Spare Room 33 Essay #3

In the smallest room of their unassuming Western Creek home, local collectors Susan Taylor and Peter Jones present a regular program of exhibitions under the banner of Spare Room 33. Rigorously researched and curated, diligently compiled and considered, the program connects visitors directly to a network of international art historical discourses.  Over the coming weeks the Drill Hall Gallery will publish a selection of Peter and Susan’s accessible and informed essays that accompany each of their exhibitions.

We jump here to Susan and Peter’s twelfth exhibition from March 2017. This exhibition presented a selection of serial and conceptual photography. Photography become a growing area of interest for the couple first seeded by the opportunities alive in concrete poetry and conceptual art.

SPARE ROOM SHEET #12
Serial and Conceptual Photography

‘The more you repeat a thing the more variety you have. If something is monotonous it’s all right.’ 

Robert Rooney, 1975

Introduction: Precursors

Photographic works in series are not uncommon in the history of photography since its invention in 1839. In the 1880’s Eadweard Muybridge photographed his famous stop-motion series of humans and animals. At that time, Muybridge’s work fell squarely within the pioneering exploration of the capabilities and special characteristics of photography as a new form of expression. In the following century, photography became conscious of itself as a distinct art form, with certain aesthetic qualities and uniquely able to capture aspects of human experience and the natural environment. Developments in this direction became increasingly distinct from the millions of photographs taken by ordinary folk as keepsakes of people and events in their lives, and even from the work of professional photographers for the purposes of advertising and commerce.

Against this background of historical development, consider then the impact of the appearance in 1963 of a kind of photographic anti-matter, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Edward Ruscha’s first photo book. Its subject matter was ‘everyday’ to the point of banality, the photographs taken with the minimum of skill necessary to produce an in-focus exposure. Nothing happens in these photographs. There are no people, no moral or spiritual purpose, no heroic vistas, no critical moments. But they are also distinct from the domestic and holiday snapshots taken by the average family, in the deliberate seriality of the subject matter and their publication and promotion as the work of an artist. 

Ruscha went on to produce a number of similar photo books, in doing so, rekindling artists’ interest in the book as a cheap and accessible vehicle for art, introducing the idea that the photos could be taken by someone other than the artist (Thirtyfour Parking Lots) and photos as documentation of a performance or event (Royal Road Test). Importantly for the conceptual art to follow, Ruscha’s photo books re-emphasised the photograph as a tool for recording information.

In Europe, the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher had commenced in 1959 their lifelong project of recording the buildings and structures left behind in an increasingly obsolete industrial landscape. This documentation and classification approach had some commonalities with the earlier work of August Sander in the 1920’s, documenting and classifying people by their occupation, location and/or social class, but Sander did not avoid individuality and personality in the subjects of his photo portraits. In contrast, the Bechers recorded their anonymous industrial structures as dispassionately as possible, using a standard procedure for each photo – time of year, time of day, weather and light conditions – that precluded any artificial or heightened effects as well as any chance or spontaneity. The usual presentation of their photos in series of grids, and the documentation of buildings from each point of the compass, further reinforced the non-subjective, specimen-like nature of their photography.

Conceptual photography

The works of Ruscha and the Bechers were precursors to the use of photography as the preferred means, along with text, by which the emerging generation of conceptual artists chose to document their ideas, processes and actions. These artists included Jan Dibbets, whose studies of light, shade, time and perspective were essentially ephemeral, leading him to declare that the photographs documenting these studies were the work of art. In his various location, duration and variable pieces, Douglas Huebler created sets of rules and instructions to which the photograph was integral. Huebler noted in relation to his Location Piece #2: New York City – Seattle work that the camera was used ‘as a duplicating device whose operator makes no “aesthetic” decisions.’ Using the camera in this way freed the photograph from those technical and aesthetic requirements that had previously been necessary to qualify it as an artwork. Now anyone with an idea and a basic camera could play.

A good example is the Japanese-American sculptor, Shinkichi Tajiri, not known as a conceptual artist, who expatriated himself to Europe in the mid-1950’s. Tajiri moved to Berlin from The Netherlands in 1969 to take up a teaching position, and started to photograph the defining characteristic of the city at that time, the Berlin Wall. He eventually photographed all 27 kilometres of the Wall and published those photos in a small book of the same name in 1971. Presented as a continuous strip of grainy photo frames, the book owes much to Ruscha.

Also in Europe, Christian Boltanski commenced a project in 1973 which entailed photographing all the possessions of a selected individual, as a portrait by other means. These inventories ticked all the boxes for conceptual photography: the photograph simply functioning as the chosen means of documenting the artist’s idea, carrying no particular aesthetic qualities, taken by someone other than the artist to nullify any authorial bias, and finally presented as information in a grid format in an inexpensive paperback book.

Not only did conceptual art photographs not have to be taken by the artist, they could be ‘found’ photos taken by anybody. Hans-Peter Feldmann commenced his series of small, intensely humble booklets of Bilder in 1968, assembling found and amateur photos around a particular theme. Or not, in the case of 4 Bilder, where four random photos coalesce only by virtue of their selection and publication by the artist, and tempt the viewer into constructing their own narrative to link them.

