A one-way street? Part II

Since roughly the turn of the century, snapshots considered as found photos have gradually been replaced by vernacular photography. Putting it differently: museums have stopped being interested in a collector- or artist-based practice and started exhibiting non-art photography as documentation of, well, non-art photography. All right, so curators have changed their minds about snapshots. Could they change their minds back again? Has anything like this happened before? What points of reference can we find? Most of what I see tells me we’re on a one-way street. For one thing, the shift from found photos to vernacular photography is clearly a recent iteration of a move that’s been executed many times by academics and curators over the last thirty-five years or so, and in no case reversed. The idea is always to undercut the singularity, the centrality, of mainstream art by finding a way to relativize it to other categories. What you do is you identify something that isn’t mainstream art but compare it to mainstream art, thereby implicitly or explicitly putting the two on a par; you want to knock our civilization off its pedestal one way or another (this is very much a postmodern reflex, an expression of a sixtiesish Marxist discomfort with the “canon”). For example, MOMA’s 1990 show “High and Low” put “high” or fine art and artifacts of popular culture side by side. That seemed pretty bold at the time, and effectively the show chipped away at the distinction. In the Musée d’Orsay, which opened in 1986, l’art pompier and other overlooked work of the 19th and early 20th centuries is displayed, without editorial comment, alongside the canonical masters of the period. More recently, “outsider art” is in part a challenge to insider art. And the new genre of vernacular photography? It’s supposed to make art photography keep a nervous eye on the rear view mirror. The problem, of course, is that, having ceased to be the work of collectors in any meaningful way, vernacular photography is now nobody’s art—whereas popular art, unsung art that didn’t make the canon, and outsider art are all made by artists. So the snapshot case isn’t like the others at all, and snapshots don’t pose that kind of threat. But never mind. The mainstream has absorbed or wants to absorb popular art, unsung art that didn’t make the canon, and outsider art. It’s not going to reject them again, or vernacular photography, either. (Or could it? I have to say that this particular academic/curatorial gambit is looking pretty tired. It obviously isn’t even helpful on its own terms: its attack on an imperialistic art establishment does nothing but bring about the imperialist co-optation of the would-be challenging genres.) Here’s another one-way street of the past that might bear comparison with our situation. Beginning in 1907, Pablo Picasso and then Georges Braque (soon followed by non-Cubists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Emil Nolde) made extensive formal use of African tribal art. Cubism digested the African influence so thoroughly that it got into everything influenced by Cubism, which is a lot (down to Formica patterns of the 1950s, etc., etc.). Could it happen again? Not in the same way, because our political sensitivities wouldn’t permit it. The Cubists and the others now look, to this extent, imperialistic in their formal voraciousness. So although a present-day Nick Cave or Faith Ringgold may have no problem with adapting tribal art for their purposes, that’s because they feel it’s theirs; artists without African heritage can’t loot and pillage stylistically the way the Cubists did more than a century ago. To that degree African art is no longer “material” and, at least outside Africa, has landed for good in the vitrines of ethnographic museums. (Do we even feel right nowadays about having such institutions? I’m not sure.) Snapshots, too, having been academicized as the new genre of vernacular photography, have apparently stopped being possible material for artists as far as the art establishment is concerned. Is something going to keep them out of bounds in that sense? I used the word “imperialist” again, and that’s the key: we don’t want to take things away from people anymore. Just as we now feel tribal art belongs to the people who created it, museums are making snapshots seem to belong to the snapshooters. You can’t enjoy them as art, but there’s a sort of sanctity about them that they didn’t have before. I have a guilty feeling when I violate it, which I continue to do by collecting aesthetically and trying to put my photos together to make them do some sort of aesthetic work. But once again the whole thing, pathetic guilty feeling and all, goes back to the lurking suggestion that snapshots, now billed as vernacular photography, are somehow the art of vernacular photographers. If they’re hanging in art museums, what else could they be? The truth is that snapshots we like for their aesthetic appeal were generally made and appreciated for entirely different reasons by the snapshooters; and those photos aren’t even the ones in our art museums. The snapshots in our art museums aren’t there for their aesthetic appeal and don’t usually have any. The idea that snapshots are the art of the snapshooters has been enunciated by no one—it’s too incoherent—yet it’s ubiquitous at some level: the museum visitor is being allowed to believe that the snapshooters fashioned the snapshots the same way Africans and Etruscans and ancient Chinese fashioned the objects in their sections of the museum. To restate the point. In order for snapshots to pose the desired political threat to mainstream art or photography, they must be understood as the art of the snapshooters. And as long as snapshots are understood as the art of the snapshooters, a subtle kind of taboo (on top of the simple monopoly now held in our museums by snapshots presented as vernacular photography) makes anything else difficult: modern political scruples discourage artists from making use of snapshots in the public sphere. The idea that snapshots are the art of the snapshooters would seem to be the linchpin of the entire structure. Also the weak spot. It is nonsense, after all. I’m not expecting another large-scale snapshot event in this country: vernacular photography has settled in for the long haul, and as it’s now universally understood just doesn’t have the visual interest to support a real show. It gets by only because the extreme modesty of its museum presence means it doesn’t have to earn its keep either intellectually or visually. But sooner or later a European museum will mount a major snapshot exhibition and will have every reason to reevaluate the genre yet again. I am hoping that the curators point out the obvious.

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