1980: Photography Emancipated
The exhibition Ils se disent peintres, ils se di
sent photographes [They Call Themselves Painters, They Call Themselves Photographers], held at the ARC / Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris from November 22nd, 1980 to January 4th, 1981, leaves a modest testimony: a catalogue with a glued binding of barely forty pages, a classification of the artists in alphabetical order with brief notes, and illustrations in black and white that are frustrating to say the least. By way of introduction, Suzanne Pagé, then director of the ARC, acknowledged that one of the points of the exhibition was to “blur a situation”. Yet she clearly points out what is at stake: it is a “liberated” photograph that will be discussed, and not the age-old question of its artistic status or even its relationship to painting, as its title would at first suggest. According to her, photography has found a “place” in the museum that allows it to experiment with another relationship to space. The essay by the art critic and exhibition curator Michel Nuridsany, which needs to be contextualised for its significance to be measured, proposes to identify in the artistic practices of the past decade an historic moment for photography, on a par with the avant-gardes such as New Objectivity and pop art: Ils se disent peintres, ils se disent photographes was something of a photographic cat among the pigeons in the late 1970s in France.
A MYTHICAL EXHIBITION?
Historiography has made the exhibition Ils se disent peintres, ils se disent photographes an historical milestone. In the context of relative improvisation and reduced financial means, Nuridsany succeeded in bringing together 35 artists, most of them internationally renowned, whose names—Ed Ruscha, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Jochen Gerz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hamish Fulton and Victor Burgin and Cindy Sherman—are enough to indicate the scale of the exhibition. Even today, the majority of the artists in the exhibition still occupy a prominent place on the art scene and in the history of art. Was it then a break with the then current cultural scene of photographic exhibitions (1980 was the birth of Le Mois de la Photo in Paris), or was this “event” (a term claimed by its curator) part of the continuity of debates on the place of photography in contemporary art? One thing is certain, the exhibition offered a photographical journey through contemporary art, and regardless of the heterogeneous nature of the approaches and intentions of each artist: “photography” revealed a history and an aesthetic, something of a common narrative of art through photography, and no longer the affirmation of a specificity of photography. But what kind of photography were we talking about in France at the time? Certainly not “contemporary” photography as we now understand it. In 1980, for ten years, French photography had been trying to position itself in relation to American photography, desperately trying to assert its artistic identity as well as its national singularity. It was in 1971 that the exhibition Photographie
nouvelle des États-Unis was hosted by the Bibliothèque Nationale. The corpus of American photographers selected by MoMA (Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand...) resembled a photographic Marshall Plan, imposing an American brand that elicited two somewhat contradictory reactions. The first was that of a France judged to be lagging behind in terms of artistic recognition of photography. The second was that of the need to distinguish itself from the artistic canon defined by the United States. Indeed, if the latter was a model, it was only for a fine art photography foreign to the experiments of all kinds carried out by conceptual and related artists. Nuridsany, then a pioneer of photographic criticism in the daily newspaper Le Figaro for the previous ten years, was one of the most virulent in denouncing this overly classic American photography, from which the French would do well to free themselves. Another voice was also driving the debate on the contemporary art scene: that of Jean Clair, editor-in-chief of Chroniques de l’Art Vi
vant who called on France to take photography out of its photo-club milieu, and shifted the stakes in a special issue in 1974 (1). Featured in that issue is a first article on the inventor of chronophotography, Étienne-Jules Marey, who would be exhibited for the opening of the Centre Pompidou in 1977 (and to which Nuridsany would make an historical reference in his essay), as well as pieces on Jean Le Gac, Didier Bay and Jochen Gerz.
