Organized by Sarah Miller and Drew Sawyer, in collaboration with the Zimmerli Museum and the Developing Room, this interdisciplinary symposium seeks to question standard narratives around the reemergence of documentary photography during that tumultuous decade. It brings together a range of international art historians and curators, who have rarely had to opportunity to exchange research and ideas on this topic.
In the United States, scholarship on documentary during the long 1970s has tended to focus on two poles: the curatorial practices of John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art and those artists that he supported, and Allan Sekula’s and Martha Rosler’s strident critiques of modernism’s embrace of the genre. Taking Jorge Ribalta’s recent exhibition, Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid as a launching point, the symposium will widen the conversation to explore the multiple ways that documentary was rethought and contested in the 1970s, in both critical discourse and artistic practice. This symposium will bring together art historians and curators from Europe, who have been rewriting these histories over the past several years, with emerging and established art historians in the United States, who are only just beginning to look into these diverse practices. The symposium aims to propel new scholarship on these artistic practices and the critical discourses they generated, and provide a broader context for American histories of documentary during the period.
Schedule notes:
Please note that the symposium begins Thursday March 23 at 6:00pm with a keynote talk, reconvenes on Friday the 24th at 9:30am and runs until 5:30pm.
Additionally, the keynote talk on Thursday will be preceded by a reception in the Zimmerli lobby at 5:00 pm. The galleries will remain open until 6:00, allowing attendees to view the current exhibitions
The event is free and open to the public. But please RSVP at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Zimmerli Art Museum
Office of the Dean of the Humanities (Rutgers)
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Schedule
Thursday, March 23
5:00 Reception in Zimmerli Museum lobby
6:00 Keynote talk: Jorge Ribalta
Friday, March 24
10:00 Huffa Frobes Cross, David Campany
11:50 Short break
11:00 Siona Wilson, Solveig Nelson
12:50 Discussion of morning speakers
12:30 Lunch
2:00 Robert Slifkin, Katherine Bussard, Heather Diack
3:20 Discussion of afternoon speakers
4:00 Break
4:15 David Hartt
Conveners
Sarah Miller
BIO
Sarah M. Miller is co-convener of the symposium. She was an independent scholar (now at Mills College) specializing in the history of photography. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, where she was also the Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in 2010-2013. Based in Oakland, she has been a visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley and a visiting faculty member at UC-Santa Cruz, San Francisco Art Institute, California College for the Arts, and San Francisco State University. As a critic she has recently written for Artforum, Aperture, and Critical Inquiry. Current book projects include a new history of the invention and contestation of the concept “documentary” in American photography of the 1930s, and a publication of the original manuscript of Berenice Abbott’s and Elizabeth McCausland’s Changing New York with archival planning documents. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming book Partisan Views and Public Opinion: Engaged Photography in and beyond the Twentieth Century, to be published by the Zimmerli Art Museum in Fall 2017.
Drew Sawyer
BIO
Drew Sawyer is co-convener of the symposium. He was the William J. and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art (now Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum) and the Arts Editor at Document Journal. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, where in 2011 he also co-organized Social Forces Visualized: Photography and Scientific Charity, 1900–1920, an exhibition, book, and symposium that reconsidered the emergence and contexts for social documentary photography in the early 20th century. His recent exhibitions include Gathered: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection and Works by Carmen Winant and Luke Stettner (2016); The Sun Placed in the Abyss (2016), and Lucy Raven: Low Relief (2016). For the spring and summer of 2017, he is currently organizing the exhibitions Allan Sekula: Aerospace Folktales and Other Stories; Golden State; and Red Horizon: Contemporary Art and Photography in the USSR and Russia, 1960-2000.
Keynote
Not yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism - Jorge Ribalta
Not yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism
Jorge Ribalta, Artist, researcher, editor and independent curator.
ABSTRACT
My talk will be a presentation of the homonymous exhibition (Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, March-July, 2015) which continued the research that expands and deepens my earlier study on the Worker Photography Movement in the inter-war period, presented in the exhibition A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker Photography Movement 1926-1939 (Museo Reina Sofia, 2011). As such, it continued a narrative for a political history of the 'documentary idea’ in twentieth century photographic culture.
As in the earlier project on Worker Photography, this was a contribution to a historiography “against the grain”, an attempt to chart a genealogy that accounts for the dark areas of Modernism, and that also reinterpretes and provides historical consistency to today's aesthetic-political struggles. In a period like ours in which documentary practices and poetics seem to have gained a new actuality, this project offers an account of the context of the documentary paradigm shift in the 'long seventies', a period of expansion followed by contraction, that had its origins in 1968. It is tempting to insist on the historical parallels between the thirties and the seventies, both in terms of documentary culture and of economic history. It is no accident that the two periods correspond to the two major economic crises of capitalism in the twentieth century, in 1929 and 1972 –the time of the invention and reinvention of documentary, respectively. This is the grounding for the historical interpretation proposed here of documentary as an artistic response to these crises, as a means of representation of their corresponding emergent political subjectivities.
BIO
Jorge Ribalta lives and works in Barcelona
Talks
Ironic Documents: Photography and Liberal Guilt, 1967-1978 - Robert Slifkin
Ironic Documents: Photography and Liberal Guilt, 1967-1978
Robert Slifkin, NYU / The Institute of Fine Arts
ABSTRACT
Focusing on the works of Diane Arbus, Chauncey Hare, and Martha Rosler, this paper will examine the widespread invocations of irony in an array of photographic practices between 1967 and 1978, a period when photography began to take on a more significant role within the discourse of modern art, whether as ‘art photography,’ as social documentary, or through its use by artists associated with conceptualism. Irony served a crucial role in distinguishing these photographic practices from an array of other non-artistic uses of photography, which these photographically-based works of art nonetheless often cited. If this body or work’s engagement with irony provided a potent critique of the rhetoric of positivism associated with photography and positioned these works alongside more established forms of artistic practices, it also emphasized a certain sense of duplicity which, when coupled with the medium’s longstanding associations of evidentiary proof and witnessing, invoked various signs of guilt and culpability, sometimes in terms of the creator, sometimes towards the audience; sometimes parodic, other times critical or even unconscious. This paper will ultimately consider how these themes of irony and guilt may have engaged with growing sense among artists and intellectuals that the liberal ideals of progressive social betterment were becoming outlived and no longer tenable.
BIO
Robert Slifkin is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art (2013), which was awarded the Phillips Book Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as American Art, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Artforum, October, and Oxford Art Journal. He is currently working on a new book project titled The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945–1975.
Studying Tigers in the Zoo - David Campany
Studying Tigers in the Zoo
David Campany, University of Westminster
ABSTRACT
Looking back, it's clear that many of the attempts to reimagine and reinvent documentary practice in the 1970s took place within the discursive fields and institutions of art. While this did contribute to the 'dismantling of modernism' and the re-politicizing of the aesthetic, it left the established platforms for documentary (mass media magazines and newspapers) largely untouched. The space of art offered greater practical freedom and intellectual autonomy in exchange of far smaller audiences. While a handful artists did attempt to make interventions into the mass media, the idea of actually working to reform its structures from within was barely entertained. I want to ask why this was, and what the consequences were/are for a critical reinvention of documentary that limited itself to the sphere of art.
BIO
David Campany is a writer, curator and artist. His books include A Handful of Dust 2015, Walker Evans: the magazine work 2014, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip 2014, Jeff Wall: Picture for Women 2010, Photography and Cinema 2008, and Art and Photography 2003. The first three are also major travelling exhibitions. He has curated shows of the work of Victor Burgin, Hannah Collins, Mark Neville and Jo Spence.
An anthology of his essays, a book of his photographs and a book co-authored with Sara Knelman about the exhibiting of photography are forthcoming.
For his writing, David has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, the Alice Award and a Royal Photographic Society Award. He teaches at the University of Westminster, London.
