it is of the conceptual conditions of photography.
Doubt over the possibility of ever grasping the true nature of photography can
be traced back to its elusive beginnings. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, even
the English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot could not deny the ontological and
aesthetic ambiguity of the medium.34 Despite his adamant ambition to fix the photographic image, Talbot noted in his book, The Pencil of Nature: “Though we may not
be able to conjecture with any certainty what rank they [photographic images] may
hereafter attain to as pictorial productions, they will surely find their own sphere of
utility.”35 During the twentieth century, emboldened by the automatist aspects of the
medium and the belief in the indexical function of photographic images, confidence
was increasingly placed in the idea of the photograph as a neutral representation free
from “the fallacies of the human hand.”36 One twist of conceptual art more than a
century later was to use photography to counter and question this desire for reassurance. By challenging the notion of the photograph as self-evident, many conceptual
artists highlighted not only what we do not know, or cannot know, but also how we
might productively unknow. In a moment in which “truthiness” (to borrow a term
from the comedian Stephen Colbert) is receiving renewed traction, and problematic
pronouncements about the realities of living in an era of “post-truth” abound, the
need to critically assess the slippery relationship between objective facts, personal
beliefs, and visual appearances becomes all the more relevant.
Marcel Duchamp is of particular importance among the precursors to the photographic work of conceptual artists during the social, cultural, and political turmoil
of the late 1960s. In part, this is because Duchamp’s evocation of chance procedures
and his problematizing of nominalist games recur in the work of numerous conceptual artists. It is also because Duchamp’s readymades, and his specific conception
of them based on analogies to photography, set the stage for thinking through the
photographic conditions of conceptual art as well as the conceptual conditions of
photography in ways that explicitly question context. Duchamp emphasized how
the readymades “were mass produced and to be duplicated.”37 His comment highlights the photograph’s kinship with the readymade, since both occupy an ambiguous place in relation to industrial production and reproduction and, by extension,
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capitalism and modernity. 38 This connection can be read as primarily acquisitive,
linked to what Sontag called photography’s role as a “defense against anxiety” by
accumulating the world.39 Thinking of photography in this way can be helpful in that
it draws attention to some of its key social and political functions. What it misses,
however, is the other side of the Duchampian coin and, ultimately, the real source
of photography’s potential for critique: to read photography beyond its acquisitive
mode in order to seriously consider its inquisitive possibilities.
Duchamp’s idea of the “snapshot effect” enables a productive affinity between
a theory of photography and the practice of the readymade, as well as an entryway
into the inquisitive consideration noted above. Recall how Duchamp described the
readymade in his notes:
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Specifications for “Readymades” by planning for a moment to come (on such a
day, such a date, such a minute), “to inscribe a readymade.”—the readymade can
later be looked for. (with all kinds of delays) The important thing is just this matter
of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion
but at such and such an hour.40
The mention of planning emphasizes ideation and touches on one of the central
issues of making conceptual art. The echoes of this planning can be heard in Sol
LeWitt’s influential 1967 text, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”: “When an artist
uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are
made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”41 Duchamp’s analogy to framing time, “a moment to come
(on such a day, such a date, such a minute),” describes the apprehension or inscription of the image, a temporal condition that both the photograph and the readymade
affect. Duchamp also marks the contingency of the frame that is peculiar and unexpected in the snapshot by his evocation of “with all kinds of delays).” This note
suggests how even the instantaneous nature of the snapshot has contingency built
in, and how the photograph, like the readymade, is never entirely fixed either temporally, spatially, or conceptually “no matter what.” In her now-canonic reading of
the “snapshot effect,” Rosalind Krauss emphasizes the index as the key link between
photography and the readymade.42 I engage with Krauss’s writing on this in more
detail in chapter 2. For now, I find that instead of indexicality, what is more striking as a link between photography and the readymade, and thus conceptual art, is
Duchamp’s emphasis on delay and contingency. Grappling with the commonplace
and the aesthetics of indifference, both the readymade and the photograph provoke
a fundamental rethinking of the basic relationship between a sign and its referent
in a mode that continuously delays any possibility of fixing meaning while pushing
for the value of meaning despite its deliberate frustration.
Somewhat ironically, shortly after photography’s invention in the nineteenth
century, Charles Baudelaire estimated that it was precisely due to its “exactitude,”43
however contemptible, that the masses would call photography art. In the twentieth
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century, many conceptual artists (following in the footsteps of surrealism) found
photography’s imprecise inexactitude its peculiar source of artfulness. Inexactitude
and the intellectual seriousness of conceptual art demonstrate the ways such contradictory positions, as instantiated by photography, unhinge the conviction of any
given position in aesthetic, political, and social terms.
In 1976 the critic Nancy Foote noted that “oddly enough, conceptual art has
never been plagued with accusations that it belongs on photography’s side of the
tracks, yet the condition in which much of it could or would exist without photography is open to question. Photographs are crucial to the exposure (if not the making) of practically every manifestation of conceptual type art.”44 Foote’s allusion to
tracks, and the possible implication that photography resides on the wrong or rough
side of the tracks, intrigues me. It is my proposition that renegade disruption, however subtle, forms a central characteristic of the legacies and practices of conceptual
art, and is a crucial feature of photography itself. The continued prevalence of doubt
as a vital attribute of, and photography as the principal medium of, contemporary
art in the present makes the case all the more convincing: “If conceptual art lives
on today it is not because of the transmittance of any orthodoxy” but because of “its
aporias, mistakes and misrepresentations.”45 In the spirit of Bochner, we could add
misunderstandings to this list. Photography and conceptual art compose a web of
inseparable (though often elusive) interdependent supports. Articulating the unruly
photographic conditions of conceptual art in the following chapters is therefore an
attempt to grasp the radical exchange between a malleable medium and a mutable
movement.
In the last two decades, a growing body of art historical writing has addressed issues in conceptualism, yet a scholarly absence remains.46 Though artists, critics, and
art historians have acknowledged visual, material, and theoretical contradictions
within the history of conceptual art, few have followed through with sustained close
readings of specific projects in order to mine the inconsistencies and the influential
role of photography.47 Jeff Wall, for example, in what has come to be one of the most
significant texts on the historicization of conceptual art, let alone photoconceptualism, states that “many of conceptual art’s essential achievements are either created in
the form of photographs or are otherwise mediated by them.”48 I agree with Wall on
this point. However, while he contends that “photography realized itself decisively
as a modernist art in the experiments of the 1960s and 1970s,” I argue, by contrast,
that the significance of most uses of photography under the aegis of conceptual art is
located precisely in its break from the purity of the modernist paradigm.
What Wall explains as the failure of conceptual art to rid itself of depiction and
of “its ties with the Western picture,”49 leading to the restoration of these categories
in the 1970s, I understand as Wall’s own blinding attachment to the aesthetic, an attachment that homogenizes the diverse and often-opposed strategies of conceptual
art. This is a position that needs to be critiqued all the more strongly at present,
especially in light of publications such as Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters
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as Art as Never Before (2008).50 Fried seeks to affirm Wall’s argument and reinstate
his own theory of high modernist painting from Art and Objecthood (1967) as the
inheritance of contemporary photographic practice. According to Fried, photography “matters as art” because of its intrinsically self-reflexive mechanism. In other
words, as a medium it epitomizes the criteria of medium specificity that would, in
Fried’s words, “extricate the work from its entanglement in everyday contingency
and indeterminacy.”51 However, neither Wall nor Fried adequately questions the
paradoxical resistances photography performs.52 This critical occlusion is yet another symptom of the modernist aversion to theatricality perpetually characterized
by Fried. By contrast, my project highlights the unpredictable performativity of photography as a conceptual medium and as an artistic matter inextricably entangled
with everyday contingency and indeterminacy.
