On Not Knowing
Two art works, one by Victor Burgin the other by Richard Prince, both consisting of photographic images from the same moment, the late 70s, both re-presenting with varying degrees of ostensible complexity and straightforwardness images from advertising campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes. In the one case the image is subsumed within a black and white documentary photographic format with text (itself not part of the “pro-photo event’’) added, in the other, any and all text supplementary to the image has been edited out from what we are presented with. Despite their sources and their destination, (the gallery system) being in common one could say that they, the artists and their works belong in different worlds.
In the Burgin work at first sight it is difficult to discern in what ways the image and text belong together. The former an image of a self-absorbed Stetson wearing male cigarette to his lips, the latter a narrative of a “dark-haired woman in her fifties” at the hairdressers*. Perhaps not surprisingly because it is not through sight that a connection is forged but through other knowledge of theories which had a currency at the time of the works making, that the elements are given a rationale. Althusser’s reconceptualization of false consciousness and ideology where the emphasis is shifted from what is represented to how we are placed/located in relation to it, how we are addressed and ‘interpellated’, (drawn into a certain space, (and what is taken for granted in that), “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (153), is what Burgin is putting into play and has engaged with, (as has some others artists in their practice at this time e.g. Yates) as something that needs to be confounded. That the normal space offered to receive work is to be defeated,.. work, or better our place in the process has to ‘de-centred’. In this case the text (on the hairdressing) disrupting our normal place of reception. Additionally here given extra weight by the actual narratives evocation of Lacan’s work on the mirror phase as a fundamental moment in our formation and misidentification of self. (The initial sight of ourselves in the mirror perceived to have a boundedness and coherence that we experientially don’t feel confirmed). The image of the cowboy in (its original context) itself offering in its frontality a mirror (like) image to be identified with, here is subject to critique.
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Victor Burgin, Marlbro, 1977 |
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Richard Prince, Untitled, 1977 |
In comparison with Burgin Prince’s contribution to his work seems slight, he reproduces the image, or the image (in colour) minus any or its original accompanying text not unlike Warhol, and like him has by some been accused, as Warhol was (by e.g. Gablik Fuller etc. ) of not just reproducing the image but the values of the world from which it had been purloined, (in this case advertising, but in Warhol and Prince’s case advertising and other kinds of promotional pictures).
Or perhaps one could say that the work is lacking overt commentary because Prince assumes a level of sophistication in the viewer on a par with his own. Namely that the pictures without the distraction of text or without any additional text display their own non-contingent reality – that in fact the ‘pro-photo event’ and its recording are constructions (events choreographed to be photographed), not as they purport to be, events snatched from some reality quite independent of and contingent in relation to the photography. The angles of shots, the landscapes, the ‘drama’ of the action and ‘costumes’ (all often beholden to cinema), become the object of our vision. But one might say it is not just the viewer who is positioned differently in the work (from the manner of address in the Burgin), but the artist himself is dethroned. These images are offered as something with which we have a familiarity (no more or less than the artist) and as such too, like him, we can take and enjoy the pleasure of the images as images, as drama and spectacle whilst rejecting the bullshit of the ‘real’ that accompanies them.
Though both drawing from the same material, commercial images made for the advertising and promotion of Marlboro cigarettes, and presenting them in the context of the art world, in their respective treatment of that material, and in the relations that the works put in place with regard to the artists and we the viewers, as art works they separate and fall on different sides of the divide between modernist and post-modernist art.
Notes:
Althusser Louis, 1971 “Lenin and Philosophy (and Other Essays)”. New Left Books, London. p 153.
* Text on Burgin’s image reads:
“Framed
A dark haired woman in her late-fifties hands over a photograph showing the haircut she wants duplicating exactly.
The picture shows a very young woman with blond hair cut extremely short.
The hairdresser props it by the mirror in which he can see the face of his client watching her own reflection.
When he has finished he removes the cotton cape from the woman's shoulders. 'That's it', he says.
But the woman continues sitting, continues staring at her reflection in the mirror.”
The hairdresser props it by the mirror in which he can see the face of his client watching her own reflection.
When he has finished he removes the cotton cape from the woman's shoulders. 'That's it', he says.
But the woman continues sitting, continues staring at her reflection in the mirror.”
