Pictures

Author(s): Douglas Crimp

Source: October , Spring, 1979, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 75-88
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778227

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 Pictures

DOUGLAS CRIMP

Pictures was the title of an exhibition of the work of Troy B

Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith, which
Artists Space in the fall of 1977.1 In choosing the word pictures f
hoped to convey not only the work's most salient characteris
images-but also and importantly the ambiguities it sustains. As is
has come to be called postmodernism, this new work is not c
particular medium; instead, it makes use of photography, film,
well as traditional modes of painting, drawing, and sculpture
colloquially, is also nonspecific: a picture book might be a book o
photographs, and in common speech a painting, drawing, or print
simply, a picture. Equally important for my purposes, picture, in
can refer to a mental process as well as the production of an aest
The following essay takes its point of departure from the cat
Pictures; but it focuses on different issues and addresses an aesth
implicitly extending to many more artists than the original exhi
Indeed, although the examples discussed and illustrated here
necessitated by the newness and relative obscurity of this work, I thi
say that what I am outlining is a predominant sensibility am
generation of younger artists, or at least of that group of artis
committed to radical innovation.

1. Pictures, New York, Committee for the Visual Arts, 1977. The exhibition subsequently travele
to the Allen Art Museum, Oberlin, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporay Art, and the University
Colorado Museum, Boulder. I wish to thank Helene Winer, Director of Artists Space, on three cou
for inviting me to organize the Artists Space exhibition, thereby giving me the opportunity of seein
wide variety of current work in studios; for steering me in the general direction of the work I have c
to find so engaging; and, most particularly, for her commitment to showing the work of a group
young artists of major significance which would otherwise have remained publicly invisible.

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 76 OCTOBER

Art and il
Are you r
Am I reall
-Laurie Anderson

In his famous attack against minimal sculpture, written in 1967, the

Michael Fried predicted the demise of art as we then knew it, that is, the a
modernist abstract painting and sculpture. "Art degenerates," he warned us
approaches the condition of theatre," theater being, according to Fried's a
ment, "what lies between the arts."2 And indeed, over the past decade we
witnessed a radical break with that modernist tradition, effected precisel
preoccupation with the "theatrical." The work that has laid most serious cla
our attention throughout the seventies has been situated between, or outsid
individual arts, with the result that the integrity of the various medium
categories the exploration of whose essences and limits constituted the very
of modernism-has dispersed into meaninglessness.3 Moreover, if we are to
with Fried that "the concept of art itself . . . [is] meaningful, or wholly me
ful, only within the individual arts," then we must assume that art, too,
ontological category, has been put in question. What remain are just so
aesthetic activities, but judging from their current vitality we need no lo
regret or wish to reclaim, as Fried did then, the shattered integrity of mo
painting and sculpture.
What then are these new aesthetic activities? Simply to enumerate a
mediums to which "painters" and "sculptors" have increasingly turned
photography, video, performance-will not locate them precisely, since it
merely a question of shifting from the conventions of one medium to th
another. The ease with which many artists managed, some ten years a
change mediums-from sculpture, say, to film (Serra, Morris, et al.) or from
to film (Rainer)-or were willing to "corrupt" one medium with anoth
present a work of sculpture, for example, in the form of a photograph (Sm
Long)-or abjured any physical manifestation of the work (Barry, Weiner)
it clear that the actual characteristics of the medium, per se, cannot any longer
us much about an artist's activity.
But what disturbed Fried about minimalism, what constituted, for him
theatricality, was not only its "perverse" location between painting and sc

2. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum, V, 10 (Summer 1967), 21; reprin
Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology, ed. Battcock, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1968, pp. 116-
subsequent quotations from Fried are from this article; the italics throughout are his.
3. This is not to say that there is not a great deal of art being produced today that
categorized according to the integrity of its medium, only that that production has become thor
academic; take, for example, the glut of so-called pattern painting, a modernist-derived style
not only been sanctioned with a style name, but has generated a critical commentary, and con
an entire category of selection for the most recent Whitney Museum biennial exhibition.

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 Pictures 77

ture,4 but a
experience."
cal," and the
were well fo
was experie
possible man
was thus to
only that nar
were constit
both togethe
to be there."
Graham, and
Anderson no
were funda
toward estab
"presentness
which "at ev
replace that condition as a result of the sensibility he saw at work in
minimalism-what has replaced it-is presence, the sine qua non of theater.

The presence before him was a presence.

