Modernity through photography
Rosalind Krauss (born in 1941) can be considered both in the inheritance and contestation of Clement Greenberg’s work.
In her critique of modernism, she has been interested in the development of photography, parallel to that of modern painting, which brings to light certain hitherto ignored phenomena: index’s marks, the archive function of photography. She has explored certain concepts, such as “the formless”, “the optical unconscious” or the pastiche, which organize modernist art practices and announce their postmodern counterparts.
On the tradition of Benjamin and Barthes
In her preface to “Le Photographique. Pour une Théorie des Ecarts”, written by Rosalind Krauss in 1990, Hubert Damisch situates this book in the prolongation of two other classics of photography: “La Chambre claire” by Roland Barthes (1980), and “A Short History of Photography” by Walter Benjamin (1931).
Rosalind Krauss’s essay extends these two great predecessors by broadening the subject. It is not just a question of analysing photography or the effects of photography, it is about defining a theoretical object, a paradigm that affects our entire contemporary relationship to the image. On the one hand, photography is a trace of reality. But on the other hand, it is a copy of a copy, a false copy, a simulacrum. How to articulate these two dimensions?
Sign, index, traces…
A photograph is not an iconic sign (a representation). For Rosalind Krauss, photography it is another kind of sign, an index sign produced by a device (a machine, an automatism). What is irrupting with it (and which has not completely exhausted its character as an event) is the fact that light can be written directly, that it can leave a trace, an archive, almost automatically, through the intervention of a sort of prosthetic hand, independently of the intervention of a subject.
But photography is never purely indexical. If it was only a direct inscription of the real, it would remain empty of meaning. It only becomes intelligible because, in addition, it is related to discourses. From the daguerreotype, to the calotype or stereoscopic views, it has always dissociated itself from the real by combining itself with compositional rules derived from tradition, by using legends, texts, complementary signs or imaginary supplements that are added to the raw image. It is also a writing, which makes proliferate what Jacques Derrida calls spacing: gaps, doublings and duplications, reversions, photomontages, superimpositions, collages, artifacts…
For Roland Barthes, photography is neither an aesthetic object, nor a historical object, nor a sociological object. It is something that touches me in the most intimate way, that deposits in me a singular promise: the proof of a raw fact, the witness of an “It has been”, a blind spot that suspends the linguistic clichés. Before this raw evidence (that of the Referent), there is nothing more to add. For Walter Benjamin, its mechanical and reproducible character weakens the originality and the authenticity of the work. Photography contributes to the withering away of the aura. Rosalind Krauss relates these two directions of thought to the notions of “index” and “double”. One can only make a photograph by direct association, physical or chemical with a referent. The produced image is not a representation (iconic sign), but another kind of sign resulting from a direct writing of the light, from an impression, from a trace or from an archive: it is what Rosalind Krauss calls an index.
A theoretical instrument
From the daguerreotype to the stereoscopic views, photographs are always inscribed in series, systems of substitution or duplications that put the material trace in abyme and transform it into a signifying whole. This mode of functioning, this “calibration”, extended to the sculpture as to the painting. Taking note of the direct impression produced by nature, the impressionists immediately compensated for it by respecting the rules of composition of classical painting. But this reserve did not last.
After Cubism and Surrealism (which made great use of photography), the generation of so-called “modernist” painters, influenced by Marcel Duchamp and his Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, abandoned the iconographic program of the painting. It was at this point that they began to be accused of imposture.
With the collage, the Body Art, the land Art, the performance or the video, they are whole sections of the world of the art which prolonged the rupture initiated by the photography. In order to account for these events, it is necessary to make photography a theoretical instrument from which a new type of medium can be defined. For Rosalind Krauss, even if painting, to a certain extent, was indicial from the beginning (as its original myth indicates), the “photographic” has profoundly modified its practices. Themes as old as the female nude have changed in character: it is no longer a question of representing beauty, but of exhibiting its fetish.
To photograph, one needs a gesture, an operation of the hand. This operation is not neutral. It prolongs the body (prosthesis) and makes the referent intelligible by what is added to the real: technicality, beliefs, constructions, fictions. It results from it shifts, that the surrealism emphasizes by its exploration of the double.
Between the body, its image and its figurations, the crisis is permanent.