Peter Tyndall’s work in this exhibition is a photographic record of an idea and an action, the work he eventually provided in response to an invitation from the Ewing and Paton Galleries in 1974 to participate in an exhibition themed around artists’ responses to the basic object of a cardboard box. As Tyndall recalls, his various inconclusive attempts at responding to the object ultimately ‘responded it out of existence’. At which point, he realised that the whole of this event and nothing specific about the box object itself was the response. He then reconstructed/replicated the outcome with another cardboard box labelled MODERN ART-TYPE CARDBOARD REPLICA CLICHÉ and made a photographic record of its destruction by fire. In mid-1974, Tyndall was still several months away from his discovery of the ideogram of a painting hanging by two wires as a meta-object embodying both the observation (regard) and inter-connectedness of art. As a step in that discovery process, the line ‘If you’re really serious you should be laughing’ came to him and he applied it to the final work. The same sentiment eventually became summarised as LOGOS/HA HA. This exhibition is the first time this work has been shown since the original Boxes exhibition in 1974, and we thank Peter for his generosity in lending it.

The Australian artist most directly influenced by Ed Ruscha was Robert Rooney, who referred to the camera as a ‘dumb recording device’. Fresh from completing five series of pop-inspired abstract paintings based on serial components (Slippery Seals, Kind-Hearted Kitchen-Gardens, Canine Capers, Cereal Bird Beaks, and Superknits), Rooney ceased painting in 1970 in favour of photography, and didn’t return to it until the 1980’s. Scorched Almonds is one of his early photographic works, from July-August 1970, and is one of several works documenting the habits and rituals of Rooney’s daily life. Other works in this vein include Garments: 3 Dec 1972 – 19 March 1973 (1973), comprising 107 photos of Rooney’s folded clothes, taken at the end of each day. AM/PM (1974) consisted of 176 photos of the state of Rooney’s bed on waking in the morning and retiring at night. Scorched Almonds documents the chocolate covered nuts of the same name that Rooney would eat before going to bed, lined up and photographed on the carpet before being consumed. This is amusing enough, but the accompanying text gives the date of consumption and the measurements of each almond in ridiculous precision. Given that Rooney made other works from his daily rituals and was wholly committed to serial photography, the pisstake element of the work can be interpreted as an affectionate comment on his own proclivities and the general human impulse to document and classify.

The second Rooney work in the exhibition is a series of 51 colour photos titled Luna Park: St Kilda 8 Jan 1975. Notwithstanding that title, the photos were actually taken in the adjacent public gardens. Parts of Luna Park, such as the undulating line of the scenic railway, only appear in the distant background. There is not a single person to be seen in any of the photographs. The work is the antithesis of its title, with Rooney literally distancing himself from the hubbub and swarming humanity of the fun fair. With no human content, the interest in the photos is in the rhythmic patterns of pathways, palm trees and the neo-classical building that recede and emerge as the camera’s position shifts throughout the sequence.

Art photography

The established art photography community did not come easily to terms with its 130 years of development and its aesthetic canon being completely bypassed by a new generation of conceptual artists. Books and articles concerned with ‘serious’ photography at that time barely mention those artists.* One can sense the different approaches, and the tension and awkwardness between them, when works from the two camps are juxtaposed in an exhibition context. 

For example, Jan Groover’s early photographs have something in common with her conceptual counterparts in their combination of serial and sequential images of banal subjects (cars, houses, walls), with slight variations of perspective to create an overall pattern unifying the individual photos. But one always remains conscious of her aim to produce the photographic sequence as an artwork in itself, and of the technical skills involved in taking and combining photographs to achieve that effect.

It is interesting to compare Groover’s photos of houses with those of Virginia Coventry. There is a shared interest there in the commonplace and desire to bring something that is assumed to be unremarkable to notice. Coventry’s Service Roadphotos, made in the mid-seventies, were inspired by the visual design similarities of houses situated along the service road on either side of the Princes Highway at Moe in Gippsland. Six central houses were selected to be photographed externally, and the artist then requested permission of the occupants to enter those houses and photograph inside them looking out. The result is a beautiful sequence uniquely combining the characteristics of art photography (e.g. the moody interiors with silhouetted objects) and conceptual photography (e.g. the banal subject matter classified by its selection and treatment in a serial manner, the lack of human presence).

Ultimately, art photography benefitted from conceptual photography. The more that artists used photography, even if only as a dumb recording device, the more photography became recognised as art, with its own dedicated contemporary institutional collections and exhibitions. Furthermore, the privileging of the idea by conceptual photographers helped move photography further away from traditional representations of reality. Photographic artists began increasingly to invent their own narratives, drawn from their own imaginations, and to construct photos to express these. The work of Duane Michals from the late sixties and seventies exemplifies this trend. As noted by Jean-Francois Chevrier, contemporary art photographers can no longer merely ‘take’ pictures, they must cause them to exist. And serial photography continues to thrive as an expression of the human need to make sense of the world by collecting and classifying the things in it. As a recent example, walking through the NGV during the Melbourne Now exhibition in 2013, one would have seen an enormous grid of black and white photos by David Wadleton, each one of a Melbourne suburban milk bar.

Peter Jones and Susan Taylor
Spare Room 33
March 2017

*Postscript:  There are exceptions to this statement. Subsequent to the exhibition, we acquired an issue of camera (June 1972, no 6), the Swiss-published international magazine for photography. This issue contained detailed profiles on Bernd and Hilla Becher and on Ed Ruscha, and examples of their work were featured on the cover.

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For events and programs related to Eye to Eye: The Susan Taylor and Peter Jones Collection please see our website dhg.anu.edu.au

Contact Anne-Marie Jean or Tony Oates for images and to arrange interviews: 02 6125 5832, anne-marie.jean@anu.edu.au, anthony.oates@anu.edu.au