'80 Reduse: "Pictures" Reframed - critics explore rehanging of seminal exhibition from 1977

David Rimanelli

Today, the art of the '80s sits on a cusp. Too near to be "historical," the period has receded just enough to afford hindsight review. The following reflections, occasioned by Artists Space's recent rehanging of Douglas Crimp's seminal exhibition "Pictures," inaugurate a new series in these pages devoted to reexamining the unsettled legacy of that era. The remarks of contributing editor DAVID RIMANELLI, whose art-world initiation occurred as the Pictures artists came to full prominence in the mid-'80s, are paired here with the fresh-eyed appraisal of art historian SCOTT ROTHKOPF, born a year before the show's 1977 opening.

DAVID RIMANELLI

Signs of the Time

WHEN DOUGLAS CRIMP'S GROUP SHOW "PICTURES" OPENED AT ARTISTS SPACE IN SEPTEMBER 1977, I was in junior high, so I won't presume to speak about its initial reception. What I am sure of is the shadow the show cast when I first started visiting galleries in the East Village and SoHo circa 1984. Crimp's essay "Pictures"--taking "its point of departure from the catalogue text"--was published in October 8 (Spring 1979) and subsequently anthologized in Brian Wallis's Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984), the Big Think bible of the '80s art-world ingenue. Wallis's book had an indelible effect on those who were either disinclined to embrace the blatant corniness of the Neue Bilde and transavanguardia (the other movements claiming the attention of young gallerygoers) from first exposure to their theatrical tantrums or whose minds were quickly changed. Crimp's essay, along with other critical shibboleths of the time, served this conversion in a remarkably efficacious way.

The appeal of Pictures in the mid-'80s was in part the movement's calculated ambiguity, its appearance of detached irony shot through with menace, and the manner in which it embraced stagy, ersatz effects. Crimp lays emphasis on these very qualities. Of Sherrie Levine's Sons and Lovers, 1976-77, he writes in the catalogue text: "From these banal pictures emerges a scenario that moves from assassination to adultery. Levine's genre is the melodrama, where the cliche is the vehicle of the larger-than-life story. One thinks of the TV soap opera with its stultifying repetition of drab sets, bland characters, tedious dialogue. Where is there a single image in that daily routine that would indicate the dramas of life and death that are always enacted there?" Of course, one could say that Rainer Fetting's genre is melodrama, too, but it is utterly unconvincing. With the critical attitude Pictures fostered in the face of neo-expressionism, the emphasis on received or "processed" (historically overdetermined) imagery i n Pictures left the door open for an appreciation of such varied artistic phenomena as neo-geo, Institutional Critique, and even certain species of painterly painting (e.g., the early Philip Taaffe).

The Pictures aesthetic worked well with such high-'80s phenomena as promiscuous cinephilia, New Wave music, "androgyny," and asymmetrical haircuts. Its embrace of low-to-middling culture, its calculated chill, and its theoretical insistence on "constructed" identities (an ill-defined notion that became tiresome some time back but is still in use) abetted a certain young and cheerfully cynical mind-set. Nature Morte by day, Pyramid Club by night. Also, the tendency to regard the surrounding world as somehow not really real, as instead a fabric of elusive and duplicitous representations, accorded with a generalized revulsion toward the Reagan administration, although it didn't necessarily serve any more specific political agenda at the time. An increasingly inchoate sense of playacting hysteria over conspiratorial simulation reached its apogee with the shapeless yet wannabe-definitive statement of the 1989 "Image World" show at the Whitney. (A few months earlier the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles had mounted "A Forest of Signs," a more succinct overview of Pictures and neo-geo.) By the time the '80s gave way to the '90s--with the Gulf War, the recession, and the politicized attitude toward the AIDS crisis, to which Crimp gave himself wholeheartedly as both theoretician and agitator--Pictures had run its course. In "Photographs at the End of Modernism," the introduction to his collected essays On the Museum's Ruins (1993), Crimp states that "it was the specter of death that finally revealed to me the limits of my conception of postmodernism.... My engagement in direct-action politics did not, however, represent a break with the positions argued in these essays. Rather it grew out of an attempt to adapt those positions to an analysis of the aesthetic responses to AIDS."

"Pictures" included five artists: Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith. Artists Space's partial rehanging this past summer (many works were unavailable) afforded the opportunity to measure the distance some of the artists have traveled since the late '70s, either settling into institutionalized midcareer stasis or disappearing to varying degrees from the art-world stage. What of this work when it was "fresh"? Levine's drawings benefit from Crimp's reading of them in the catalogue text, prepping the would-be historian of her oeuvre for its frequently histrionic subtext. Longo's The American Soldier and the Quiet Schoolboy, 1977, is something of a canonical work. In his appropriation of a film still from Fassbinder's The American Soldier showing a man shot from behind, Longo introduces an image to which he would return in his performance-cum-film Sound Distance of a Good Man, 1978. With their suggestions of violence and grandiosity, such works provide a template for the artist's subsequent "Men in the Cities" series, 1978-83, the paragon of Longo's archly stylized, rather bombastic vision of apocalyptic urban alienation.