My take on this nexus is much more akin to that of John Roberts, who, in his
essay “Photography, Iconophobia, and the Ruins of Conceptual Art” (1997), argues
that “photography was the means through which conceptual art realized its exit from
modernist closure as practice.”53 If there is a failure in conceptual art, it can be productive and, in some cases, a deliberate failing at that. Moreover, the status of failure
itself in conceptual art is indeterminate. By challenging Clement Greenberg’s elision
of self-criticism with self-certainty, I continue the argument put forth by Donald
Kuspit: “Greenberg’s quest for the grail of self-certainty fails not simply because it is
false from the start, but because it is facile in its method. It handicaps the uncovering
of uncertainty as a necessary if not sufficient condition for creation by giving art a
historically readymade goal.”54
It is precisely in the face of the ostentatious certainty and solemnity espoused
by Greenbergian modernism and continued by the writings of Fried and Wall that
Bochner, Huebler, Nauman, Baldessari, and other conceptual artists responded with
ironic wit, brazen doubt, and often deliberate evasiveness. Among conceptual art’s
central epistemological critiques lay its multiple and disparate efforts to dissolve the
autonomy of art. The use of photography by such artists intensified this critique,
partly by radically altering artistic conditions of production and consumption, as I
explain further, and by exploring the medium’s palpable duplicity. The photographic
conditions of conceptual art enact a postmodernist sensibility characterized in the
literary theorist Ihab Hassan’s words:
“openness, heterodoxy, pluralism, eclecticism, randomness, revolt, deformation . . . ambiguity . . . perversion . . . unmaking, decreation, disintegration,
deconstruction, decentrement, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, decomposition, de-definition, demystification, detotalization,
delegitimization.”55
My study considers these attributes in varying and specific artistic projects of the
Vietnam War era to demonstrate the expanded implications of such work and how the
conditions of uncertainty and contingency mark both conceptual art and photography.
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Low Resolution
Photography has been deemed revelatory since its invention. Well before nineteenthcentury debates surrounding combination printing and its attendant accusations
about the deceitful image, photography was praised as revealing what previously had
been hidden from the human eye. This exposure had both aesthetic and scientific
significance, purportedly allowing humans to understand the minutiae of movement
and biological form, as well as to appreciate the beauty previously invisible in “the
everyday.” Investments in photography’s essential veracity as a medium, as a kind
of truth-sayer, exist at its inception and account partly for the late twentieth-century
announcement that photography has been executed by the digital.
I argue, however, that skepticism rather than assurance is central to the photographic principle. It is the potential instability and uncertainty of the photograph
that underscore its power. The historic moment that best displays this realization in
terms of artistic practice is conceptual art of the late 1960s, during which an overlap
between discourses of art and science were taken up, and the question of the “real”
hinged on the aesthetic and the sociopolitical. The years 1966 to 1973 mark a moment in which many artists embraced photography’s unique semiotic limbo as a way
to productively challenge authority, disciplinary boundaries, and artistic autonomy.
This was often achieved through subversive humor, leaving one with questions that,
in provoking a new way of thinking, were infinitely more valuable. The artists’ emphasis on aporetic thinking and the negation of finitude also points to the fact that
if photography discloses any sense of truth, it nevertheless remains in flux and uncontained. Photography reveals a process of being with beginnings and endings that
continuously remain uncertain, delayed, and unfixed.
This book offers both an analytic and philosophical questioning of how the photograph’s epistemological and ontological challenges manifest within specific conceptual art practices, and how this juncture functions as a defining moment in the
larger understanding of the photograph in contemporary art. Pivoting on the discrepancy between what we “know” and what we perceive, I engage one of the essential problematics of photographic documentation. In the context of 1960s minimalism, objectivity was paramount. The pervasive hope was that creating a work
that was anti-illusionistic and uninflected would sidestep the pitfalls of subjectivity.
In similar terms, many conceptual artists claimed the photographic medium as
literal, direct, transparent, and ultimately unmediated. In many unexpected ways,
however, the turn to photography upended the notion of objectivity. The photograph’s unavoidable links to perspectival manipulation and the distortion of the
lens, for example, as well as the troubling gaps between the real and representation, obstinately interfered with fantasies of so-called pure information. Indeed,
as Robert Smithson explained, as opposed to direct experience, photography inevitably altered our ability to perceive without it: “I think, perhaps ever since the
invention of the photograph, we’ve seen the world through photographs and not the
other way around.”56
The many-layered and acutely paradoxical promise of photography as an evi22
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dentiary practice is one of the many productive conundrums of early conceptual
art. Evoking photography as both contingent and excessive, the medium becomes
an inassimilable eruption in logical thinking. Because the photograph has no single
temporality, it is figured as a space of resistance to science, and to traditional concepts of art, logic, and progress, not simply in imaginary terms but in fundamentally
ontological ones. The photograph’s complex temporality contributes to its essential
irrationality and leads to doubt partly because of the impossible desires for presence
and certainty that are repeatedly projected onto the photograph.
