Roadside #2

Below are two analogue photos from  the on-going, post-studio roadside series. This  is a minor photographic  series that has emerged from the various poodlewalks in and around Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

 The site of the first photo  is the southern side of the eastern end of Depledge Rd whilst the site of the second photos is Halls Creek Rd, with  both sites  in  Waitpinga.   Both  photos being  made with a Linhof Technika 70 coupled to  a Linhof 6x9 film back,  and Kodak Porto 160 ASA film 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 as an artwork? 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. Its  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/mediums. 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.

A key  reference point  is  Robert Smithson's  idea of the relation between  'site' and 'non-site' in Spiral Jetty.  Basically,  the “site” was “the physical, raw reality” of a location while the “nonsite” was a representation  of that reality displayed elsewhere. Craig Owens, in reading Smithson, characterised this as the defining element of the post-modern: namely, the 'eruption of language into the field of the (Greenberg, modernist) visual.'  iIn the 1980s Barbara Kruger's   combination of text and photo  in a single work exemplifies this interpretaion.  

However,  there are  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. Smithson often included maps in which a particular place is diagrammed, approximated and rendered into symbolic language. 

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 multiple forms with a single title 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).  

Robert Smithson, 'The Writings of Robert Smithson', edited by Nancy Holt,  (New York University Press, New York, 1979). 

Craig Owens, 'Earthwords,' October 10, (Fall 1979).

Peter Osborne,  Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art,  (Verso, London, 2013).