How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age by Andy Grundberg

Author:Andy Grundberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Hats), 1981. Pencil on paper.

The evening I met them they showed me Brauntuch’s and Goldstein’s new paintings; I felt myself in over my head but did my best to fake knowingness. I was familiar with New Image painting, where the images were abstracted and vaguely symbolic, as if floating in a Color Field painting, but the images in these paintings were photographic and more akin to history painting. Indeed, Brauntuch’s were history paintings of a sort: his source materials were photographs from the Third Reich taken by Adolf Hitler’s chief photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, and others employed by the Nazis. Goldstein’s were less specific but more spectacular, looking like photographs of lightning or fireworks.

Knowing that photographs were central to the new art that Reiring and Winer were promoting made me intensely curious. I was especially curious about the work they intended to feature at Metro Pictures that was photography, especially Cindy Sherman’s and Laurie Simmons’s. Here I felt somewhat less derailed, not only because photography was my field of expertise but also because I already had seen some of their work, thanks to Michael Klein.

Klein had a great nose for the new and already had a sense that Reiring and Winer were on to something. He even beat them to the punch in terms of showing some of their stable of artists, mounting an exhibition called Re:Figuration at Max Protetch Gallery in December 1979, almost a year before Metro Pictures opened. Re:Figuration included Brauntuch, Longo, Sherman, and Simmons, among others. Despite Protetch’s protests—“I’m not showing photography in the gallery,” Klein remembers him saying—the show did well, with megacollector Charles Saatchi buying all the Longo and Sherman work on view.14

Since I had been writing reviews for Art in America, as well as taking pictures of artwork for the gallery, Klein decided I could be a sounding board for the new photo-based art he was seeing. Once, after I had finished photographing some drawings by Richard Fleischner in the gallery’s back room, he asked me what I thought of two Laurie Simmons photographs he had hung on the wall. One showed a dollhouse figure seated in a miniature living-room set, and the other was of two cowboy figures astride plastic horses in a patently fake Western outdoors.

At first I was nonplussed. Photographers of my generation and a generation earlier had long ago decided that “tabletop photography” was the province of amateurs with too much time and too little talent—and that included any form of miniature setups like Simmons’s. Tabletops were tantamount to model railroading—why not go out and ride a real train? Plus, the figures Simmons used were utterly familiar: my sister had played with a similar dollhouse while I was growing up, and I probably had similar cowboy figures lurking in my childhood toy box.

It turns out this was exactly the point. As Klein explained it, the artist was re-presenting the scenes with a critical eye, asking viewers to reflect on the fantasies they were allowed (and encouraged) to construct during childhood.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.