OF ROCKS AND PHANTASMATIC HARD PLACES: Art Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s

Reading the art criticism of the early 1980s, one is struck by the perceived urgency of dealing with photography as a medium. Time and again, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, and others attempted to determine just what made photography so peculiar, and important, as an artistic medium. One might, of course, chalk this up to a simple matter of context. After all, photography’s central role in the increasingly visible works of “Appropriation Art” by Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and others would have made ignoring its characteristics feel sloppy, even irresponsible. My intention here, therefore, is not to suggest that critics, faced with an increasing interest in photographic imaging on the part of contemporary artists, should have refrained from discussing the medium. Rather, I am interested in the particular significance they ascribed to it. In the pages of October, Artforum, and Art in America, one saw photography invoked time and again as the almost perfect embodiment of—and, more interestingly, the solution to—the contemporary predicament of art and culture. From Krauss’s depiction of photography as the medium that stymied aesthetic judgment to Crimp’s suggestion that photographs entailed the death of the museum, one thing seemed clear: photography was the “postmodern” medium par excellence. In an effort to push current discussions of 1980s art and criticism in a different, and potentially productive direction, I would like in this essay to look closely at the way these authors, and Crimp in particular, looked to reevaluate photography, and to consider the ways in which, in spite of their best intentions, these writers nevertheless performed one of the central contradictions of leftist art criticism all the same.