Brauntuch's 1 2 3, 1977--a triptych showing three drawings by Adolf H. against blood-red backgrounds--isn't "disturbing" in its lack of commentary. Instead, the piece looks agreeably aesthetic and quite collectible. Ergo, the distancing effects typically employed by the Pictures artists don't necessarily promise criticality; maybe they never meant to. Anyway, Nazis never go out of style: A recent descendant of Brauntuch's my-lips-are-sealed attitude is Piotr Uklanski's "The Nazis," 1998, although the latter images, all appropriated from the movies and often very campy, are not exactly understated, whereas Brauntuch relies on reserve to achieve his effect. The title itself operates precisely not as a caption.

Having apparently vanished from the art scene for over a decade, Jack Goldstein seems poised for a revival, with recent exhibitions of his early films in Stuttgart, Cologne, and Los Angeles. His works were the most successful in the show. The films Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Shane, both 1975, were highlights. The former is Goldstein's famous appropriation of the MGM lion, caught in a perpetual roar (at least when the film is shown as a loop, as it was not here); the latter shows a trained German shepherd barking on cue, over and over again. In such works as these, Goldstein overlays the serial attitude of Minimalism and Conceptualism with aspects of Pop, achieving with elegance and economy that sotto voce creepiness that courses throughout the best of the Pictures work.

Perhaps the exhibition's oddest surprise was Philip Smith, whose schematic drawings figured prominently in the original show but who was demoted to a footnote in Crimp's October text. Critic Jerry Saltz told me that when he visited Artists Space with some recent MFA grads, the works they responded to most were Smith's--this sort of figurative, handmade imagery (like, say, that of Ida Applebroog or William Kentridge) best accorded with their idea of what art looks like. Smith was "cool," the others "whatever." It certainly wasn't the response I would have expected, but then again, like Pictures, maybe I'm a little dated.

SCOTT ROTHKOPF

Hit or Myth

BY THE TIME I BEGAN STUDYING ART HISTORY IN THE MID-'90S, DOUGLAS CRIMP'S 1977 GROUP show "Pictures" had achieved the quasi-mythic status of those exhibitions we latecomers can imagine we've seen, even if we haven't. Like the Jewish Museum's "Primary Structures," Michael Fried's "Three American Painters," or even Damien Hirst's "Freeze," "Pictures" seems less an object of history than of folklore in the minds of those too young to have seen it firsthand. With that show, we are told, a canny critic inaugurated the enticingly slick and brainy strain of '80s art, and we might envision a gallery space in which Richard Prince's Marlboro man gallops alongside Cindy Sherman as she mugs for the camera, with Sherrie Levine's rephotographed sharecropper grimacing nearby. Never mind that none of these iconic works had yet been realized at the time of the exhibition's opening, or for that matter that Sherman and Prince didn't even grace its walls. They may as well have--given that the hype and attendant theorizing of "po stmodern" and "appropriation" art grew so bloated as to have all but obscured its fabled source. Nearly a quarter century later, Artists Space, the exhibition's original venue, partially restaged "Pictures," introducing the show to a new generation of viewers. Yet rather than substantiate the myth, the rehanging felt more like a glimpse behind the wizard's curtain.

From the vantage of hindsight, "Pictures" had the air of a dress rehearsal for the '80s, not the decade's triumphant debut. Lucky for Crimp, he still had a few years to shuffle his casting and clean up his act, which is in effect what he did before publishing a revision of his catalogue essay in the spring 1979 issue of October. Today the exhibition is remembered primarily through that article, which featured Sherman's film stills as well as other works that were not actually included in the show but that better suited the theoretical trajectory launched in the catalogue essay. In that earlier text, Crimp argued that the "Pictures" artists were engaged in a radical exploration of the very nature of representation, which in their hands "does not achieve signification in relation to what is represented, but in relation to other representations." He continued: "Representation has returned in their work not in the familiar guise of realism, which seeks to resemble a prior existence, but as an autonomous function that might be described as 'representation as such.'" According to this line of thinking, the "Pictures" artists questioned the structure of visual signification by exposing how images mediate our experience and how images are themselves mediated by other images. Eventually, this argument took on a life of its own, expanding to include critiques of authorship and identity politics, issues not directly addressed by the original show.

That exhibition included not only such familiar figures as Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine but also Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, and Philip Smith, artists far less known today. In light of the show's rehanging, Smith's and Brauntuch's slimmer renown seems fairly well deserved. The former's bannerlike paintings each served up an enigmatic abundance of nearly fifty sketchy images, ranging from sportsmen and puppeteers to cats taking tea, but the works failed to offer viewers adequate incentive to muddle through their overwhelming accumulations of incongruous imagery. By comparison, Brauntuch's spare prints seemed too precious in design and overdetermined in iconography, as in the case of three expansive crimson fields, each containing a single, small, silk-screened drawing of an architectural detail or a tank. Although the source of these images may not have been immediately recognizable, the catalogue's disclosure that they issued from none other than Hitler's hand came less as a dramatic revelation than a leaden punch line.

Goldstein's work, however, looked fresh and perfectly ripe for historical reappraisal, especially in light of recent efforts by the likes of Douglas Gordon, Dara Friedman, and Paul Pfeiffer. A number of his elegant short films centered on a still image that miraculously sprang to life. In one, a human hand--each finger tipped with a tiny adhesive butterfly--sat motionless on a blue ground, until a slight twitch of the fingers made the insects flutter as if in the breeze. Other films of Goldstein's, including one starring an endlessly growling MGM lion, consisted of repeating film fragments entirely stripped from their contexts (a device related to Longo's far less compelling film-based reliefs). These works actually answered Crimp's call for an investigation of representation, and they did so on their own terms, with economy and wit, as did the artist's phonographs, such as The Six Minute Drown, 1977, which on two three-minute sides contrasted the gruesome pretense of recording a death with the hilarious stag iness of splashing sounds and Chewbacca-like screams.

Apart from Goldstein's contribution, all the work in the show had a surprisingly rough and quirky feel, betraying a hand often presumed to be purposefully absent from Pictures art. Here, one realized how these artists' production values had grown slicker over the years, just as Pop and Minimal artists had tidied up their own early work by adopting the silk screen or commercial fabrication. For example, Sherrie Levine exhibited a series of drawings in which the silhouetted profiles of American presidents and anonymous women faced off across blank expanses of graph paper. The works seemed familiar, in light of Levine's later presidential profiles cut from glossy magazine photographs. However, the earlier heads were filled not with mass-media imagery but with carefully painted bands of fluorescent tempera in bright blue, black, orange, red, and pink. Levine's strange palette and emphatic touch were at once charming and perplexing, since such details seemed to seep--like some aberrant pictorial excess--outside th e rigid semantic boundaries in which Crimp inscribed his artists' work.

This asymmetry between Crimp's theoretical model and its initial objects was perhaps the biggest surprise of the exhibition's rehanging. How, one wondered, could Crimp have based such grand claims on art that seemed to make such modest claims for itself, and what critical bias could have led him to overlook that work's often insistent visual detail? More important, did the art in his original exhibition really question the nature of representation in a fundamentally different way than earlier appropriations by Rauschenberg, Warhol, Ruscha, or even Baldessari? Certainly, the later photographic inquiries that came to be grouped under the umbrella of '8os Pictures theory--whether by Sherman, Prince, Lawler, Kruger, Charlesworth, or Levine--all did raise important new questions regarding the signifying power of images and their attendant place in an endlessly proliferating chain of reference. Yet those works were not found in the original landmark exhibition, and its rehanging gave us the opportunity to see that Pictures, like any budding artistic "movement" or tendency, emerged unevenly and tentatively before Crimp and his artists refined its theoretical course. Nowhere was this hesitancy more visible than in Crimp's recurring suggestion that the early Pictures artists shared an impulse toward psychological "narrative." In his catalogue essay, he sprinkled words and phrases such as "psychological resonance," "imagination," "dreams," and "anxiety" throughout his discussions of Levine's paired profiles, Smith's busy menageries, and Goldstein's oblique tales. Nevertheless, to contemporary eyes, Crimp and his gang still seemed slightly embarrassed by the reemergence of those "literary" conventions in visual art, and they clung to modernism's self-critical logic, even as they were said to break from it. Crimp claimed that the Pictures artists, like guilty pleasure seekers, questioned the very possibility of representation while simultaneously flirting with its narrative rewards. Today, that anxious ambivalence toward dep iction seems just as alien as the forceful critical conviction with which Crimp diagnosed it. Of course, many young artists still appropriate preexisting imagery and stage elliptical narrative "pictures" before the camera or canvas. But now, often less directly concerned with the problems of representation, they just get on with the story.

SCOTT ROTHKOPF is an art historian based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Curator of the first comprehensive survey of Mel Bochner's late-'60s photographs, to open at the Fogg Art Museum in March 2002, Rothkopf is completing a book on Surrealism in American art in the '60s, forthcoming from Yale University Press next year. In this issue, Rothkopf presents one of a pair of essays reflecting on the legacy of Douglas Crimp's seminal 1977 show "Pictures" at Artists Space in Tribeca, partially restaged this summer at the alternative venue's current SoHo location. Artforum contributing editor DAVID RIMANELLI provides a second look at the show. The curator of "The Salon of 1999: Friends and Enemies" at the Fifth International and "Sentimental Education" at Deitch Projects, New York, the following year, Rimanelli is teaching art history at New York University this fall.

PHOTO: ALEXIS SORNIN (ROTHKOPF); TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS (RIMANELLI).

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