Photography has puzzled many. While Barthes remarked that “because of its
indexical condition, its status as a physical trace of its referent, the photograph is, of
course, intrinsically documentarian, possessed with a unique evidential power: ‘the
Photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents.’”57 He complicated the issue in the
next breath by admitting the insecurity of his first proposition, stating that though
“the Photograph never lies,” nevertheless “it can lie as to the meaning of the thing,
being by nature tendentious.”58 Barthes’s comment on the tendentious aspect of the
photograph can productively be connected to Sigmund Freud’s writings on humor
and the human negotiation of irrationality.59 The influential Austrian psychoanalyst’s definition of a “tendentious joke” in opposition to the “innocent joke” demonstrates striking affinities with the irrational underpinnings of the photograph. A
“tendentious joke,” according to Freud, is a joke that displaces some form of aggression and seeks to fulfill a repressed urge. In other words, “tendentious jokes safely
give voice to what cannot be spoken directly out loud,” and “as displacement mechanisms, tendentious jokes function as a safety valve for aggression.”60 The photograph
as a displacement mechanism is analyzed at length throughout the following pages
and often in conjunction with the device of humor as a way to disrupt the security of
rational thinking and commonplace conventions.
As previously mentioned, one of the central claims of early conceptual art was
its insistence on “dematerialization,” despite its intense reliance on the material and
materiality of photography. Yet another way to discuss conceptual art during the
sixties and seventies was as “anti-object art.” The discourse of anti-object art was a
proposition surrounding the problems of objectivity, an attempt to find the place of
the subject within the social while confounding presumptions of scientific objectivity. The claims made for anti-object art revealingly parallel a fundamental reformulation of the sculptural object. Ultimately, I interrogate photography and conceptual
art’s joint contribution to this redefinition and the expansion of the field of possibility within art historical discourse, art criticism, and emergent artistic practices. I
investigate the ways in which the emphasis on meaning making is placed onto the
spectator as active participant, particularly concerning both the nature and the culture of knowledge. Each artist’s work under consideration here is put in historical
context, not simply in terms of the art world, emergent contemporaneous discourses
of art history, and the history of photography, but also in relation to the integral political and social events of its time.
Introduction 23
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A radical shift occurs in the late 1960s, when a number of “minimal” artists, including Robert Morris, Huebler, Nauman, Oppenheim, and Bochner, turn to photography, a medium inextricably linked to the logic of both the icon and the index.
This goes directly against the minimalist demand that art be anti-iconic and antirepresentational. These artists’ documents enact an opening of dialogues about the
role of the object and of phenomenology that were not considerations of other photographers of the time. Through a wide array of approaches, each of these practitioners drew strategic attention to the politics embedded in constructs of representation and interrogated photographs “as an ideological function to critique.”61 This
was a way to tactically confront the cultural confinement described by Smithson as
the context of living within the unrelieved social crisis that plagued the late 1960s
through to the mid-1970s.62 Documents of Doubt is therefore an argument against
reading the uses of photography in conceptual art as an extension of high modernist logic. This book demonstrates that these particular photographs are defined by
their insistence on aporias and even misrepresentations within established expectations for art and visual culture. Though conceptual art has no stable set of positions,
I argue for conceptual photography’s critical impact by considering photographic
rupture as a strategy for confronting conventional ways of looking, framing, and
depicting that were increasingly understood as orchestrating systems of hegemonic
control.
