Art of the Twentieth Century

A Reader

Edited by Jason Gaiger and Paul Viood

Yale University Press) N ew Haven and Lundon in association with The Open University

--I o JUOIt

-1 10 fl r HlLj

This volume accompanies the Open Univer sity course Art of the Twentieth

Century which examines the fundamental changes that took place in the concepts

and practices of art during the last century There are four other books in the series

a ll published by Yale University Press in association with the Open U ni Cersity

Frameworksfor Modern Art edited by Jason Gaiger

T he A rt of the Avanl-Gardes ed ited by Steve Edwards and Paul ood

Varietzes of M odernism ed ited by Paul Wood

T hemes in Contemporary Irt edi ted by Gill Perry and Paul Vrood

Jason Gaiger is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the Open University

Paul Wood is a Senior Lecturer in the H istory of An at the Open University

F irst published 2 0 03

Copyright ) 2003 select ion and editorial ma[ter The Open University individual

items the contributors

T he publishers have m ade every effon to trace the relevant copyright holders to

clear permissions If any have been inadvertently omitted th is is deep ly regretted

and win be corrected in any fulure pr inting

All rights reserved T his book may not be reproduced in hole or in part in any

for m (beyond that copying per mi t ted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyrigh t

Law and except by r eviewers for the public press) rithout wr itten pe rmission from

the publisher s

For information about thjs and other Yale University Press publications please

contact

US Office saleSpreSSyaleedu yalebookscom

Europe Offi(c salesyaJeupcouk wwyalebookscouk

Printed in Great Britain by BiddIes Ltd

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2003 114629

ISBN 0 - 300- 10 144- 9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Libra ry

COtTENTS

Acknowledgements A Note on the Presentat ion and Editing of TlS List of Illustrations

IX X

Xl

Introduction XIX

I Modernism and the Crisis of Modernism

Introduction 3

Selection of statemellts on early modernism 4

(i) Clive Bell Si rnpl ifi cation and Design 191 3

4

(ii) Roger Fry Negro Sculpture 1920

(iii) Carol a Giedion -Welcker from lVl odern Plastic A rt 1937

10

(iv) Robert Goldwater A Defini tion of PrimitivisJn 1938

6

( v) Sheldon Cheney from The Story if Modern A rt 941

18

(vi) Elaine de Kooning Stateln ent 1959

20

2 Meyer Schapi ro T he Nature of Abstract Art 1937

22

--I o JUOIt

-1 10 fl r HlLj

This volume accompanies the Open Univer sity course Art of the Twentieth

Century which examines the fundamental changes that took place in the concepts

and practices of art during the last century There are four other books in the series

a ll published by Yale University Press in association with the Open U ni Cersity

Frameworksfor Modern Art edited by Jason Gaiger

T he A rt of the Avanl-Gardes ed ited by Steve Edwards and Paul ood

Varietzes of M odernism ed ited by Paul Wood

T hemes in Contemporary Irt edi ted by Gill Perry and Paul Vrood

Jason Gaiger is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the Open University

Paul Wood is a Senior Lecturer in the H istory of An at the Open University

F irst published 2 0 03

Copyright ) 2003 select ion and editorial ma[ter The Open University individual

items the contributors

T he publishers have m ade every effon to trace the relevant copyright holders to

clear permissions If any have been inadvertently omitted th is is deep ly regretted

and win be corrected in any fulure pr inting

All rights reserved T his book may not be reproduced in hole or in part in any

for m (beyond that copying per mi t ted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyrigh t

Law and except by r eviewers for the public press) rithout wr itten pe rmission from

the publisher s

For information about thjs and other Yale University Press publications please

contact

US Office saleSpreSSyaleedu yalebookscom

Europe Offi(c salesyaJeupcouk wwyalebookscouk

Printed in Great Britain by BiddIes Ltd

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2003 114629

ISBN 0 - 300- 10 144- 9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Libra ry

COtTENTS

Acknowledgements A Note on the Presentat ion and Editing of TlS List of Illustrations

IX X

Xl

Introduction XIX

I Modernism and the Crisis of Modernism

Introduction 3

Selection of statemellts on early modernism 4

(i) Clive Bell Si rnpl ifi cation and Design 191 3

4

(ii) Roger Fry Negro Sculpture 1920

(iii) Carol a Giedion -Welcker from lVl odern Plastic A rt 1937

10

(iv) Robert Goldwater A Defini tion of PrimitivisJn 1938

6

( v) Sheldon Cheney from The Story if Modern A rt 941

18

(vi) Elaine de Kooning Stateln ent 1959

20

2 Meyer Schapi ro T he Nature of Abstract Art 1937

22

115 ART OF THE TWETlETH CENTURY A READ H4

manner as naturally and clearly as one could desire Furthermore phoshytomontage conti nues to be the best aid for p hotoreportage

Filla])y I come to what can be termed in opposition to the applied phoshytomontage that we have been discussing up to this point free-form phoshytomontage that is an art form that has grown out of the soil of photography T he peculiar characteristics of photography and its approaches have opened up a new and im_mensely fantasljc field for a creative human being a new magi_

cal territory for the discovery of which freedom is the first prerequisite BUL not lack of disci pline however Even these newly discovered possibil ities remain subject to the laws of form and color in creating an iJ1tegral image surshyface VVhenever we want to force this photomatter to yield new for ms w(

must be prepared for a journey of discovery we must start without any prf shy

conceptions most of aU we must be open to the beauties of fortuity Here more than anywhere else these beauties wandering and extravagant obligshyingly enrich our fantasy

3 Rosalind Krauss Photography in the Service of Surrealism

In this essay originally written to accompany the exhibition L Amour fou Photography and Surrealism at the Hayward Gallery London in 1986 Rosalind Krauss maintains that surrealist photography is the great unknown undervalued aspect of surrealist practice but that nonetheless it is the great production of the movement She starts out with the identification of a seeming paradox how can photography with its di rect photomechanishycal trace of the rea l be employed in the service of Surrealisms project of reorshyganising our very conception of reality She shows that the various manipushylations to which photography was subjected in Surrealism includ ing doushyblings spacings close-ups and cropping allowed the Surrealists to interrupt photographys apparently seamless relation with reality These techniques inscribed photography with in the realm of language or signification rather than that of a causal imprint or index of reali ty At the same time however Surrealist photographers exploited photographys privileged connection with the real in order to convulse reality from within and to show that reality itself is already configured or coded or written The essay is repinted in full from Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston LAmour fou Photography and Surrealism exhibition catalogue Hayward GalleryArts Council of Great Britain London 1986 pp 15-42 We have only been able to reproduce a limited selection of the photographs that originally accompanied this text and have renumbered the endnotes

PART THREE MODERtITY A~D PHOTOGRAPHY

IFhen lllill we have sleepLIIg logicians sleeping philosophers J would like to sleep in order to sW7-ender myself to the dreamers

- J1Wlifesto of Surrealism 1

I-Jere is a paradox It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and phoshytography but only surrealjsm or photography For surrealjsm was defined from the start as a revol ution in values a reorganization of the very way the real was conceived Therefore as its leader and founder the poet Andre Breton declared for a total revision of real values the plastic work of art wi ll (ither refer to a purely internal model or will cease to exist~ These internal models were assembled when consciousness lapses I n dream in free associashytion in hypnotic states in au tomatism in ecstacy or delir ium the pure creshyations of the mind were able to erupt

Now if painting might hope to chart these depths phoLOgraphy would seem most unlikely as a medi um And indeed in the Firsl Nan ifeslo oj Surrealism (192+) Bretons aversion to the real fo rm of real objects expressshyes itseU in for example a dislike of the literary realism of the nineteenthshycentury Dove] disparaged precisely as photographic And the descriptions he deplores ~othing compares to their nonentity they are simply superilTIposed pictures taken out of a catalogue the author takes eery opportunity to slip me these postcards he tries to make me see eye to eye with him about the obvious5 Bretons own novel IVadj(l (1928) which was copiously illustrated with photographs exactly to obviate the need fo r such wTi tten descri ptions disappointed its author as be looked at its illustrated part For the photoshygraphs seemed to him to leave the magical places he had passed through stripped of their aura turned dead and disillusioning4

But that did not stop Breton from continuing to act on the call he had issued in 1925 when he demanded and when wi ll all the books that are worth anyshyrhing stop being illustrated with drawings and appear only with photoshygrapbs5 The photographs by Man Ray and BrassaY that had ornamen ted the sections from the novel LAmourfou (1937) that had fi rst appeared in the surshyrea list periodical lWillolaure survived in the final veTsion fai th fully keyed to the text with those word-for-word quotations as in old chambermaids books that had so fascinated the cri tic Valter Benjamin when he thought about their anomolous presence Thus in one of the most centTal articulations of the surrealist exrperience of the 1930s photography continued as Benjamin said to intenmiddotene6

Indeed) it had intervened all during the 1920S in tlle journals published by the movement journals that continually sened to exemplify to define to manshyifest what it was that was surreal 1an Ray begins in La Revolulion sun-ealisle contributing six photographs to the firs t issue alone to be joined by those surmiddot realist artists like Magrittc who were experimenting in photomontage and later in Le Surrealisme au sel1ice de fa revolulion by Breton as well Tn Docwnenls it

6 ART OF T I-fE nVEgt~TIETH CE~TURY A READER

was Jacques-Andre Boiffard who manifested the sensibility photographically And by the time of Minolaures operation ilan Ray was working along with Raoul Ubac and BrassaL But the issue is not just that these books and journals contamed photographs - or tolerated them as it werc The more important fact is that in a few of these photographs surrealism achieved some of its supreme images - images of far greater power than most of what was done in the remorselessly labored paintings and drawings that came increasingly to estabshylish the identi ty of Bretons concept of Isurrealism and painting

If we look at certain of t hese photographs we see with a shock of recogshynition the simultaneous effect of d isplacement and condensation the vcry operations of sym bol formation hard at work on the fl esh of the rcal In iVian Rays Monument a D I F de Sade for example our perception of nude buttocks is guided by an act of rotation as the cruci form inner fra memiddot for this image is tra nsformed into the fi gure of the phallus [Plate 14] Th e sense of capture that is simultaneously impl ied by this fall is then heightshyened by the structural reciprocity between frame and im age contain er a nd contained For it is th e frame that counteracts the effects of the lighting on the flesh a lumino us intensity that causes the nude body to d issolve as it moves with increasi ng insubstantiabty toward the edges of the sheet seem shying as it goes to become as thin as paper Only the cruciform edges of the frame rhyming jth the clefts and folds of th e photographed anatomy serve to reinject this field with a sense of the corporeal presence of the body guarantying its density by the act of drawing limits But to caJl th is body into being is to eroticize it forever to freeze it as the sym bol of pl easur e In a variation on th is theme of limits J1an R ay s untitled Minotaure imagc d isplaces the visually decapitlted head of a body downward to transfo r m the recorded torso into the face of an animal And the cropping of the i_mage by the p hotograp hic frame a croppi ng that defines the bull s physiognomy by the act of locating it as it were - th is cutt ing mimes the beheading by shadshyow that is at work insjde the images fi eld So that in both these photographs a transformation of t he real occurs through the action of the franle And in both each in its own way the frame is experienced as figurative as redrawshying the elements inside it These two images by LVIan R ay the work of a photographer who participated d irectly in the movement are stunni ng instances of surreal ist visual practice But others qualifying equally for th is position as the greatcst of surreal ist images a re not r eally by surrealists BrassaXs Involuntary Sculptures or his nudes fo r the journal Minotaure arc examples And this fact would seem to raise a problem lor how with th is blurring of boundaries can we com e to understand surrealist photography How can we thi nk of it as an aesthetic category D o the photographs that for m a his torical cluster either as ob jects made by surreal ists or chosen by ulem do they in fact const itute some kind of unified visual fi eld And can we conceive th is field as an aesthetjc category

PART THREE MODERt-ITY A-D PHOTOGRAPHY 7

Plate 14 lan Raylomunenl to DAF dJ Sadc 1933 gelatin silver print and ink 2 0 x 16 em Israel Iusewn Jerusalem counes) of The Vera Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art Photo Ih shalom Aital C Man Ray Trust ADAGP Paris and

DACS London 2003

Vhat Breton himself put together however in the fi rst Surrealisl 1l1anifesto was not so much an aesthetic category as it was a focus on certain states of mind - dreams - certain criteria - the marvelous - and certain processes - automashytism T he exempla of these conditions could be picked up as though Lhey ere trouvailles at a flea market al most anywhere in history And so Breton finds the middotmarvelous in the romantic ruins the modern mannequin Villods gibbets Baudelaires couches- And his famous incantatory list of historys surreal ists is

8 ART OF THE nVENTlETH CENTURY A RRADER

precisely the demonstration of a found aesthetic rather than one that thinks itself through the formal coherence of say a period style

Swifl is Surrealist in malice Sade is Surrealist in sadism Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism Constant is Surrealist in politics Hugo is Surrealist when he isnt stupid 8

Tn the beginning the surrealist movement may have had its members its paid-up subscribers we cOllld say but there were many morc complimenlluy subscriptions being sent by Breton to far-off places and into the d istant paslJJ

T his attitude which annexed to surrealism such disparate artists as Uccello Gustave i1oreau Seurat and Klee seemed bent on dismantling the vcr) notioll

of style One is therefore not surprised at the position the poet and reolutionar~

Pierre ~aille took up agrullst the Beaux-Arts when he limited thc visual aesshythetic of the movement LO memory and the pleasure of the eyes and produced a list of those things that would produce this pleasure streets kiosks automobiles cinema photographs1O Tn modeling what he in tended as the mO-emenlS authorshyitati-e journal La Revolillioll surtialiste after the French scientific regt1ew La lYalure Naville wanted to clarify that this was not an art magazine and his deci sion as its editor to include a great deal of photography was predicated precisely he has said on the aai lability of photographys inlages - one could fmd them anywhcre 1I FOT laviHe artistic style was anathema I have no tastes he wrote except djstastc_ vIastcrs master-crooks smear your canvases E-eryone knows there is no surrealisl paiming Neither the marks of a pencil abandoned to th( accidents of gesturc nor the image retracing the forms of the dream U

To place in this way a ban on accident and dream as the basis of a visual style thereby proscribing the very resources on which Breton depended was to make of himself a kind of roadblock in the direction along which surrea lshyism was moving Navilles struggle with Breton is acted out in the masthead of La Revolution surrealisle which is issued at its beginning from i ts rue de Grenelle headquarters dubbed the ICentrale its editors listed as Naville and peret then is wrested from th em in the third issue by Breton and moved to the rue Fontaine only to return for one number to the Centrale until it is definitively taken back home by Breton to the r ue Fontaine lany things were at issue in this struggle but one of them was painting_ For by the mid die of 925 Breton had allowed the possibility of Surrealism and Painting in the text he produced by that name At first he thought of it in terms of found surrealists like de Chirico or P icasso But by March 1926 his second installment of this essay was bent on constructing precisely what everyollf knows there is none of a pictorial ffiO-ement a stylistic phenomenon a surshyreal ist painting to go into the newly organized Galerie Surrealiste

In going about formulating this thing this style Breton resorted to his very

PART THREE MODERNITY AND PIiQTOGIAJlHY 9

own privileging of -isuality when in the first JVlanijeslo he had located his own invention of psychic automatism within the experience of hypnogogic images _ that is of half-waking half-dreaming visual experience For it was out of the priority that he wanted to give to this sensory mode - the very medium of dream e-perience - that he thought he could institute a pictorial style

Surrealism and Painting thus begins with a declaration of the absolute value of vision above the other senses_ 13 R ejecting symbolisms notion that art shou ld aspire to the condition of music Breton rejoins that visual images attain what music never can and he adds no doubt for the benefi t of twen shytieth-century proponents of abstraction so may night continue to descend upon the orchestra Breton had opened by extolling vision in terms of its absolute immediacy its resistance to the alienating powers of thought T he eye exists in its savage state he had begun T he marvels of the earth __ have as their sole witness the wild eye that traces all its colors back to the rainbow Visioll defined as primitive or natural is good it is reason calculati ng p re shy

medi tated controlling that is bad No sooner however is the immediacy of vision established as the grounds

for an aesthetic that it is overthrown by something else something normally thought to be its opposite wTi ting Psychic au tomatism is itseU a Titten form a scribbling on paper a textual production_Describing the automatic drawings of Andre iJasson - the painter whose chemistry of t he intellect Breton was most drawn to - Breton presents them too as a kind of writing as essentially cursive scriptorial the resu lt of th is hand enamoured of its own movement and of that alone I ndeed he adds the essential discovery of surrealism is that without preconceived intention the pen that flows in order to wTite and the pencil that runs in order to draw spin an infinitely preshycious substance So preferable is this substance in Bretons eyes to the fun shydamentally visual product of the dream that Breton ends by giving way to a distaste for the other road available to Surrealism namely the stablizing of dream images in the kind of still-life deception known as trompe loeil (and the very word deception betrays the weakness of the process)

Now this distinction between writing and yision is one of the many alltin~ omies that Breton speaks of wanting surrealism to dissolve in the higher synshythesis of a surreality tha t will in this case resolve the dualism of perception and representation4 It is an old opposition within Testern culture and one that does not simply hold these two modalities to be contrasting forms of experience but places one higher than the other 15 Perception is better - tTuer _ because it is imlnediate to experience while r epresentation must ahvays remain suspect because it is nevcr anything but a copy a re-creation in anothshyer form a set of signs for experience Because of its distance from the real

representation can thus be suspected of fTaud In preferring the products of a cursive automatism to those of dream imagery

Breton appears to be reversing the classical preference of vision to writing For in

