Another analogue photo in the post-studio roadside series --- a minor photographic series that has emerged from the various poodlewalks. This site is the southern side of the eastern end of Depledge Rd in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in the late afternoon.
What could be more mundane than the roadside of a back country road, which people treat as a dumping ground for their illegal dumping? What could be less uninteresting? It is about as interesting as Ed Ruscha's serial photographic project entitled Various Small Fires that presents a sequence of such objects (matches that are alight, a lighter that’s fired, a lit cigar, a lit cigarette, an ignited gas ring and so forth).
As noted in this earlier post a significant moment in art history and aesthetic philosophy was the short-lived Conceptual Art movement in the United States and England, whose central concern was to advance the conception that what is of central importance in a work of art is the idea governing, organizing, and/or unifying the work. Secondly, the artistic interest of the idea always 'exceeds' its embodiments in different media. Thirdly, the model of unity is a series, and not of works presented one at a time.
Concepuality is now a necessary (but insufficient) condition for a work to be a contemporary art work. The sufficient conditions are supplied by the use of various materials, put to artistic uses with the conditions of of contemporary art.
Secondly, if we refer back to Robert Smithson's relation of 'site' and 'non-site' we have three interconnected components of the historical ontology of the artwork. There is the artwork sited in the Salt Lake in Utah, an essay reflecting on this art work, and a film about its construction. So a single title Spiral Jetty refers to multiple artistic forms. So the ever-changing Roadside is the site, the photograph is the non-site with the latter's relation one of reflection and 'representation' to the site, which is then reworked/supplemented /interpreted with different kinds of materials -- a text.
A single title referring to multiple artistic forms indicates that the work of art is an open-process which also inscribes non-artistic’ material within the framework and legacy of art practice. This means that photography's mode of being is freed from being seen in terms of conventional categories of artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, performance).
Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Peter Osborne, (Verso, London, 2013).