The political persists. Even when works of art seem disconnected from worldly
realities, or when artists seem to turn away from the pressing issues of the day, it is
remarkable how the political nevertheless permeates. In her precise and persuasive account of artistic labor in the work of artists including Carl Andre, Robert
Morris, Lucy Lippard, and Hans Haacke, Julia Bryan-Wilson notes the striking lack
of direct reference to the conflict in Vietnam in much American art of the time and
how, “although adversarial politics were frequently made palpable in the art of this
era, those politics could also be veiled or difficult to decipher.” Even in “forms not
legibly antiwar in any conventional way,” Bryan-Wilson demonstrates, this apparent
absence can be mined in important critical ways.63 My approach here is inspired by
such scholarship. While strains of conceptualism were indeed pointedly political—
including the work of Fred Lonidier, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula,
and numerous others—further forms of social and political engagement were being
investigated in conspicuous and inconspicuous ways.
Remarkably, amid the volatility of 1960s America, a significant body of conceptual art emerges that appears blank-faced, indifferent, and even apathetic. Reading
these works anew as cyphers of their context, understood with and against the tensions of their time rather than apart from them, reveals more than initially meets the
eye. Widespread acceptance of one of conceptual art’s dominant narratives—that
the idea is always more important than the object or the image—has led too many
art historians to neglect the act of looking closely at the artwork itself. Turning our
attention toward the objects and images of conceptual art thus rewards by expanding our understandings of the ideas that were indeed at stake.
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That said, recent thematic and monographic studies of conceptual art have contributed to a more expansive understanding of artistic practices of the late 1960s. In
addition to Alexander Alberro’s Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003)
and Bryan-Wilson’s Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2011), in
particular, I want to underscore the contribution of Liz Kotz’s Words to Be Looked
At: Language in 1960s Art (2007) and Frazer Ward’s No Innocent Bystanders:
Performance Art and Audience (2012).64 Though these scholarly works do not take up
photography specifically as a subject of inquiry, each offers an insightful account of
art in the wake of late-sixties social transformations in ways that have informed my
own thinking on the matter.
Two recent publications similarly attest to the importance of my area of study and
the need to critically revisit the uses of photography in the late twentieth century.
These are Joshua Shannon’s The Recording Machine: Art and Fact during the Cold War
(2017) and Kate Palmer Albers’s Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility,
and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (2015).65 Emphasizing the concept of factualism, Shannon presents a compelling account of how photography and other visual
arts including painting and land art were altered by their engagement with realism
around 1968. Though Shannon and I share an interest in analyzing the new attention given to surface appearances during the Cold War era, my study focuses explicitly on photography under the aegis of conceptualism as a distinct move away from
the culture of fact and toward multivalent contingency. Perhaps closer to my project
thematically is Albers’s Uncertain Histories, which discusses the aesthetics of doubt
and its relation to photography in particular. Though Albers’s argument does not
exclusively frame this element in terms of conceptual art practices, but rather with
regard to artistic projects that use accumulation and archives as a means to question the way histories are collected and understood, it nevertheless resonates with
my commitment to recognizing the importance of uncertainty as a productive and
critical artistic category.
Documents of Doubt makes no claim to a comprehensive history. Indeed, the very
ambition to do such a thing runs counter to my central argument. And though there
are other artists whose practices could amply be thought through in relation to the
questions posed across the chapters that follow, the four central artists chosen here
were selected for the specific, and often peculiarly, rich, multivalent, and problemdriven case studies they proffer. Though they may seem in some ways to be the usual
suspects, all four being white male artists with well-established narratives surrounding their work and its reception, I believe that my approach in these pages suggests
new and unexpected connections. A lack of resolution and ultimate contingency
marks each artist’s art practice, and I explore these facets in depth. Despite the
privileged position of Bochner, Nauman, Huebler, and Baldessari in the art history
of the period, criticality and contextual questioning are oddly absent in much writing about them. In many instances, their work has been taken as a given. Against
such static views, in a near analogy with the photograph, I suggest ways to rethink
their fixity and pry further into their overlooked complexities. As mentioned earlier,
Introduction 25
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through a close analysis of a single artist’s work in the moment of the late-sixties
United States, each chapter engages a particular photographic condition, moving
sequentially through issues of materiality, performance, the social, and visuality.