6 ART OF T I-fE nVEgt~TIETH CE~TURY A READER

was Jacques-Andre Boiffard who manifested the sensibility photographically And by the time of Minolaures operation ilan Ray was working along with Raoul Ubac and BrassaL But the issue is not just that these books and journals contamed photographs - or tolerated them as it werc The more important fact is that in a few of these photographs surrealism achieved some of its supreme images - images of far greater power than most of what was done in the remorselessly labored paintings and drawings that came increasingly to estabshylish the identi ty of Bretons concept of Isurrealism and painting

If we look at certain of t hese photographs we see with a shock of recogshynition the simultaneous effect of d isplacement and condensation the vcry operations of sym bol formation hard at work on the fl esh of the rcal In iVian Rays Monument a D I F de Sade for example our perception of nude buttocks is guided by an act of rotation as the cruci form inner fra memiddot for this image is tra nsformed into the fi gure of the phallus [Plate 14] Th e sense of capture that is simultaneously impl ied by this fall is then heightshyened by the structural reciprocity between frame and im age contain er a nd contained For it is th e frame that counteracts the effects of the lighting on the flesh a lumino us intensity that causes the nude body to d issolve as it moves with increasi ng insubstantiabty toward the edges of the sheet seem shying as it goes to become as thin as paper Only the cruciform edges of the frame rhyming jth the clefts and folds of th e photographed anatomy serve to reinject this field with a sense of the corporeal presence of the body guarantying its density by the act of drawing limits But to caJl th is body into being is to eroticize it forever to freeze it as the sym bol of pl easur e In a variation on th is theme of limits J1an R ay s untitled Minotaure imagc d isplaces the visually decapitlted head of a body downward to transfo r m the recorded torso into the face of an animal And the cropping of the i_mage by the p hotograp hic frame a croppi ng that defines the bull s physiognomy by the act of locating it as it were - th is cutt ing mimes the beheading by shadshyow that is at work insjde the images fi eld So that in both these photographs a transformation of t he real occurs through the action of the franle And in both each in its own way the frame is experienced as figurative as redrawshying the elements inside it These two images by LVIan R ay the work of a photographer who participated d irectly in the movement are stunni ng instances of surreal ist visual practice But others qualifying equally for th is position as the greatcst of surreal ist images a re not r eally by surrealists BrassaXs Involuntary Sculptures or his nudes fo r the journal Minotaure arc examples And this fact would seem to raise a problem lor how with th is blurring of boundaries can we com e to understand surrealist photography How can we thi nk of it as an aesthetic category D o the photographs that for m a his torical cluster either as ob jects made by surreal ists or chosen by ulem do they in fact const itute some kind of unified visual fi eld And can we conceive th is field as an aesthetjc category

PART THREE MODERt-ITY A-D PHOTOGRAPHY 7

Plate 14 lan Raylomunenl to DAF dJ Sadc 1933 gelatin silver print and ink 2 0 x 16 em Israel Iusewn Jerusalem counes) of The Vera Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art Photo Ih shalom Aital C Man Ray Trust ADAGP Paris and

DACS London 2003

Vhat Breton himself put together however in the fi rst Surrealisl 1l1anifesto was not so much an aesthetic category as it was a focus on certain states of mind - dreams - certain criteria - the marvelous - and certain processes - automashytism T he exempla of these conditions could be picked up as though Lhey ere trouvailles at a flea market al most anywhere in history And so Breton finds the middotmarvelous in the romantic ruins the modern mannequin Villods gibbets Baudelaires couches- And his famous incantatory list of historys surreal ists is

8 ART OF THE nVENTlETH CENTURY A RRADER

precisely the demonstration of a found aesthetic rather than one that thinks itself through the formal coherence of say a period style

Swifl is Surrealist in malice Sade is Surrealist in sadism Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism Constant is Surrealist in politics Hugo is Surrealist when he isnt stupid 8

Tn the beginning the surrealist movement may have had its members its paid-up subscribers we cOllld say but there were many morc complimenlluy subscriptions being sent by Breton to far-off places and into the d istant paslJJ

T his attitude which annexed to surrealism such disparate artists as Uccello Gustave i1oreau Seurat and Klee seemed bent on dismantling the vcr) notioll

of style One is therefore not surprised at the position the poet and reolutionar~

Pierre ~aille took up agrullst the Beaux-Arts when he limited thc visual aesshythetic of the movement LO memory and the pleasure of the eyes and produced a list of those things that would produce this pleasure streets kiosks automobiles cinema photographs1O Tn modeling what he in tended as the mO-emenlS authorshyitati-e journal La Revolillioll surtialiste after the French scientific regt1ew La lYalure Naville wanted to clarify that this was not an art magazine and his deci sion as its editor to include a great deal of photography was predicated precisely he has said on the aai lability of photographys inlages - one could fmd them anywhcre 1I FOT laviHe artistic style was anathema I have no tastes he wrote except djstastc_ vIastcrs master-crooks smear your canvases E-eryone knows there is no surrealisl paiming Neither the marks of a pencil abandoned to th( accidents of gesturc nor the image retracing the forms of the dream U

To place in this way a ban on accident and dream as the basis of a visual style thereby proscribing the very resources on which Breton depended was to make of himself a kind of roadblock in the direction along which surrea lshyism was moving Navilles struggle with Breton is acted out in the masthead of La Revolution surrealisle which is issued at its beginning from i ts rue de Grenelle headquarters dubbed the ICentrale its editors listed as Naville and peret then is wrested from th em in the third issue by Breton and moved to the rue Fontaine only to return for one number to the Centrale until it is definitively taken back home by Breton to the r ue Fontaine lany things were at issue in this struggle but one of them was painting_ For by the mid die of 925 Breton had allowed the possibility of Surrealism and Painting in the text he produced by that name At first he thought of it in terms of found surrealists like de Chirico or P icasso But by March 1926 his second installment of this essay was bent on constructing precisely what everyollf knows there is none of a pictorial ffiO-ement a stylistic phenomenon a surshyreal ist painting to go into the newly organized Galerie Surrealiste

In going about formulating this thing this style Breton resorted to his very

PART THREE MODERNITY AND PIiQTOGIAJlHY 9

own privileging of -isuality when in the first JVlanijeslo he had located his own invention of psychic automatism within the experience of hypnogogic images _ that is of half-waking half-dreaming visual experience For it was out of the priority that he wanted to give to this sensory mode - the very medium of dream e-perience - that he thought he could institute a pictorial style

Surrealism and Painting thus begins with a declaration of the absolute value of vision above the other senses_ 13 R ejecting symbolisms notion that art shou ld aspire to the condition of music Breton rejoins that visual images attain what music never can and he adds no doubt for the benefi t of twen shytieth-century proponents of abstraction so may night continue to descend upon the orchestra Breton had opened by extolling vision in terms of its absolute immediacy its resistance to the alienating powers of thought T he eye exists in its savage state he had begun T he marvels of the earth __ have as their sole witness the wild eye that traces all its colors back to the rainbow Visioll defined as primitive or natural is good it is reason calculati ng p re shy

medi tated controlling that is bad No sooner however is the immediacy of vision established as the grounds

for an aesthetic that it is overthrown by something else something normally thought to be its opposite wTi ting Psychic au tomatism is itseU a Titten form a scribbling on paper a textual production_Describing the automatic drawings of Andre iJasson - the painter whose chemistry of t he intellect Breton was most drawn to - Breton presents them too as a kind of writing as essentially cursive scriptorial the resu lt of th is hand enamoured of its own movement and of that alone I ndeed he adds the essential discovery of surrealism is that without preconceived intention the pen that flows in order to wTite and the pencil that runs in order to draw spin an infinitely preshycious substance So preferable is this substance in Bretons eyes to the fun shydamentally visual product of the dream that Breton ends by giving way to a distaste for the other road available to Surrealism namely the stablizing of dream images in the kind of still-life deception known as trompe loeil (and the very word deception betrays the weakness of the process)

Now this distinction between writing and yision is one of the many alltin~ omies that Breton speaks of wanting surrealism to dissolve in the higher synshythesis of a surreality tha t will in this case resolve the dualism of perception and representation4 It is an old opposition within Testern culture and one that does not simply hold these two modalities to be contrasting forms of experience but places one higher than the other 15 Perception is better - tTuer _ because it is imlnediate to experience while r epresentation must ahvays remain suspect because it is nevcr anything but a copy a re-creation in anothshyer form a set of signs for experience Because of its distance from the real

representation can thus be suspected of fTaud In preferring the products of a cursive automatism to those of dream imagery

Breton appears to be reversing the classical preference of vision to writing For in

8 ART OF THE nVENTlETH CENTURY A RRADER

precisely the demonstration of a found aesthetic rather than one that thinks itself through the formal coherence of say a period style

Swifl is Surrealist in malice Sade is Surrealist in sadism Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism Constant is Surrealist in politics Hugo is Surrealist when he isnt stupid 8

Tn the beginning the surrealist movement may have had its members its paid-up subscribers we cOllld say but there were many morc complimenlluy subscriptions being sent by Breton to far-off places and into the d istant paslJJ

T his attitude which annexed to surrealism such disparate artists as Uccello Gustave i1oreau Seurat and Klee seemed bent on dismantling the vcr) notioll

of style One is therefore not surprised at the position the poet and reolutionar~

Pierre ~aille took up agrullst the Beaux-Arts when he limited thc visual aesshythetic of the movement LO memory and the pleasure of the eyes and produced a list of those things that would produce this pleasure streets kiosks automobiles cinema photographs1O Tn modeling what he in tended as the mO-emenlS authorshyitati-e journal La Revolillioll surtialiste after the French scientific regt1ew La lYalure Naville wanted to clarify that this was not an art magazine and his deci sion as its editor to include a great deal of photography was predicated precisely he has said on the aai lability of photographys inlages - one could fmd them anywhcre 1I FOT laviHe artistic style was anathema I have no tastes he wrote except djstastc_ vIastcrs master-crooks smear your canvases E-eryone knows there is no surrealisl paiming Neither the marks of a pencil abandoned to th( accidents of gesturc nor the image retracing the forms of the dream U

To place in this way a ban on accident and dream as the basis of a visual style thereby proscribing the very resources on which Breton depended was to make of himself a kind of roadblock in the direction along which surrea lshyism was moving Navilles struggle with Breton is acted out in the masthead of La Revolution surrealisle which is issued at its beginning from i ts rue de Grenelle headquarters dubbed the ICentrale its editors listed as Naville and peret then is wrested from th em in the third issue by Breton and moved to the rue Fontaine only to return for one number to the Centrale until it is definitively taken back home by Breton to the r ue Fontaine lany things were at issue in this struggle but one of them was painting_ For by the mid die of 925 Breton had allowed the possibility of Surrealism and Painting in the text he produced by that name At first he thought of it in terms of found surrealists like de Chirico or P icasso But by March 1926 his second installment of this essay was bent on constructing precisely what everyollf knows there is none of a pictorial ffiO-ement a stylistic phenomenon a surshyreal ist painting to go into the newly organized Galerie Surrealiste

In going about formulating this thing this style Breton resorted to his very

PART THREE MODERNITY AND PIiQTOGIAJlHY 9

own privileging of -isuality when in the first JVlanijeslo he had located his own invention of psychic automatism within the experience of hypnogogic images _ that is of half-waking half-dreaming visual experience For it was out of the priority that he wanted to give to this sensory mode - the very medium of dream e-perience - that he thought he could institute a pictorial style

Surrealism and Painting thus begins with a declaration of the absolute value of vision above the other senses_ 13 R ejecting symbolisms notion that art shou ld aspire to the condition of music Breton rejoins that visual images attain what music never can and he adds no doubt for the benefi t of twen shytieth-century proponents of abstraction so may night continue to descend upon the orchestra Breton had opened by extolling vision in terms of its absolute immediacy its resistance to the alienating powers of thought T he eye exists in its savage state he had begun T he marvels of the earth __ have as their sole witness the wild eye that traces all its colors back to the rainbow Visioll defined as primitive or natural is good it is reason calculati ng p re shy

medi tated controlling that is bad No sooner however is the immediacy of vision established as the grounds

for an aesthetic that it is overthrown by something else something normally thought to be its opposite wTi ting Psychic au tomatism is itseU a Titten form a scribbling on paper a textual production_Describing the automatic drawings of Andre iJasson - the painter whose chemistry of t he intellect Breton was most drawn to - Breton presents them too as a kind of writing as essentially cursive scriptorial the resu lt of th is hand enamoured of its own movement and of that alone I ndeed he adds the essential discovery of surrealism is that without preconceived intention the pen that flows in order to wTite and the pencil that runs in order to draw spin an infinitely preshycious substance So preferable is this substance in Bretons eyes to the fun shydamentally visual product of the dream that Breton ends by giving way to a distaste for the other road available to Surrealism namely the stablizing of dream images in the kind of still-life deception known as trompe loeil (and the very word deception betrays the weakness of the process)

Now this distinction between writing and yision is one of the many alltin~ omies that Breton speaks of wanting surrealism to dissolve in the higher synshythesis of a surreality tha t will in this case resolve the dualism of perception and representation4 It is an old opposition within Testern culture and one that does not simply hold these two modalities to be contrasting forms of experience but places one higher than the other 15 Perception is better - tTuer _ because it is imlnediate to experience while r epresentation must ahvays remain suspect because it is nevcr anything but a copy a re-creation in anothshyer form a set of signs for experience Because of its distance from the real

representation can thus be suspected of fTaud In preferring the products of a cursive automatism to those of dream imagery

Breton appears to be reversing the classical preference of vision to writing For in

120 ART OF THE nVENTtETH CENTURY A READER

Bretons definition it is the pictorial image that is suspect a deception while the cursive one is true16

Yet this reversal only appears to overthrow the traditional Platonic dislike of representation In facr because the visual imagery Breton suspects is a picture and thus the representation of a dream rather than the dream itself Breton here continues estern cultures fear of representation as an invitation to deceit And the truth of the CUTS1C flow of automatist wri ting or drawing derics precisely from the faeL that this activity is less a representation of something than it is a manifestation or recording like tlle lines traced on paper by machines that monshyitor heartbeats vVhat this cursive web makes present by making visible is a direct connection to buried miues of experjcnce Automatism Breton declares leads us in a straight line to this region and the region he had in mind is obviously the lUlconscious17 VVith this directness automatism makes the unconscious present Automatism may be wri ting but it is not representation It is ilnmediate to expeshyrience untainted by the distance and extenority of signs

But this commitment to automatism and writing as a special modality of presence and a consequent dislike of representation as a cheat is not consis shytent in Breton As we will see Breton expressed a great enthusiasm for signs - and thus for representation - since representation is the very core of his defshyinition of Convulsie Beauty and Convulsive Beauty is another term for the Manelous th e great talismanic concept at the heart of surrealism itself

On the levcl of theory these contradictions about the priorities of vision and representation presence and sign perform what the contradiction between the two poles of surrealist art Inanjfests on the level of forlll For the problem of how to forge some kind of stylistical ly coberent entity out of the apparent opposition between the abstract liquefaction of liros art on the one hand and the dry realism of Magritte or Dah 0 11 the other has continued to plague every writer - beginning with Breton him self - who has set out to define sWTealist art- Is

Automatism and dream may seem coherent as parallel functions of unconscious activity but give rise to image types that seem irreconcilably diverse

It is wi th in this confusion ocr the nature of surrealis t art that the present investigation of surrealist photography should be placed -lor to begin that investigation with the claim that surrealist photography is the great unknown undervalued aspect of surrea1ist practice but that nonetheless it is the great production of the momiddotement is undoubtedly to write a kind of promissory note l1ight Dot this work be the very key to the dilem_ma of sur shyrealist style the catalys t for the solution the magnet th at attracts and there shyby organizes the particles in the field

On the surface of th ings this would seem a promise impossible to keep The very same diversity so troubling to the art histori an or cri tic who tries to think coherence into the contrad ictory condition of surrealist pictorial proshyduction repealS itself wi thin the corpus of the photographs T he range of stymiddot listic options taken by the photographers is enormous There are straight

PART THREE MODERNITY Al(D PHOTOGRAPHY 12 1

Plate 15 Jacques-Andre Boi ffard The Big Toe 1C)19 photograph from Georges Bataille Ie gros oneil in Documents 0 6 1929 Centre Pompidou-1 I 7l-CCl Pans Photo C C~AClrNA)J D1SL RlX

Plate 16 Raou l Ubac II omaIl Ciomi (La ~Wblllellse) 1939 Cen tre Pompidou-1JlA i -Cel Paris C~AC 1L~l DisL InL~ 0 AD AGP Par is and DACS London 2003

images sharply focused and in close-up which vary from the contemporaneshyous production of Neue Sachlichkeit or Bauhaus photography only in the peculiarity of their subjects - like Boiffards untitled photographs of big toes [Plate ISJ or Dora Maars Ubu (1936) or Man Rays hands or Mescns As fVe Understand It (Comme nous lentendolls ) - but sometimes as in the images Brassal made for L Amour fou not even in that There are photographs that are not straight but are the result of combination printing a darkroom maneuer that produces the irrational space of what could be taken to be the image of dreams Some of these retain the crispness and definition of any contemporary Magritte or Dati others particularly those by Ubact begin to slide into the fluid melting condition that we associate more with the pictoshyrial terms elaborated by Masson and Miro [Plate 16] And there were of course techn iques associated directly with automatist procedures and the courting of chance Thus Ubac speaks of releasing photography from the middotrationalist arrogance that powered its discovery and identifying it with he poetic movement of liberation through a process identical with that of aUlomatism19 Ubacs brulages photographs in which the image is modified by melting the negative emulsion before printing arc thought to be one example of thislO Man Rays rayographs - cameraless photograms produced

