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March 25, 2010
In his Introduction to Thinking Photography Victor Burgin critically comments on what a photographic education in the 1980s represented. He says that:
Contrary to their declared intent, the majority of those courses whose concern is with photography as art belong in the first [vocational] category rather than the second [ones that consider photography in its totality as a general cultural phenomenon, and to develop his or her own ideas as to what direction to pursue]. They offer a vocational training for that branch of the culture industry whose products are photographic exhibitions and books. The academic content of such courses tends overwhelmingly to take the form of an uncritical initiation into the dominant beliefs and values prevailing in the art institution as a whole. On such courses 'criticism' and 'history' stand in place of theory....The dominant mode of history and criticism of photography, in which the main concern is for reputations and objects, and in which the objects inherit the reputations to become commodities: a history and criticism to suit the saleroom.
That describes my experience in gaining a photographic education in the 1980s in Melbourne. Photography was the outsider to the art institution because it had been excluded through most of the 20th century. It just wanted to be accepted by the art institution, and was not critical of the ethos of the art institution.
What was not explored was 'Modernism', most specifically in the meaning that this word has been given in the writings of Clement Greenberg and his followers (the essential features of which are present in the earlier writings of Clive Bell and Roger Fry), the sign was to be totally erased from the surface. The art work was to become a totally autonomous material object which made no gesture to anything beyond its own boundaries; the surface itself - its colour, its consistency, its edge - was to become the only content of the work.
It was accepted by embracing the ethos of modernism. As Burgin points out after Cubism, Modernism was to free art from its old obligations to representation defined in those every terms which Cubism itself had called into question: illusion and communication:
Photography, however, was unable to follow painting into modernist abstraction without the appearance of straining after effect; the unprecedented capacity of photography for resemblance seemed most appropriately to determine its specific work and to distinguish it from painting...Certainly there has emerged over the modern period a form of 'photographic modernism' founded on concepts of 'photographic
seeing', but.... it has only the most tenuous and uneasy purchase on those considerations of 'content' which remain so obstinately central to our experience of photographs.
Photography's relationship to modernism and to theory was therefore an uneasy one. In my experience my photographic education made no reference to conceptual art which underlined the central importance of theory, to the photographic as sign, or to photographic meaning.
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