Academic Sessions: London 2008
Photography after Conceptual Art
Session Convenors:
Margaret Iversen, Deptment of Art History and Theory, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ miversen@essex.ac.uk
Diarmuid Costello, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick; Diarmuid.Costello@warwick.ac.uk
Speakers:
Wölfgang Brückle (University of Essex) ‘Near -Documentary’ in the work of Jeff Wall
Margaret Iversen (University of Essex) Ed Ruscha and Performative Photography
Mark Godfrey (Tate Modern) Close-ups, Archives, Doubles, Series Portraits: Roni Horn and photography
Catherine Grant (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Courtauld Institute of Art) From ‘The Directorial Mode’ to ‘The Anti Photographers’
Hilde Van Gelder (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) The Shape of the Pictorial in Contemporary Photography
Alexander Streitberger (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Victor Burgin, Thomas Demand and the Logical Structure of Photography
Aron Vinegar (Ohio State University) Deadpan and the Absorption of Skepticism
Luke Skrebowski (Middlesex University) Productive Misunderstandings: Interpreting Mel Bochner’s theory of photography
Jean-François Chevrier (École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris) The Persistence of Realism
James Nisbet (PhD Stanford University and California College of the Arts) Hybrid Capture: James Welling’s photographs
Sandra Plummer (London Consortium, Birkbeck College) Depicting the Photograph
Tamara Trodd (University of Edinburgh) Thomas Demand’s Uncanny Re-Staging of Atget
Christine Conley (University of Ottawa) Morning Cleaning: Jeff Wall’s Large Glass
Rosemary Hawker (Queensland College of Art, Griffith University) Photography and the Banal
Joanna Lowry (University College for the Creative Arts) Photography Entropy and the Archive
Gordon Hughes (Rice University,Texas) Making Faces: Douglas Huebler’s photographic portraits
Session Abstract:
The title of this session can be taken in two directions. One can, with Jeff Wall, see conceptual photography as ‘the last moment of the pre-history of photography as art’ and so see the large-scale, colour photography of Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Wall himself, as the realization of the ambition of the medium to become an autonomous art form. Certainly it has been welcomed by the museum, market and many critics as such. Alternatively, the title might gesture in the direction of contemporary work that more clearly bears the traces of its passage through conceptual art. Much of the work that could be described in these terms is often produced by artists who employ photography alongside a range of other artistic media and activities to achieve their goals – Francis Alÿs, Sophie Calle, James Coleman, Tacita Dean, Louise Lawler and Gabriel Orozco. In the former case, photography holds its rightful place as a medium among other autonomous art forms; in the latter, photographic practices tend to blur the boundaries between the arts. Do these twin poles of the pictorial and the conceptual continue to organise the field of photography as a medium for contemporary art? Should photography be approached through aesthetic categories that apply more generally to pictorial arts or does it require a distinct framework to do justice to its specificity as both a medium and a technical apparatus? This session, which seeks to open up a debate about what is at stake in contemporary photographic art, forms part of large AHRC funded research project, Aesthetics after Photography, concerning the challenges of recent art photography to aesthetic theory. Papers deal with substantive theoretical or aesthetic issues raised by post-1960s photography as an artistic medium, particularly in light of the oft-heard claim that the arts now inhabit a ‘post-medium’ condition.
Margaret Iversen, Deptment of Art History and Theory, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ miversen@essex.ac.uk
Diarmuid Costello, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick; Diarmuid.Costello@warwick.ac.uk
Speakers:
Wölfgang Brückle (University of Essex) ‘Near -Documentary’ in the work of Jeff Wall
Margaret Iversen (University of Essex) Ed Ruscha and Performative Photography
Mark Godfrey (Tate Modern) Close-ups, Archives, Doubles, Series Portraits: Roni Horn and photography
Catherine Grant (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Courtauld Institute of Art) From ‘The Directorial Mode’ to ‘The Anti Photographers’
Hilde Van Gelder (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) The Shape of the Pictorial in Contemporary Photography
Alexander Streitberger (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Victor Burgin, Thomas Demand and the Logical Structure of Photography
Aron Vinegar (Ohio State University) Deadpan and the Absorption of Skepticism
Luke Skrebowski (Middlesex University) Productive Misunderstandings: Interpreting Mel Bochner’s theory of photography
Jean-François Chevrier (École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris) The Persistence of Realism
James Nisbet (PhD Stanford University and California College of the Arts) Hybrid Capture: James Welling’s photographs
Sandra Plummer (London Consortium, Birkbeck College) Depicting the Photograph
Tamara Trodd (University of Edinburgh) Thomas Demand’s Uncanny Re-Staging of Atget
Christine Conley (University of Ottawa) Morning Cleaning: Jeff Wall’s Large Glass
Rosemary Hawker (Queensland College of Art, Griffith University) Photography and the Banal
Joanna Lowry (University College for the Creative Arts) Photography Entropy and the Archive
Gordon Hughes (Rice University,Texas) Making Faces: Douglas Huebler’s photographic portraits
Session Abstract:
The title of this session can be taken in two directions. One can, with Jeff Wall, see conceptual photography as ‘the last moment of the pre-history of photography as art’ and so see the large-scale, colour photography of Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Wall himself, as the realization of the ambition of the medium to become an autonomous art form. Certainly it has been welcomed by the museum, market and many critics as such. Alternatively, the title might gesture in the direction of contemporary work that more clearly bears the traces of its passage through conceptual art. Much of the work that could be described in these terms is often produced by artists who employ photography alongside a range of other artistic media and activities to achieve their goals – Francis Alÿs, Sophie Calle, James Coleman, Tacita Dean, Louise Lawler and Gabriel Orozco. In the former case, photography holds its rightful place as a medium among other autonomous art forms; in the latter, photographic practices tend to blur the boundaries between the arts. Do these twin poles of the pictorial and the conceptual continue to organise the field of photography as a medium for contemporary art? Should photography be approached through aesthetic categories that apply more generally to pictorial arts or does it require a distinct framework to do justice to its specificity as both a medium and a technical apparatus? This session, which seeks to open up a debate about what is at stake in contemporary photographic art, forms part of large AHRC funded research project, Aesthetics after Photography, concerning the challenges of recent art photography to aesthetic theory. Papers deal with substantive theoretical or aesthetic issues raised by post-1960s photography as an artistic medium, particularly in light of the oft-heard claim that the arts now inhabit a ‘post-medium’ condition.