123 122 ART OF THE nVEnlETH CE1TRY A READER

~ (UviutL

~Jlt-t--HtAL-1iAt l (

Plate 17 ~ndre Breton Scf-Portrait L ampriture AUlOl1lnllque 1938 photomontage 1+2 x 19 em The Vera Silvia and Arturo Schwan Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art at the Jsracl Museum JerusaJem Photo Avshalom AitaJ Q ADAGP Paris and DACS London 2003

by placing objects directly on photographic paper which is then exposed to light - can be seen as another As Ma n Rav himself said by Irecal ling the event m ore or less clearly like the undistUIbed ashes of an object consumed by flam es the rayographs seemed like those precipitates from the unconshyscious on which automatist poetic practice was founded 2 1 The technical divershysity of photographic surrealism does not end here Ve must add solarization negative printing cliche verret multiple exposure photomontage and photo collage noting that wi thin each of these technical categories there is the pos-

PRT THREE MODERIITY AjD PHOTOGRAPlnshy

sibiLity of the same stylistic bifurcation (linear painterly or representational abstract) that surrealist painting exhibits

Kowhere does this internal contradiction seem more immediately available than in the photo collage that Andre Breton made as a self-portrait a work called LEcriture aUlomalique [Plate I -J For here in a single work is enshrined the very split for which these stylist ic terms are the surrogates vision writing Breton portrays hiJDself with a microscope an optical instrument invented to expand normal eyesight to ctend its powers in ways not unlike those associshyated with the camera itself I Te is shown that is to say as the surrealist seer armed with vision But th is condition of sio l1 produces images and these images are understood as a textual product hence the title Automalic rfriliflg

There is however one important factor that must be added to any considerashytion of Bretons Automalic Wnliflg before concluding that its contradictions are irreconcilable It is a factor that allows one to think as Breton seems to have been doing here about the relationship between phowgraphy and writing tormally we consider wTiting as absolutely banned fTom the photographic field exilCd by the ery nature of the image - the message thout a code - to an ctcrnal location where language fWlcLions as the ncccssary interpreter of the rnuteness of the photographic signu This place is the caption the very necessity of which produced the despair that Brecht for example felt about photography Walter Benjamin cites th is hostilit)f to the stTaight photograph when he quotes Brechts objection to the camera image I phowgraph of the Krupp works or GRe yields almost nothing about these institutions Therefore something has actively w be construcled something artificial something set-upJ3 Throughout the avantshygarde of the 1920S and 1930 5 that somethi ng that constructed photograph was the photomontage about which it cou ld be claimed that it expresses not simply the fact vruch it shows but also the sociallendency expressed by the factq And this notion of the montages insistence upon meaning on a sense of reali ty bearmiddot ing its OWI1 interpretation was articulated by Aragons reception of the ork of the revolutionary artist John I Teartfield s he was playing with the Ere of appearance real ity took fire around him The scraps of photographs that be formerly manoeuTcd for the pleaslue of stupefaction lUlder his fingers begin to signify The possibility of signification that AIagon saw in Hearlfleld seems to have been llnderstood as a function of the agglomerative constructed medium of photo collage Referring in another context to the separate collage elements of Ernsts montages Aragon compared them to wordsl

In what sense we might ask could the very act of collage montage be thought of as tex1ual- as it seenlS to hae been so thought by these writers And is this a logic that can resolve what is contradictory in Lampnlure automatique

Objects metamorphosed before my very 9lSj they did not assume WI allegancal SIlUlce or tire personality of fymboLs they seemed Less lhe outgrowths 0 all idea tilallthe idea itself

- Louis Aragon26

124 ART OF THE nVET1ETH CENTURY It RIADI-R

If these works were able to signify to articulate reality through a kind of language this was a function of the cellular structure that montage exploits with its em phatic gaps between one shard of reality and another gaps that in the montages fTom the early 192 0 S by the dadaists Hannah Hoch or Raoul Hausmann left rivers of white paper to flow around the individual photo graphic units For this cell construction mimics not the look of words but the fo rmal preconditions of signs the fact that they require a fundamental exteshyriority between one another I n language this exteriority man ifests itself as syntax and syntax in turn is both a system of connection between the ele ments of a language and a system of separat ion of m ain taini ng the differshyence between one sign and the next of creating m eaning th rough the synshytactical condition of spacing

By leaving the blanks or gaps or spaces of the page to show dada m ontage traded in the powerful resource of photographic realism for the quali ty that we could call the language effece Normally photography is as far as possible from creating such an effect For photography with its techn ical basis in an instantaneous recording of an event captures what we could call the si mulshytaneity of real space the fact that space does not present itself to us as sucshycessie in nature like time but as pure presence present-all-at-once By carshyrying on its continuous surface the trace or imprint of all that vision captures in one glance photography nor mally functio ns as a kind of declaration of the seamlessness of reality itself It is this seamlessness that dada photo collage disr upts in an attempt to in fil trate reali ty with in terpretation with significashytion wi th the very wTiting to which Breton refers in h is own collage ecriwre automatique It is this seam lessness of the photographic field that is fractu red and segmented in DaIis extraordinary collage The Phenomenon if ECSla~y

(Le Phenometze de I extase) [P late 18]i as well and with the similar producshytion of the language effect For within the grid that organ izes the ecstatic images of women we fi nd the inclusion of strips of different ears taken from the catalogue of anatom ical parts assembled by master police ch ief Alphonse Berti llon that stands as ule nineteenth-century criminological attcmpt to lise photography to constTuct the porlrait parlanl or speaking likeness wiuless to the last centurys expectation that like other mediums photography could WTest a message from the muteness of material reality

If photo collage set up a relationship between photography and languagc it did so at the sacrifice of photographys p rivileged connection to the world T his is why the surrealist photographeTs for the most part shunned the colshylage technique seeming to have found in it a too-willing surrender of phoshytographys hold on the real Darkroom processes like combination printing and double exposure were preferred to scissors an d paste For these techniques could preserve the seamless sur face of the fin al print and thus reenforce the sense that this image bei ng a photograph documents the reality from which it is a transfer But at the same time this image internally riven by the effects

PART THREE YIODER-TIT AND P-JOTQGRAPHY 12 5

Plale 18 Salvador DaH The Phenomeflon of ampSlasy photomontage from ~rillolaure Nos 3- + 4 December 1953middot Courtesy of The British Iibrary London BL cISod 1 0 Salvador Dali Gala - Salvador Dali Foundations OAGS London 2003

126 ART OF THE TIVErTlETH CEITURi A READER

of syntax - of spacing - would imply nonetheless that it is reality that has composed itself as a sign

To cOlwulse reality from within to demonstrate it as fTactured by spacing became the coUectlC result of all that vast range of techniques to which SUT

realist photographers resorted and which they understood as producing the characteristics of the sign For example solarization - in which photographic paper is briefly exposed to light during the priJlting process thereby altering in varying degrees the relationship of dark and light tones introducing elemiddot ments of the photographic ncgtatic into the positive print - creates il strange effect of cloisonne which visually walls off parts of a single space or a whole body frolll one another establish ing in this way a kind of testimony to a clovcn reality Negative printing which produces an entirely negative print with the momentarily unintelligible gaps that it creates within objeclS promotes th same effect But nothing creates this sense of the linguistic hold on the rcal more than the photographic strategy of doubling For it is doubling that pro duces the formal rhythm of spacing - the twomiddotstep that banishes sinlultaneity And it is doubling that elicits the notion that to an original has been added its copy The double is the simulacrwn the second the representalire of the origshyinal It comes after the first and in this following it can only exist as figure or image But in being seen in conjunction with the original the double destroys the pure singularity of the first Through duplication it opens the original to the effect of difference of deferral of onemiddotulingmiddotafter-another

This sense of opening reality to deferral is one form of spacing But doumiddot bling does something else besides transmute presence into succession It also marks the first in the chain as a signifying element- which is to say doubl ing transforms raw matter into the conventional shape of the signifier Linguistics describes this effect of doubling in terms of an infants progress from babbling to speech For babbling produces phonemic elements as mere noise as opposed to what happens when one phoneme is doubled by anothe r Papa is a word rather than only a random repetition of the sound pa because The reduplication indicates intent on the part of the speaker it endows th second syllable with a function different from that which would have been performed by the flrst separately or in the form of a potentially Ijmitlcss series of identical sounds papapapa produced by mere babbling Therefore the second pa is not a repetition of the fITst nor has it the same significamiddot tion It is a sign that like itself the first pa too was a sign and that as a pair they fall into the category of signifiers not of things signified

Repetition is thus the indjcator that the wild sounds of babbling have been rendered deliberate intentional and that what they intend is meaning Doubling is in this sense the signjfier of signification

Yithin surrealist photography doubling also functions as the signifier of signification It is this semiological rather than stylistic condition that unites the vast array of the movements photographic production As we observe the

pRT THREE MODERXITY A~D 1l0TQGRAPIlY 12shy

Plate 19 l-lam Bellmer Doll 193649 silvcrprint coloured with aniline 41 329 Cffi Centre Pompidou iINAI-CCJ Paris Photo C~AC l~Ai1 DisL RLI 0 ADAGP Paris and DACS London 2003

various technical options explored by surrealist photography moving from unmanipulated straight photography to negative printing to solarization to montage to rayography ulere is the constant preoccupation with doubling Ye come to realize that this is not only a thematic concern it is a structural one For the structure of the double produccs the mark of the sign

vVe find this withil1Hans Bellmers Dolls (Poupees 1936) where the mechanically duplicated parts of a dolls anatomy ailo- for a dou bling of these doubles and the doll herself call be composed of identical pairs of legs mirroring each other [Plate 19] T his can happen within the very construction of the doU or from the do1ls momentary arrangement for a gi-en photo sesshysion or through paired prints of near-twin images All of these are rendered through tech niques of documentary photography in which manipulation is studiously avoided But at other points in Bellmers production the doubling can manjfest itself technically within the image as in the double e)posures that multiply the multiples Double exposure functions in ]an Rays work to produce for example the famous doubling of the eyes of the Afarquise Cassali That photographs multiple by nature can themselves be doubled makes furth er doublillg available as in the SLacking of images Man Rays col middot lage of doubled breasLS in the opening number of La R evolution surrealisle (1924) serves as one example or again Frederick Sommers similarly doubled landscapes reproduced in the American surrealist journal VVV(1944) or Man Rays doubles in rayographic form as the mass-produced multiple object of the phonograph record (manufactured of translucent plastic in the days when th is work was made) is paired and tJlereby twinned The Dislorlions which

28 29 ~RT OF THE TWEXTlETH CENTURY A READER

Plate 20 Man Ray SLipper- spoon 19yh photograph Courtesy of Telimageshy2003 C iJan Ray Trust ADAGp Paris and DAGS London 2003middot

Andre Kertesz made in J933 eP)oit the doubling of the m irror to create a series dedicated to this effect

As we noted beforc surrealist photography exploits the very special con middot neclion to realjty with which all photography is endowed Photography is an imprint or transfer of the real it is a photochemically processed trace causalshyly connected to that thing in the world to whieh it refers in a way parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses l ea(~

on tables The photograph is thus genetically distinct from painting or sculpshyture or drawi ng On the frunily tree of ilnages it is closer to palm prin ts death masks cast shadows the Shroud of Turin or the tracks of gulls on beaches Technically and semiologically speaking drawing and paintings arc icons while photographs are indexes~8

Given photographys special status with regard to the real - that is being a kind of deposit of the real itself - the manipulations wrought by the surreal ist photographers the spacings and doublillgs are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithshyful trace In this way the photographic medium is exploi ted to produce a parashydox the paradox of reality constituted as a sign - or presence transformed into absence into representation into spacing into writing ill this semiological move surrealist photography parallels a similar move of Bretons For Bretoll though he promoted as surrealist a vast heterogeneity of pictorial styles devised a defmition of beauty that is rather more unified and that is itself translatable il1to semiological terms Beauty he said should be convulsive

I n explaining the nature of that convulsion in me text that serves as pro logue to L Amowjou Breton spells out the process of reality contorting or convulsing itself into its apparent opposite namely a sign29 Reality wh ich is present becomes a sign for hat is absent so that the world itself rendered beautiful is understood as a forest of signs In defining what he means by this indice this

PART THREE MODERNITY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

sign Breton begins to sketch a theory not of painting but of photography Each of Bretons aspects or moments of convulsive beaut) are ways of

describing the action of signs The first - erolique-voiLee - inokes the occurshyrence in nature of representation as one animal imitates another or as inorshyganic matter shapes itself to look like statuary T he second termed middotezplosanle-fixe is related to the lexpiration of movement which is to say the experience of something that should be in motion but has been for some reashyson Slopped derailed or as Duchanlp would have said delayed In this regard Breton writes I am sorry not to be able to reproduce among the illusshytrations to this text a photograph of a very handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for m any years to the delirium of a virgin forest30 T he conshyvulsiveness then the arousal in front of the object is not to it perceived wi thshyin the continuum of its natural existence but detached from that flow by means of an expiration of motion a detachment that deprives the locomotive of some part of its physica l self and turns it into a sign of the reality it no longer possesses

Bretons third example of convulsive beauty - magique-circonslancielle shyconsists of the found object or found erbal fragment both instances of objecshytive chance where (specifically in the case of the fowld object) an emissary from the external world carries a message informing the recipient of his own desire The found object is a sign of that desire Breton recognized this kind of convulsive beauty in a slipper spoon he had found in a flea market an object he recognized as the fulfil1ment of a -rish spoken by the automatic phrase that had begun running th rough his mind some months before [Plate 20] The phrase cendriller-Cendrilloll translates as Cinderella ashtray The flea-market object - a spoon with a li ttle shoe affued to the underside of its handle - suddenly convulsed itself into a sign when Breton began to see it as a chain of representations in which the shoe was reduplicated to infinity as though caught in a hall of mirrors I n addition to the little shoe under the handle he suddenly saw the bowl and handle of the spoon as the front and last of another shoe of which the little carved slipper was only the heel Then he imagined thal slipper as having for its heel yet another slipper and so on to infinity Th is chain of reduplicated and mirrored slippers Breton read as a kind of natural writing a set of lindices that signi fi ed his own desire for love and the beginning of a quest whose magical unfolding is plotted throughout LAmow-jou

If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism the concept of convul~ sive beauty is at the core of its aesthetic a concept that reduces to an experi shyence of r eality transformed into representation Surreality is we could say nature convulsed into a kind of writing The special access that photography as a medium has to this experience is photographys privileged connection to the reaL The manipulations then available to photography - what we have been calling doubling and spacing as weB as a technique of representational

15 1 ART OF TH~ TWE-TIErH CETlRf 1 READER13deg

reduplicatioll or sUmiddotucture en abyme- appear to document these connllsions The photographs are not inlerpretalions of reality decoding it as in the phogomontage practice of Heartfield or H ausmann Instead they are presen lations of that very reality as configured or coded or middotvritten

The experience of nature as sign or representation comes naturally then to photography This experience extends as well to the domain that is most inherently photographic the framing edge of the image experienced as cut or cropped This is possible even when the image does not seem folded from within by means of the reduplicative strategy of doubling when the im age is entirely unmanipulated like the Boiffard big toes or the Involuntary Sculptures by BrassaY or the image of a hatted figure by Man Ray published in JrJillotaure5 For at the very boundary of the image the camcra frame which essentially crops or cuts the represented element out of reality at large can be seen as another example of spacing

Spacing like the doubled phonemes of papa is the signifier of significashytion the ind ication of a break in the simultaneous experience of the rea l a rupture that issues into sequence P hotographic cropping is always experi shyenced as a ruptUIe in the continuous fabric of reality But surreal ist photog raphy puts enormous pressure on that frame to make it itself read as a sign - an empty sign it is true but an integer in the calculus of meaning nonetheless a signifier of signification T he frame announces that between the part of real ity cut away and this part there is a difference and that th is segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representashyt ion or n ature~as-sign Een as it announces th is experience of rea lity th e camera frame of course controls it co nfigures it3l Th is it does by poin t of view as in the 1an Iay or focal length as in the extreme close-ups of Brassai But in both these instances what the camera frames and thereby makes visible is the automatic writing of the world the constant unintershyrupted production of signs BrassaIs images are of those nasty pieces of paper like bus tickets and theater-ticket stubs that we roll into li ttle columns in our pockets or those pi eces of eraser th at we unconsciously knead - these are what his camera produces through the enlargements that he published as imoluntary sculptures 11an Rays photograph is one of sev eral made to accompany an essay by dadas founding spirit Tristan Tzara about the constant unconscious production of sexual imagery throughout culture - here in the design of hats

The fr run e announces the cameras ability to fm d and isolate what we cou ld call the worlds constant production of erotic symbols its ceaseless automatic wTiLing In th is capacity the frame can itself be glorified noticed represent shyed as in the Nirul Ray monwnent to the Marquis de Sade Or it can be there silently operating as spacing as in BrassaYs seizUIe of automatic production through his images of sculptural onanism or his captUTed grafitti

I n cutting into the body of the world stopping it framing it spacing it

I-IT THREE MODERrrv AD PHOTOGRAPHY

photography reveals that world as written Surrealist vision and photographshyic vision cohere around these principles For in the explosallle-fLXe we discov~ er the stop-motion of the still photograph in the erolique-voiM we see its fram ing and in the magique-circollslallcielie we find the message of its spacshying Breton has thus provided us all the aesthetic theory we will e er need to understand that for sUIrealist photography too beauty will be convulsic or it will not be

Andre Breton ame5loJ of Sureubsm trans Richard Seaver and I ldpoundgtn R Lane (Ann rOOr le

