>Paul Strand said it first. I expect it will come to me where I filed it,
>but I have a Strand quote about "the purity/nature of the medium" written
>about 1917. Greenberg could have lifted it verbatim.
Oops, my sentence was clearly unclear at best. I WAS quoting Strand, but
saying that his demand that every medium must only do what it does
exclusively is repeated later by Greenberg. That Strand said it first was
exactly my point. Greeberg, BTW, considered photography a bastard medium on
the face of it, hence outside of the discussion of purism (and by extension,
art). As least, that's how i see it, without a direct supporting quote.
That idea of purism, that a medium should remain within the realm that is
its exclusively (hence Greenberg saying painting can't be "narrative")(oh
and i think it was that photography was always "narrative" that was a big
reason it wasn't art to him) is a big part of the "modernism" that was
countered by "post-modernism" (more properly "pluralism").
Many of the early critics of Pictorialism say photos shouldn't be on matte
paper, cuz that's the realm of etching, drawing, etc., and that it is used
only to imitate existing arts. Many photographers did just this, even
running their prints through an etching press with a blank plate to create a
plate mark. But some photographers (and somewhere in my piles may still
exist a contemporaneous quote) used matte paper for the same reasons the
other artists did (tactile surface, etc.). Why the first use should claim
exclusive rights is beyond me.
I think Frank Eugene's "Adam and Eve" (i've only seen the photogravure in
Camera Work- Graham Nash donated a quite complete collection to UCSC and i
spent quite some time with them, even got to drag my 5x7 and lights in one
day...) is an excellent work of art. It was (and still is) generally
dismissed as "fake etching." Eugene was actually a skilled etcher, and if
he'd wanted could have either done a real etching of the subject, or a more
convincing fake. What he was doing, i feel, was similar to what Whistler was
also doing at the time, violently removing unwanted areas of a pitcher and
leaving clear evidence of that violence.
-------------------------
Plywood and Rhetoric
graphic design from both sides of the brain
plyboy@teleport.com
http://www.teleport.com/~plyboy
"Momma DID raise a fool"