After having powered the postmodern critique of photography and a profound rethinking of the historical avant-gardes, is photomontage exhausted? Has its use as a point of critical inquiry, an object of research, and a contemporary practice run its course? Or have new ways to discuss and engage in the practice emerged?
The afternoon symposium and roundtable will address these questions by calling on the expertise of a range of scholars and artists.
The event is free and open to the public. But please RSVP at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department, Rutgers University
Schedule
1:30 Greetings and Welcome
1:40 Introduction
1:55 Panelist Statements
- Jindrich Toman
- Virginia McBridge
- Alexsandar Bošković
- Sabine Kriebel
- Miranda Lichtenstein
2:00 Short Break
2:10 Roundtable Part I
3:15 Coffee Break
3:45 Roundtable Part II
4:45 Closing Statements
5:00 End
Talks
Manufacturing Discontent: Photomontage in the Year 2017 - Sabine Kriebel
Manufacturing Discontent: Photomontage in the Year 2017
Sabine Kriebel, University College Cork, Ireland
ABSTRACT
Photomontage has, since its inception, had to broker its place in visual culture by negotiating various culturally-charged discourses that are often at odds: humor, fun, wit, play vs. progressive politics, critical intervention, radical deconstruction. In German this is simply called a Spannungsfeld, or field of tension, between antitheses. At times, photomontage has indeed been facile, simplistic, superficial, and unsatisfying. At others, the medium has risen to the challenge and offered incisive critiques where other media have fallen short. The moments where montage has been most bracing have also been those where photographic intervention has been the most urgent and where the fraught cultural coordinates have been cannily invoked. The stakes have to matter, and to resonate beyond a clever juxtaposition. Address to the psyche is crucial. Given the dizzying pace at which European and American politics have polarized and unraveled, a development revealing an angry underbelly of popular resentment, racism, atavistic behavior, beginning with the Brexit vote, continuing with the evolving instability of the Trump administration, and reaching into Silicon Valley, the cultural and political stakes are certainly inflamed. The question is not whether photomontage can matter, but how contemporary practitioners can recruit the language of photographic de-/re-construction to make it matter in the technological landscape of the present moment.
BIO
Sabine Kriebel has thought critically about photomontage for nearly two decades—longer than is advisable for sanity, surely—culminating in her 2014 book Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (University of California Press). Her collaboration Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2016) with fellow Heartfield scholar Andrés Zervigón issued from their joint discussions about the relevance of photomontage to thinking about photography. She has taught at the University College Cork, Ireland since 2004, offering undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary art, photography history and theory, and theories of perception. She also serves as Book Reviews Editor for the journal History of Photography.
Grounds - Miranda Lichtenstein
Grounds
Miranda Lichtenstein, Rutgers University
ABSTRACT
I began working with photography in non-traditional ways as an undergraduate because I wanted to push against the images around me, particularly those of women. I used collage and alternative processes because it allowed me to transform and control the pictures I was appropriating. I studied under Joel Sternfeld, so “straight photography” was the assumed paradigm, but I was lucky enough to see work by women in the early 90s that had a dramatic impact on me. Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth, Gretchen Bender and Barbara Kruger were some of the artists whose work cleared a path for my own. Experimentation and non-conventional image making remain fertile ground, because they provide processes that can address issues of representation in myriad forms.
I don’t believe photomontage is exhausted as a contemporary practice. My own work, which I have not described as montage before now, is among others things a layering and compression of analog and digital processes, as is the case with many of my contemporaries. One could say that among other things, such an amalgam ties the work to montage through a consideration of the screen as both a physical and a social space, a site in which fragments are employed to constitute something approximating a whole.
BIO
Miranda Lichtenstein earned a Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions including The Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Renaissance Soiety, Chicago, Stadthaus Ulm, Germany, and the New Museum of Cotemporary Art, New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at venues such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, Gallery Min Min, Tokyo and at the Gallery at Hermes, New York. She is Assistant Professor of Photography at Mason Gross School of the Art at Rutgers University.
Reflections on Nature and Use - Jindrich Toman
Reflections on Nature and Use
Jindrich Toman, University of Michigan
ABSTRACT
In my contribution I would like to briefly introduce three photomonteurs of the 1930s—Boris Klinch, Vladimír Konvička and Karel Teige. Although contemporaries, they pursued completely different approaches to photomontage. Klinch was a Soviet political cartoonist inspired by Heartfield; Konvička was a Czech art pedagogue who taught photomontage as a skill that would be useful for high-school students when making ads; and Teige was a Czech Surrealist who left behind a large body of quasi erotic photomontages that remained largely private during his life. Almost absurd, the juxtaposition reminds us that photomontage was used in a highly diversified manner.