University of Jichigan Prlt~ 1969) p 12

Andre Breton Le Surrcalisll1c N 1ft peimurc La RetOlullon surrialiste no 4 (JIJI~ 1911) p 18 The complpoundgttpoundgt senes of dSaya was rollectoo in Ilrpoundgtton Surrralism and Pmminamp tran SlIlIon alSOll

Taylor (New York I larptr amp Ro 9-l) runher refpoundgtrpoundgtllce5 arc to this translation j Breton lIonifestos p i Andre Brelon Yada trans Richard Iloward (ew York Gro~ Press 1960) p 15~ In the preratt to

the 1963 Prellch edition (Galhmard) Breton speau of the photographs in relation to one of the

antihterary principles that guided Lhe creation of the book The abundant photographIc illuslfa lion he writes had as us obicttl-e the elimination or all dCSCription- what had been chided as iIlane in the Surrealist jlanifeslo- and the tone that the narrati~e adopted was modeled on Lhat of medlca1 obsen(ltioll See- ~11chel Beaujour Qumiddotest-ce que )adjaT La Youvdle Rnue FrunfoiM no 11

(April I 196) pp -80-99 ror an analYSIS of adlas rondllion as a text that is open 10 addlUons from what would nonnall) be ie-wed as hors-lerte and the role the photographs pin in Lhis gard

This question had begun The pholographic print 15 permeated with an emoti~middotf nlue Lhal maks il a supremely preciow rude or exchange (SurrralullI and Paint~ p Yl)

ti ndre Breton La Beautl sera convuI5i~ lmolo~ no 5 ( 934) pp 9-16 alter BenJamm Surrealism lbc Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia in Reflections trailS Edmund Jephrott (Xew York Ilarrourt Brace Jovanovich 19-8) p 183 See Rosalind Krauss ~ightalkers

-Irt Journal +5 (Spring 1981) n-8 8rNon onifestos p 16

~ Ibid p 77 I) Iksides the famous dictionary defillltion or surreahsm (II Psychic automatism in its pure state )

BrelOnmiddots first Surrralist Ilenifnio includes an encycloped ia entry iu which rnc performers of acts of absolute surrealism are listed ragon Baron Borfard Breton Carrh-e Crel Oelteil Ibnos

EJuard Gerard Llmbour ilalkine Ionse Na-ille 011 Perc Plcon Soupauh itrampc 10 1gtlerre wille Beaw Aru La Rhviflilon surrialislc no 5 (April 1915) p ~-

II As told to the author in ronmiddotersatlon lin- 0 1985 11 1111 also said that it was he vhodtlsed the three

pronged photo ooUage of lhe members BIllie Cenu-alc for Lhe CO-er of the first issue of LA RhxgtuJon

surrealisre See his aCCOllill in Pierre )111111 U Temps du sllrriaJ (pans Galilee 197) pp 99110

Il allle Beaw-Aru p ~7

I) The quotations in this and the nen paragraph are from Breton SlIrrralism and PaUltln8 pp 68 0

I ~ ndre Breton ilceanie (19middot~8 ) reprinted in Breton La CU ths clwmps (Pans Saglttaire 9~) 97 edition) p 28

I) Breton bere reenacu the polantauon between speech and wnting presence and representauon that Derrida analyzes as the opposIliol1$ Lhat structure Western metaphysics See Jicques Ot-rnda 0 Gramrru1rol~ tram GC Spl-ak ( Balumore Johru Hopkins Lniversity Press 19--6) The roncepl of

~pacmg developed there (pp 653) and in Freud and the Scene of Writing (in Jacques Ocrridi IIntmg and Differrllce trails Alall Bass [Chicago tllimiddotersuy of Chicago Press 1978 ]) II IInportalll

for the discussion tha t follows 16 Thus BrelOlI insists thai any fOflll of cxpression In which automatism does not at least adancc

undercover runs a gramiddote risk or 1I10ing out of the surrcalist orbit (Surrealism and PIIUIifB p 68)

I ~ Ibid p 70 18 Wilham Rubin attempts to ronstruCl an ullnnsic difvtlllon oj Surrealist paUltlnl i ll his rssa)

Toward a Critical Framework Inonu ) (September 1966) 35 But becallle he rlpnxluCtS the

same bipolar or blalent ronceptual SLructure Lhat Bf(ton had established ill 915 his defimtlon mir

ART OF THE nVENTl lITH CEITURY A READ ER 32

ron the problems of Bretons iUi well Ig See Gamille BI)ell and Raoul lichelet lcluatwn poitlqUL ( 1955 reprinted 1I1 lsteel larien

LAclInlii surrlolisu ~ff ampIAlI~ [Brussels Lebeermiddot llossmano 1979J pp 26g--O) 20 Chac describes the procedure of broJa~ also callMi souJJl~~ u a S)5tem of placing the glass plate

of an eposed negaue over a heated pan of water ill order to melt the emulsion It was thw a n

automausrn of destruction a complete dissolution of the image towards an absolute formlessness I

treated a large number of my ncgaue$ in this manner - the result bt-ing for the most pan disap_

pointing except in one caM where a woman in a bathing SUit was trarufonned IIItO 8 thunderstruck

Goddess - a photo titled La Xebuleuse On an unpublished letter to eI Ge-en from Raoul tbac dated Dieudonne 2 1 March 1981)

21 )Ian Ray Exhibition Ra~raphs 1921- 1928 (Stuttgart L G A 1963) 12 llessage without a code is Barthess term in his essays nle Photographic Message and IUletoric of

the Image See Roland Barthes Image 1IllS1c Tul trans Stephen Ileath (ew York I 1111 and Wang

19n)middot 23 In Walter Iknjamill A Short Ihstory or Photography trans Stanley I itchcll Screen 1J (Spnng

19(2) 24middot 24 John Heartfield PhorolOma~esof the azl Penod(~ew York Uni-erse Book 19i) p 16 25 Louis Aragon Joh n I(artfield ella beaute reOlullonnaire (1935) Tltprimed in Aragon u s Colloge~

( Paris I lermallll 965) pp i8--9 l6 18hllLlIku (Le Paysan de Pans) trans Frederick Brown ( Englewood Clirrs -c Jcrsey Prenticemiddot

llal 9iO) p 9 27 Claude 1imiddotI Strauss The RQU(lIU the Cooked trails J and D cighlm8n (lew York Ilarperamp 10

19-0) pp 359-40 28 Photographys posItion u 8n index was fi m established by C S I)circe within the taxonomy or signs

that he developed In Logic as Semiotic The Theory or Sigm Cs Peirce PhllosophlcalWnlmgr of Pevec ed Justw Buchler (-lew York Dover 1955)

29 Ine text La beaute sera colwulsle (pp cil) became the first chapter or C1mourfou See Andre Breton L Amour fou (Paris Gallimard 1957) pp - 9

30 Ibid P 13 50 Boiffards big toes accompanied the text by Georges Bataill~ Le Gros Ort(il Docunumts no 6 ( 929)

Brassais Sculpwres I Imollln(aves appeared 111 lflnOoure los 3- (1953) p 68 Mall Rays photo graphs or hats illustrated Tristan Tzaras DUJl Cena in Automallsme du gout Jinotoun nos 5-4

(1933) pp 81- 8 2 Derrida analyres the frame as an outside which is called inside the inside to col1sutl(e it as inside

See Jacques Dcrrida rhe Parcrgon trans Craig Owens OciOMr no 9 (Summer 199)

4 John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

John Szarkowski worked as a photographer before becoming the curator of photographs at the Museum of Modem Art New York in 1962 a post that he held until his retirement in 1991 Through a series of high ly influential exhibitions and accompanying catalogues he elaborated a modernist account of photography that drew heavily on the idea of vernacular form This text was originally written as a catalogue essay for the exhibition The Photographers Eye held in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art It represents a key statement of Szarkowski s approach and clearly lays out the fi ve eleshyments that he held to be central to photography conceived as an art The follOWing extracts are taken from John Szarkowski The Photographers Eye Museum of Modern Art New York 1969 unpaginated [SE]

PART THREE MODERNITY AD PHOTOGRAPHY 33

Introduction

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like and or why they look that way It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic trashydition with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection T he difference was a baSIC one Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of tradi shytional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs as the man on the street put it were taken

The di ffeTence raised a creative issue of a new orde r how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms - pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be fOW1 d by those who loved too m uch the old forms for in large part the photographer was berert or the old artistic traditions Speak ing or photography Baudelaire said This indusshytry by invading the territories of art has become ares most mortal e nemy And in h is own terms of re rerence Baudelaire was haIr right certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards The photographer must fi nd new ways to make his meaning clear

T hese new ways might be found by men who could abandon their alleshygiance to tradi t ional pictorial standards - or by the artistically ignorant who had no old allegiances to break T here hare been many of the latter sort Since its earliest days photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training who were disciplined and united by no academy or gui ld who considered their medium variously as a science an art a t rade or an entertainment and who were often unavare of each others work Those who invented photography were scientists and painters but its professional practitioners were a ery different lot [ J

T he enormous popularity of the new medium produced proressionals by the thousands - converted silversmiths t inkers druggists blacksmiths and printers If photography was a new artistic problem such men had the advanshytage of having nothing to unlearn Among them they produced a fl ood of images In 1853 the VellJ- York Daily Tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that yearl Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention many were the product of accident improvisation misunderstanding and empirical experiment But whether produced by art or by luck) each picture was part of a massive assault on our t raditional habits of seeing

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious amateurs were joined by an even larger host of casual snap-shooters By the early eighties the dry plate which could be purchased rcady-to-use had replaced the refractory and messy wet plate process which dernanded that the

124 ART OF THE nVET1ETH CENTURY It RIADI-R

If these works were able to signify to articulate reality through a kind of language this was a function of the cellular structure that montage exploits with its em phatic gaps between one shard of reality and another gaps that in the montages fTom the early 192 0 S by the dadaists Hannah Hoch or Raoul Hausmann left rivers of white paper to flow around the individual photo graphic units For this cell construction mimics not the look of words but the fo rmal preconditions of signs the fact that they require a fundamental exteshyriority between one another I n language this exteriority man ifests itself as syntax and syntax in turn is both a system of connection between the ele ments of a language and a system of separat ion of m ain taini ng the differshyence between one sign and the next of creating m eaning th rough the synshytactical condition of spacing

By leaving the blanks or gaps or spaces of the page to show dada m ontage traded in the powerful resource of photographic realism for the quali ty that we could call the language effece Normally photography is as far as possible from creating such an effect For photography with its techn ical basis in an instantaneous recording of an event captures what we could call the si mulshytaneity of real space the fact that space does not present itself to us as sucshycessie in nature like time but as pure presence present-all-at-once By carshyrying on its continuous surface the trace or imprint of all that vision captures in one glance photography nor mally functio ns as a kind of declaration of the seamlessness of reality itself It is this seamlessness that dada photo collage disr upts in an attempt to in fil trate reali ty with in terpretation with significashytion wi th the very wTiting to which Breton refers in h is own collage ecriwre automatique It is this seam lessness of the photographic field that is fractu red and segmented in DaIis extraordinary collage The Phenomenon if ECSla~y

(Le Phenometze de I extase) [P late 18]i as well and with the similar producshytion of the language effect For within the grid that organ izes the ecstatic images of women we fi nd the inclusion of strips of different ears taken from the catalogue of anatom ical parts assembled by master police ch ief Alphonse Berti llon that stands as ule nineteenth-century criminological attcmpt to lise photography to constTuct the porlrait parlanl or speaking likeness wiuless to the last centurys expectation that like other mediums photography could WTest a message from the muteness of material reality

If photo collage set up a relationship between photography and languagc it did so at the sacrifice of photographys p rivileged connection to the world T his is why the surrealist photographeTs for the most part shunned the colshylage technique seeming to have found in it a too-willing surrender of phoshytographys hold on the real Darkroom processes like combination printing and double exposure were preferred to scissors an d paste For these techniques could preserve the seamless sur face of the fin al print and thus reenforce the sense that this image bei ng a photograph documents the reality from which it is a transfer But at the same time this image internally riven by the effects

PART THREE YIODER-TIT AND P-JOTQGRAPHY 12 5

Plale 18 Salvador DaH The Phenomeflon of ampSlasy photomontage from ~rillolaure Nos 3- + 4 December 1953middot Courtesy of The British Iibrary London BL cISod 1 0 Salvador Dali Gala - Salvador Dali Foundations OAGS London 2003

126 ART OF THE TIVErTlETH CEITURi A READER

of syntax - of spacing - would imply nonetheless that it is reality that has composed itself as a sign

To cOlwulse reality from within to demonstrate it as fTactured by spacing became the coUectlC result of all that vast range of techniques to which SUT

realist photographers resorted and which they understood as producing the characteristics of the sign For example solarization - in which photographic paper is briefly exposed to light during the priJlting process thereby altering in varying degrees the relationship of dark and light tones introducing elemiddot ments of the photographic ncgtatic into the positive print - creates il strange effect of cloisonne which visually walls off parts of a single space or a whole body frolll one another establish ing in this way a kind of testimony to a clovcn reality Negative printing which produces an entirely negative print with the momentarily unintelligible gaps that it creates within objeclS promotes th same effect But nothing creates this sense of the linguistic hold on the rcal more than the photographic strategy of doubling For it is doubling that pro duces the formal rhythm of spacing - the twomiddotstep that banishes sinlultaneity And it is doubling that elicits the notion that to an original has been added its copy The double is the simulacrwn the second the representalire of the origshyinal It comes after the first and in this following it can only exist as figure or image But in being seen in conjunction with the original the double destroys the pure singularity of the first Through duplication it opens the original to the effect of difference of deferral of onemiddotulingmiddotafter-another

This sense of opening reality to deferral is one form of spacing But doumiddot bling does something else besides transmute presence into succession It also marks the first in the chain as a signifying element- which is to say doubl ing transforms raw matter into the conventional shape of the signifier Linguistics describes this effect of doubling in terms of an infants progress from babbling to speech For babbling produces phonemic elements as mere noise as opposed to what happens when one phoneme is doubled by anothe r Papa is a word rather than only a random repetition of the sound pa because The reduplication indicates intent on the part of the speaker it endows th second syllable with a function different from that which would have been performed by the flrst separately or in the form of a potentially Ijmitlcss series of identical sounds papapapa produced by mere babbling Therefore the second pa is not a repetition of the fITst nor has it the same significamiddot tion It is a sign that like itself the first pa too was a sign and that as a pair they fall into the category of signifiers not of things signified

Repetition is thus the indjcator that the wild sounds of babbling have been rendered deliberate intentional and that what they intend is meaning Doubling is in this sense the signjfier of signification

Yithin surrealist photography doubling also functions as the signifier of signification It is this semiological rather than stylistic condition that unites the vast array of the movements photographic production As we observe the

pRT THREE MODERXITY A~D 1l0TQGRAPIlY 12shy

Plate 19 l-lam Bellmer Doll 193649 silvcrprint coloured with aniline 41 329 Cffi Centre Pompidou iINAI-CCJ Paris Photo C~AC l~Ai1 DisL RLI 0 ADAGP Paris and DACS London 2003

various technical options explored by surrealist photography moving from unmanipulated straight photography to negative printing to solarization to montage to rayography ulere is the constant preoccupation with doubling Ye come to realize that this is not only a thematic concern it is a structural one For the structure of the double produccs the mark of the sign

vVe find this withil1Hans Bellmers Dolls (Poupees 1936) where the mechanically duplicated parts of a dolls anatomy ailo- for a dou bling of these doubles and the doll herself call be composed of identical pairs of legs mirroring each other [Plate 19] T his can happen within the very construction of the doU or from the do1ls momentary arrangement for a gi-en photo sesshysion or through paired prints of near-twin images All of these are rendered through tech niques of documentary photography in which manipulation is studiously avoided But at other points in Bellmers production the doubling can manjfest itself technically within the image as in the double e)posures that multiply the multiples Double exposure functions in ]an Rays work to produce for example the famous doubling of the eyes of the Afarquise Cassali That photographs multiple by nature can themselves be doubled makes furth er doublillg available as in the SLacking of images Man Rays col middot lage of doubled breasLS in the opening number of La R evolution surrealisle (1924) serves as one example or again Frederick Sommers similarly doubled landscapes reproduced in the American surrealist journal VVV(1944) or Man Rays doubles in rayographic form as the mass-produced multiple object of the phonograph record (manufactured of translucent plastic in the days when th is work was made) is paired and tJlereby twinned The Dislorlions which

28 29 ~RT OF THE TWEXTlETH CENTURY A READER

Plate 20 Man Ray SLipper- spoon 19yh photograph Courtesy of Telimageshy2003 C iJan Ray Trust ADAGp Paris and DAGS London 2003middot

Andre Kertesz made in J933 eP)oit the doubling of the m irror to create a series dedicated to this effect

As we noted beforc surrealist photography exploits the very special con middot neclion to realjty with which all photography is endowed Photography is an imprint or transfer of the real it is a photochemically processed trace causalshyly connected to that thing in the world to whieh it refers in a way parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses l ea(~

on tables The photograph is thus genetically distinct from painting or sculpshyture or drawi ng On the frunily tree of ilnages it is closer to palm prin ts death masks cast shadows the Shroud of Turin or the tracks of gulls on beaches Technically and semiologically speaking drawing and paintings arc icons while photographs are indexes~8

Given photographys special status with regard to the real - that is being a kind of deposit of the real itself - the manipulations wrought by the surreal ist photographers the spacings and doublillgs are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithshyful trace In this way the photographic medium is exploi ted to produce a parashydox the paradox of reality constituted as a sign - or presence transformed into absence into representation into spacing into writing ill this semiological move surrealist photography parallels a similar move of Bretons For Bretoll though he promoted as surrealist a vast heterogeneity of pictorial styles devised a defmition of beauty that is rather more unified and that is itself translatable il1to semiological terms Beauty he said should be convulsive