-Henry James

An art whose strategies are thus grounded in the literal temporality and
presence of theater has been the crucial formulating experience for a group of
artists currently beginning to exhibit in New York. The extent to which this
experience fully pervades their work is not, however, immediately apparent, for its
theatrical dimensions have been transformed and, quite unexpectedly, reinvested
in the pictorial image. If many of these artists can be said to have been apprenticed
in the field of performance as it issued from minimalism, they have nevertheless
begun to reverse its priorities, making of the literal situation and duration of the
performed event a tableau whose presence and temporality are utterly psycholo-
gized; performance becomes just one of a number of ways of "staging" a picture.
Thus the performances of Jack Goldstein do not, as had usually been the case,
involve the artist's performing the work, but rather the presentation of an event in
such a manner and at such a distance that it is apprehended as representation-
representation not, however, conceived as the re-presentation of that which is
prior, but as the unavoidable condition of intelligibility of even that which is
present.

4. Fried was referring to Donald Judd's claim that "the best new work in the last few years has been
neither painting nor sculpture," made in his article "Specific Objects," Arts Yearbook, 8 (1964), 74-82.
5. Rosalind Krauss has discussed this issue in many of her recent essays, notably in "Video: the
Aesthetics of Narcissism," October, 1 (Spring 1976), and "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in
America," Parts 1 and 2, October, 3 (Spring 1977) and 4 (Fall 1977).

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Jack Goldstein. Stills from The Jump. 1978.

Two years ago Goldstein presented Two Fencers at the Salle Patino in
Geneva. Distanced some fifty feet from the audience, bathed in the dim red glow of
a spotlight, accompanied by the sound of recorded music taken from Hollywood
swashbuckler soundtracks, two men in fencing gear enacted their athletic routine.6
They appeared as if deja vu, remote, spectral, yet just as certainly, present. Like
the contortionist and gymnast of Goldstein's earlier performances, they were
there, performing in the space of the spectators, but they nevertheless looked
virtual, dematerialized, like the vivid but nebulous images of holograms. After one
fencer had appeared to defeat the other, the spotlight went down, but the
performance continued; left in darkness to listen to a replay of the background
music, the audience would attempt to remember that image of fencing that had
already appeared as if in memory. In this doubling by means of the mnemonic
experience, the paradoxical mechanism by which memory functions is made
apparent: the image is forgotten, replaced. (Roget's Thesaurus gives a child's
definition of memory as "the thing I forget with.")
Goldstein's "actors" do not perform prescribed roles; they simply do what
they would ordinarily do, professionally, just as the Hollywood-trained German
shepherd growls and barks on cue in Goldstein's film A German Shepherd, and a
ballerina descends from pointe in A Ballet Shoe, and a lion framed in a golden
logo tosses his head and roars in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. These films show either
simple, split-second gestures that are repeated with little or no difference, or
slightly more extended actions that appear to exhaust themselves. Here, for
example, is the scenario for A Ballet Shoe: the foot of a dancer in toe shoe is shown
on pointe; a pair of hands comes in from either side of the film frame and unties
the ribbon of the shoe; the dancer moves off pointe; the entire film lasts twenty-two
seconds. The sense that its gesture is a complete one is therefore mitigated by its
fragmented images (generating multiple psychological and tropological reso-
6. Goldstein's phonograph records, intended both as independent works and, in some cases, as
soundtracks for performances, are made by splicing together fragments, sometimes no longer than a
few seconds, of sound from existing recordings, paralleling his use of stock footage to make films.

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nances) and its truncated duration; the whole is but a fragment.
The impression of a completed action (one fencer defeats the other) combines
with a structure of repetition (the match is one of constant attack and parry) so
that no action is really brought to closure; the performance or film stops, but it
cannot be said to end. In this respect the recent film entitled The Jump is
exemplary. Shown as a loop, it is a potentially endless repetition of repetitions. A
diver leaps, somersaults, plunges, and disintegrates. This happens very quickly,
and then it happens again, and still a third time. The camera follows the courses
of the three divers, framing them in tight close-up, so that their trajectories are not
graphically discernable. Rather, each diver bursts like fireworks into the center of
the frame and within a split second disappears.
The Jump was made by rotoscoping stock super-8 footage of high dives and
shooting the animation through a special-effects lens that dispersed the image into
jewellike facets.7 The resultant image, sometimes recognizable as diver, sometimes
amorphous, is a shimmering, red silhouette seen against a black field. Time is
extremely compressed (the running time is twenty-six seconds) and yet extremely
distended (shown as a loop, it plays endlessly). But the film's temporality as
experienced does not reside in its actual duration, nor of course in anything like
the synthetic time of narrative. Its temporal mode is the psychological one of
anticipation. We wait for each dive, knowing more or less when it will appear, yet
each time it startles us, and each time it disappears before we can really take
satisfaction in it, so we wait for its next appearance; again we are startled and
again it eludes us. In each of Goldstein's films, performances, photographs, and
phonograph records, a psychologized temporality is instituted: foreboding, pre-
monition, suspicion, anxiety.8 The psychological resonance of this work is not

7. Rotoscopy is a technique of tracing over live-action footage to make an animation.

8. Each of the artists discussed here might be said to work with the conventions of a particular
genre; if that is the case, Goldstein's would be those of the disaster film. In the movie Earthquake, for
example, the entire first third of the film is nothing but a narration about an impending earthquake; yet
when it comes, we are taken completely by surprise.

