We shall discuss the contemporary situation of photography with regard to three fundamental trends. The first trend is aesthetic and concerns the struggle between "low" and "high" images; the second is political and concerns the struggle between "right" and "left" images; the third trend is technological and concerns the struggle between "digital" and "analog" images.
We can use a simple model, a three-dimensional coordinate system, to help us visualize these trends. The aesthetic trend ("low" versus "high") is represented on the vertical axis, the political trend ("left" versus "right") on the horizontal axis, and the technological trend ("digital" versus "analog") on the diagonal axis.
Before we look deeper into the region we have just mapped out, however, I would like to outline the strategies that permeate it. Today these strategies are no longer strictly oriented towards the mode of "straight photography," the mode of seeking and finding, of scanning a space-time landscape for certain patterns of attraction. Rather, they are performed as stagings by means of the elements of the photographic process: subject, object, apparatus, light, as well as the resulting image and its context.
1. Strategies of Staging
The first strategy we encounter is the staging of the subject, the self-representation of the photographer. The photographer who portrays himself uses the camera, so to speak, as a writing mirror – as a plane or distorting mirror, a rear-view or telescopic mirror, a magnifying or reducing mirror.
The second strategy is the staging of the object, from the arrangement of the things photographed to their construction and fabrication. In contrast to the traditional concept of the finder (Finder), who extracts his image from an ensemble of objects, the inventor (Erfinder) imprints his image into it: he forms, "informs" what he presents in the picture.
A third strategy is the staging of the apparatus, by which we mean those procedures that contravene the photographic process as laid down in the operating instructions of the apparatus. (Operating instructions always describe only those operations conducive to the utilitarian functioning of an apparatus; the possible use of a typewriter, for example, as a musical instrument is not part of the typewriter’s operating instructions.) While the finder strives for virtuosity in the sense of mastering the operating instructions, thus becoming, as Vilém Flusser pointed out, a functionary of his apparatus, the inventor explores its deviating, dysfunctional possibilities.
The fourth strategy, the staging of light, concerns the creation of autonomous light events: light not as a medium, but as a message, including types of radiation that lie outside the visible spectrum – infrared, ultra-violet, X-ray – as well as holography.
Finally, the fifth form of staging is the staging of the image itself, that is, the further processing of existing – one's own or "appropriated" – visual material. The image is collectivized, is placed in a fixed context with other images (as a series, sequence, tableau, etc.); or given material is further synthesized (made into a montage, collage, etc.); or it is transcoded (into video signals, binary code, etc.).
Here the image is advancing deeper and deeper into the third dimension, away from the wall and into the viewer's space. Whether as an individual photographic image or integrated into the new multi-media art, photography participates in the staging of space as a vital artistic and – as will be demonstrated – political and technological strategy. The new installation art would be unthinkable without it, as either a solid or a projected, immaterial image. The staging of space should not just be seen as a means of enlarging the range of artistic expression to accommodate complex forms of experience. In that the context of presentation, the channel of distribution becomes an integral component of the artwork, a new ethic, a new form of responsibility is put into effect.
The strategies of staged photography outlined here, as we have come to know them since the early 1980s, can certainly be seen as an answer to the aesthetic redundancy of traditional photography, but can also be interpreted as bridges leading to the new "telematic creativity" which is emerging everywhere in the interconnected operations of electronic art.
We shall now project these strategies into our coordinate system with its aesthetic, political, and technological axes. Let us consider first the vertical, or aesthetic axis.
2. "Low" versus "high": The aesthetic dimension
The struggle of the "low" against the "high" image is not a recent development, as was illustrated not long ago in the exhibition High & Low at New York's Museum of Modern Art, but is as old as modernism itself. And no technique has played a more significant role in this struggle than photography or photomechanic reproduction: they are the mainsprings of the "trivialization" of high culture.
Let us consider the vertical, aesthetic axis as an open scale of values: at the very top we place the most expensive art (say, van Gogh), below that the moderately expensive (say, Magritte), then the reasonably-priced (say, Ansel Adams), then folk art, trivial art, sub-art, and at the very bottom, below zero level, comes the trash that has a negative value because it costs money to get rid of it.
As we see all around us today, the lower levels are clinging to the upper ones, either to increase their own value or to check their decline. We can find the results of this process in any magazine: van Gogh advertises for Credit Lyonnais, Dürer for Pilsner Urquell, Magritte for Minolta, and this devouring of high art by advertising photographers, art directors, and other art thieves inevitably leads to further debasement, i.e. to more kitsch and more trash.
