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Styleless Style? What Photorealism Can Tell Us about “the Sixties”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2013
Abstract
This essay reads 1960s “photorealist” painting and its critical reception against two sets of contemporary social analyses. First, it places these artistic and critical works next to Pierre Bourdieu's 1965 text Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, demonstrating that, although the critical literature surrounding “photorealism” tended to assume that its involvement with photography grew out of a desire for an objective realism, contemporary thought on photography was anything but convinced of the medium's transparency. Second, it looks to cultural critics like Susan Sontag and Jacob Brackman to propose that, rather than seeing the art of this period in opposition to the heated political battles of “the sixties,” the presumably “styleless” works of artists like Robert Bechtle and Ralph Goings may lead us to reconsider the forms of those battles themselves.
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References
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4 The desire to cast the 1960s as a decade of commitment/authenticity has persisted even in more recent attempts to recast this period in American history. See, for example, Rossinow's, Douglas C.The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
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11 Ibid., 32.
12 Ibid., 28.
13 Ibid., 28. H. D. Raymond echoed this sentiment when he later wrote that the photorealists partook of a “nonelitist common denominator of shared interests with the public.” See Raymond, “Beyond Freedom, Dignity, and Ridicule,” 134.
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20 Ibid., 125. Nochlin's argument regarding the “New Realism” in art and film here closely resembles the contemporary writings of art and literary critic Susan Sontag. In the collection of essays entitled Against Interpretation, first published in 1965, Sontag argued that in the 20th century the relationship between the critic and the work of art had become strained because the critic no longer respected the work's objectivity. “In most modern instances,” she wrote, criticism simply rendered art “manageable, conformable.” By offering interpretations of artworks the critic implied that form and content were distinct, thereby violating the work, separating it from itself. In response to this critical misunderstanding, Sontag argued that modern artists had begun to make works that thwarted any and all attempts at interpretation by appealing directly to the senses. Artists from Antonin Artaud to Michelangelo Antonioni had sought to “elude the interpreters … by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be … just what it is.” The value of these works, she argued, was that they defied translation. They forced one to acknowledge the work's “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy … and its … solutions to certain problems of … form.” Sontag, Susan, “Against Interpretation,” in , Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1965), 9, 11Google Scholar. For a closer reading of Sontag's art criticism in the 1960s, see Peariso, Craig J., “The ‘Counter Culture’ in Quotes: Sontag and Marcuse on the Work of Revolution,” in Ching, Barbara and Wagner-Lawler, Jennifer, eds., The Scandal of Susan Sontag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 154–70Google Scholar.
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26 Ibid., 30.
27 Ibid., 30.
28 Rosalind Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” October, 31 (Winter 1984), 49–68, 58–59.
29 Ibid., 59.
30 Ibid., 83–84.
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34 Ibid., 19 (emphasis in original).
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37 Ibid., 9.
38 Ibid., 9.
39 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 277.
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42 Brackman, The Put-on, 90–93.
43 See Brown, H. Rap, Die Nigger Die! A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 13–31Google Scholar; Newton, Huey P., “He Won't Bleed Me: A Revolutionary Analysis of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,” in , Newton, To Die For the People (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1995), 112–47Google Scholar.
44 A thorough discussion of Brackman's various examples is beyond the scope of this paper. For more on the put-on as it relates to activism see Craig J. Peariso, “Re/Citing: Radical Activism in Late-1960s America” (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2006).
45 J. Patrice Mandel, “The Deductive Image,” in Battcock, Super Realism, 36–48, 41.
46 Ibid., 48, 46.
47 See Gitlin, Todd, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)Google Scholar.
48 Free [Hoffman, Abbie], Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 59Google Scholar.
49 Ultimately, this is the solution offered by David Joselit's recent work on art, activism, and television in the 1960s. In spite of Joselit's commendable desire “to contribute to the social and political debates of our time,” his analysis too often assumes those debates to be settled, taking conventional notions of “the sixties” at face value. Thus, for example, he recounts the ways in which the “visual culture of psychedelia was devoted to dissolving objects into networks of optical pulsion,” without interrogating the apparent significance of concepts like psychedelia and dissolution in American culture. See Joselit, David, “Yippie Pop: Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol and 60s Media Politics,” Grey Room, 8 (Summer 2002), 62–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and , Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007)Google Scholar.