{"id":19972,"date":"2014-02-27T23:38:59","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T04:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=19972"},"modified":"2016-06-13T14:25:35","modified_gmt":"2016-06-13T18:25:35","slug":"across-the-great-divide-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2014\/02\/27\/across-the-great-divide-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Across the Great Divide (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.O Canada!<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my previous post<\/a> I dealt with my involuntary\u00a0services rendered to Canadian scholar and curator Peggy Cousineau-Levine<\/a> as convenient whipping boy for her chastisement of all those who \u201cassume that criticism is about applying a standardized (which is to say, \u2018international\u2019) system of evaluation that ascertains how a given product \u2018measures up\u2019 to abstract, idealized, and currently fashionable notions of what constitutes an acceptable work of art\u201d and who employ a \u201cmonolithic approach\u201d involving supposedly \u201c\u2018universal\u2019 terms of discourse\u201d when discussing Canadian photography \u2014 with yours truly held up as the prime example of these nefarious tendencies.<\/p>\n

\"PennyCousineau-Levine fired this grapeshot salvo in the opening paragraph of her book\u00a0Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination<\/i>\u00a0(Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen\u2019s University Press, 2003). The book then served as the basis for an exhibition by the same title curated by its author, shown in New York in early 2006 at the Jack Shainman Gallery<\/a> in Chelsea. (I’d gone to China, and missed the show.\u00a0Click here for Roberta Smith’s February 3, 2006\u00a0New York Times<\/em> review<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Clearly a manifestion of the creativity of the Canadian imagination: Cousineau-Levine imagined me holding positions patently antithetical to those I’ve long espoused, then used that fictionalized version of me as a springboard from which to launch her argument.<\/p>\n

Our Home and Native Land!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"NoIf, even today, there exists some\u00a0“standardized … ‘international’ … system of evaluation that ascertains how a given product ‘measures up’ to abstract, idealized, and currently fashionable notions of what constitutes an acceptable work of art” in photography, I have absolutely no idea what it is. Aside, that is, from once-trendy postmodernist theory and its dicta, which permeate Cousineau-Levine’s project but were just entering the discourse on photography in the mid-’70s.<\/p>\n

Unlike so many of my colleagues, I never drank the pomo Kool-Aid. So I can certify that, in 1974, when Cousineau-Levine accuses me of applying such a “monolithic approach,” I neither did so nor could have if I’d wanted to.<\/p>\n

\"Canadian

Canadian flag, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2004, by Jared Grove. Courtesy Creative Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

At that juncture the medium’s field of ideas was in a state of extreme flux, the kind of crisis that philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn identified as “paradigm shift.”<\/a> The\u00a0very idea of photography criticism as a legitimate discipline and subset of the discourse on art was new and amorphous right then. You could count its North American practitioners on your fingers and toes, with digits left over; the hands and feet of three people would have sufficed for the global total of our cohort.<\/p>\n

Few of us had anything in common beyond our fascination with the medium. Not even an agreed-upon vocabulary and set of working definitions, much less something resembling a “standardized ‘international’ system of evaluation.” Deliberately misleading readers unfamiliar with that period into believing otherwise constitutes an act of scholarly irresponsibility verging on the unethical.\u00a0This is pure fantasy, baseless and unsupportable, unworthy of any reputable historian.<\/p>\n

With Glowing Hearts We See Thee Rise …<\/strong><\/p>\n

\""Latent

“Latent Image” column logo, Village Voice, ca. 1968.<\/p><\/div>\n

During that period I was working out\u00a0my own hermeneutic understandings and testing my exegetic strategies in public, in my columns in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Village Voice<\/em>. Contrarian that I am, and was then, I wouldn’t have subscribed to any “standardized international system of evaluation” for photographs had I known of one, which I didn’t \u2015 because nothing of the sort existed. (The ideas propounded by John Szarkowski in The Photographer’s Eye<\/em> might have come\u00a0closest, but I hadn’t found them as persuasive as did others \u2014 especially proponents of that “snapshot mode” to which I’d referred in\u00a0my review of John Max’s work<\/a>, which Cousineau-Levine found objectionable.)<\/p>\n

\"JohnAnd I know of no evidence fingering my writing as the model for such a system used by others, then or subsequently. So I enter a plea of not guilty to the charges levelled by Cousineau-Levine, and think now, as I did in 1974, that I did neither John Max (who died in 2011<\/a>) nor Canadian photography any disservice with my brief, respectful review<\/a> of Max’s book Open Passport<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cousineau-Levine must know that. She’s been around long enough that she has no excuses;\u00a0she was writing at the same time. Why she pretends to ignorance on that score in her book I can’t say.\u00a0No doubt there’s something distinctly Canadian about all this, but assuredly we’ll need a Canadian to explain it.<\/p>\n

