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In the late 1960s and the 1970s, a significant
paradigm shift occurred within the history of postwar
art: photography was absorbed into critical contemporary
art practices. Postmedia: Conceptual Photography in
the Guggenheim Museum Collection investigates the
ways in which artists in the U.S. and Europe deployed
photographic strategies during this period to transgress
traditional, medium-specific boundaries such as painting,
sculpture, and fine-art photography.
The art-historical sources for this turn to the
photographic may be located in the aesthetics of Dada
photo-montage. Robert Rauschenberg's and Andy Warhol's
exploitations of media imagery also provided prototypes
for a younger generation's embrace of photo-based
practices. Photography's prevalence in the most radical
art of the late '60s and '70s directly paralleled its
ubiquity in all forms of cultural representation:
television, film, print journalism, and
advertising.
Defined by multiple social and institutional
functions, the photograph bridges such discrete
categories as mass culture and high art as well as
technology and aesthetics. Its seeming correspondence to
the "real" world, and its "low" cultural value, made
photography a democratic vehicle through which to
redefine aesthetic experience. Artists used photography
as a means to contest the autonomous art object and
transgress the medium-based categories of Modernism. As a
hybrid medium, the photograph was used to create works
that privileged art-as-activity over art-as-product and
documentary evidence over expression.
Postmedia presents various ways that
artists of the time incorporated the photographic into
their work as a critical tool, including photography as a
recording device for ephemeral or durational events (as
in the work of Jan Dibbets and Douglas Huebler); as a
document of art created outside the gallery environment
(Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, and
Robert Smithson); as a tool to analyze the seriality of
architecture and industry (Dan Graham); as a record of
the performative, corporeal gesture (Marina Abramovic,
Vito Acconci, and Ana Mendieta); and as a means to
examine the relationship between image, text, and meaning
(Robert Barry and Joseph Kosuth).
Nancy Spector, Curator of Contemporary
Art
This exhibition is sponsored by
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Top: Robert
Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9)
[detail, image 4], 1969. Nine Kodachrome color slides,
variable dimensions. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography
Committee and with funds contributed by the International
Director's Council and Executive Committee Members:
Edythe Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Linda
Fischbach, Ronnie Heyman, Dakis Joannou, Cindy Johnson,
Barbara Lane, Linda Macklowe, Brian McIver, Peter Norton,
Willem Peppler, Denise Rich, Rachel Rudin, David Teiger,
Ginny Williams, Elliot Wolk.
Bottom: Gordon
Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975. Cibachrome
print, 101.9 x 76.2 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York, Purchased with funds provided by the International
Director's Council and Executive Committee Members:
Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Linda Fischbach,
Ronnie Heyman, J. Tomilson Hill, Dakis Joannou, Cindy
Johnson, Barbara Lane, Linda Macklowe, Brian McIver,
Peter Norton, Willem Peppler, Alain-Dominique Perrin,
David Teiger, Ginny Williams, Elliot Wolk.
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