Various Representational Tasks: The Documentary Strategies of Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier, Phil Steinmetz and Allan Sekula, 1972-1976 - Huff Frobes-Cross
Various Representational Tasks: The Documentary Strategies of Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier, Phil Steinmetz and Allan Sekula, 1972-1976
Huffa Frobes-Cross, Columbia University
ABSTRACT
This paper will trace the emergence of documentary as a central methodology within the work of Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier and Phil Steinmetz during the time they spent in close collaboration and dialogue while studying and teaching at University of California, San Diego between 1970 and 1976. All of these artists were involved in the antiwar movement, labor organizing and women’s liberation, and their turn towards documentary emerges out of their search for ways to intertwine their artistic and activist practices. This paper will investigate their redefinition of documentary practice through a renewed connection with left documentary of the 1930s and 1940s and a rejection of concurrent modernist and formalist documentary tendencies. It will also consider why and how these artists decided to turn towards documentary, and particularly documentary photography, as a potential solution to their more fundamental problem of producing art in and through their ongoing activism. Steinmetz, perhaps the least studied of the four artists, will emerge as a central figure in this documentary turn.
BIO
Huffa Frobes-Cross is a Core Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He received his PhD from Columbia in 2016 and is currently working on a manuscript based on his dissertation, "Various Representational Tasks: Art and Activism in the Early Work of Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula and Fred Lonidier, 1967-1976
Between States - Heather Diack
Between States
Heather Diack, University of Miami (Florida)
ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes the changing status of documentary photography in relation to conceptual art practices of the 1970s in the United States. Specifically, I emphasize the ways these photographic manifestations influenced one another, resulting in the movement of traditional documentary expectations of objectivity towards ambivalence, rooted in the particular anxieties and social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as extending possibilities opened by viewing documentation as art. Both documentary photography and conceptual photography in this era question the photograph’s ability to bear witness and moreover to articulate affect. I consider the work of artists such as Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, and Dennis Oppenheim as a means of understanding how the photographic act was frequently fused with the performative, ultimately destabilizing the very possibility of understanding a photograph as a reliable document or of grasping the category “documentary” itself as a coherent entity.
BIO
Heather A. Diack is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Miami. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Whitney Independent Study Program, her work focuses on conceptual art in relation to photography and questions the ontological and epistemological limits of the image. Her writing has appeared in the journals Visual Studies, History of Photography, Public, and RACAR, and in several edited volumes, such as The Public Life of Photographs (MIT Press and Ryerson Image Center, 2016) and Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2017). She is currently completing a book entitled Marks of Contingency: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art, and is co-authoring with Erina Duganne and Terri Weissman a textbook titled Global Photography: ACritical History (Bloomsbury, 2018).
On the Legacies of Civil Rights Reportage in Early Video Art of the 60s- and 70s, from ‘street tapes’ to Multi-Channel Video Performances - Slveig Nelson
On the Legacies of Civil Rights Reportage in Early Video Art of the 60s- and 70s, from ‘street tapes’ to Multi-Channel Video Performances
Solveig Nelson, University of Chicago
ABSTRACT
Following the conference “Open Circuits” at MoMA in 1974, critics and artists have challenged narratives of early video for occluding the role of video collectives and the diverse range of practices. For instance, in the mid-1980s, Martha Gever critiqued the tendency of museum curators and art historians to separate out the more abstract experiments in installation from “overtly critical, political video.” Gever reminded readers of the diversity of early video practices, when “many videomakers made street tapes, fiddled with electronics, built installations, [and] recorded artists’ performances.” She stressed that, “even the most esoteric video presupposes communication.”
Drawing upon debates about the institutionalization of early video art alongside Stuart Hall’s writing about television’s hybrid role between art and communication in a 1970 report for UNESCO, this paper explores the flourishing of documentary within the video art of the 1970s. From single channel works such as Andy Mann’s ‘street tapes’ or Gay Revolution Video’s Lesbian Mothers, 1972, to multi-channel performance works that employed documentary footage alongside ‘live’ footage of the audience such as The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, 1970-1975, and The Irish Tapes, 1975, early video artists embraced an aesthetics of mostly black-and-white documentary after the ascendance of color television in the mid-1960s. I suggest that the role of reportage within video art was crucially informed by the media practices of civil rights. Further, I ask how video art moved in and out of sync with debates about documentary within photography.
BIO
Solveig Nelson is the Chester Dale Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago, where she is completing the dissertation ‘The Whole World is Still Watching’: Early Video Art, the Televisual, Civil Rights. In 2015-2016, Nelson held a LUCE/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. She has worked as an art critic for Artforum since 2012 and published feature reviews on Steve McQueen; "The Freedom Principle"; and Anna and Lawrence Halprin workshops. At the University of Chicago, Nelson developed and taught courses on “History of Video Art,” “20th Century Art,” and “New Queer Cinema/Culture Wars, 1980s-1990s.” Nelson collaborated with artist Sadie Benning on the video installation Play Pause in 2006, and recently curated a program for the Video Data Bank about the stakes of the 1960s in the video art of the 1990s available at www.vdb.org.
“Beyond the Documentary Approach:” Arthur Tress’ Open Space in the Inner City - Katherine Bussard
“Beyond the Documentary Approach:” Arthur Tress’ Open Space in the Inner City
Katherine Bussard, Princeton Art Museum
ABSTRACT
Arthur Tress's project Open Space in the Inner City (1970-71) embodies some of the concerns, uses, and reinventions of documentary in the 1970s. Initially conceived as a multimedia exhibition experience and later published as a portfolio of photomechanical prints intended for communal activation, this project worked against the history of the photo essay and sought an interdisciplinary inventiveness. Tress's efforts have critical links to environmentalism, urbanism, and civic dialogue.
BIO
Katherine Bussard was appointed Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2013. Previously, she served as associate curator of photography at the Art Institute Chicago. Since 1999, she has organized a number of exhibitions, including: Film and Photo in New York (2012); Souvenirs of the Barbizon: Photographs, Paintings, and Works on Paper (2011); So the Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan (2006); and a biennial series dedicated to emerging photographers (2005–2011). Bussard is co-author of Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (2013). Her doctoral research on street photography at the City University of New York is the subject of Unfamiliar Streets: The Photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (2014). Most recently, Bussard co-authored an award-winning publication exploring the intersection of photography, architecture, and urban studies. That book and the accompanying exhibition are entitled The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980.
Look Back in Anger: Jo Spence's Subjective Documentary - Siona Wilson
Look Back in Anger: Jo Spence's Subjective Documentary
Sion Wilson, College of Staten Island & Graduate Center CUNY
ABSTRACT
Siona Wilson will speak about the work of British feminist photographer, photo theorist and radical educator, Jo Spence. Her paper will consider the problem of documentary in 1970s Britain and Spence’s shift to, or invention of, a form of "subjective documentary" in light of her feminist engagement with "people's history."
BIO
Siona Wilson is associate professor of art history at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of _Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance_ (Minnesota, 2015) as well as essays on photography, video, film and performance art in edited collections and journals such as Art History, October, Oxford Art Journal and Third Text.
Urban Futures of the Recent Past - David Hartt
Urban Futures of the Recent Past
David Hartt, University of Pennsylvania
ABSTRACT
The talk borrows the sub-title from Reyner Banham’s seminal book Megastructure, published in 1976. As a reference, Banham’s text critiques the failure of translating the energy and optimism of 60’s era civic projects into lasting institutions; thus creating fertile conditions for the seeds of our own post-ideological crisis to germinate in the capitalist restructuration of the mid 70’s. I’ll focus on the relationship between the speculative and documentary aspects of my practice and works in particular that continue this narrative forward to our own age of fiction.
BIO
David Hartt is an artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent solo exhibitions include, The Art Institute of Chicago, LA><ART, Los Angeles, and Or Gallery, Vancouver. Additionally, his work has been included in several group exhibitions including Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at The Museum of Modern Art, America Is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Shine a light/Surgir de l’ombre: Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada