aims and objectives
- To explore the shift from post-conceptual photographic art practices to
large-scale, colour photography. Photography was accepted as an avant-garde
art form when it ceased trying to become a modernist Fine Art and pursued a
range of anti-aesthetic strategies instead. In the 1960s and 70s photographs
appeared alongside texts, as documents of performances, parodies of
photojournalism, or little books of snapshots. Large-scale colour photography
looks like a break with such practices, and a return to pictorial conventions.
What accounts for this shift?
- To re-examine anti-aesthetic photographic theory and practice from the
late 1960s through the 1980s in the light of these recent developments. Walter
Benjamin's 'Work of Art' essay was mobilized by theorists in the 70s and 80s
to pit photography against painting. According to this account, photography
necessarily corrodes the 'auratic' values of Fine Art. Against such values,
photography offered a more democratic, demystified, and critical cultural
form. Now that many artists seem to have abandoned this project, does it
remain credible?
- To examine what challenges photographic art practice presents to
traditional aesthetic categories. This will involve rethinking the relation
between recent photographic art and aesthetics in order to get beyond the
oppositions of the aesthetic versus the anti-aesthetic, and painting versus
photography. The more receptive attitude toward the aesthetic in art theory
raises a question as to whether it is to be revived in canonical or
reconfigured form.
-
To investigate photography as an artistic medium. We will focus on the
'post-Ruscha' conceptual tradition, and the 'post-Bechers' pictorial
tradition. Modernist criticism, from Greenberg to Szarkowski, suggested that
the specific nature of the medium could be isolated. As a result, it could not
accommodate the hybrid practices that thrived in the 1960s and 1970s. This
project will explore ways in which photography theory might take account of
the medium in non-essentialist, non-formalist ways.
- To explore the impact of digitalization on understanding photography as an
artistic medium. The debate over whether photography 'automatically' documents
the world, or creates imaginary worlds is as old as photography itself.
Digital technology has reinvigorated this debate, blurring the boundary
between photography and painting. Once artists can manipulate images to the
extent that it places the veracity of even apparently 'straight' photographs
in question, does this have implications for the medium in general?
- To promote discussion of recent photographic art within a broad art
historical, philosophical, curatorial and pedagogical context. Contemporary
art is increasingly represented in university curricula; as a result there is
a growing need for research into the history and theory of recent photographic
art. Moreover, in so far as photography is regarded as a mainstream art, our
goal to develop new criteria of value, and a more refined vocabulary for its
discussion, has implications for other fields, such as the acquisitions
policies of publicly-funded museums and grant-awarding bodies.
CLICK HERE For a
short description of the project's aims as published in Fotogeschichte, vol. 28,
issue 107 (in German)
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