I n explaining the nature of that convulsion in me text that serves as pro logue to L Amowjou Breton spells out the process of reality contorting or convulsing itself into its apparent opposite namely a sign29 Reality wh ich is present becomes a sign for hat is absent so that the world itself rendered beautiful is understood as a forest of signs In defining what he means by this indice this

PART THREE MODERNITY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

sign Breton begins to sketch a theory not of painting but of photography Each of Bretons aspects or moments of convulsive beaut) are ways of

describing the action of signs The first - erolique-voiLee - inokes the occurshyrence in nature of representation as one animal imitates another or as inorshyganic matter shapes itself to look like statuary T he second termed middotezplosanle-fixe is related to the lexpiration of movement which is to say the experience of something that should be in motion but has been for some reashyson Slopped derailed or as Duchanlp would have said delayed In this regard Breton writes I am sorry not to be able to reproduce among the illusshytrations to this text a photograph of a very handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for m any years to the delirium of a virgin forest30 T he conshyvulsiveness then the arousal in front of the object is not to it perceived wi thshyin the continuum of its natural existence but detached from that flow by means of an expiration of motion a detachment that deprives the locomotive of some part of its physica l self and turns it into a sign of the reality it no longer possesses

Bretons third example of convulsive beauty - magique-circonslancielle shyconsists of the found object or found erbal fragment both instances of objecshytive chance where (specifically in the case of the fowld object) an emissary from the external world carries a message informing the recipient of his own desire The found object is a sign of that desire Breton recognized this kind of convulsive beauty in a slipper spoon he had found in a flea market an object he recognized as the fulfil1ment of a -rish spoken by the automatic phrase that had begun running th rough his mind some months before [Plate 20] The phrase cendriller-Cendrilloll translates as Cinderella ashtray The flea-market object - a spoon with a li ttle shoe affued to the underside of its handle - suddenly convulsed itself into a sign when Breton began to see it as a chain of representations in which the shoe was reduplicated to infinity as though caught in a hall of mirrors I n addition to the little shoe under the handle he suddenly saw the bowl and handle of the spoon as the front and last of another shoe of which the little carved slipper was only the heel Then he imagined thal slipper as having for its heel yet another slipper and so on to infinity Th is chain of reduplicated and mirrored slippers Breton read as a kind of natural writing a set of lindices that signi fi ed his own desire for love and the beginning of a quest whose magical unfolding is plotted throughout LAmow-jou

If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism the concept of convul~ sive beauty is at the core of its aesthetic a concept that reduces to an experi shyence of r eality transformed into representation Surreality is we could say nature convulsed into a kind of writing The special access that photography as a medium has to this experience is photographys privileged connection to the reaL The manipulations then available to photography - what we have been calling doubling and spacing as weB as a technique of representational

15 1 ART OF TH~ TWE-TIErH CETlRf 1 READER13deg

reduplicatioll or sUmiddotucture en abyme- appear to document these connllsions The photographs are not inlerpretalions of reality decoding it as in the phogomontage practice of Heartfield or H ausmann Instead they are presen lations of that very reality as configured or coded or middotvritten

The experience of nature as sign or representation comes naturally then to photography This experience extends as well to the domain that is most inherently photographic the framing edge of the image experienced as cut or cropped This is possible even when the image does not seem folded from within by means of the reduplicative strategy of doubling when the im age is entirely unmanipulated like the Boiffard big toes or the Involuntary Sculptures by BrassaY or the image of a hatted figure by Man Ray published in JrJillotaure5 For at the very boundary of the image the camcra frame which essentially crops or cuts the represented element out of reality at large can be seen as another example of spacing

Spacing like the doubled phonemes of papa is the signifier of significashytion the ind ication of a break in the simultaneous experience of the rea l a rupture that issues into sequence P hotographic cropping is always experi shyenced as a ruptUIe in the continuous fabric of reality But surreal ist photog raphy puts enormous pressure on that frame to make it itself read as a sign - an empty sign it is true but an integer in the calculus of meaning nonetheless a signifier of signification T he frame announces that between the part of real ity cut away and this part there is a difference and that th is segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representashyt ion or n ature~as-sign Een as it announces th is experience of rea lity th e camera frame of course controls it co nfigures it3l Th is it does by poin t of view as in the 1an Iay or focal length as in the extreme close-ups of Brassai But in both these instances what the camera frames and thereby makes visible is the automatic writing of the world the constant unintershyrupted production of signs BrassaIs images are of those nasty pieces of paper like bus tickets and theater-ticket stubs that we roll into li ttle columns in our pockets or those pi eces of eraser th at we unconsciously knead - these are what his camera produces through the enlargements that he published as imoluntary sculptures 11an Rays photograph is one of sev eral made to accompany an essay by dadas founding spirit Tristan Tzara about the constant unconscious production of sexual imagery throughout culture - here in the design of hats

The fr run e announces the cameras ability to fm d and isolate what we cou ld call the worlds constant production of erotic symbols its ceaseless automatic wTiLing In th is capacity the frame can itself be glorified noticed represent shyed as in the Nirul Ray monwnent to the Marquis de Sade Or it can be there silently operating as spacing as in BrassaYs seizUIe of automatic production through his images of sculptural onanism or his captUTed grafitti

I n cutting into the body of the world stopping it framing it spacing it

I-IT THREE MODERrrv AD PHOTOGRAPHY

photography reveals that world as written Surrealist vision and photographshyic vision cohere around these principles For in the explosallle-fLXe we discov~ er the stop-motion of the still photograph in the erolique-voiM we see its fram ing and in the magique-circollslallcielie we find the message of its spacshying Breton has thus provided us all the aesthetic theory we will e er need to understand that for sUIrealist photography too beauty will be convulsic or it will not be

Andre Breton ame5loJ of Sureubsm trans Richard Seaver and I ldpoundgtn R Lane (Ann rOOr le

University of Jichigan Prlt~ 1969) p 12

Andre Breton Le Surrcalisll1c N 1ft peimurc La RetOlullon surrialiste no 4 (JIJI~ 1911) p 18 The complpoundgttpoundgt senes of dSaya was rollectoo in Ilrpoundgtton Surrralism and Pmminamp tran SlIlIon alSOll

Taylor (New York I larptr amp Ro 9-l) runher refpoundgtrpoundgtllce5 arc to this translation j Breton lIonifestos p i Andre Brelon Yada trans Richard Iloward (ew York Gro~ Press 1960) p 15~ In the preratt to

the 1963 Prellch edition (Galhmard) Breton speau of the photographs in relation to one of the

antihterary principles that guided Lhe creation of the book The abundant photographIc illuslfa lion he writes had as us obicttl-e the elimination or all dCSCription- what had been chided as iIlane in the Surrealist jlanifeslo- and the tone that the narrati~e adopted was modeled on Lhat of medlca1 obsen(ltioll See- ~11chel Beaujour Qumiddotest-ce que )adjaT La Youvdle Rnue FrunfoiM no 11

(April I 196) pp -80-99 ror an analYSIS of adlas rondllion as a text that is open 10 addlUons from what would nonnall) be ie-wed as hors-lerte and the role the photographs pin in Lhis gard

This question had begun The pholographic print 15 permeated with an emoti~middotf nlue Lhal maks il a supremely preciow rude or exchange (SurrralullI and Paint~ p Yl)

ti ndre Breton La Beautl sera convuI5i~ lmolo~ no 5 ( 934) pp 9-16 alter BenJamm Surrealism lbc Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia in Reflections trailS Edmund Jephrott (Xew York Ilarrourt Brace Jovanovich 19-8) p 183 See Rosalind Krauss ~ightalkers

-Irt Journal +5 (Spring 1981) n-8 8rNon onifestos p 16

~ Ibid p 77 I) Iksides the famous dictionary defillltion or surreahsm (II Psychic automatism in its pure state )

BrelOnmiddots first Surrralist Ilenifnio includes an encycloped ia entry iu which rnc performers of acts of absolute surrealism are listed ragon Baron Borfard Breton Carrh-e Crel Oelteil Ibnos

EJuard Gerard Llmbour ilalkine Ionse Na-ille 011 Perc Plcon Soupauh itrampc 10 1gtlerre wille Beaw Aru La Rhviflilon surrialislc no 5 (April 1915) p ~-

II As told to the author in ronmiddotersatlon lin- 0 1985 11 1111 also said that it was he vhodtlsed the three

pronged photo ooUage of lhe members BIllie Cenu-alc for Lhe CO-er of the first issue of LA RhxgtuJon

surrealisre See his aCCOllill in Pierre )111111 U Temps du sllrriaJ (pans Galilee 197) pp 99110

Il allle Beaw-Aru p ~7

I) The quotations in this and the nen paragraph are from Breton SlIrrralism and PaUltln8 pp 68 0

I ~ ndre Breton ilceanie (19middot~8 ) reprinted in Breton La CU ths clwmps (Pans Saglttaire 9~) 97 edition) p 28

I) Breton bere reenacu the polantauon between speech and wnting presence and representauon that Derrida analyzes as the opposIliol1$ Lhat structure Western metaphysics See Jicques Ot-rnda 0 Gramrru1rol~ tram GC Spl-ak ( Balumore Johru Hopkins Lniversity Press 19--6) The roncepl of

~pacmg developed there (pp 653) and in Freud and the Scene of Writing (in Jacques Ocrridi IIntmg and Differrllce trails Alall Bass [Chicago tllimiddotersuy of Chicago Press 1978 ]) II IInportalll

for the discussion tha t follows 16 Thus BrelOlI insists thai any fOflll of cxpression In which automatism does not at least adancc

undercover runs a gramiddote risk or 1I10ing out of the surrcalist orbit (Surrealism and PIIUIifB p 68)

I ~ Ibid p 70 18 Wilham Rubin attempts to ronstruCl an ullnnsic difvtlllon oj Surrealist paUltlnl i ll his rssa)

Toward a Critical Framework Inonu ) (September 1966) 35 But becallle he rlpnxluCtS the

same bipolar or blalent ronceptual SLructure Lhat Bf(ton had established ill 915 his defimtlon mir

ART OF THE nVENTl lITH CEITURY A READ ER 32

ron the problems of Bretons iUi well Ig See Gamille BI)ell and Raoul lichelet lcluatwn poitlqUL ( 1955 reprinted 1I1 lsteel larien

LAclInlii surrlolisu ~ff ampIAlI~ [Brussels Lebeermiddot llossmano 1979J pp 26g--O) 20 Chac describes the procedure of broJa~ also callMi souJJl~~ u a S)5tem of placing the glass plate

of an eposed negaue over a heated pan of water ill order to melt the emulsion It was thw a n

automausrn of destruction a complete dissolution of the image towards an absolute formlessness I

treated a large number of my ncgaue$ in this manner - the result bt-ing for the most pan disap_

pointing except in one caM where a woman in a bathing SUit was trarufonned IIItO 8 thunderstruck

Goddess - a photo titled La Xebuleuse On an unpublished letter to eI Ge-en from Raoul tbac dated Dieudonne 2 1 March 1981)

21 )Ian Ray Exhibition Ra~raphs 1921- 1928 (Stuttgart L G A 1963) 12 llessage without a code is Barthess term in his essays nle Photographic Message and IUletoric of

the Image See Roland Barthes Image 1IllS1c Tul trans Stephen Ileath (ew York I 1111 and Wang

19n)middot 23 In Walter Iknjamill A Short Ihstory or Photography trans Stanley I itchcll Screen 1J (Spnng

19(2) 24middot 24 John Heartfield PhorolOma~esof the azl Penod(~ew York Uni-erse Book 19i) p 16 25 Louis Aragon Joh n I(artfield ella beaute reOlullonnaire (1935) Tltprimed in Aragon u s Colloge~

( Paris I lermallll 965) pp i8--9 l6 18hllLlIku (Le Paysan de Pans) trans Frederick Brown ( Englewood Clirrs -c Jcrsey Prenticemiddot

llal 9iO) p 9 27 Claude 1imiddotI Strauss The RQU(lIU the Cooked trails J and D cighlm8n (lew York Ilarperamp 10

19-0) pp 359-40 28 Photographys posItion u 8n index was fi m established by C S I)circe within the taxonomy or signs

that he developed In Logic as Semiotic The Theory or Sigm Cs Peirce PhllosophlcalWnlmgr of Pevec ed Justw Buchler (-lew York Dover 1955)

29 Ine text La beaute sera colwulsle (pp cil) became the first chapter or C1mourfou See Andre Breton L Amour fou (Paris Gallimard 1957) pp - 9

30 Ibid P 13 50 Boiffards big toes accompanied the text by Georges Bataill~ Le Gros Ort(il Docunumts no 6 ( 929)

Brassais Sculpwres I Imollln(aves appeared 111 lflnOoure los 3- (1953) p 68 Mall Rays photo graphs or hats illustrated Tristan Tzaras DUJl Cena in Automallsme du gout Jinotoun nos 5-4

(1933) pp 81- 8 2 Derrida analyres the frame as an outside which is called inside the inside to col1sutl(e it as inside

See Jacques Dcrrida rhe Parcrgon trans Craig Owens OciOMr no 9 (Summer 199)

4 John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

John Szarkowski worked as a photographer before becoming the curator of photographs at the Museum of Modem Art New York in 1962 a post that he held until his retirement in 1991 Through a series of high ly influential exhibitions and accompanying catalogues he elaborated a modernist account of photography that drew heavily on the idea of vernacular form This text was originally written as a catalogue essay for the exhibition The Photographers Eye held in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art It represents a key statement of Szarkowski s approach and clearly lays out the fi ve eleshyments that he held to be central to photography conceived as an art The follOWing extracts are taken from John Szarkowski The Photographers Eye Museum of Modern Art New York 1969 unpaginated [SE]

PART THREE MODERNITY AD PHOTOGRAPHY 33

Introduction

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like and or why they look that way It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic trashydition with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection T he difference was a baSIC one Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of tradi shytional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs as the man on the street put it were taken

The di ffeTence raised a creative issue of a new orde r how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms - pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be fOW1 d by those who loved too m uch the old forms for in large part the photographer was berert or the old artistic traditions Speak ing or photography Baudelaire said This indusshytry by invading the territories of art has become ares most mortal e nemy And in h is own terms of re rerence Baudelaire was haIr right certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards The photographer must fi nd new ways to make his meaning clear

T hese new ways might be found by men who could abandon their alleshygiance to tradi t ional pictorial standards - or by the artistically ignorant who had no old allegiances to break T here hare been many of the latter sort Since its earliest days photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training who were disciplined and united by no academy or gui ld who considered their medium variously as a science an art a t rade or an entertainment and who were often unavare of each others work Those who invented photography were scientists and painters but its professional practitioners were a ery different lot [ J

T he enormous popularity of the new medium produced proressionals by the thousands - converted silversmiths t inkers druggists blacksmiths and printers If photography was a new artistic problem such men had the advanshytage of having nothing to unlearn Among them they produced a fl ood of images In 1853 the VellJ- York Daily Tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that yearl Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention many were the product of accident improvisation misunderstanding and empirical experiment But whether produced by art or by luck) each picture was part of a massive assault on our t raditional habits of seeing

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious amateurs were joined by an even larger host of casual snap-shooters By the early eighties the dry plate which could be purchased rcady-to-use had replaced the refractory and messy wet plate process which dernanded that the

126 ART OF THE TIVErTlETH CEITURi A READER

of syntax - of spacing - would imply nonetheless that it is reality that has composed itself as a sign

To cOlwulse reality from within to demonstrate it as fTactured by spacing became the coUectlC result of all that vast range of techniques to which SUT

realist photographers resorted and which they understood as producing the characteristics of the sign For example solarization - in which photographic paper is briefly exposed to light during the priJlting process thereby altering in varying degrees the relationship of dark and light tones introducing elemiddot ments of the photographic ncgtatic into the positive print - creates il strange effect of cloisonne which visually walls off parts of a single space or a whole body frolll one another establish ing in this way a kind of testimony to a clovcn reality Negative printing which produces an entirely negative print with the momentarily unintelligible gaps that it creates within objeclS promotes th same effect But nothing creates this sense of the linguistic hold on the rcal more than the photographic strategy of doubling For it is doubling that pro duces the formal rhythm of spacing - the twomiddotstep that banishes sinlultaneity And it is doubling that elicits the notion that to an original has been added its copy The double is the simulacrwn the second the representalire of the origshyinal It comes after the first and in this following it can only exist as figure or image But in being seen in conjunction with the original the double destroys the pure singularity of the first Through duplication it opens the original to the effect of difference of deferral of onemiddotulingmiddotafter-another

This sense of opening reality to deferral is one form of spacing But doumiddot bling does something else besides transmute presence into succession It also marks the first in the chain as a signifying element- which is to say doubl ing transforms raw matter into the conventional shape of the signifier Linguistics describes this effect of doubling in terms of an infants progress from babbling to speech For babbling produces phonemic elements as mere noise as opposed to what happens when one phoneme is doubled by anothe r Papa is a word rather than only a random repetition of the sound pa because The reduplication indicates intent on the part of the speaker it endows th second syllable with a function different from that which would have been performed by the flrst separately or in the form of a potentially Ijmitlcss series of identical sounds papapapa produced by mere babbling Therefore the second pa is not a repetition of the fITst nor has it the same significamiddot tion It is a sign that like itself the first pa too was a sign and that as a pair they fall into the category of signifiers not of things signified

Repetition is thus the indjcator that the wild sounds of babbling have been rendered deliberate intentional and that what they intend is meaning Doubling is in this sense the signjfier of signification

Yithin surrealist photography doubling also functions as the signifier of signification It is this semiological rather than stylistic condition that unites the vast array of the movements photographic production As we observe the

pRT THREE MODERXITY A~D 1l0TQGRAPIlY 12shy

Plate 19 l-lam Bellmer Doll 193649 silvcrprint coloured with aniline 41 329 Cffi Centre Pompidou iINAI-CCJ Paris Photo C~AC l~Ai1 DisL RLI 0 ADAGP Paris and DACS London 2003

various technical options explored by surrealist photography moving from unmanipulated straight photography to negative printing to solarization to montage to rayography ulere is the constant preoccupation with doubling Ye come to realize that this is not only a thematic concern it is a structural one For the structure of the double produccs the mark of the sign

vVe find this withil1Hans Bellmers Dolls (Poupees 1936) where the mechanically duplicated parts of a dolls anatomy ailo- for a dou bling of these doubles and the doll herself call be composed of identical pairs of legs mirroring each other [Plate 19] T his can happen within the very construction of the doU or from the do1ls momentary arrangement for a gi-en photo sesshysion or through paired prints of near-twin images All of these are rendered through tech niques of documentary photography in which manipulation is studiously avoided But at other points in Bellmers production the doubling can manjfest itself technically within the image as in the double e)posures that multiply the multiples Double exposure functions in ]an Rays work to produce for example the famous doubling of the eyes of the Afarquise Cassali That photographs multiple by nature can themselves be doubled makes furth er doublillg available as in the SLacking of images Man Rays col middot lage of doubled breasLS in the opening number of La R evolution surrealisle (1924) serves as one example or again Frederick Sommers similarly doubled landscapes reproduced in the American surrealist journal VVV(1944) or Man Rays doubles in rayographic form as the mass-produced multiple object of the phonograph record (manufactured of translucent plastic in the days when th is work was made) is paired and tJlereby twinned The Dislorlions which

28 29 ~RT OF THE TWEXTlETH CENTURY A READER

Plate 20 Man Ray SLipper- spoon 19yh photograph Courtesy of Telimageshy2003 C iJan Ray Trust ADAGp Paris and DAGS London 2003middot

Andre Kertesz made in J933 eP)oit the doubling of the m irror to create a series dedicated to this effect

As we noted beforc surrealist photography exploits the very special con middot neclion to realjty with which all photography is endowed Photography is an imprint or transfer of the real it is a photochemically processed trace causalshyly connected to that thing in the world to whieh it refers in a way parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses l ea(~

on tables The photograph is thus genetically distinct from painting or sculpshyture or drawi ng On the frunily tree of ilnages it is closer to palm prin ts death masks cast shadows the Shroud of Turin or the tracks of gulls on beaches Technically and semiologically speaking drawing and paintings arc icons while photographs are indexes~8

Given photographys special status with regard to the real - that is being a kind of deposit of the real itself - the manipulations wrought by the surreal ist photographers the spacings and doublillgs are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithshyful trace In this way the photographic medium is exploi ted to produce a parashydox the paradox of reality constituted as a sign - or presence transformed into absence into representation into spacing into writing ill this semiological move surrealist photography parallels a similar move of Bretons For Bretoll though he promoted as surrealist a vast heterogeneity of pictorial styles devised a defmition of beauty that is rather more unified and that is itself translatable il1to semiological terms Beauty he said should be convulsive

I n explaining the nature of that convulsion in me text that serves as pro logue to L Amowjou Breton spells out the process of reality contorting or convulsing itself into its apparent opposite namely a sign29 Reality wh ich is present becomes a sign for hat is absent so that the world itself rendered beautiful is understood as a forest of signs In defining what he means by this indice this

PART THREE MODERNITY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

sign Breton begins to sketch a theory not of painting but of photography Each of Bretons aspects or moments of convulsive beaut) are ways of

describing the action of signs The first - erolique-voiLee - inokes the occurshyrence in nature of representation as one animal imitates another or as inorshyganic matter shapes itself to look like statuary T he second termed middotezplosanle-fixe is related to the lexpiration of movement which is to say the experience of something that should be in motion but has been for some reashyson Slopped derailed or as Duchanlp would have said delayed In this regard Breton writes I am sorry not to be able to reproduce among the illusshytrations to this text a photograph of a very handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for m any years to the delirium of a virgin forest30 T he conshyvulsiveness then the arousal in front of the object is not to it perceived wi thshyin the continuum of its natural existence but detached from that flow by means of an expiration of motion a detachment that deprives the locomotive of some part of its physica l self and turns it into a sign of the reality it no longer possesses

Bretons third example of convulsive beauty - magique-circonslancielle shyconsists of the found object or found erbal fragment both instances of objecshytive chance where (specifically in the case of the fowld object) an emissary from the external world carries a message informing the recipient of his own desire The found object is a sign of that desire Breton recognized this kind of convulsive beauty in a slipper spoon he had found in a flea market an object he recognized as the fulfil1ment of a -rish spoken by the automatic phrase that had begun running th rough his mind some months before [Plate 20] The phrase cendriller-Cendrilloll translates as Cinderella ashtray The flea-market object - a spoon with a li ttle shoe affued to the underside of its handle - suddenly convulsed itself into a sign when Breton began to see it as a chain of representations in which the shoe was reduplicated to infinity as though caught in a hall of mirrors I n addition to the little shoe under the handle he suddenly saw the bowl and handle of the spoon as the front and last of another shoe of which the little carved slipper was only the heel Then he imagined thal slipper as having for its heel yet another slipper and so on to infinity Th is chain of reduplicated and mirrored slippers Breton read as a kind of natural writing a set of lindices that signi fi ed his own desire for love and the beginning of a quest whose magical unfolding is plotted throughout LAmow-jou

If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism the concept of convul~ sive beauty is at the core of its aesthetic a concept that reduces to an experi shyence of r eality transformed into representation Surreality is we could say nature convulsed into a kind of writing The special access that photography as a medium has to this experience is photographys privileged connection to the reaL The manipulations then available to photography - what we have been calling doubling and spacing as weB as a technique of representational

15 1 ART OF TH~ TWE-TIErH CETlRf 1 READER13deg

reduplicatioll or sUmiddotucture en abyme- appear to document these connllsions The photographs are not inlerpretalions of reality decoding it as in the phogomontage practice of Heartfield or H ausmann Instead they are presen lations of that very reality as configured or coded or middotvritten

The experience of nature as sign or representation comes naturally then to photography This experience extends as well to the domain that is most inherently photographic the framing edge of the image experienced as cut or cropped This is possible even when the image does not seem folded from within by means of the reduplicative strategy of doubling when the im age is entirely unmanipulated like the Boiffard big toes or the Involuntary Sculptures by BrassaY or the image of a hatted figure by Man Ray published in JrJillotaure5 For at the very boundary of the image the camcra frame which essentially crops or cuts the represented element out of reality at large can be seen as another example of spacing

Spacing like the doubled phonemes of papa is the signifier of significashytion the ind ication of a break in the simultaneous experience of the rea l a rupture that issues into sequence P hotographic cropping is always experi shyenced as a ruptUIe in the continuous fabric of reality But surreal ist photog raphy puts enormous pressure on that frame to make it itself read as a sign - an empty sign it is true but an integer in the calculus of meaning nonetheless a signifier of signification T he frame announces that between the part of real ity cut away and this part there is a difference and that th is segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representashyt ion or n ature~as-sign Een as it announces th is experience of rea lity th e camera frame of course controls it co nfigures it3l Th is it does by poin t of view as in the 1an Iay or focal length as in the extreme close-ups of Brassai But in both these instances what the camera frames and thereby makes visible is the automatic writing of the world the constant unintershyrupted production of signs BrassaIs images are of those nasty pieces of paper like bus tickets and theater-ticket stubs that we roll into li ttle columns in our pockets or those pi eces of eraser th at we unconsciously knead - these are what his camera produces through the enlargements that he published as imoluntary sculptures 11an Rays photograph is one of sev eral made to accompany an essay by dadas founding spirit Tristan Tzara about the constant unconscious production of sexual imagery throughout culture - here in the design of hats

The fr run e announces the cameras ability to fm d and isolate what we cou ld call the worlds constant production of erotic symbols its ceaseless automatic wTiLing In th is capacity the frame can itself be glorified noticed represent shyed as in the Nirul Ray monwnent to the Marquis de Sade Or it can be there silently operating as spacing as in BrassaYs seizUIe of automatic production through his images of sculptural onanism or his captUTed grafitti

I n cutting into the body of the world stopping it framing it spacing it

I-IT THREE MODERrrv AD PHOTOGRAPHY

photography reveals that world as written Surrealist vision and photographshyic vision cohere around these principles For in the explosallle-fLXe we discov~ er the stop-motion of the still photograph in the erolique-voiM we see its fram ing and in the magique-circollslallcielie we find the message of its spacshying Breton has thus provided us all the aesthetic theory we will e er need to understand that for sUIrealist photography too beauty will be convulsic or it will not be

Andre Breton ame5loJ of Sureubsm trans Richard Seaver and I ldpoundgtn R Lane (Ann rOOr le

University of Jichigan Prlt~ 1969) p 12

Andre Breton Le Surrcalisll1c N 1ft peimurc La RetOlullon surrialiste no 4 (JIJI~ 1911) p 18 The complpoundgttpoundgt senes of dSaya was rollectoo in Ilrpoundgtton Surrralism and Pmminamp tran SlIlIon alSOll

Taylor (New York I larptr amp Ro 9-l) runher refpoundgtrpoundgtllce5 arc to this translation j Breton lIonifestos p i Andre Brelon Yada trans Richard Iloward (ew York Gro~ Press 1960) p 15~ In the preratt to

the 1963 Prellch edition (Galhmard) Breton speau of the photographs in relation to one of the

antihterary principles that guided Lhe creation of the book The abundant photographIc illuslfa lion he writes had as us obicttl-e the elimination or all dCSCription- what had been chided as iIlane in the Surrealist jlanifeslo- and the tone that the narrati~e adopted was modeled on Lhat of medlca1 obsen(ltioll See- ~11chel Beaujour Qumiddotest-ce que )adjaT La Youvdle Rnue FrunfoiM no 11

(April I 196) pp -80-99 ror an analYSIS of adlas rondllion as a text that is open 10 addlUons from what would nonnall) be ie-wed as hors-lerte and the role the photographs pin in Lhis gard

This question had begun The pholographic print 15 permeated with an emoti~middotf nlue Lhal maks il a supremely preciow rude or exchange (SurrralullI and Paint~ p Yl)

ti ndre Breton La Beautl sera convuI5i~ lmolo~ no 5 ( 934) pp 9-16 alter BenJamm Surrealism lbc Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia in Reflections trailS Edmund Jephrott (Xew York Ilarrourt Brace Jovanovich 19-8) p 183 See Rosalind Krauss ~ightalkers

-Irt Journal +5 (Spring 1981) n-8 8rNon onifestos p 16

~ Ibid p 77 I) Iksides the famous dictionary defillltion or surreahsm (II Psychic automatism in its pure state )

BrelOnmiddots first Surrralist Ilenifnio includes an encycloped ia entry iu which rnc performers of acts of absolute surrealism are listed ragon Baron Borfard Breton Carrh-e Crel Oelteil Ibnos

EJuard Gerard Llmbour ilalkine Ionse Na-ille 011 Perc Plcon Soupauh itrampc 10 1gtlerre wille Beaw Aru La Rhviflilon surrialislc no 5 (April 1915) p ~-

II As told to the author in ronmiddotersatlon lin- 0 1985 11 1111 also said that it was he vhodtlsed the three

pronged photo ooUage of lhe members BIllie Cenu-alc for Lhe CO-er of the first issue of LA RhxgtuJon

surrealisre See his aCCOllill in Pierre )111111 U Temps du sllrriaJ (pans Galilee 197) pp 99110

Il allle Beaw-Aru p ~7

I) The quotations in this and the nen paragraph are from Breton SlIrrralism and PaUltln8 pp 68 0

I ~ ndre Breton ilceanie (19middot~8 ) reprinted in Breton La CU ths clwmps (Pans Saglttaire 9~) 97 edition) p 28

I) Breton bere reenacu the polantauon between speech and wnting presence and representauon that Derrida analyzes as the opposIliol1$ Lhat structure Western metaphysics See Jicques Ot-rnda 0 Gramrru1rol~ tram GC Spl-ak ( Balumore Johru Hopkins Lniversity Press 19--6) The roncepl of

~pacmg developed there (pp 653) and in Freud and the Scene of Writing (in Jacques Ocrridi IIntmg and Differrllce trails Alall Bass [Chicago tllimiddotersuy of Chicago Press 1978 ]) II IInportalll

for the discussion tha t follows 16 Thus BrelOlI insists thai any fOflll of cxpression In which automatism does not at least adancc

undercover runs a gramiddote risk or 1I10ing out of the surrcalist orbit (Surrealism and PIIUIifB p 68)

I ~ Ibid p 70 18 Wilham Rubin attempts to ronstruCl an ullnnsic difvtlllon oj Surrealist paUltlnl i ll his rssa)

Toward a Critical Framework Inonu ) (September 1966) 35 But becallle he rlpnxluCtS the

same bipolar or blalent ronceptual SLructure Lhat Bf(ton had established ill 915 his defimtlon mir

ART OF THE nVENTl lITH CEITURY A READ ER 32

ron the problems of Bretons iUi well Ig See Gamille BI)ell and Raoul lichelet lcluatwn poitlqUL ( 1955 reprinted 1I1 lsteel larien

LAclInlii surrlolisu ~ff ampIAlI~ [Brussels Lebeermiddot llossmano 1979J pp 26g--O) 20 Chac describes the procedure of broJa~ also callMi souJJl~~ u a S)5tem of placing the glass plate

of an eposed negaue over a heated pan of water ill order to melt the emulsion It was thw a n

automausrn of destruction a complete dissolution of the image towards an absolute formlessness I

treated a large number of my ncgaue$ in this manner - the result bt-ing for the most pan disap_

pointing except in one caM where a woman in a bathing SUit was trarufonned IIItO 8 thunderstruck

Goddess - a photo titled La Xebuleuse On an unpublished letter to eI Ge-en from Raoul tbac dated Dieudonne 2 1 March 1981)

21 )Ian Ray Exhibition Ra~raphs 1921- 1928 (Stuttgart L G A 1963) 12 llessage without a code is Barthess term in his essays nle Photographic Message and IUletoric of

the Image See Roland Barthes Image 1IllS1c Tul trans Stephen Ileath (ew York I 1111 and Wang

19n)middot 23 In Walter Iknjamill A Short Ihstory or Photography trans Stanley I itchcll Screen 1J (Spnng

19(2) 24middot 24 John Heartfield PhorolOma~esof the azl Penod(~ew York Uni-erse Book 19i) p 16 25 Louis Aragon Joh n I(artfield ella beaute reOlullonnaire (1935) Tltprimed in Aragon u s Colloge~

( Paris I lermallll 965) pp i8--9 l6 18hllLlIku (Le Paysan de Pans) trans Frederick Brown ( Englewood Clirrs -c Jcrsey Prenticemiddot

llal 9iO) p 9 27 Claude 1imiddotI Strauss The RQU(lIU the Cooked trails J and D cighlm8n (lew York Ilarperamp 10

19-0) pp 359-40 28 Photographys posItion u 8n index was fi m established by C S I)circe within the taxonomy or signs

that he developed In Logic as Semiotic The Theory or Sigm Cs Peirce PhllosophlcalWnlmgr of Pevec ed Justw Buchler (-lew York Dover 1955)

29 Ine text La beaute sera colwulsle (pp cil) became the first chapter or C1mourfou See Andre Breton L Amour fou (Paris Gallimard 1957) pp - 9

30 Ibid P 13 50 Boiffards big toes accompanied the text by Georges Bataill~ Le Gros Ort(il Docunumts no 6 ( 929)

Brassais Sculpwres I Imollln(aves appeared 111 lflnOoure los 3- (1953) p 68 Mall Rays photo graphs or hats illustrated Tristan Tzaras DUJl Cena in Automallsme du gout Jinotoun nos 5-4

(1933) pp 81- 8 2 Derrida analyres the frame as an outside which is called inside the inside to col1sutl(e it as inside

See Jacques Dcrrida rhe Parcrgon trans Craig Owens OciOMr no 9 (Summer 199)

4 John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

John Szarkowski worked as a photographer before becoming the curator of photographs at the Museum of Modem Art New York in 1962 a post that he held until his retirement in 1991 Through a series of high ly influential exhibitions and accompanying catalogues he elaborated a modernist account of photography that drew heavily on the idea of vernacular form This text was originally written as a catalogue essay for the exhibition The Photographers Eye held in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art It represents a key statement of Szarkowski s approach and clearly lays out the fi ve eleshyments that he held to be central to photography conceived as an art The follOWing extracts are taken from John Szarkowski The Photographers Eye Museum of Modern Art New York 1969 unpaginated [SE]

PART THREE MODERNITY AD PHOTOGRAPHY 33

Introduction

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like and or why they look that way It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic trashydition with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection T he difference was a baSIC one Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of tradi shytional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs as the man on the street put it were taken

The di ffeTence raised a creative issue of a new orde r how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms - pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be fOW1 d by those who loved too m uch the old forms for in large part the photographer was berert or the old artistic traditions Speak ing or photography Baudelaire said This indusshytry by invading the territories of art has become ares most mortal e nemy And in h is own terms of re rerence Baudelaire was haIr right certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards The photographer must fi nd new ways to make his meaning clear

T hese new ways might be found by men who could abandon their alleshygiance to tradi t ional pictorial standards - or by the artistically ignorant who had no old allegiances to break T here hare been many of the latter sort Since its earliest days photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training who were disciplined and united by no academy or gui ld who considered their medium variously as a science an art a t rade or an entertainment and who were often unavare of each others work Those who invented photography were scientists and painters but its professional practitioners were a ery different lot [ J

