Artifacts of artifice

Art in America, July, 1998 by Kate Linker

(3.) Charlesworth, "For Artists Meeting," The Fox, no. 3, 1976, p. 41.

(4.) Charlesworth, review of Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, in Artforum, April 1982, pp. 72-73.

(5.) This sense of the constructive role of representations informed many '80s exhibitions, from the early "Image Scavengers: Photography" and "In Plato's Cave" (both 1982) to the 1989 "A Forest of Signs" and "Image World."

(6.) Most directly, however, Charlesworth's use of the term is a gloss on Douglas Crimp's definition, in his landmark 1977 exhibition, "Pictures," of the picture as "an object of desire, the desire for the significance that is known to be absent."

(7.) Charlesworth, in an interview with David Deitcher in Afterimage, Summer 1984, p. 17.

(8.) Giovanni Battista della Porta. Natural Magick (London, 1558), as cited in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 1990, p. 37.

(9.) Dave Hickey, "A Matter of Time: On Flatness, Magic, Illusion, and Mortality," Parkett, no. 40/41, 1994, p. 168.

(10.) Charlesworth's understanding of the organization of vision in the 19th century, like my own in these pages, has been influenced by Crary's Techniques of the Observer.

"Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective" was co-curated by Louis Grachos and Susan Fisher Sterling; it was jointly organized by SITE Santa Fe and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Itinerary: SITE Santa Fe [Nov. 1, 1997-Jan. 25, 1998], Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, [Mar, 23-June 13], National Museum of Women in the Arts [July 9-Sept. 27], Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art [Nov. 20, 1998-Jan. 24, 1999], Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass. [Mar. 25-May 30, 1999].