Anodyne
Friday, December 23, 2005
 
Jean-Francois Chevrier's "The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography" (1989), finally translated in and the highlight of the Walker's Last Picture Show catalog:

"The restitution of the picture form (to which the art of the 1960s and 1970s, it will be recalled, was largely opposed) has the primary aim of restoring the distance to the object-image neccessary for the confrontational experience, but implies no nostalgia for painting and no specifically 'reactionary' impulse. The frontality of the picture hung on or affixed to the wall and its autonomy as an object are not sufficient as finalities. It is not a matter of elevating the photographic image to the place and rank of the painting. It is about using the picture form to reactivate a thinking based on fragments, opennness, and contradiction, not the utopia of a comprehensive or systematic order. There is a return to classical compositional forms, along with borrowings from the history of modern and premodern painting, but that movement is mediatized by the use of extra-painterly models, heterogeneous with canonical art history -- models from sculpture, the cinema, or philosophical analysis."


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