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 80 OCTOBER

that of the su
presented, st
staging the im
technique of
filmed imag
staging of th
then, a func
manner in w
a moving on
Here is a pic
a suit and ha
called, in tha
merely confir
city. But tho
isolate the w
obvious anx
lurking outs
But what is
which is imp
to read the p
juxtaposition
artifice of re
might signal
The picture
artist Cindy
costumes and
thoroughly
pictures, but
is a fictional
but staged.
The still photograph is generally thought to announce itself as a direct
transcription of the real precisely in its being a spatiotemporal fragment; or, on
the contrary, it may attempt to transcend both space and time by contravening that
very fragmentary quality.9 Sherman's photographs do neither of these. Like
ordinary snapshots, they appear to be fragments; unlike those snapshots, their
fragmentation is not that of the natural continuum, but of a syntagmatic
sequence, that is, of a conventional, segmented temporality. They are like
quotations from the sequence of frames that constitutes the narrative flow of film.
Their sense of narrative is one of its simultaneous presence and absence, a
narrative ambience stated but not fulfilled. In short, these are photographs whose

9. See, for example, Hollis Frampton, "Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place,"
October, 5 (Summer 1978), especially pp. 59-62.

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 i~ii,

rdlDi

me-?

el.:- :: ii::` 8B

Cindy She

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 0 ?Rffi wi

......... . . . .

Rob
Good Man. 1978.

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 Pictures 83

condition is
fragment." 1
The psycho
can best be
syntagmati
solicits a r
temporal m
ties that R
tableau performance, Sound Distance of a Good Man, presented last year at
Franklin Furnace, was a film, showing, with no motion at all (save for the
flickering effect of light that is a constant feature of cinema) the upper torso of a
man, body arched and head thrown back as if in convulsion. That posture,
registering a quick, jerky motion, is contrasted, in this motionless picture, with
the frozen immobility of the statue of a lion. As the film unwound it continued to
show only this still image; the entire film consisted of nothing but a freeze frame.
But if the film's image does not traverse any temporal distance other than that
literal time of the performed events that framed it on either side, its composition
followed a rather complex scenario. Longo's movie camera was trained on a
photograph, or more precisely a photo-montage whose separate elements were
excerpted from a series of photographs, duplicate versions of the same shot. That
shot showed a man dressed and posed in imitation of a sculpted aluminum relief
that Longo had exhibited earlier that year. The relief was, in turn, quoted from a
newspaper reproduction of a fragment of a film still taken from The American
Soldier, a film by Fassbinder.
The "scenario" of this film, the scenario just described, the spiral of
fragmentation, excerptation, quotation that moves from film still to still film is, of
course, absent from the film that the spectators of Sound Distance of a Good Man
watched. But what, if not that absent scenario, can account for the particular
presence of that moving still image?
Such an elaborate manipulation of the image does not really transform it; it
fetishizes it. The picture is an object of desire, the desire for the signification that is
known to be absent. The expression of that desire to make the picture yield a
reality that it pretends to contain is the subject of the work of Troy Brauntuch.
But, it must be emphasized, his is no private obsession. It is an obsession that is in
the very nature of our relationship to pictures. Brauntuch therefore uses pictures
10. Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills," in Image-
Music-Text, trans. Heath, New York, Hill and Wang, 1977, p. 67. The appearance of the film still as an
object of particular fascination in recent artistic practice is so frequent as to call for a theoretical
explanation. Both Sherman's and Robert Longo's works actually resemble this odd artifact, as does
that of John Mendelsohn, James Birrell, among others. Moreover, many of its characteristics as
discussed by Barthes are relevent to the concerns of all the work discussed here. In this context, it is also
interesting to note that the performances of Philip Smith were called by him "extruded cinema" and
had such revealing titles as Still Stories, Partial Biography, and Relinquish Control. They consisted of
multiple projections of 35-mm. slides in a sequence and functioned as deconstructions of cinematic
narrative.

