From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 02/11/01-06:00:58 PM Z
shannon stoney wrote:
> >
> > In regard to sneering dismissals of Pictorialism: I think this is still
> > taught in colleges and universities, in my experience. I am a photo major
> > , and the mainstream view at my university seems to be that Pictorialism
> > is silly and Modernism rules. This is more the case with teachers in the
> > photo dept than with the art history people, though, I think. It may take
It's hard to believe even tenured professors don't know "modernism" is so
totally over, dead, buried, with a stake through its heart by end of the
'70s -- after years of passion and agitation to legalize "pluralism" or
post-modernism or whatever you like to call it.
In fact I wrote/edited a book on the saga: "Mutiny and the Mainstream:
Talk That Changed Art, 1975-1990," how the passionate panelists sat in a
circle going "Greenberg, ptui, Greenberg ptui, let's all spit on Clement
Greenberg !" And how the fearless pluralists trounced the old-line
formalists at CAA panels on "Perils of Pluralism."
Though frankly my hunch is these profs are simply retards of *theory.*
They're probably hip to all sorts of new art ideas, just didn't notice the
new lingo, still mouthing the old.
I don't in any event think a new art movement takes over simply through
external pressure, whether from Stieglitz or Clement Greenberg. The old
one gets tired, stale, repetitive, worn out, boring, like any "style"
we're sick of. Smushy "action" paintings, the epigones of epigones of
abstract expressionism were dead on arrival by the '70s. All sorts of art
had been bubbling up around the edges for at least 10 years, only the
folks "in charge" hadn't noticed.
As for demise of "pictorialism" in photography, by the time Edward Weston
& Co revved up, it was a moldering corpse. Dirty lens aesthetic of same
old same old. Photographer's wife with a tea towel around her head, titled
Hindoo, or naked lady with a ribbon of black chiffon titled "Spirit of
Yearning." You didn't need to push it out of the way, it existed only in
the amateur photo press -- as described (and quoted) at length in
Post-Factory #5 ("Reply to Coleman") and #3 ("Looking for Wm Mortensen")
among other places. A vital living movement with something real it hasn't
yet said is NOT so readily squelched.
How long does any art movement last? Even in the days when you had to
cross the Alps on foot to find out what the honchos in Italy were doing,
they changed pretty quick. Today, the moment it's in Artforum, every grad
student in the country is doing it. (In Shannon's school too, I bet, at
least the students, if not the profs.) So how long is something so
familiar going to be interesting?
> > a while before people stop making fun of Pictorialism. It's weird that
> > even some people who consider themselves thoroughly post-modern in their
> > sensibility still sort of act as mouthpieces for Modernism in their
> > complete contempt for Pictorialism. But Steiglitz was a very powerful
They may also be inexpert in photo history, not familiar with the glories
of pictorialist photography in its heyday, rather taking the latterday
amateur/salon/corruption for the whole. (Or they read too much Nancy
Newhall, Lincoln Kirstein, Brett Weston !)
> > personality, and a rather arrogant one for all his greatness, and his
> > eventual conclusion that the perfectly focussed, perfectly sharp gelatin
I've read a lot of Stieglitz & don't remember him saying "perfectly
focussed, perfectly sharp." He did certainly prefer *straight* photography
(and crooked painting) by 1915 or so, but I think that perfect sharpness
stuff may well have been a corruption by disciples/epigones grinding their
own axes.
> > silver print was the apotheosis of photography may take a long time
> to go > away. (let's just be glad we weren't married to him, like
> O'Keefe!)
Oh lordy, which of those fellows would we want to be married to? Or
O'Keeffe either, for that matter !
Judy
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| Judy Seigel, Editor >
| World Journal of Post-Factory Photography > "HOW-TO and WHY"
| info@post-factory.org >
| <http://rmp.opusis.com/postfactory/postfactory.html>
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