The Uses of Photography Art Politics and the Reinvention of a Medium
"The Uses of Photography"
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego | Downtown
In three identical sets of twenty-5 images, projected every bit slides in an endlessly repeated cycle, Allan Sekula's Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972, depicts workers leaving the General Dynamics Convair Segmentation aerospace factory in San Diego at the end of the day shift. Offering upward the plenitude of information implicit in the American documentary tradition—a tradition that implies that by studying these records we might somehow come to know the workers and their private stories—while at the same time withholding that gratification via the anonymity and homogeneity or homogeny of its subjects, it offers a form of political and social engagement that was missing from before documentary forms as well as from newly emerged Conceptual practices. Shown in the exhibition "The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium," organized by Jill Dawsey, MCASD's curator, Sekula's work takes on a new context: that of its own social product and discursive milieu inside the customs associated with the newly founded Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where the creative person matriculated equally an MFA pupil in 1972.
The exhibition takes a number of well-known Photoconceptualist projects from the tardily 1960s and early '70s—Eleanor Antin's 100 Boots, 1971–73; John Baldessari's Choosing: Green Beans, 1972; Fred Lonidier's 29 Arrests: Headquarters of the 11th Naval District, May four, 1972, San Diego, 1972; and Martha Rosler'southward "Firm Beautiful: Bringing the State of war Home," ca. 1967–72, to name a few—and places them in dialogue with works by fellow UCSD kinesthesia and students, including David Antin, Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Allan Kaprow, Babette Mangolte, Elizabeth Sisco, Lorna Simpson, Phel Steinmetz, and Carrie Mae Weems. That these artists introduced the social world—the personal, political, and historical realms—to Conceptual art, in a direct critique of its purported neutrality, may exist a familiar claim, only it is one cogently presented in this exhibition. What is new here is Dawsey's reframing of these works vis-à-vis the vibrant, collaborative, and progressive environs of the visual arts department at UCSD, itself situated within the conservative political climate of San Diego, a central locus in the military-industrial complex. Lonidier's now-canonical 29 Arrests, which records antiwar demonstrators existence booked by the police, is placed in context with lesser-known works such as his Daughter Watcher Lens (formerly known every bit Pornography), 1972, made on the UCSD campus while Lonidier was a grad student, which furthered his exploration of the theme of photographic voyeurism and technological control. Sekula's act of countersurveillance in Red Team (San Diego, 20 January 1973), 1973/2005, in which he confronts and photographs hush-hush agents in San Diego's Balboa Park, turning the tables on them with his own apparatus of surveillance and control, was a direct response to local police documentation of individuals involved in political protest.
The exhibition and attendant catalogue jointly suggest that much of this collaborative work would not take emerged without the surrounding historical and social context of both the university and the larger customs of San Diego. Dawsey's essay argues that the nonhierarchical quality of the visual arts section, where students and kinesthesia interacted on multiple social and pedagogical levels, combined with the radical climate of other UCSD departments (Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson were also on the faculty) to form a customs that engaged in especially astute social critique. The testify evidences a vibrant exchange betwixt what one might phone call the socioconceptual projects of members of the San Diego grouping (composed of Lonidier, Rosler, Sekula, and Steinmetz) and those of a subsequently generation of artists to emerge out of the school in the tardily '70s and '80s (namely Sisco, Simpson, and Weems) who, with their emphasis on race and other marginalized histories, are frequently positioned in textbooks and exhibitions as completely separate in their goals. Thus echoes of the performative nature of the work of both Kaprow and Eleanor Antin can exist constitute in Simpson's Gestures/Reenactments, 1985, but as Lonidier's critique of social systems resonates with Weems's "Family Pictures and Stories," 1978–84. The exhibition does not try to encapsulate these diverse artists, but rather adds to our noesis of their historical context—thus running in the vein of a series of recent exhibitions that take examined the legacies of key educational institutions.
—Kate Butler
Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201701/the-uses-of-photography-65455
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