Artifacts of artifice

Art in America, July, 1998 by Kate Linker

Among the photographs in the retrospective of Sarah Charlesworth's work recently on view at SITE Santa Fe, one image has special significance. Still Life with Camera (1995), from the series of Cibachrome prints called "Doubleworld," presents an arrangement of objects posed simply, almost austerely, on a shelf, as if in a Victorian library or drawing room. A bottle of wine adjoins a worn, leather-bound book; next to the book is a framed daguerreotype, which is spatially closest to the massive, accordionlike box camera of the work's title. Nothing about this roundelay of 19th-century objects seems special-- one could sleuth endlessly, pointlessly, for hidden meanings -- but their arrangement is.

For one thing, the woman figured in the daguerreotype gazes intently at a camera, much as the camera in Still Life seems fixed on its surrounding forms. And, equally important, a close look reveals that the wooden frame that seems to support the shelf also divides it in two, into identical, diptychlike shelves. The camera occupies one, surveying its object -- world-a location that the artist emphasizes through framing. However, if the viewer of the photograph were to imagine his or her eye in the position of the viewfinder, the scene that confronts that eye would include not the objects but the board: the camera lens is focused on a visual field from which it is separated, occluded, "blanked." Charlesworth thus interposes a screen into a century's delusions of visual appropriation.

This retrospective offers an occasion to survey a career, now spanning two decades, that is emblematic of the concerns of a postwar generation of artists. Born in East Orange, N.J., in 1947, Charlesworth attended Barnard College in New York City, graduating in 1969. As an art history major she took many studio art courses, including classes in painting, but a series of encounters gradually redirected her allegiances. In 1967 Charlesworth studied with Douglas Huebler, and this period and her friendship with Huebler initiated her interest in Conceptual art. At the time, Huebler was turning away from his Minimalist-style sculptures towards dematerialized, objectless work, attempting, as Charlesworth says, "to lasso the idea in art."(1)

Through Huebler she became acquainted with many of the practices and partisans of Conceptualism, and in 1968 she saw one of the first exhibitions of Conceptual art in New York, a four-person show of work by Robert Barry, Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, that Seth Siegelaub organized in a rented gallery on 52nd Street. Reading Kosuth's essay "Art after Philosophy" distanced Charlesworth further from painting, and she felt an increasing need, in her words, to "answer the argument" posed by Conceptualism. One response was her undergraduate thesis -- a 50-print study of the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum that used photographs instead of written text as a means of representing ideas.

Charlesworth supported herself for seven years after graduation as a free-lance photographer, taking courses in different disciplines, including a photography course at the New School with Lisette Model. As is well known, she lived with Kosuth for most of the 1970s. In retrospect, she has said that what she gained from this period was a sense of the need for artists to reflect critically on their practice, acknowledging both the internal dialectic of art and the external ground of social and economic conditions. This sense of the "historicity" of practice, however, was absent from the purist culture of art photography to which she had been exposed with Model. The gap pained her, and Charlesworth has described this period as a phase of searching for her own historical voice. In 1973, while researching turning points in human history, she discovered a daguerreotype containing an image of the first person known to be photographed, a solitary man having his shoes shined on a Parisian boulevard. Because of the long exposure time, the figure registered in strong, dark tones, standing out sharply from its blurred surroundings. Charlesworth isolated the figure, enlarged it, and printed it as a silkscreen, resulting in an image that, she said, "felt right."

With Kosuth and several colleagues from Art & Language/New York, Charlesworth in 1975-76 founded and edited 7We Fox, a landmark magazine devoted to art theory that survived for only three issues. Although its pages are permeated by squabbling in-fighting among its founders, The Fox is a remarkable document: behind its sometimes labored language and yawn-inducing syntax lies a radical sense of historical urgency. Thus, in one of Charlesworth's contributions from 1975, pointedly titled "A Declaration of Dependence," she describes art's dependence on social or historical conditions, opposing it to the supposedly autonomous world of idealist art. In her argument for a materialist practice that presumes an intimate relationship between artist and culture, Charlesworth tweaks the nose of the now-attenuated Conceptualism: "To the extent that conceptual art is dependent upon the very same mechanisms for presentation, dissemination, and interpretation of art works, it functions in society in a manner not unlike previously more morphologically inclined work. . . . `Art as idea' was once a good idea, but art as idea as art product, alas, moves in the world of commodity products.