Game face: Douglas Huebler and the voiding of photographic portraiture

"The illiteracy of the future," someone has said, "will be ignorance not
of reading or writing, but of photography." But shouldn't a photographer
who cannot read his own pictures be no less considered an illiterate?
Won't the inscription become the most important part of the photograph?
--Walter Benjamin

On December 17, 1972, Douglas Huebler took ten photographic portraits of the German photographer Bernd Becher. These portraits, together with a written statement, constitute Huebler's Variable Piece #101. The statement explains how the work was made: Becher was asked to pose, in the following order, as: "a priest, a criminal, a lover, an old man, a policeman, an artist, Bernd Becher, a philosopher, a spy, and a nice guy." After two months Huebler reordered the original sequence of photographs and sent them to Becher, asking him to "make the 'correct' associations with the given verbal terms." Becher's reordered list of character types is listed on the statement as: "1. Bernd Becher; 2. Nice Guy; 3. Spy; 4. Old man; 5. Artist; 6. Policeman; 7. Priest; 8 Philosopher; 9. Criminal; 10. Lover." The written statement explains all this. But more than a simple explanation, the statement is also constitutive of the work: "Ten photographs and this statement join together to constitute the final form of this piece." Word and image combine, one playing off the other, to form Variable Piece #101.

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As with the majority of Huebler's work, Variable Piece #101 couples the laconic, bureaucratic voice of a written statement with the absurd humor of the photographs. Writing serves as the straight man to Huebler's photographic portraits as Becher's face contorts to fit its impersonations: priest glowers, nice guy laughs, artist throws his head back despondently, criminal eyes bulge, philosopher brow furrows. Or is it the policeman who glowers and the artist who furrows his brow; the lover who laughs while the spy's eyes bug out? Is this the piercing stare of priestly disapproval or of criminal cunning? Is it metaphysics or mania that provokes this grimace? How do we, along with Becher, "make the 'correct' associations with the given verbal terms"?

The situation is not helped if we look to the two most widely distributed manifestations of Variable Piece #101: the 1995-96 catalogue to the exhibition Reconsidering the Object of Art at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the 1992-93 catalogue to Huebler's retrospective exhibition in Limoges, France. In the Limoges catalogue, Becher's numbered choices seem to correspond to the numbers on the photographs. We can see the logic in Becher's matching of description to image--the first "neutral" portrait makes sense as "Bernd Becher," the second face laughs as the "nice guy," the "spy" keeps his head down in the third, the "old man" babbles and drools in the fourth, and so on. Word and image seem to dovetail neatly as photography captures its types. But there is a problem with this apparent bond between text and photograph. For while Huebler gives us the original list, organized according to the sequence in which the character types were photographed (priest, criminal, lover, etc.), and the order in which Becher made his choices (1. Bernd Becher, 2. nice guy, 3. spy, and so on), he does not tell us which of these lists the numbered photographs correspond to. We have no way of knowing, in other words, whether the first photograph in the sequence is "a priest" as per the original list, or "Bernd Becher" as Becher guessed two months later.

Comparison with the MoCA catalogue only complicates matters. Here, the photographs are no longer numbered, and worse, they are not in the same order as the Limoges catalogue. Worse still, the first and third photograph in each of the series is different, appearing in one catalogue but not the other. What are we to make of these differences? How are we to understand the ultimate indecipherability of identity as it occurs in Variable Piece #101, as two forms of information--text and photograph--confuse and conceal, rather than affirm and disclose, the image of Becher and his assumed character types?

The statement, in contrast to the photographs, is consistent. But then it needs to be in order to satisfy the requirements of the work: "Ten photographs and this statement join together to constitute the final form of this piece." The statement demands consistency--it has to be "this statement"--but there is no mention of which ten photographs need accompany it; the ten from either the Limoges or MoCA catalogue serve equally well. What is stated explicitly, however, is that once ten photographs are coupled with the statement, the piece is constituted in its "final form." Yet this categorical statement of finality is patently contravened in the disparity between the Limoges and MoCA catalogues. The discrepant photographs clearly refuse to cooperate with demands of the text, creating a disjunction that is exactly opposite the ordinarily supportive role of caption to photograph. Indeed, as Roland Barthes describes, captions typically work in tandem with accompanying photographs such that the text is effectively "absorbed" into the overall denotative function. "The caption," Barthes writes, "by its very disposition, by its average measure of reading, appears to duplicate the image, that is, to be included in its denotation." (1) Or as Carol Armstrong puts it: