Did anyone else see the photos of Rio’s 2007 Carnaval in the media last week? Though the event is always a boon to photographers in search of colour and dramatic juxtapositions, the theme of one group was a real stunner for the SLR set: celebrating iconic photographs. I’m currently doing some work for a (really great) photo-art education group and I feel like, looking at this snap from the BBC website, that this dance piece basically beats about 90% of their — and basically anyone else’s photo-art — programming hands-down. Like, talk about perfectly capturing or raising questions about (a) the power position of photography in our culture, (b) the way that photography and the age of reproduction produces unwilling (and often uncompensated) icons, (c) the role of photography and said reproductions in creating a global visual culture, (d) relationships and disparities between body and image, object and picture plane, and (e) what is creative thought.
Of course, the question of context would be an important one here if I were curatorially or museologically inclined. This dance/costuming/festival/spectacle was not at all created in a contemporary art context, nor was it (I’m guessing, to be honest, but since this wasn’t reported in the art media I’m gonna say) created by artists. Is it, ergo, not art? I think to the art media and to art institutions, it probably means that it isn’t. But if Matthew Barney or Vanessa Beecroft had coordinated it, it would be.
So, I’m wandering here, but it’s basically wandering around something I’ve been thinking about for a while and that a lot of people have theorized around but about which I’m still not convinced. Shall I spit it out, already? OK. I’ve been thinking about how Great Lord Duchamp rocked the art world past and present because his object-projects so exquisitely demonstrated and tested the concept that the definition of object art is contingent on its locational context. That is, if an object is in a gallery, it’s art, but if it exists beyond the walls of a gallery, it’s somehow not art. (Even though we’re all postmodern and stuff, I still think this mentality prevails. Heavily.)
Well, I’ve been thinking (as others likely have before me, but nevertheless) that there is a collary to Level 5 Dragonmaster Duchamp’s experiments in terms of “artistic public performance.” But instead of the physical boundaries of the galleries and museum dictating what is art and what is not, it’s the physical boundaries of the artist’s body that dictates what public performance is art and what is not.
This artist-as-gallery/white-cube-in-flesh-and-blood rule can be a frustrating one, however, because, as demonstrated in Rio, it’s often not artists who are making the most compelling and meaningful public action work. And this is where it might come full circle to photography, in a way. Photography, through its framing, can steal those terrific actions and performances from the public “non-art” sphere (meaning public, “non-artist” bodies) and relocate them in more readily acknowledged artistic contexts (galleries, museums, magazines, or hey! maybe blogs).
But the sucky part, in a way, is that the photog gets the credit, not the incredibly awesome non-BFA’d publics out there. I don’t think these thoughts should stop anyone from making photographs or nice gallery works, but I feel like a snake that’s eaten my tail on this one; if you can get me moving again cerebrally, I’d appreciate it.
On a briefer note, the ever-pleasantly-snake-eating-its-own-tailish Guardian Arts Blog has a little article on whether art critics should also be artists.