Beginning with the work of Bochner in chapter 1, “Material Witness: Mel Bochner
Takes Photographic Measures,” I examine the transient reality of photographed objects and photographic objects, particularly as concerns their material life. Analyzing
the indexical function of photography and questioning normative frames of art
segue into how Bochner investigated the ideal of measurement as an objective standard through analogy with the photograph. Bochner’s experiments with photography were indeed short-lived, yet their material and theoretical implications continue
to resonate in the world of contemporary art practices, particularly in the ways they
propose a corporeal investigation of photography that is vital, unpredictable, and
indecisive. I chart Bochner’s move from minimalism to conceptual practice specifically through photography. What began as a desire for order became the systematic
undoing and confounding of all order, as Bochner realized the degree to which he
could not control the photographic object. Stating emphatically, “I realized that the
physicality of the objects I was making interested me less than the types of order I
was imposing,” Bochner crosses a trajectory from materialism through conceptualism that ultimately abrogates modernist rule.66 Tracing his critical engagement with
the duplicity of photography from Surface Dis/Tension (1968) and 36 Photographs and
12 Diagrams (1966) to Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (1967–70), I seek
to systematically unpack Bochner’s claims for photography and art more broadly
while working through the philosophical questions they jointly pose. Bochner had
other people take many of his photographs for him, as did many of his peers. This
decision signals yet another challenge to long-established traditions of the hand of
the artist and of technē. Bochner initially saw photography as a mode of “objective”
creation, as a means toward scientific neutrality. I consider the influence of scientific
discourse, bureaucratic language, and other pseudo-empirical systems in Bochner’s
early photographs, underscoring their significant impact on the proliferation and
meaning of conceptual art at this time.
Like Bochner’s, Nauman’s use of photography was also brief, yet those early photographic experiments shed light on the artist’s later projects while expanding the
paradigm of what conceptual art is and what a photograph might be. Chapter 2,
“Pressing the Point: Bruce Nauman Performs with and against the Frame,” discusses the multiple ways in which Nauman engaged photography as a way to analytically, conceptually, and aesthetically accentuate the theatrical dimension of the
work of art, making literal situations not only self-reflexive but also representationally subversive. Playful images such as Bound to Fail or Self Portrait as Fountain
(1966–67/1970) pose serious artistic and intellectual questions under the guise of
humorous scenarios. Through a close reading of photographs from 1966 to 1970, I
argue that Nauman contributed to the experimental framework of performance art
at a pivotal historic moment in order to take the trace, otherwise known as the index,
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to task, thereby disavowing the dominant discourse of conceptual art. As mentioned
above, though conceptualism was very much concerned with self-reflexivity, it was
not associated with medium specificity in the ways heralded by modernism. Rather,
by using an intermedia approach, Nauman’s evocation of bodily experience under
the rubric of photoconceptualism ultimately denies the vital “dematerialization” of
the work of art announced by much conceptual art—and by Lucy Lippard’s early
reading of conceptual art—by contrast insisting on the essential corporeality of conceptualism.67 Nauman’s prescience calls attention to the difficult relationship between social reality and the work of art, and the role of photographic mediation in
its semblance and dissemblance.
In chapter 3, “Everyone Who Is Anyone: Douglas Huebler and the Social Capacity of Photography,” I undertake an in-depth analysis of photography as a network
of communication that not only reflects but also shapes sociopolitical and cultural
boundaries. Though photography was the most visible material manifestation of
conceptual art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the majority of conceptual practitioners nevertheless denied the role of the medium on the work itself. Instead, skeptics wrote photography off as a means rather than an end, as a transparent document
of the “dematerialized” work rather than the work itself. Huebler’s photographs
poignantly register the anxiety surrounding this misperception by deliberately intervening into the pivotal role of photography not simply in conceptual art but in social and economic ideology more broadly. Huebler notes the deceptive transparency
of photography’s claim to truth-value through strategic investigations of objectivity,
portraiture, and mapping.