As a historian I am wondering whether this situation was really new; it seems that this range existed already in the nineteenth century. As a theorist I am interested in whether diversity of use was flanked by statements that reflect particular approaches. I would argue that reflections on the nature and use of photomontage are crucial in that they typically document central concerns of modernism. They thus provide insights that make the study of photomontage reach beyond its technically defined domain. And as an occasional “photo-shopper,” I am arguing that photomontage continues to be “a victory over physics,” i.e., a technique that foregrounds creativity while contravening elements of “indexicality” that enter photomontage through photography.
BIO
Jindrich Toman's research interests are largely defined by cultures and languages of Central and Eastern Europe. Among his studies is Photomontage in Print (2009), a monographic coverage of the intersection of photomontage and print media, with a special focus on the 1920s and 1930s in Czechoslovakia. Among his current project is a monograph entitled Languages of Simplicity that traces the metamorphoses of the New Typography in Central and Eastern Europe. He also teaches courses on Central European avant-gardes and Soviet visual culture of the 1920s-1940s.
A Widening Set of Practices - Aleksandar Bošković
A Widening Set of Practices
Aleksandar Bošković, Columbia University
ABSTRACT
If the answer to the rhetorical question from the panel’s title is negative, one needs to outline and explicate a “widening set of practices” in contemporary art and culture that continue to shape the medium’s future today. Any successful approach to photomontage must take into account the concepts of photography and montage, along with their histories. Media theorist Vilem Flusser famously claimed that photography is “the first post-historical image” and that it should not be studied in terms of representation because its structure is one of projection. Art historian Klaus Honnef recognized that montage appears not only as “a symbolic form of our time,” but also as “a model of a view of the world and its experience, as perspective was to our ancestors." Taking cues from both Flusser and Honnef, I propose to address a set of contemporary art and cultural practices that are in dialogue with the history of photomontage and its self-reflective nature. Throughout their paralleled histories, photography and photomontage became the touchstone of rethinking culture, whether it was a question of entrenchment, revisionism, or critique. Are the contemporary practices of rethinking space photographically still effective in re-thinking cultural space (views on the world)?
BIO
Aleksandar Bošković is a Lecturer in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on the intersection of literature and visual culture in Slavic avant-gardes as well as on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema and literature. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade, 2008) and a number of articles on issues such as digital mnemonics, Yugonostalgia and cultural memory, and avant-garde photobooks. His article on Iuri Rozhkov's photomontage series to Maiakovskii's propagandistic poem "To the Workers of Kursk," appeared in the 2017 summer issue of Slavic Review.
He is currently working on several projects, including the anthology of Yugoslav modernism (with Steven Teref) and the book manuscript, Slavic Avant-Garde Cinepoetry, a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration of photopoetry and bioscopic books within Slavic avant-gardes.
Anything but Moribund - Virginia McBride
Anything but Moribund
Virginia McBridge, Rutgers University
ABSTRACT
Photomontage, photocollage, assemblage, composite—true to their form, clipped and reconfigured images have always resisted easy definition. Ever tenuous, the distinctions between these modes grow murkier still as digital processes abstract cutting and pasting from scissors and glue. But, viewing these new techniques on a continuum of photographic technology, I will maintain that montage is anything but moribund. Though never an exclusive practice of avant-gardists, montage is increasingly universal and anonymous. Readymade montages crowd smartphones and subway cars. As images merge and overlap with unprecedented density, at issue is not what a photomontage is, but what it is not.
Recent research has shown that photomontage was alive and well long before it had a name. It follows that scholars should now expand its present definition(s), to accommodate additional forms of photo-matter, and with them, more diverse methods of montage. Digital interventions have only exacerbated the ease of photo manipulation, and as image viewers and consumers play an ever greater role montage-making, the medium’s inherent interactivity deserves greater due in scholarship of works both present and past. Whether flipping a page or swiping a screen, viewers themselves rearrange images, acting as inadvertent monteurs.
BIO
Virginia McBride is a doctoral student at Rutgers University, where she studies the history of photography. Her research concerns interwar Soviet and European photomontage.