Peter Schjeldahl argues in the New Yorker that Ed Ruscha is overlooked as a seminal 60s artist. Schjeldahl's got something of a point. I think the problem might be that with American Pop and minimalist artists all hitting their stride during this decade, the field was unusually crowded—so if you didn't overhaul visual art, you might be overlooked for the textbook. Ruscha was working on broader semiotic questions. It's not a fault—I think that as with Bruce Nauman some of Ruscha's work was well ahead of its time, and that each of them was building on the lessons of his generation even as those fundamental concepts were still being played out. Then again, I'm not terribly familiar with his work, so maybe it's a bigger cosmic injustice than I'm making it out to be. Personally I don't care for his book-objects but I love his word paintings.
Lisp, 1968
Then Schjeldahl puzzles me with this tangent:
The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.I'm not sure I'd call the camera the dominant problem for art over the last half century—it's certainly been the dominant problem for pure painters, but other dominant problems led to massive expanses in what constitutes art—new genres, new concepts—and I don't think they all reduce to the photograph. Also seems weird to me to talk about the twentieth century in halves, at least as far as art is concerned. Tough questions. Posted by Kriston at July 26, 2004 3:42 PM
I thought the camera had begun to be the problem much earlier than the 1950s; hence the turn away from photo-like effects in visual art. Once photography could give us the single perspective, we got Cubism's multiple perspectives; once we got the veracious realism of photography, we got surrealism.
Art now has to do something beyond simply showing us things; it has to avoid the "Aw, I coulda just taken a picture" response.
What PG said.
Posted by: j.scott barnard at July 27, 2004 11:52 AMI think the camera-art dynamic is more complicated than artists just trying to distance themselves from photographers. Because we also have those amazing artists like Chuck Close and Gerhardt Richter who did photo-realism in their paintings. (Pardon me as I channel Kriston.)
I think that shows a more interesting dynamic at work - photography in this case isn't so much a problem as it is something to be explored. They're maybe re-approaching realism in a different way in the post-camera world. Eh, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Posted by: susan at July 27, 2004 12:47 PMI'm kind of in between. I think a painting is instrinsically different than a photograph, and therefore people are making too much of fending off the camera's alleged attack.
For example, look at the work of the Uhlir (sp?) twins. I love the work of both brothers. Raymond often deals in images whose subjects would never be considered photo-realistic, while Erik paints portraits that, yes, could be sort of recreated with film, but those pictures would fall far, far short of a painting's impact.
My point is, if the art is made with the specific intention of defying the camera, and not with a natural curiosity into new pespectives, I think the work suffers greatly.
Posted by: matty at July 27, 2004 4:27 PMThanks for the nod, Matt. Really want to chime in on this one but soooo busy at work.
Posted by: Raymond at July 28, 2004 2:20 PMPerhaps the best artist to explore in patterning out the photog. v. painting debate is Jeff Wall. Or as Capps might refer to him, "Raymond's hero."
More often than not his compositions reference a particular painting from the canon of art history. Using this reference, as an anchor in the evolution of Modernism, he constructs a totally controlled photograph. Everything is managed, organized and considered. Any chance elements are then removed digitally.
The end result is a photographic image that has lost the momentary, fleeting transparency of documentary photography. What you have instead is something that feels and reads more like a painting.
How is this important in the hunter gatherer sense? It's not. But in the art nerd world it's enormous. What Wall has done is bring painting and photography to a sort of parity, seperated only by technology. In the end you have the image- the technology used to arrive at that image is simply language.
Posted by: at July 28, 2004 4:24 PM:-) Wow, an agreement from J. Scott.
I realize that even before the advent of the camera, artists did work that went beyond than photo-like realism (Mona Lisa, etc.). What I meant was that with the camera, artists were in some ways freed from the demand that they portray reality in an objective fashion. Art could become nonfigurative and abstract, could concentrate on emotions and ideas instead graspable objects or visible landscapes.
Posted by: PG at July 28, 2004 5:39 PM