True Patriot Love in All Thy Sons Command!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Phil

Phil Bergerson, “American Artifacts” (cover), 2014<\/p><\/div>\n

To maintain even a semblance of intellectual integrity,\u00a0Cousineau-Levine would have to direct the same accusations at Canadian\u00a0curator and photography historian\u00a0David Harris<\/a>,\u00a0Associate Professor, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto. In his jacket-flap blurb for Canadian photographer Phil Bergerson’s just-published monograph\u00a0American Artifacts<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a follow-up to to his 2004 book\u00a0Shards of America<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 Harris, with Bergerson’s obvious approval,\u00a0places this photographer squarely in the lineage of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nathan Lyons, and Lee Friedlander.<\/p>\n

Not a Canadian among them, unless you count the Swiss emigr\u00e9 Frank (long a part-time resident of Nova Scotia). Yet I feel confident that\u00a0Cousineau-Levine will not excoriate her compatriot Harris for committing hegemonic monolithic universalizing blahblahblah, nor her fellow citizen\u00a0Bergerson for approving it.<\/p>\n

I have no problem with Bergerson feeling himself part of that tradition, nor with Harris placing him within it. Which hardly means that I think all photographic roads lead to the Great Satan, since it wouldn’t bother me if a U.S. photographer claimed Edward Burtynsky as a primary influence. To the contrary, I concluded a report on the 1991 edition of the biennial festival\u00a0Mois de la Photo \u00e0 Montreal<\/a>\u00a0as follows:<\/p>\n

What the Mois as a whole seemed to propose … was that Canada \u2015 along with virtually everyplace else \u2015 has become yet another melting-pot of photographic styles. That there is strong and, indeed, world-class work being produced there is, from the evidence provided by this event, undeniable; the Mois serves well its announced purpose of acting as a platform for that work and a forum for notable lesser-known work from elsewhere; and the city of Montreal, which hosts a great many festivals of the arts, is clearly capable of (and interested in) serving as a springboard for such an exchange of lens imagery.<\/p>\n

\"MoisBut perhaps the third Mois \u2015 on which Vox Populi [the festival’s nonprofit organization] and its support staff “are now setting their sights,” according to the catalogue’s introduction, and more power to them \u2015 might profitably and provocatively ask the question, “What’s Canadian about Canadian photography today?” Outsider that I am, it’s not a question I’d presume to answer, but I’d love to hear and see what the Canadians themselves think on that score. (See “North of the Border, Up Canada Way,”\u00a0Camera & Darkroom Photography<\/i>, February 1992.)<\/p>\n

We Stand on Guard for Thee!<\/strong><\/p>\n

So I wouldn’t deny that there’s something uniquely Canadian about Canadian photography, perceivable to Canadians (some of them, anyhow) but not to the rest of the world. Indeed, I’ve often acknowledged the cultural specificity of images in general and photographs in particular, rejecting out of hand \u2015 in articles for the\u00a0Times<\/i>\u00a0and other platforms from the late ’60s through the present \u2015\u00a0the belief promulgated by Edward Steichen and others that photographs speak in some “universal language,” requiring no translation because all viewers everywhere intuitively understand them the same way.<\/p>\n

\"Katherine

Katherine Barber, “Only in Canada, You Say,” by (2007), cover<\/p><\/div>\n

And I’ve long called for increased translation into English of critical and historical texts in other languages, and vice versa, terming the shortage of same a major blockage in the flow of the discourse on photography, precisely because I believe that critics from within a culture can tease out significant aspects of a work that outsiders will likely miss.<\/p>\n

At the same time, arguing that only a Canadian can understand Canadian photography \u2014 by John Max, Sandra Semchuk, Arnaud Maggs, Jeff Wall, and Suzy Lake, among others \u2014 verges on solipsism. And rebuking non-Canadians for not venturing their considerations of such Canadianness, which Canadians would reasonably consider presumptuous, creates a double-bind stuation. (Complicating this even further, we have Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan<\/a>‘s sensible proposal that “Whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish” \u2014 suggesting that non-Canadian observers might well note aspects of Canadian culture that natives take for granted.)<\/p>\n

(Part 1<\/a> I 2 I 3<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

This post\u00a0supported by a donation from photographer\u00a0Peter Kayafas<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arguing that only a Canadian can understand Canadian photography verges on solipsism. And chastising non-Canadians for not venturing their considerations of such Canadianness, which Canadians would reasonably consider presumptuous, creates a double-bind stuation. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[906,887,903,888,905],"class_list":["post-19972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews-book-notes","category-event-reports","tag-david-harris","tag-john-max","tag-mois-de-la-photo-a-montreal","tag-penny-cousineau-levine","tag-phil-bergerson","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}