But there are artistic strategies, recycling strategies, which endeavor to redirect the linear process of debasement. I would like to briefly describe two of them.
The first, the aestheticization of kitsch, begins at the level of trivia and is aimed at the "informatization" of kitsch: that which has been digested and excreted is brought up again to the level of high art and vomited out as high art. The outward smoothness typical of all kitsch thereby corresponds to its inner indifference, its almost complete lack of aesthetic criteria. For kitsch knows only one criterium ? that of money and marketability. That is what makes it aesthetically so unresistant and politically so anaesthetic. "The dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Franco," Vincente Romano has written, "encouraged not art but kitsch, that is, cheap sentimentality and base emotions."
In order to infuse kitsch with new information, so as to invest it with the kind of potency that Abraham Moles has called the "rebellion of bad taste against good," it must be subordinated to a new criterium, embedded in a new context, provided with a new point of view. And what point of view could be more appropriate for kitsch than that of irony?
The second recycling strategy is what I call the aestheticization of trash. It begins even below the level of trivia, there where the discarded tools and products of culture are lying; fotografia povera would be a possible characterization of this strategy. A few examples:
First of all, there is the use of primitive, antiquated apparatuses such as the pinhole camera. It is no accident that the renaissance of pinhole photography coincides with the explosion of fully automatic electronic cameras onto the market in the mid 1980s. As in the case of kitsch, one notices that as the products are increasingly perfected (that is, increasingly automated), they become smoother, shinier, slicker. Smoothness is the determining surface characteristic of the perfect picture. Thus, pictures must be made rough again.
Similar attempts at an aesthetic of imperfection are being carried out in the field of software, of technical processes. Sigmar Polke and Johannes Brus are among the trailblazers in this field. As far back as the mid-70s, Brus was recommending that we "not forget to put some sausage or cheese between the negatives in the sandwich process." He also wondered if urine might not be an excellent fixer.
Zurich-based artist Fritz Vogel works with actual trash (the "ready-made" principle), taking objets trouvés out of their trash context, sealing them in plastic bags, and offering them as signed art editions. Thomas Ruff combines plain newspaper photos into a gallery installation, thereby recalling the pictures" lost informational value; everyday refuse yields ikons of contemporary history. Joachim Schmid uses similar methods: snapshots found at flea markets reveal themselves as "masterpieces of photographic art." Keith Arnatt collects non-photographic trash to serve as props for studio photos. Andreas Müller-Pohle uses discarded photos shredded into strips and confetti for re-use as so-called cyclograms (recycled photograms).
And suddenly we become aware what a wealth of information is concealed in trash, and that the trend towards perfection through automation, and away from trash, accident, and chance (Abfall, Unfall, and Zufall), leads to impoverishment. Indeed, the strategies of aestheticizing trash provide a solution to the entire problem of trash by proposing a re-evaluation of values: that which we scorn as trash occurs full of surprises, unusual and aesthetically rich. Conversely, the products of technological perfection are redundant, ordinary, and aesthetically poor. It is they, consequently, that belong on the trash heap.
3. "Left" versus "right" images: The political dimension
The aesthetic axis will turn into a political one if we turn it 90 degrees clockwise. "High" and "low" now become "right" and "left" ? two political attitudes which in everyday language are equated with "conservative" (seeking to preserve the political status quo) and "progressive" (seeking to change the political status quo).
But what is "right" and "left," and what is, in fact, "political" photography?
According to Umberto Eco, a message has an aesthetic function when it reveals the characteristics of ambiguity and autoreflexivity, that is, when it is (1) equivocally structured and (2) appears to refer to itself. By the same token, it can also be said that a message has a political function when it is (1) unequivocally structured and (2) appears to refer to something other than itself, i.e. it is not autoreflexive but projective. The aesthetic and political functions of a message are thus in a state of rivalry: an aesthetically rich work is politically poor, a politically rich one is aesthetically poor.
The discussion now touches on the dilemma of "political art," as, for instance, Josep Renau illustrates in his work We are proud to be Americans . . . ? the dilemma involving the aesthetic objective of interpreting and experiencing the world and the political objective of changing the world. Renau's photomontage is laid out denotatively for political forcefulness and has an unambiguous message which can be read in a straight line from top to bottom: the fat American can devour his huge roast with God's blessing because the starving peoples of the Third World caused their own suffering through uncontrolled population growth ("Malthusianism"). Aesthetically, however, this work is rather feeble, because its interpretation is clear and it cannot claim to be very original. ? Something entirely different is found in this scene by Eugene Smith: a young girl in a hallway before a glass door, transformed against the light into a bizarre silhouette, her hand spread in an oblivious gesture.
