Photo Play

By Linda Yablonsky 4/3/09

View Slideshow Opposite, Barbara Kruger: Untitled (You Are Not Yourself),1981, gelatin silver print, 72 by 48 inches. Private collection, courtesy Skarstedt Fine Art, New York.; Paul McMahon:Untitled (Nixon), 1974,pastel on newspaper page, 53⁄4 by 91⁄2 inches.;

David Salle recently relayed to me a joke that began with this question: Why did the Conceptual artist start painting? Answer: Because he heard it was a good idea. “One of us made that up 30 years ago,” Salle said. “It was really funny then.”1

By “us,” Salle meant one of the artists in “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984,” an exhibition opening this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A historical survey organized by the Met’s associate photography curator Douglas Eklund, the show re-examines the early work of 30 artists whom he identifies as members of the last definitive movement in 20th-century art. Named for Douglas Crimp’s 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at New York’s Artists Space, the group came of age by questioning the entire apparatus by which images from mass media determined, rather than merely described, our experience of the world. Where once artists made visual objects, this group made “meaning.”

“That was an important time,” says Helene Winer, the director of Artists Space from 1975 through 1980 (the year she and Janelle Reiring founded Metro Pictures gallery in New York). “It was one of the rare occasions when artists could make a distinctive break from prior work and identify it as something new. And I was in a position to show it.”

Eklund locates the birth of the Pictures generation in Los Angeles, in the early 1970s, with the “post-studio” classes that John Baldessari taught at the then-new California Institute of the Arts.

In the program, he liberated students from single-medium formalism and encouraged work with found photographs. He also emphasized a sense of social responsibility. For the Met show, Eklund proposes a cause-and-effect narrative that moves from CalArts to Manhattan, where young artists such as Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Sarah Charlesworth were independently seeking a path beyond Conceptualism and Pop. Others, including Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, Charles Clough and Michael Zwack, arrived from Buffalo, N.Y., where, as students, they had founded the multidisciplinary art space Hallwalls. But even before they moved to New York City, the Buffalo contingent started knocking on the door at Artists Space, which Longo has said was the place every young artist wanted to show.

If any one person can be said to have shaped the Pictures generation, it would be Winer. Eklund told me that his show is in some ways a tribute to her. She was the one who facilitated alliances among many of the artists. It was she who asked Crimp to organize his now-legendary exhibition, which included Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Phillip Smith and Troy Brauntuch, and which few people saw. Much greater attention was paid to an essay on the subject that Crimp wrote for October two years later, dropping Smith and adding Sherman, who was not included in the exhibition because Artists Space had mounted a solo show of her work the previous year.

New attitudes toward quotation and critique were in the air at the time. But the Pictures group did not coalesce around shared interest in the mechanisms of representation alone. The social networks that formed among them fostered an atmosphere in which they could flourish, providing a ready audience to support and discuss the work. An especially unusual aspect of the group was that women enjoyed an unprecedented degree of prominence in it.

Among Pictures artists from CalArts were Salle, Goldstein, James Welling, Matt Mullican and Barbara Bloom, whose 1972 “advertisements” of steel windows for modernist homes, Crittall Metal Windows (1972), are the earliest works in the Met show. Painters Ross Bleckner and Eric Fischl were also at the school, and Nancy Chunn worked in the admissions office. Her boyfriend at the time, Paul McMahon, later to work closely with Winer at Artists Space, attended Pomona College. Before Winer came to New York in 1975, she was the college’s gallery director and presented exhibitions of artists such as William Leavitt, Bas Jan Ader and Allen Rupersberg. (None of these are represented in Eklund’s show, nor are any of the Pictures artists’ European contemporaries, such as Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel or Isa Genzken.)

Further examining the social interconnectedness of the group we find that Winer’s then-boyfriend, Jack Goldstein, a California-born artist who was friendly with Mullican, Welling and Salle, first showed his work in Los Angeles with Claire Copley. She was Rupersberg’s girlfriend and also showed Goldstein, Salle and Leavitt. It was Copley who introduced Allan McCollum to Louise Lawler, with whom he would later collaborate, and who in turn introduced him to Levine. The group bonded at parties in New York given by McMahon and Chunn. Sometimes day jobs connected the artists. Lawler was a slide labeler at Leo Castelli when Reiring worked there as a registrar.

Mullican arrived in New York in 1973, when the artist-run alternative space movement was under way, with 112 Greene Street (later White Columns), Artists Space, P.S.1, the Kitchen and Franklin Furnace eventually attracting a broad range of artists, experimental filmmakers, dancers and musicians. Of course, in the mid-1970s, they needed each other. The country was in a deep recession, and there was no market for their art. Having gone bankrupt, New York itself was as marginalized as they were, particularly after the Daily
News claimed that then-president Gerald Ford told the city it could “drop dead” if it expected any help from the White House. Even the critics who first took the new media-based work seriously—Crimp, Craig Owens, Brian Wallis, Edit DeAk, Walter Robinson, Liza Bear, Thomas Lawson and others—were all friends and neighbors who saw the artists and each other nearly every day. Or night. They were all roughly the same age and hung out in the same bars, went to the same parties and (for those who made art) showed in the same artist-run spaces or clubs, played in each other’s rock bands and appeared in each other’s movies.