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 84 OCTOBER

whose subjec
charged with
Here is a pi

ME:: 1:_-:: :: ::ii::::::

sm.:: .
':"'-'::--'Ziii.-'iiiiiiiiiiiu

It appeared as an illustration to the memoirs of Albert Speer with the caption

"Hitler asleep in his Mercedes, 1934." 11 Brauntuch has reproduced it as the central
image of a recent three-part photographic print. The degree to which the image is
fetishized by its presentation absolutely prevents its re-presentation; itself photo-
graphic, Brauntuch's work cannot in turn be photographically reproduced. Its
exacting treatment of the most minute details and qualities of scale, color,
framing, relationships of part to part would be completely lost outside the
presence of the work as object. The above photograph, for example, is enlarged to
a width of eighteen inches, thereby making its halftone screen visible, and printed
on the left-hand side of a seven-foot long bloodred field. To the right of this
picture is a further enlarged excerpt of it showing the building in the distance seen
just above the windshield of the Mercedes. The panel on which these two images
appear is flanked by two other panels positioned vertically, so that the ensemble of
photographs looks diagrammatically like this:

photo ill.
above excerpt

photo of Nuremberg rally lights

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Pictures 85

The two ver

abstracted t
photograph
vast expans
right-hand
they divulg
Reproduce
cerpted, en
fragmentar
the most op
revealing o
drawings? E
the duration
secrets; but
forever in
images. Tha
Although t
are far less
separates us
the desire t
cultural m
through the
example, Le
the emblem
currency of
taken as the
magazine. T
they must b
of mother a
have no aut
picture); th
presented (o
them away

11. Albert Spe

course Walter B
the task of th
name the guilt
'will not be th
must we not al
caption becom
Screen, Spring
12. Brauntuch
works. Perhaps
inside the conc
New York, Jew

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 Pictures 87

Shown as a
child/Kenn
through a s
theatrical p
work? Ligh
medium of
impossible
original art
At the beg
abandonment of the artistic medium as such that we had witnessed a break with
modernism, or more precisely with what was espoused as modernism by Mic
Fried. Fried's is, however, a very particular and partisan conception of mode
ism, one that does not, for example, allow for the inclusion of cinema ("cine
even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art") or for the preeminen
theatrical painting of surrealism. The work I have attempted to introduce her
related to a modernism conceived differently, whose roots are in the symbo
aesthetic announced by Mallarm,'4 which includes works whose dimensio
literally or metaphorically temporal, and which does not seek the transcendenc
the material condition of the signs through which meaning is generated.
Nevertheless, it remains useful to consider recent work as having effecte
break with modernism and therefore as postmodernist. But if postmodernism
have theoretical value, it cannot be used merely as another chronological ter
rather it must disclose the particular nature of a breach with modernism.15 It
this sense that the radically new approach to mediums is important. If it had b
characteristic of the formal descriptions of modernist art that they were to
graphical, that they mapped the surfaces of artworks in order to determine t
structures, then it has now become necessary to think of description as
stratigraphic activity. Those processes of quotation, excerptation, framing,
staging that constitute the strategies of the work I have been discussing necess
uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of source
or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there
always another picture.
A theoretical understanding of postmodernism will also betray all th
attempts to prolong the life of outmoded forms. Here, in brief, is an examp

13. Levine initially intended that the three parts of the work take three different forms for
purposes of this exhibition: the Kennedy silhouette as a slide projection in the gallery, the Lincoln
postcard announcement, and the Washington as a poster, thus emphasizing the work's ambi
relationship to its medium. Only the first two parts were executed, however.
14. For a discussion of this aesthetic in relation to a pictorial medium, see my essay "Posi
Negative: a Note on Degas's Photographs," October, 5 (Summer 1978), 89-100.
15. There is a danger in the notion of postmodernism which we begin to see articulated, that w
sees postmodernism as pluralism, and which wishes to deny the possibility that art can any lo
achieve a radicalism or avant-gardism. Such an argument speaks of the "failure of modernism"
attempt to institute a new humanism.

Sherrie Levine. Untitled. 1978.

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 88 OCTOBER

chosen becau
Whitney Mu
show of wor
being forced
characterist
the work wa
included wer
horses appea
horses migh
because it di
by Robert M
the figure o
reading as bo
of irony tow
New Image
ity with that
museums th
era of modernism coincides with the era of the museum. So if we now have to look
for aesthetic activities in so-called alternative spaces, outside the museum, that is
because those activities, those pictures, pose questions that are postmodernist.

16. In Richard Marshall, New Image Painting, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978,
p. 56.

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