It is a scene, however, whose mysterious, poetic charm quicklydisappears when we learn from the caption that this girlhas been disfigured since birth as the result of a chemical accident. This picture, from Smith's project Minamata, is aesthetically too rich and too connotative to be politically effective. In view of the pictures' subject matter, the photographer was accused at the time of turning a highly political subject ? the chemical contamination of Minamata ? into an aesthetic subject.
Smith had also done something else that displeased a number of critics: he had exhibited his Minamata photographs in art galleries. Thus we come to the second aspect of "political" art. For the message ? whether aesthetic or political ? which an artist puts into a work is inevitably obscured by the meaning of the context in which it reaches the viewer. The context impregnates the work with meaning, if necessary even against the intentions of its creator.
The meaning of a work is determined by where it is received. More significant than the distinction between political goals and themes is the channel which an artist uses – the gallery (the aesthetic venue) or the street (the market of politics).
Alfredo Jaar, Hans Haacke, Victor Burgin, Barbara Kruger are all considered "political artists"; they belong to the first category, i.e. they work, to a large extent, for the gallery. Working for the gallery means working for the commodity market. When asked why she did not simply print her message on posters, Barbara Kruger answered: "These were objects. I wasn't going to stick them on the wall with pushpins. I wanted them to enter the marketplace because I began to understand that outside the market there is nothing . . . That's what the frames were about: how to commodify them. It was the most effective packaging device. Signed, sealed, and delivered." (Artnews 86/1987).
The second category of political artists includes those whose preferred field of action is the street. Their media are also appropriate for the street: posters, stickers, flyers, t-shirts. These artists produce no wares, only pure information. Their work, which includes both elaboration and propaganda of counter-information, has become known under the term cultural activism, coined by Douglas Crimp. They work mostly in groups, often anonymously, for unlike the political gallery-artists they are under threat of government persecution. I would like to briefly describe three examples of Cultural Activism.
Since 1985 the Guerilla Girls, a group of activists calling themselves "the conscience of the art world," have been mounting poster campaigns in Manhattan against racism and sexism in the art business. To preserve their anonymity, the Guerilla Girls wear gorilla masks when they appear in public. Their messages are terse and are based on elementary sociological and statistical facts.
Gran Fury, an activist collective working in New York since 1988 (named for the Plymouth automobile used by the police as an undercover vehicle), stages public events in an attempt to "take collective direct action to end the AIDS crisis." As long as there is no cure for AIDS, education is the only way to save lives: education about how AIDS is dealt with by health authorities and the media as well as about alternative sex practices. One of Gran Fury's most spectacular campaigns took place in 1988: they raided the city's newspaper vending machines and replaced the New York Times with New York Crimes, a protest edition with an identical layout.
Boys with Arms Akimbo is an anonymous activist group in San Francisco that sees itself as the driving force behind an international movement against censorship and hostility towards homosexuals. Since 1989 they have been distributing xerox posters with excerpts from sex education books and other sources under the motto "Sex is . . just sex." The Boys rely heavily on Dadaist principles, and their posters have been seen in more than 30 American and European cities as well as in Tel Aviv.
All three approaches – which, if you will, can be described as "leftist" – have one thing in common: they choose the street as their field of action in order to create a second public, the public of the mass media.
The political significance of a photograph, as we have seen, arises on the one hand from its aesthetic structure (its denotative and projective contents) and on the other hand from the context in which it reaches the viewer. The combination of image and text as well as image and number are among the preferred principles of aesthetic structuring today: text and number reduce the broad range of possible interpretations inherent in the image to a linear and thus political dimension. The aesthetic product will be received and interpreted, however, in a channel of a particular bias. And it appears to be the radical approaches of the cultural activists, who see the channel as an integrative aspect of the work, that give evidence of a broader consciousness. At the same time it becomes clear that the conquest of space outlined above, the step from staging to installation, is the outgrowth of strong political motivations.
4. "Digital" versus "analog" images: The technological dimension
We shall now extend our aesthetic-political model to include a third dimension – the technological. It is characterized by the conflict between digital and analog principles, and is represented by the spatial axis. For even more than the previous conflicts, that between digital and analog is a struggle for space.
The concept behind the photographic image is that of light strands between an original and its reproduction. We spontaneously regard this relationship as analog – as "logical" or "rational" – because it is a relationship that to a large extent corresponds to our experiential world: the photograph stands in analog relation to our natural human dimensions.
This natural relationship is being cracked, so to speak, by digital machines: the analog strands are cut, hacked to pieces, and newly computed. It would seem that this disappearance of analog space, this submergence into the black holes of zero-information, has served only to make room for an entirely new kind of space – an artificial, simulative, virtual space – although as yet we can only take a few tiny steps into it.
The immediate consequences for photography today can be partly summarized as follows.
Like all other analog technologies, photography is falling into the digital whirlpool. The photographic image is being functionalized and enslaved by computers; photographs become ordinary raw material. Photography thereby loses its proverbial autonomy and integrity. In other words, it is disintegrating into a production-oriented generative and a reproduction-oriented degenerative trend. The "generative" trend accentuates the material-sensual qualities inherent in the elementary photographic process; qualities of paper fiber, silver grain, and so on. The "degenerative" trend, on the other hand, detaches itself from these qualities and limits itself to pure surface information.
In that photography, as a digital code, can be transcoded at will, and complex syntheses of widely differing origins can be produced, our previous classifications are falling into total confusion. Can, for example, a picture produced with a paint software be called a photograph simply because it is photographed from the screen and printed on cibachrome? On the other hand, can a picture based on a photograph be described as a graphic simply because it is produced on a matrix printer? In short, our traditional categories are getting lost in digital space. New criteria must be developed, and the need for them is even greater when we consider the horizontal connections and the combinations arising from them – the links between optical, acoustical, tactile, and other signals.
Our traditional criteria of truth in photography are no less obsolete in the digital network. Photography as an analog technology allowed us to consider the camera a vending machine of truth, whose statements were conclusive with respect to technology. In the digital craze the resulting oppositions between document and invention, truth and fiction, authentic and fake are being disarranged as well. In consequence, the ethical burden is shifted from the process itself to the person using it: credibility in a courtroom, for example, is no longer an attribute of photography per se, but at best an attribute of a certain photographer.
In looking at today's digital art, I would now like to distinguish between three functions.
First, the computer as drawing tool: This application, hitherto the one most frequently encountered, is outmoded today. The computer as a kind of Super Mondrian that transforms mathematical formulas into graphic structures: digital pictorialism.
Second, the computer as image mixer: Montages, fades, etc., make use of the computer's synthetic possibilities, which are superior to conventional techniques not only in terms of precise maneuverability but also with respect to the generation of chaos and chance. In this as in all synthetic processes, the danger of kitsch is omnipresent – the computer as Super Dalí. Irrespective of such temptations, however, the image mixing computer can also be an instrument for a theoretically inspired attainment of sensual perception, as proved by the works of Nancy Burson and others.
The third function I wish to discuss is the computer as space-time machine. Here we are not concerned with material objects, with artefacts in the classical sense, but with the formation of social processes between humans and programmed machines. The discussion surrounding virtual worlds and cyberspace has pushed this most exciting approach to human-machine interaction into the foreground. In Jeffrey Shaw's "virtual museum," for example, a viewer sitting in a chair equipped with sensors "moves about" inside a museum structure which is visible as a video image. By turning and leaning the chair he can determine the direction of his movements, which he perceives as both real and simulated. He perceives spaces that contradict his experience, in that a small space is able to contain several larger ones.
This separation between observer and observed finally dissolves in the experimental cyberspace. The human is immersed in a mental world where space occurs as a plastic hull, as an immense holographic landscape in which all limitations of space and time seem to be abolished. It is a world, however, which, as Derrick de Kerckhove of the McLuhan Institute prophesies, will not necessarily appear clean and beautiful, but may perhaps look like a disused playground for garbage and kitsch.
The space dreamed of by the developers of cyberspace is of a different complexity than the Cartesian model, which I have used here to present the photographic dimension at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and technology. And it should be clear that the photographic dimension is a highly spatial one. Seldom has the expansion of two dimensions into three taken place on so many levels: in aesthetic creativity from wall picture to spatial installation; in political creativity from appeal to action; in scientific creativity from screen to cyberspace. The "photographic dimension" – it is no longer the simple category it once was; the epistemological ghetto of a few freaks. What it is, and what is interesting about it, can be found on its periphery: a dimension with innumerable interfaces.
© 1992 Andreas Müller-Pohle. Abridged version of a lecture delivered at the Madrid symposium "The Photographic Dimension – Contemporary Strategies in the Arts," first published in European Photography 53, vol. 14, nr. 1, spring 1993. English translation by Timothy Bell. An updated (French/English) version, based on a lecture delivered at the Goethe Institute in Tokyo on 18 October 1996, has been published in Rik Gadella (ed.): Paris Photo 1997, Paris: I.P.M., 1997.