In effect, Huebler used photography to systematically unravel systems. For example, his Variable Piece #70: 1971 (In Process) Global (1971), with the stated intention “to photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive,” played on
the humanistic and hegemonic desires embedded in the instantaneity and apparent
objectivity of the photographic image while exposing the failures of the medium’s
democratic ideals. Proposals such as his “anti-documentary documentary” highlight the double negative process that formulates his practice. Importantly, Huebler’s
project cleverly shifts the emphasis from photography’s acquisitive capacity to its inquisitive potential, using accumulation itself as one of his key strategies. Addressing
what Siegfried Kracauer described in the 1920s as the “blizzard,” the “flood,” and
the “assault” of mass media photographs, Huebler similarly invests the manic omnipresence of the photograph in the 1960s and 1970s with redemptive potential.68
Kracauer’s thesis, like Huebler’s, is based on a paradox. Writing that “in the illustrated magazines, people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent
them from perceiving,”69 Kracauer suggests that seeing is not the same as being critically conscious of what one sees, and that somehow through the overaccumulation
of photographs, a radical recognition of overrationalized society could and would
occur. This chapter is a close reading of Huebler’s practice both in the face of and
alongside select moments in the history of photography, including the infamous
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Family of Man exhibition (1955), in order to interrogate the place of the subject in
the social within the established criteria of documentary and art photography during
this critical historical juncture. It extends my argument against popular histories of
conceptual art’s dematerialization and photography’s transparency.
In his review of Seth Siegelaub’s groundbreaking January 5–31, 1969 conceptual
art exhibition, Gregory Battcock wrote, “There’s nothing to see, and that’s why it’s
great.” Assumptions about what it means to be “visible” hound conceptual art practice, its perception, and its historicization. Chapter 4, “This Is Not to Be Looked
At: John Baldessari and Photography’s Insistent Visuality,” explores this fraught dynamic and questions the ideologies of “seeing” as they were engaged by Baldessari.
Violence is omnipresent in Baldessari’s practice. Sometimes it is tacit, sometimes
repressed, but nevertheless always there. With this undercurrent in view, I assess
the condition of visuality in Baldessari’s use of the photographic in relation to contemporaneous social and political events, and aesthetic conventions. Though there
is a popular desire to read Baldessari exclusively from a crowd-pleasing perspective
(the title of his Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Metropolitan Museum of Art
retrospective in 2011 was, after all, Pure Beauty), I excavate his works for something
more complex if insidious, particularly in the ways they grapple with the construction of, and injunctions against, the act of looking. In addition to weighing the stakes
of visuality in political terms, chapter 4 also addresses one of the most significant
yet least explored antinomies in the legacies of photoconceptualism: the tension between subversive humor and the notion of a constrained and analytic approach.
Though these categories are not aesthetically or philosophically exclusive, they have
nevertheless been pitted against each other as contradictory, in a manner that parallels the theorization of photography as a mediator either of authorial control or of
artistic agency since the 1960s. The tendency to regard Baldessari’s artwork as an
amusing one-liner is reassessed here under the premise that there is indeed more
than meets the eye. Nearly all of Baldessari’s photoworks pivot on ruptures in logic
and gaps in legibility, using photography to suggest wholeness yet expose its limits
and unknowns, thereby serving as a comic reversal of Joseph Kosuth’s declaration
that the purest definition of conceptual art is its investigation into the foundations
of the “art” concept, and that humor has no place in “serious” art. This chapter
seeks to productively reveal the playful seriousness of humor in photoconceptualism and to carefully consider the implications of visuality in relation to visibility and
representation.
Documents of Doubt analyzes conceptual photography as a network of communication that not only reflected but also shaped sociopolitical and cultural boundaries.
Throughout the book I acknowledge and investigate conceptual photography’s significant movement away from a consideration of objects and toward a performance
of effects, away from thinking about products and toward thinking about processes.
Conceptual art emerged in the late 1960s as the first global art movement, and the
first art movement in which photography took center stage. This is not a coincidence.
28
Introduction
Diack, Heather. Documents of Doubt : The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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The broadening of artistic definitions and boundaries at this time, and the various
challenges to aesthetic preconceptions and theoretical models, were inextricably connected to a new emphasis on photography. Moreover, the movement’s protagonists
consisted of a generation of artists considerably altered by communication systems
and the increased mobility of people and images, along with the disorienting sense of
contingency that comes along with such displacement and dispersion.70
Introduction 29
Diack, Heather. Documents of Doubt : The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Diack, Heather. Documents of Doubt : The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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