METAMORPHOSIS
In the United States the gaze also shifted. In 1976 Artforum published a special issue on photography (2), with two major contributions: Nancy Foote’s article on “anti-photographers” (Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz, Jared Bark, les Becher, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Hamish Fulton, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Denis Oppenheim, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson), showing the ambivalence of a photography at the heart of conceptual art, and A.D. Coleman’s article on “Directorial Mode”, which he later called “grotesque photography” (3), based on staging and fictionalisation. It is an understatement to say that the photographic question and the various practices have become much more than just “well-behaved” prints for graphic art collectors. In the mid-1970s, the case was heard: for Jean Clair, who in 1977 signed Duchamp et
la photographie (4), as well as for the American critic Rosalind Krauss, who in the same
year wrote the famous article ‘Note on the index’ (5) in the magazine October. The theoretical moment of photography had come. People were no longer writing about photography, but of it and the notions it had brought into play, which were likely to revise the very idea of modernity. In the wake of this, Susan Sontag’s articles were grouped together in On Photography (1977), Roland Barthes published Camera Lucida (1980) and Philippe Dubois would soon publish L’Acte
Photographique (1983). How did this theoretical frenzy tally with conceptualist productions? The providential alliance of the documentary value and the aura of the ready-made is to be found in photography, which can carry out its task of reproduction while benefiting from the art quotient potentially achieved by the most trivial of entities. Photography thus seems to be able to occupy all positions: an alternative that makes the image reappear clandestinely in an iconophobic universe, an ersatz of a work of art in a climate that is resistant to the market, a release in the case of ephemeral works and, beyond information, a ready-made capable of dialoguing with the gallery space while adapting to the published form.The “humble servant” of conceptual art appears to be freeing itself, photography becoming a “theoretical object” as well as an expressive practice. But the national photographic scene was seeking an identity. In 1977 Nuridsany organised Tendances actuelles de la photographie en France (6) at the ARC. For him it was a manifesto for a new approach, with Bernard Plossu, Daniel Boudinet and John Batho among others. However, this counter-attack against the hegemony of American photography no longer seemed to be very topical. Three years later Ils se disent disent peintres,
ils se disent photographes confirmed to a wider public that photography was changing its world. That exhibition was still very different from the one that the Mam-VP offered in 1982 with the French Association of Artistic Action (AFAA), Photographie France Au
jourd’hui (7), where the spirit of synthesis brought together the trends of French photography and its critics. On this occasion Nuridsany was rather ironic, believing from then on only in a broader conception of photography extending to the plastic arts. In the space of a few years the field of photography underwent a metamorphosis, provincialising traditional photography to place at the centre a “liberated” photography, which had the merit of unifying artistic practices that were, to say the least, heterogeneous. Ils se disent photographes, ils se disent peintres, in a manner as intuitive as retrospective, without managing to name it, but nevertheless identifying a process in progress, sent out a strong signal that another large-scale event, this time entitled Une autre photographie (8) organised by Christian Gattinoni and Alin Avila in 1982 at the Maison des arts de Créteil, came to amplify with no fewer than a hundred artists and 350 works.
A TRICK OF HISTORY
So what about Ils se disent disent peintres,
ils se disent photographes? Does a manifestation make a manifesto? Admittedly, the curator criticizes in his text the desire for the “respectability of the photo”, because for him the adventure lies elsewhere than in the artistic legitimacy of the beautiful print. Photography would have much more to do with the obsession with the death of art that undermines the conceptual generation. It allows precisely getting out of the aporia that consists for artists in wanting to destroy art while producing it: art without art, this is the martingale that photography offers to the most iconoclastic artists. But Nuridsany understands just as well that it is a way out of a more prosaic impasse, by being the “means of bringing back within limits tolerable tor the art market an artistic trend that was trying to escape the system”. Galleries can indeed sell some remnant of an action or ephemeral experience thanks to the photographic “document of expression”. Nuridsany’s essay also seems to pin-point a ruse of history. In serving the interests of a dematerialised art, photography colonises the space freed up: photography henceforth combined with the present of art has to rethink its relationship to the wall. For several years now, what might be referred to as a photographic “tableaumania” has been taking shape in the words of Pierre de Fenoÿl, who organised 10 Ans de Photojournalisme (1977), Francois Hers, who, on this occasion, enlarged his press prints to a monumental format to conjure up the model of reportage, or Jean-Marc Bustamante, who baptised his large colour prints “tableaux”, affirming his ambitions to exhibit in art galleries. With this idea that the photographic print must move from the tradition of the graphic arts to an occupation of space, but without returning to the scenographic recipes too marked by a museography of propaganda (such as the historical one of Family of Man, in 1955, at the MoMA), it is indeed a question of thinking of photography as a work of art. Nuridsany notes: “More and more photographers asked themselves: What to do to obtain a picture that would look better on the wall than in a catalogue?They thought about it and enlarged their formats, joining the painters who first used photography in the 1920s [...] We therefore witnessed the ‘return to painting’ among artists, with the abandonment of the beautiful 30 x 30 black and white print, i.e. of the craft of art among photographers, an essential change in attitude towards photography. On the wall, the photograph almost necessarily becomes a painting. Or it doesn’t fit on the wall... Almost ten years later the notion of the “painting format” enunciated by Jean-François Chevrier at the exhibition Une autre objectivité (9) (1989) would in turn complete a process that had begun in the vicinity of conceptual art and which again finds in the allusion to New Objectivity a means of identifying the era with an historical avant-garde.
Translation: Chloé Baker (1) Chroniques de l’art vivant, no. 44, Nov. 1973. (2) Artforum, vol. 15, n°1, Sept. 1976. (3) A. D. Coleman, The Grotesque in Photography, Summit Books, 1977. (4) Jean Clair, Duchamp et la photographie, Chêne, 1977. (5) Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America (Part I), October, No. 3, Spring 1977, pp. 68-81; id., "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America" (Part II), October, No. 4, Autumn 1977, pp. 70-79. (6) Michel Nuridsany, Tendances ac
tuelles de la photographie en France, exhibition catalogue, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1977.
(7) Photographie France Aujourd’hui, exhibition catalogue, ARC / Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1982. (8) The exhibition was accompanied by a leaflet listing artists such as Sophie Calle, François Hers, Denis Roche, Tania Mouraud, Alix Cléo Roubaud, Hervé Guibert, etc. (9) Jean-François Chevrier, James Lingwood, Une autre objectivité, exhibition at the Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, March 14th-April 30th, 1989. Michel Poivert is professor of art history/photography at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University. Most recent book: 50 ans de photographie française de 1970 à nos
jours (Textuel, 2019).