Automat, automatic, automatism : Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on photography and the photographically dependent arts

How might philosophers and art historians make the best use of one another’s research? That, in nuce, is what this special issue considers with respect to questions concerning the nature of photography as an artistic medium; and that is what my essay addresses with respect to a specific case: the dialogue, or lack thereof, between the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell and the art historian-critic Rosalind Krauss. It focuses on Krauss’s late appeal to Cavell’s notion of automatism to argue that artists now have to invent their own medium, both to provide criteria against which to judge artistic success or failure and to insulate serious art from the vacuous generalization of the aesthetic in a media-saturated culture at large. Much in the spirit of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, paying attention to the medium is once again an artist’s best line of defence against the encroachment of new media, the culture industry, and spectacle. That Krauss should appeal to Cavell at all, let alone in such a Greenbergian frame of mind, is surprising if one is familiar with the fraught history of debate about artistic media in art theory since Greenberg. Cavell’s work in this domain has always been closely associated with that of Michael Fried, and the mutual estrangement of Fried and Krauss, who began their critical careers as two of Greenberg’s leading followers, is legendary

Introduction : photography between art history and philosophy

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2003), Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) (2005), or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA (2006–7). Indeed, Wall’s most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels (2011), situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography’s increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate’s first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way

Spontaneity and Materiality: What Photography Is in the Photography of James Welling

Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting.1 Scholars of photography disavow such crude distinctions: much recent writing attends in detail to the materials and processes of photography, the agency of photographic artists, and the social determinants of the production and reception of photographs. As such writing makes plain, photographs cannot be reduced to mechanical traces.2 Yet background conceptions of photography as trace or index persist almost by default, as no framework of comparable explanatory power has yet emerged to replace them. A conception of photography adequate to developments in recent scholarship is long overdue. Rather than constructing such a conception top-down, as philosophers are wont to do, this paper articulates it by examining selected works by James Welling.3 There are several reasons for this: Welling’s practice persistently explores the resources and possibilities of photography, the effect of these explorations is to express a particular metaphysics of the mind’s relation to its world, and appreciating why this metaphysics is aptly expressed by exploring photography requires a revised conception of what photography is. In as much as it provides a framework for a richer interpretation of Welling, the new conception is also capable of underwriting a wide range of critical and historical approaches to photography

Whither photography theory? Replies to Catharine Abell and Paloma Atencia Linares

In On Photography Costello traces the roots of cur-rent conceptions of photography back to the formulations of its earliest pioneers, and shows that contemporary philosophical reflection on photography is an increasingly refined formalization of intuitions that have been around since its invention, and by now permeate folk wisdom. Those intuitions are false in key respects. Costello’s reply considers the present state of debate, concluding that work remains to be done before New Theory can claim to have bested Orthodoxy. In particular, while New Theory does better in accounting for photography’s aesthetic capacities; the challenge remains to do as well with its alleged epistemic privilege. For this reason, New Theorists should cease worrying about Skeptical Orthodoxy, and direct their energies to Non-Skeptical Orthodoxy, which represents a much stiffer challenge. It also notes that despite New Theory’s attention to the photographic process, this remains incomplete in at least one important respect as currently described

What's so new about the "new" theory of photography?

This paper considers the shift currently taking place in philosophical thinking about photography. What I call “new” theory departs from philosophical orthodoxy as to when photographs come into existence. I trace this to Dawn Wilson (née Phillips) on the “photographic event.” To assess the new theory’s newness one needs a grip on the old. I divide this between “sceptical” and “non-skeptical orthodoxy,” where this turns on the theory’s implications for photography’s standing as art. New theory emerges as a response to sceptical orthodoxy (Roger Scruton) in particular. I divide new theory between “restrictive” (Paloma Atencia-Linares) and “permissive” (Dominic McIver Lopes) responses to sceptical orthodoxy, and raise challenges for both. The restrictive version arguably divides what does and does not count as strictly photographic in arbitrary ways; the permissive version rules in images that are not obviously photographs, and faces two difficulties individuating photographs. I conclude by noting several questions that need to be considered more fully before new theory has the upper hand over orthodoxy. These concern its ability to account for photography’s epistemic capacities, the extent to which it constitutes an advance over non-sceptical orthodoxy (notably, Kendall Walton), and whether new theorists have yet to be new enough when it comes to photographic agency

What is abstraction in photography?

There is confusion about what counts as abstraction in photography: art theorists class very different kinds of photographs as abstract, and common philosophical views of photography, if true, should cause us to doubt their very possibility. I address two questions here: ‘What is Abstraction?’ and ‘What is Abstraction in Photography?’ To the answer the second, I briefly consider a third: ‘What is Photography?’ so that the resulting account is not undermined by a poor theory of photography. In answer to my target question, I outline a schematic (and non-exhaustive) typology of kinds of work generically typed as ‘abstract’ in order to bring out some differences between them. I distinguish ‘proto’, ‘faux’, ‘constructed faux’, ‘weak’, ‘strong’, ‘constructed’ and ‘concrete’ abstraction, although the differences between them are not always clear-cut and there is room for debate about borderline cases. My goal is not to resolve all such cases, but to show: (i) that there is a range of broadly identifiable kinds of abstraction in photography; (ii) that images can be abstract in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons; and (iii) why certain images are not abstract, despite being widely typed as such

On the very idea of a "political" work of art

Art can be “political” in a variety of ways. Mobilizing these differences offers correspondingly many ways for artists producing “political art” to understand themselves, and the activity in which they are engaged. To demonstrate this, the present article focuses on a particular work of art (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001), by a particular contemporary artist (Jeremy Deller), seeking to locate it within this broader possibility space. The work consists in a re-enactment, as art, of a bloody confrontation that took place between police and picketing miners during the 1984-5 National Union of Mineworkers’ [NUM] Strike. Deller has said of an earlier work, Acid Brass (1999), comprising the rearrangement for Brass Band of various Acid House anthems from the 1980s: “It was a political work but not, I hope, in a hectoring way. To be called a ‘political artist’ is, for me, a kiss of death, as it suggests a fixed or dogmatic position like that of a politician.” Of The Battle of Orgreave he remarked in the same interview: “I went to a number of historical re-enactments, and they mostly seemed drained of the political and social narratives behind the original events […] I wanted instead to work with re-enactors on a wholly political re-enactment of a battle […] one that had taken place within living memory, that would be re-staged in the place it had happened, involving many of the people who had been there the first time round.” I aim to show that these seemingly contradictory attitudes towards the value of political art, and whether (and if so how) his own art should be considered “political,” can be rendered consistent by distinguishing carefully between a wide variety of ways in which art may be political, and locating Deller’s work within this wider space. I conclude that Deller's work is "strongly" political: that is, political through and through in virtue of bringing its political content to bear, reflexively, on its own principles of construction