Return to The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984
In the mid-1970s, Richard Prince was an aspiring painter who earned his living at Time-Life clipping articles from magazines for staff writers. What was left at the end of the day were the ads: gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models that provoked in the artist an uneasy mix of fascination and repulsion, disgust and envy. By 1977 Prince had begun re-photographing these advertisements in order to, as he put it, "turn the lie back on itself." Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he imagined his purloined images as stills from a movie in his head. He developed a repertoire of strategies—blurring, cropping, enlarging, grouping—that revealed the hallucinatory strangeness, or "social science fiction," of his seemingly natural source material.
Lawler is a spy in the house of art, casting sidelong glances at modernist masterpieces as they wend their way from the pristine white cubes of galleries and the carpeted walls of auction houses to museum storerooms, corporate boardrooms, and cloistered private homes around the world. The artist's greatest coup came in 1984, when she was granted full access to the Connecticut home of twentieth-century collectors Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine. As sometimes happens in photography, the artist serendipitously discovered the crux of her entire project in one place. Working in available light with a 35mm camera, she found treasures everywhere she looked, such as this decorator's duet between the tortured gestural slashes of a late Jackson Pollock and the filigree of a soup bowl.
For his MFA thesis exhibition, Welling presented examples from his series Men, along with even more provisional-looking works that floated free from any particular medium—collage seems too potent for these enigmatic presentations of excised magazine pages—and put both artist and viewer in the strange position of being understood by the image rather than vice versa. "Images compose our preconceptions of the possible," Welling said in a conversation with David Salle, published in 1980, "and in that sense we are their product."Listen to James Welling comment on this work in an excerpt from the exhibition's Audio Guide.TranscriptIn the Winston ads, a piece called And/Should—I was interested in this expression "And should," which was an abbreviation for "There's a Lot of Good Between Winston and Should." And this imperative, this "should," seemed both humorous and interesting in terms of aesthetics, pointing at what to look at—you should look at this—that visual art is about pointing.
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Cheap, machine-made, multiple, and meant to be mailed, the postcard was a favored format for Conceptual artists such as Gilbert and George and On Kawara. McMahon's written-on postcards exemplify his predilection for the inappropriate comment delivered with a straight face.
McMahon's pastels were greeted quizzically by Conceptual artists of the previous generation, who tried to expunge systematically all traces of recognizable imagery and discrete media from their work (pastel may be seen as one of the most elite and rarefied). That he was covering over the kind of raw information that Conceptualism valorized was seen as equally perplexing, but under the veil of Pop humor and irony lay an important shift back to an emphasis on the image and its presentation that can be compared to Jack Goldstein's short color films (also on view in the exhibition).
Hallwalls artists Cindy Sherman and Nancy Dwyer referred affectionately to Longo's and Zwack's objects and reliefs as "boy's toys." The works of both men hunt back the violence that permeates our society to its source in the play of a typical 1950s American childhood.
Listen to Robert Longo comment on this work in an excerpt from the exhibition's Audio Guide.TranscriptThere was a photograph in the Village Voice of an image from the end of this movie called American Soldier, which was an image of this guy getting shot. So I took a pencil and I isolated the figure and I thought, "This could be a really cool relief." I liked the idea that I was making something that happened every time you looked at it. It wasn't a picture of something. I mean, this guyóthat moment happens every time you look at him.
In Big Camera, Small Camera, Simmons shows how deeply photography permeated the inner life of her generation and how from the 1950s forward we would all have images coursing through our veins.
Mullican's multifaceted exploration of the universe of his own perceptual and cognitive makeup begins just on the other side of the looking glass from that of 1960s Conceptual artists grounded in performance such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci (whom David Salle referred to as an "anthropologist of his own universe"). Mullican's unbounded archiving of the self is the result of his constant testing of the boundary between objective and subjective reality; for Mullican, images have equal weight in both those worlds.
Between 1977 and 1980 Sherman photographed herself in a series of sixty-seven staged scenarios in the manner of postwar European and American movies. In each picture, the artist foregrounds the elements of cinematic form—from gaze and camera angle to lighting, costume, and backdrop—that trigger the stock narratives and characters from which our identities are composed.
Kruger first showed her large-scale photomontages in an exhibition at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1981 entitled Public Address. Appropriating generic-looking images from old camera annuals and magazines, the artist overlaid them with bold, declarative statements in bold-faced type that resembled political agit-prop or perhaps ransom letters. Kruger's phrasing was as deft and multivalent as her images were propulsive and direct, and the red enameled frames she sealed them in were like a kiss before a knockout punch. Despite their seeming simplicity, however, the artist was playing complex games with the way that images normally include or exclude segments of the audience, and bringing to the forefront the kinds of power plays that underlie all forms of communication.
Casebere's dramatically lit photographs of tabletop sculptures (made from plaster, Styrofoam, and cardboard) show uncannily familiar yet eerily inhuman spaces—from courtrooms and libraries to an empty storefront or a suburban street at night—that belong to everyone and no one, a ghost world of collective memory. Using the camera to question photography's cherished myths of documentary veracity and transparent objectivity, Casebere virtually invented the tradition of setup photography as it is practiced today by artists such as Thomas Demand and Vik Muniz.
"Golden Distance is a pair of prints each reproducing a black and white picture of the head of a woman seen from behind. This image is inscribed in a circle, printed on black, reprinted on gold, and provided with a caption. But to what does this caption 'Whispers around a woman' refer? It seems only to reinforce the inaccessibility of the photograph itself…. It is the insistent reminder of the picture's withdrawal from signification…. The caption is only one of many expressions of a desire that treats the image with the mechanistic devotion appropriate to a fetish. The obsessive manipulations, alterations, applications of words are the materialization of a reverie. But because desire comes about only in the sphere of frustration, the image remains forever at a distance."—Douglas Crimp, Pictures (1977)
Goldstein's records were pressed in vivid hues or had brightly colored labels that match or complement the aural images: purple for The Tornado, deep blue for A Swim Against the Tide, and an alarming bright red for the barks heard on A German Shepherd (see image above). When played on a turntable, the sounds are sometimes wittily divided between the two sides. Three Felled Trees, for instance, has the trees being chopped on one side and falling one by one on the other. This suite of 45-rpm records was the first of a number made by Goldstein over the next decade from appropriated sound effects and canned movie music. It was produced in an edition of one hundred sets, one of which was featured in the 1977 Pictures exhibition at Artists Space alongside his short color films from the same time.Listen to A German Shepherd.Listen to Two Wrestling Cats.Listen to The Tornado.Listen to A Faster Run.Listen to A Swim Against the Tide.Listen to Three Felled Trees.Listen to The Dying Wind.Listen to The Burning Forest.Listen to The Lost Ocean Liner.