T he enormous popularity of the new medium produced proressionals by the thousands - converted silversmiths t inkers druggists blacksmiths and printers If photography was a new artistic problem such men had the advanshytage of having nothing to unlearn Among them they produced a fl ood of images In 1853 the VellJ- York Daily Tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that yearl Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention many were the product of accident improvisation misunderstanding and empirical experiment But whether produced by art or by luck) each picture was part of a massive assault on our t raditional habits of seeing

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious amateurs were joined by an even larger host of casual snap-shooters By the early eighties the dry plate which could be purchased rcady-to-use had replaced the refractory and messy wet plate process which dernanded that the

28 29 ~RT OF THE TWEXTlETH CENTURY A READER

Plate 20 Man Ray SLipper- spoon 19yh photograph Courtesy of Telimageshy2003 C iJan Ray Trust ADAGp Paris and DAGS London 2003middot

Andre Kertesz made in J933 eP)oit the doubling of the m irror to create a series dedicated to this effect

As we noted beforc surrealist photography exploits the very special con middot neclion to realjty with which all photography is endowed Photography is an imprint or transfer of the real it is a photochemically processed trace causalshyly connected to that thing in the world to whieh it refers in a way parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses l ea(~

on tables The photograph is thus genetically distinct from painting or sculpshyture or drawi ng On the frunily tree of ilnages it is closer to palm prin ts death masks cast shadows the Shroud of Turin or the tracks of gulls on beaches Technically and semiologically speaking drawing and paintings arc icons while photographs are indexes~8

Given photographys special status with regard to the real - that is being a kind of deposit of the real itself - the manipulations wrought by the surreal ist photographers the spacings and doublillgs are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithshyful trace In this way the photographic medium is exploi ted to produce a parashydox the paradox of reality constituted as a sign - or presence transformed into absence into representation into spacing into writing ill this semiological move surrealist photography parallels a similar move of Bretons For Bretoll though he promoted as surrealist a vast heterogeneity of pictorial styles devised a defmition of beauty that is rather more unified and that is itself translatable il1to semiological terms Beauty he said should be convulsive

I n explaining the nature of that convulsion in me text that serves as pro logue to L Amowjou Breton spells out the process of reality contorting or convulsing itself into its apparent opposite namely a sign29 Reality wh ich is present becomes a sign for hat is absent so that the world itself rendered beautiful is understood as a forest of signs In defining what he means by this indice this

PART THREE MODERNITY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

sign Breton begins to sketch a theory not of painting but of photography Each of Bretons aspects or moments of convulsive beaut) are ways of

describing the action of signs The first - erolique-voiLee - inokes the occurshyrence in nature of representation as one animal imitates another or as inorshyganic matter shapes itself to look like statuary T he second termed middotezplosanle-fixe is related to the lexpiration of movement which is to say the experience of something that should be in motion but has been for some reashyson Slopped derailed or as Duchanlp would have said delayed In this regard Breton writes I am sorry not to be able to reproduce among the illusshytrations to this text a photograph of a very handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for m any years to the delirium of a virgin forest30 T he conshyvulsiveness then the arousal in front of the object is not to it perceived wi thshyin the continuum of its natural existence but detached from that flow by means of an expiration of motion a detachment that deprives the locomotive of some part of its physica l self and turns it into a sign of the reality it no longer possesses

Bretons third example of convulsive beauty - magique-circonslancielle shyconsists of the found object or found erbal fragment both instances of objecshytive chance where (specifically in the case of the fowld object) an emissary from the external world carries a message informing the recipient of his own desire The found object is a sign of that desire Breton recognized this kind of convulsive beauty in a slipper spoon he had found in a flea market an object he recognized as the fulfil1ment of a -rish spoken by the automatic phrase that had begun running th rough his mind some months before [Plate 20] The phrase cendriller-Cendrilloll translates as Cinderella ashtray The flea-market object - a spoon with a li ttle shoe affued to the underside of its handle - suddenly convulsed itself into a sign when Breton began to see it as a chain of representations in which the shoe was reduplicated to infinity as though caught in a hall of mirrors I n addition to the little shoe under the handle he suddenly saw the bowl and handle of the spoon as the front and last of another shoe of which the little carved slipper was only the heel Then he imagined thal slipper as having for its heel yet another slipper and so on to infinity Th is chain of reduplicated and mirrored slippers Breton read as a kind of natural writing a set of lindices that signi fi ed his own desire for love and the beginning of a quest whose magical unfolding is plotted throughout LAmow-jou

If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism the concept of convul~ sive beauty is at the core of its aesthetic a concept that reduces to an experi shyence of r eality transformed into representation Surreality is we could say nature convulsed into a kind of writing The special access that photography as a medium has to this experience is photographys privileged connection to the reaL The manipulations then available to photography - what we have been calling doubling and spacing as weB as a technique of representational

15 1 ART OF TH~ TWE-TIErH CETlRf 1 READER13deg

reduplicatioll or sUmiddotucture en abyme- appear to document these connllsions The photographs are not inlerpretalions of reality decoding it as in the phogomontage practice of Heartfield or H ausmann Instead they are presen lations of that very reality as configured or coded or middotvritten

The experience of nature as sign or representation comes naturally then to photography This experience extends as well to the domain that is most inherently photographic the framing edge of the image experienced as cut or cropped This is possible even when the image does not seem folded from within by means of the reduplicative strategy of doubling when the im age is entirely unmanipulated like the Boiffard big toes or the Involuntary Sculptures by BrassaY or the image of a hatted figure by Man Ray published in JrJillotaure5 For at the very boundary of the image the camcra frame which essentially crops or cuts the represented element out of reality at large can be seen as another example of spacing

Spacing like the doubled phonemes of papa is the signifier of significashytion the ind ication of a break in the simultaneous experience of the rea l a rupture that issues into sequence P hotographic cropping is always experi shyenced as a ruptUIe in the continuous fabric of reality But surreal ist photog raphy puts enormous pressure on that frame to make it itself read as a sign - an empty sign it is true but an integer in the calculus of meaning nonetheless a signifier of signification T he frame announces that between the part of real ity cut away and this part there is a difference and that th is segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representashyt ion or n ature~as-sign Een as it announces th is experience of rea lity th e camera frame of course controls it co nfigures it3l Th is it does by poin t of view as in the 1an Iay or focal length as in the extreme close-ups of Brassai But in both these instances what the camera frames and thereby makes visible is the automatic writing of the world the constant unintershyrupted production of signs BrassaIs images are of those nasty pieces of paper like bus tickets and theater-ticket stubs that we roll into li ttle columns in our pockets or those pi eces of eraser th at we unconsciously knead - these are what his camera produces through the enlargements that he published as imoluntary sculptures 11an Rays photograph is one of sev eral made to accompany an essay by dadas founding spirit Tristan Tzara about the constant unconscious production of sexual imagery throughout culture - here in the design of hats

The fr run e announces the cameras ability to fm d and isolate what we cou ld call the worlds constant production of erotic symbols its ceaseless automatic wTiLing In th is capacity the frame can itself be glorified noticed represent shyed as in the Nirul Ray monwnent to the Marquis de Sade Or it can be there silently operating as spacing as in BrassaYs seizUIe of automatic production through his images of sculptural onanism or his captUTed grafitti

I n cutting into the body of the world stopping it framing it spacing it

I-IT THREE MODERrrv AD PHOTOGRAPHY

photography reveals that world as written Surrealist vision and photographshyic vision cohere around these principles For in the explosallle-fLXe we discov~ er the stop-motion of the still photograph in the erolique-voiM we see its fram ing and in the magique-circollslallcielie we find the message of its spacshying Breton has thus provided us all the aesthetic theory we will e er need to understand that for sUIrealist photography too beauty will be convulsic or it will not be

Andre Breton ame5loJ of Sureubsm trans Richard Seaver and I ldpoundgtn R Lane (Ann rOOr le

University of Jichigan Prlt~ 1969) p 12

Andre Breton Le Surrcalisll1c N 1ft peimurc La RetOlullon surrialiste no 4 (JIJI~ 1911) p 18 The complpoundgttpoundgt senes of dSaya was rollectoo in Ilrpoundgtton Surrralism and Pmminamp tran SlIlIon alSOll

Taylor (New York I larptr amp Ro 9-l) runher refpoundgtrpoundgtllce5 arc to this translation j Breton lIonifestos p i Andre Brelon Yada trans Richard Iloward (ew York Gro~ Press 1960) p 15~ In the preratt to

the 1963 Prellch edition (Galhmard) Breton speau of the photographs in relation to one of the

antihterary principles that guided Lhe creation of the book The abundant photographIc illuslfa lion he writes had as us obicttl-e the elimination or all dCSCription- what had been chided as iIlane in the Surrealist jlanifeslo- and the tone that the narrati~e adopted was modeled on Lhat of medlca1 obsen(ltioll See- ~11chel Beaujour Qumiddotest-ce que )adjaT La Youvdle Rnue FrunfoiM no 11

(April I 196) pp -80-99 ror an analYSIS of adlas rondllion as a text that is open 10 addlUons from what would nonnall) be ie-wed as hors-lerte and the role the photographs pin in Lhis gard

This question had begun The pholographic print 15 permeated with an emoti~middotf nlue Lhal maks il a supremely preciow rude or exchange (SurrralullI and Paint~ p Yl)

ti ndre Breton La Beautl sera convuI5i~ lmolo~ no 5 ( 934) pp 9-16 alter BenJamm Surrealism lbc Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia in Reflections trailS Edmund Jephrott (Xew York Ilarrourt Brace Jovanovich 19-8) p 183 See Rosalind Krauss ~ightalkers

-Irt Journal +5 (Spring 1981) n-8 8rNon onifestos p 16

~ Ibid p 77 I) Iksides the famous dictionary defillltion or surreahsm (II Psychic automatism in its pure state )

BrelOnmiddots first Surrralist Ilenifnio includes an encycloped ia entry iu which rnc performers of acts of absolute surrealism are listed ragon Baron Borfard Breton Carrh-e Crel Oelteil Ibnos

EJuard Gerard Llmbour ilalkine Ionse Na-ille 011 Perc Plcon Soupauh itrampc 10 1gtlerre wille Beaw Aru La Rhviflilon surrialislc no 5 (April 1915) p ~-

II As told to the author in ronmiddotersatlon lin- 0 1985 11 1111 also said that it was he vhodtlsed the three

pronged photo ooUage of lhe members BIllie Cenu-alc for Lhe CO-er of the first issue of LA RhxgtuJon

surrealisre See his aCCOllill in Pierre )111111 U Temps du sllrriaJ (pans Galilee 197) pp 99110

Il allle Beaw-Aru p ~7

I) The quotations in this and the nen paragraph are from Breton SlIrrralism and PaUltln8 pp 68 0

I ~ ndre Breton ilceanie (19middot~8 ) reprinted in Breton La CU ths clwmps (Pans Saglttaire 9~) 97 edition) p 28

I) Breton bere reenacu the polantauon between speech and wnting presence and representauon that Derrida analyzes as the opposIliol1$ Lhat structure Western metaphysics See Jicques Ot-rnda 0 Gramrru1rol~ tram GC Spl-ak ( Balumore Johru Hopkins Lniversity Press 19--6) The roncepl of

~pacmg developed there (pp 653) and in Freud and the Scene of Writing (in Jacques Ocrridi IIntmg and Differrllce trails Alall Bass [Chicago tllimiddotersuy of Chicago Press 1978 ]) II IInportalll

for the discussion tha t follows 16 Thus BrelOlI insists thai any fOflll of cxpression In which automatism does not at least adancc

undercover runs a gramiddote risk or 1I10ing out of the surrcalist orbit (Surrealism and PIIUIifB p 68)

I ~ Ibid p 70 18 Wilham Rubin attempts to ronstruCl an ullnnsic difvtlllon oj Surrealist paUltlnl i ll his rssa)

Toward a Critical Framework Inonu ) (September 1966) 35 But becallle he rlpnxluCtS the

same bipolar or blalent ronceptual SLructure Lhat Bf(ton had established ill 915 his defimtlon mir

ART OF THE nVENTl lITH CEITURY A READ ER 32

ron the problems of Bretons iUi well Ig See Gamille BI)ell and Raoul lichelet lcluatwn poitlqUL ( 1955 reprinted 1I1 lsteel larien

LAclInlii surrlolisu ~ff ampIAlI~ [Brussels Lebeermiddot llossmano 1979J pp 26g--O) 20 Chac describes the procedure of broJa~ also callMi souJJl~~ u a S)5tem of placing the glass plate

of an eposed negaue over a heated pan of water ill order to melt the emulsion It was thw a n

automausrn of destruction a complete dissolution of the image towards an absolute formlessness I

treated a large number of my ncgaue$ in this manner - the result bt-ing for the most pan disap_

pointing except in one caM where a woman in a bathing SUit was trarufonned IIItO 8 thunderstruck

Goddess - a photo titled La Xebuleuse On an unpublished letter to eI Ge-en from Raoul tbac dated Dieudonne 2 1 March 1981)

21 )Ian Ray Exhibition Ra~raphs 1921- 1928 (Stuttgart L G A 1963) 12 llessage without a code is Barthess term in his essays nle Photographic Message and IUletoric of

the Image See Roland Barthes Image 1IllS1c Tul trans Stephen Ileath (ew York I 1111 and Wang

19n)middot 23 In Walter Iknjamill A Short Ihstory or Photography trans Stanley I itchcll Screen 1J (Spnng

19(2) 24middot 24 John Heartfield PhorolOma~esof the azl Penod(~ew York Uni-erse Book 19i) p 16 25 Louis Aragon Joh n I(artfield ella beaute reOlullonnaire (1935) Tltprimed in Aragon u s Colloge~

( Paris I lermallll 965) pp i8--9 l6 18hllLlIku (Le Paysan de Pans) trans Frederick Brown ( Englewood Clirrs -c Jcrsey Prenticemiddot

llal 9iO) p 9 27 Claude 1imiddotI Strauss The RQU(lIU the Cooked trails J and D cighlm8n (lew York Ilarperamp 10

19-0) pp 359-40 28 Photographys posItion u 8n index was fi m established by C S I)circe within the taxonomy or signs

that he developed In Logic as Semiotic The Theory or Sigm Cs Peirce PhllosophlcalWnlmgr of Pevec ed Justw Buchler (-lew York Dover 1955)

29 Ine text La beaute sera colwulsle (pp cil) became the first chapter or C1mourfou See Andre Breton L Amour fou (Paris Gallimard 1957) pp - 9

30 Ibid P 13 50 Boiffards big toes accompanied the text by Georges Bataill~ Le Gros Ort(il Docunumts no 6 ( 929)

Brassais Sculpwres I Imollln(aves appeared 111 lflnOoure los 3- (1953) p 68 Mall Rays photo graphs or hats illustrated Tristan Tzaras DUJl Cena in Automallsme du gout Jinotoun nos 5-4

(1933) pp 81- 8 2 Derrida analyres the frame as an outside which is called inside the inside to col1sutl(e it as inside

See Jacques Dcrrida rhe Parcrgon trans Craig Owens OciOMr no 9 (Summer 199)

4 John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

John Szarkowski worked as a photographer before becoming the curator of photographs at the Museum of Modem Art New York in 1962 a post that he held until his retirement in 1991 Through a series of high ly influential exhibitions and accompanying catalogues he elaborated a modernist account of photography that drew heavily on the idea of vernacular form This text was originally written as a catalogue essay for the exhibition The Photographers Eye held in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art It represents a key statement of Szarkowski s approach and clearly lays out the fi ve eleshyments that he held to be central to photography conceived as an art The follOWing extracts are taken from John Szarkowski The Photographers Eye Museum of Modern Art New York 1969 unpaginated [SE]

PART THREE MODERNITY AD PHOTOGRAPHY 33

Introduction

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like and or why they look that way It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic trashydition with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection T he difference was a baSIC one Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of tradi shytional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs as the man on the street put it were taken

The di ffeTence raised a creative issue of a new orde r how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms - pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be fOW1 d by those who loved too m uch the old forms for in large part the photographer was berert or the old artistic traditions Speak ing or photography Baudelaire said This indusshytry by invading the territories of art has become ares most mortal e nemy And in h is own terms of re rerence Baudelaire was haIr right certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards The photographer must fi nd new ways to make his meaning clear

T hese new ways might be found by men who could abandon their alleshygiance to tradi t ional pictorial standards - or by the artistically ignorant who had no old allegiances to break T here hare been many of the latter sort Since its earliest days photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training who were disciplined and united by no academy or gui ld who considered their medium variously as a science an art a t rade or an entertainment and who were often unavare of each others work Those who invented photography were scientists and painters but its professional practitioners were a ery different lot [ J

T he enormous popularity of the new medium produced proressionals by the thousands - converted silversmiths t inkers druggists blacksmiths and printers If photography was a new artistic problem such men had the advanshytage of having nothing to unlearn Among them they produced a fl ood of images In 1853 the VellJ- York Daily Tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that yearl Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention many were the product of accident improvisation misunderstanding and empirical experiment But whether produced by art or by luck) each picture was part of a massive assault on our t raditional habits of seeing

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious amateurs were joined by an even larger host of casual snap-shooters By the early eighties the dry plate which could be purchased rcady-to-use had replaced the refractory and messy wet plate process which dernanded that the

15 1 ART OF TH~ TWE-TIErH CETlRf 1 READER13deg

reduplicatioll or sUmiddotucture en abyme- appear to document these connllsions The photographs are not inlerpretalions of reality decoding it as in the phogomontage practice of Heartfield or H ausmann Instead they are presen lations of that very reality as configured or coded or middotvritten

The experience of nature as sign or representation comes naturally then to photography This experience extends as well to the domain that is most inherently photographic the framing edge of the image experienced as cut or cropped This is possible even when the image does not seem folded from within by means of the reduplicative strategy of doubling when the im age is entirely unmanipulated like the Boiffard big toes or the Involuntary Sculptures by BrassaY or the image of a hatted figure by Man Ray published in JrJillotaure5 For at the very boundary of the image the camcra frame which essentially crops or cuts the represented element out of reality at large can be seen as another example of spacing

Spacing like the doubled phonemes of papa is the signifier of significashytion the ind ication of a break in the simultaneous experience of the rea l a rupture that issues into sequence P hotographic cropping is always experi shyenced as a ruptUIe in the continuous fabric of reality But surreal ist photog raphy puts enormous pressure on that frame to make it itself read as a sign - an empty sign it is true but an integer in the calculus of meaning nonetheless a signifier of signification T he frame announces that between the part of real ity cut away and this part there is a difference and that th is segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representashyt ion or n ature~as-sign Een as it announces th is experience of rea lity th e camera frame of course controls it co nfigures it3l Th is it does by poin t of view as in the 1an Iay or focal length as in the extreme close-ups of Brassai But in both these instances what the camera frames and thereby makes visible is the automatic writing of the world the constant unintershyrupted production of signs BrassaIs images are of those nasty pieces of paper like bus tickets and theater-ticket stubs that we roll into li ttle columns in our pockets or those pi eces of eraser th at we unconsciously knead - these are what his camera produces through the enlargements that he published as imoluntary sculptures 11an Rays photograph is one of sev eral made to accompany an essay by dadas founding spirit Tristan Tzara about the constant unconscious production of sexual imagery throughout culture - here in the design of hats

The fr run e announces the cameras ability to fm d and isolate what we cou ld call the worlds constant production of erotic symbols its ceaseless automatic wTiLing In th is capacity the frame can itself be glorified noticed represent shyed as in the Nirul Ray monwnent to the Marquis de Sade Or it can be there silently operating as spacing as in BrassaYs seizUIe of automatic production through his images of sculptural onanism or his captUTed grafitti

I n cutting into the body of the world stopping it framing it spacing it

I-IT THREE MODERrrv AD PHOTOGRAPHY

photography reveals that world as written Surrealist vision and photographshyic vision cohere around these principles For in the explosallle-fLXe we discov~ er the stop-motion of the still photograph in the erolique-voiM we see its fram ing and in the magique-circollslallcielie we find the message of its spacshying Breton has thus provided us all the aesthetic theory we will e er need to understand that for sUIrealist photography too beauty will be convulsic or it will not be

Andre Breton ame5loJ of Sureubsm trans Richard Seaver and I ldpoundgtn R Lane (Ann rOOr le

University of Jichigan Prlt~ 1969) p 12

Andre Breton Le Surrcalisll1c N 1ft peimurc La RetOlullon surrialiste no 4 (JIJI~ 1911) p 18 The complpoundgttpoundgt senes of dSaya was rollectoo in Ilrpoundgtton Surrralism and Pmminamp tran SlIlIon alSOll

Taylor (New York I larptr amp Ro 9-l) runher refpoundgtrpoundgtllce5 arc to this translation j Breton lIonifestos p i Andre Brelon Yada trans Richard Iloward (ew York Gro~ Press 1960) p 15~ In the preratt to

the 1963 Prellch edition (Galhmard) Breton speau of the photographs in relation to one of the

antihterary principles that guided Lhe creation of the book The abundant photographIc illuslfa lion he writes had as us obicttl-e the elimination or all dCSCription- what had been chided as iIlane in the Surrealist jlanifeslo- and the tone that the narrati~e adopted was modeled on Lhat of medlca1 obsen(ltioll See- ~11chel Beaujour Qumiddotest-ce que )adjaT La Youvdle Rnue FrunfoiM no 11

(April I 196) pp -80-99 ror an analYSIS of adlas rondllion as a text that is open 10 addlUons from what would nonnall) be ie-wed as hors-lerte and the role the photographs pin in Lhis gard

This question had begun The pholographic print 15 permeated with an emoti~middotf nlue Lhal maks il a supremely preciow rude or exchange (SurrralullI and Paint~ p Yl)

ti ndre Breton La Beautl sera convuI5i~ lmolo~ no 5 ( 934) pp 9-16 alter BenJamm Surrealism lbc Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia in Reflections trailS Edmund Jephrott (Xew York Ilarrourt Brace Jovanovich 19-8) p 183 See Rosalind Krauss ~ightalkers

-Irt Journal +5 (Spring 1981) n-8 8rNon onifestos p 16

~ Ibid p 77 I) Iksides the famous dictionary defillltion or surreahsm (II Psychic automatism in its pure state )

BrelOnmiddots first Surrralist Ilenifnio includes an encycloped ia entry iu which rnc performers of acts of absolute surrealism are listed ragon Baron Borfard Breton Carrh-e Crel Oelteil Ibnos

EJuard Gerard Llmbour ilalkine Ionse Na-ille 011 Perc Plcon Soupauh itrampc 10 1gtlerre wille Beaw Aru La Rhviflilon surrialislc no 5 (April 1915) p ~-

II As told to the author in ronmiddotersatlon lin- 0 1985 11 1111 also said that it was he vhodtlsed the three

pronged photo ooUage of lhe members BIllie Cenu-alc for Lhe CO-er of the first issue of LA RhxgtuJon

surrealisre See his aCCOllill in Pierre )111111 U Temps du sllrriaJ (pans Galilee 197) pp 99110

Il allle Beaw-Aru p ~7

I) The quotations in this and the nen paragraph are from Breton SlIrrralism and PaUltln8 pp 68 0

I ~ ndre Breton ilceanie (19middot~8 ) reprinted in Breton La CU ths clwmps (Pans Saglttaire 9~) 97 edition) p 28

I) Breton bere reenacu the polantauon between speech and wnting presence and representauon that Derrida analyzes as the opposIliol1$ Lhat structure Western metaphysics See Jicques Ot-rnda 0 Gramrru1rol~ tram GC Spl-ak ( Balumore Johru Hopkins Lniversity Press 19--6) The roncepl of

~pacmg developed there (pp 653) and in Freud and the Scene of Writing (in Jacques Ocrridi IIntmg and Differrllce trails Alall Bass [Chicago tllimiddotersuy of Chicago Press 1978 ]) II IInportalll

for the discussion tha t follows 16 Thus BrelOlI insists thai any fOflll of cxpression In which automatism does not at least adancc

undercover runs a gramiddote risk or 1I10ing out of the surrcalist orbit (Surrealism and PIIUIifB p 68)

I ~ Ibid p 70 18 Wilham Rubin attempts to ronstruCl an ullnnsic difvtlllon oj Surrealist paUltlnl i ll his rssa)

Toward a Critical Framework Inonu ) (September 1966) 35 But becallle he rlpnxluCtS the

same bipolar or blalent ronceptual SLructure Lhat Bf(ton had established ill 915 his defimtlon mir

ART OF THE nVENTl lITH CEITURY A READ ER 32

ron the problems of Bretons iUi well Ig See Gamille BI)ell and Raoul lichelet lcluatwn poitlqUL ( 1955 reprinted 1I1 lsteel larien

LAclInlii surrlolisu ~ff ampIAlI~ [Brussels Lebeermiddot llossmano 1979J pp 26g--O) 20 Chac describes the procedure of broJa~ also callMi souJJl~~ u a S)5tem of placing the glass plate

of an eposed negaue over a heated pan of water ill order to melt the emulsion It was thw a n

automausrn of destruction a complete dissolution of the image towards an absolute formlessness I

treated a large number of my ncgaue$ in this manner - the result bt-ing for the most pan disap_

pointing except in one caM where a woman in a bathing SUit was trarufonned IIItO 8 thunderstruck

Goddess - a photo titled La Xebuleuse On an unpublished letter to eI Ge-en from Raoul tbac dated Dieudonne 2 1 March 1981)

21 )Ian Ray Exhibition Ra~raphs 1921- 1928 (Stuttgart L G A 1963) 12 llessage without a code is Barthess term in his essays nle Photographic Message and IUletoric of

the Image See Roland Barthes Image 1IllS1c Tul trans Stephen Ileath (ew York I 1111 and Wang

19n)middot 23 In Walter Iknjamill A Short Ihstory or Photography trans Stanley I itchcll Screen 1J (Spnng

19(2) 24middot 24 John Heartfield PhorolOma~esof the azl Penod(~ew York Uni-erse Book 19i) p 16 25 Louis Aragon Joh n I(artfield ella beaute reOlullonnaire (1935) Tltprimed in Aragon u s Colloge~

( Paris I lermallll 965) pp i8--9 l6 18hllLlIku (Le Paysan de Pans) trans Frederick Brown ( Englewood Clirrs -c Jcrsey Prenticemiddot

llal 9iO) p 9 27 Claude 1imiddotI Strauss The RQU(lIU the Cooked trails J and D cighlm8n (lew York Ilarperamp 10

19-0) pp 359-40 28 Photographys posItion u 8n index was fi m established by C S I)circe within the taxonomy or signs

that he developed In Logic as Semiotic The Theory or Sigm Cs Peirce PhllosophlcalWnlmgr of Pevec ed Justw Buchler (-lew York Dover 1955)

29 Ine text La beaute sera colwulsle (pp cil) became the first chapter or C1mourfou See Andre Breton L Amour fou (Paris Gallimard 1957) pp - 9

30 Ibid P 13 50 Boiffards big toes accompanied the text by Georges Bataill~ Le Gros Ort(il Docunumts no 6 ( 929)

Brassais Sculpwres I Imollln(aves appeared 111 lflnOoure los 3- (1953) p 68 Mall Rays photo graphs or hats illustrated Tristan Tzaras DUJl Cena in Automallsme du gout Jinotoun nos 5-4

(1933) pp 81- 8 2 Derrida analyres the frame as an outside which is called inside the inside to col1sutl(e it as inside

See Jacques Dcrrida rhe Parcrgon trans Craig Owens OciOMr no 9 (Summer 199)

4 John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

John Szarkowski worked as a photographer before becoming the curator of photographs at the Museum of Modem Art New York in 1962 a post that he held until his retirement in 1991 Through a series of high ly influential exhibitions and accompanying catalogues he elaborated a modernist account of photography that drew heavily on the idea of vernacular form This text was originally written as a catalogue essay for the exhibition The Photographers Eye held in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art It represents a key statement of Szarkowski s approach and clearly lays out the fi ve eleshyments that he held to be central to photography conceived as an art The follOWing extracts are taken from John Szarkowski The Photographers Eye Museum of Modern Art New York 1969 unpaginated [SE]

PART THREE MODERNITY AD PHOTOGRAPHY 33

Introduction

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like and or why they look that way It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic trashydition with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection T he difference was a baSIC one Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of tradi shytional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs as the man on the street put it were taken

The di ffeTence raised a creative issue of a new orde r how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms - pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be fOW1 d by those who loved too m uch the old forms for in large part the photographer was berert or the old artistic traditions Speak ing or photography Baudelaire said This indusshytry by invading the territories of art has become ares most mortal e nemy And in h is own terms of re rerence Baudelaire was haIr right certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards The photographer must fi nd new ways to make his meaning clear

T hese new ways might be found by men who could abandon their alleshygiance to tradi t ional pictorial standards - or by the artistically ignorant who had no old allegiances to break T here hare been many of the latter sort Since its earliest days photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training who were disciplined and united by no academy or gui ld who considered their medium variously as a science an art a t rade or an entertainment and who were often unavare of each others work Those who invented photography were scientists and painters but its professional practitioners were a ery different lot [ J

T he enormous popularity of the new medium produced proressionals by the thousands - converted silversmiths t inkers druggists blacksmiths and printers If photography was a new artistic problem such men had the advanshytage of having nothing to unlearn Among them they produced a fl ood of images In 1853 the VellJ- York Daily Tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that yearl Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention many were the product of accident improvisation misunderstanding and empirical experiment But whether produced by art or by luck) each picture was part of a massive assault on our t raditional habits of seeing

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious amateurs were joined by an even larger host of casual snap-shooters By the early eighties the dry plate which could be purchased rcady-to-use had replaced the refractory and messy wet plate process which dernanded that the

ART OF THE nVENTl lITH CEITURY A READ ER 32

ron the problems of Bretons iUi well Ig See Gamille BI)ell and Raoul lichelet lcluatwn poitlqUL ( 1955 reprinted 1I1 lsteel larien

LAclInlii surrlolisu ~ff ampIAlI~ [Brussels Lebeermiddot llossmano 1979J pp 26g--O) 20 Chac describes the procedure of broJa~ also callMi souJJl~~ u a S)5tem of placing the glass plate

of an eposed negaue over a heated pan of water ill order to melt the emulsion It was thw a n

automausrn of destruction a complete dissolution of the image towards an absolute formlessness I

treated a large number of my ncgaue$ in this manner - the result bt-ing for the most pan disap_

pointing except in one caM where a woman in a bathing SUit was trarufonned IIItO 8 thunderstruck

Goddess - a photo titled La Xebuleuse On an unpublished letter to eI Ge-en from Raoul tbac dated Dieudonne 2 1 March 1981)

21 )Ian Ray Exhibition Ra~raphs 1921- 1928 (Stuttgart L G A 1963) 12 llessage without a code is Barthess term in his essays nle Photographic Message and IUletoric of

the Image See Roland Barthes Image 1IllS1c Tul trans Stephen Ileath (ew York I 1111 and Wang

19n)middot 23 In Walter Iknjamill A Short Ihstory or Photography trans Stanley I itchcll Screen 1J (Spnng

19(2) 24middot 24 John Heartfield PhorolOma~esof the azl Penod(~ew York Uni-erse Book 19i) p 16 25 Louis Aragon Joh n I(artfield ella beaute reOlullonnaire (1935) Tltprimed in Aragon u s Colloge~

( Paris I lermallll 965) pp i8--9 l6 18hllLlIku (Le Paysan de Pans) trans Frederick Brown ( Englewood Clirrs -c Jcrsey Prenticemiddot

llal 9iO) p 9 27 Claude 1imiddotI Strauss The RQU(lIU the Cooked trails J and D cighlm8n (lew York Ilarperamp 10

19-0) pp 359-40 28 Photographys posItion u 8n index was fi m established by C S I)circe within the taxonomy or signs

that he developed In Logic as Semiotic The Theory or Sigm Cs Peirce PhllosophlcalWnlmgr of Pevec ed Justw Buchler (-lew York Dover 1955)

29 Ine text La beaute sera colwulsle (pp cil) became the first chapter or C1mourfou See Andre Breton L Amour fou (Paris Gallimard 1957) pp - 9

30 Ibid P 13 50 Boiffards big toes accompanied the text by Georges Bataill~ Le Gros Ort(il Docunumts no 6 ( 929)

Brassais Sculpwres I Imollln(aves appeared 111 lflnOoure los 3- (1953) p 68 Mall Rays photo graphs or hats illustrated Tristan Tzaras DUJl Cena in Automallsme du gout Jinotoun nos 5-4

(1933) pp 81- 8 2 Derrida analyres the frame as an outside which is called inside the inside to col1sutl(e it as inside

See Jacques Dcrrida rhe Parcrgon trans Craig Owens OciOMr no 9 (Summer 199)

4 John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

John Szarkowski worked as a photographer before becoming the curator of photographs at the Museum of Modem Art New York in 1962 a post that he held until his retirement in 1991 Through a series of high ly influential exhibitions and accompanying catalogues he elaborated a modernist account of photography that drew heavily on the idea of vernacular form This text was originally written as a catalogue essay for the exhibition The Photographers Eye held in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art It represents a key statement of Szarkowski s approach and clearly lays out the fi ve eleshyments that he held to be central to photography conceived as an art The follOWing extracts are taken from John Szarkowski The Photographers Eye Museum of Modern Art New York 1969 unpaginated [SE]

PART THREE MODERNITY AD PHOTOGRAPHY 33

Introduction

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like and or why they look that way It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic trashydition with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection T he difference was a baSIC one Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of tradi shytional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs as the man on the street put it were taken

The di ffeTence raised a creative issue of a new orde r how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms - pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be fOW1 d by those who loved too m uch the old forms for in large part the photographer was berert or the old artistic traditions Speak ing or photography Baudelaire said This indusshytry by invading the territories of art has become ares most mortal e nemy And in h is own terms of re rerence Baudelaire was haIr right certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards The photographer must fi nd new ways to make his meaning clear

T hese new ways might be found by men who could abandon their alleshygiance to tradi t ional pictorial standards - or by the artistically ignorant who had no old allegiances to break T here hare been many of the latter sort Since its earliest days photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training who were disciplined and united by no academy or gui ld who considered their medium variously as a science an art a t rade or an entertainment and who were often unavare of each others work Those who invented photography were scientists and painters but its professional practitioners were a ery different lot [ J

T he enormous popularity of the new medium produced proressionals by the thousands - converted silversmiths t inkers druggists blacksmiths and printers If photography was a new artistic problem such men had the advanshytage of having nothing to unlearn Among them they produced a fl ood of images In 1853 the VellJ- York Daily Tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced that yearl Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention many were the product of accident improvisation misunderstanding and empirical experiment But whether produced by art or by luck) each picture was part of a massive assault on our t raditional habits of seeing

By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious amateurs were joined by an even larger host of casual snap-shooters By the early eighties the dry plate which could be purchased rcady-to-use had replaced the refractory and messy wet plate process which dernanded that the