I

In some sense, the viewers of photorealist paintings must have been relieved. In his 1965 lecture “Critical Schizophrenia and the Intentionalist Method,” Max Kozloff pointed out that in the early 1960s he and other critics had become increasingly anxious about their own status in relation to works of art. Clement Greenberg, Hilton Kramer, Leo Steinberg, Michael Fried: the number of critics who seemed suddenly to be concerned with the viability of their practice was remarkable. On one hand, Kozloff suggested, it would be foolish to assume that these critics’ discomfort was somehow removed from the increasingly popular status of much contemporary art. As he put it, the “greatly accelerated interest in art by laymen only emphasized by contrast the evasion of responsibility by most critics. Nothing less than their leadership was at stake.”Footnote ⁵ However much these critics may have felt challenged by art's new audience, though, it was the art itself that proved their greatest bugbear. With the emergence of movements like pop art and minimalism, “Nothing was clearer than the inadequacy of the then-going critical apparatus.”Footnote ⁶ Neither formalist criticism, seeking to remain faithful to the pure optical data of the work, nor its “poetic” counterpart, which looked to explicate the content of aesthetic objects, seemed capable of dealing with the rising generation of artists and their works. The paintings of Frank Stella appeared to “encourage, only to reject, a certain kind of analysis,” and the films, paintings, and even persona of Andy Warhol read as if they had been “designed to invalidate” any attempt at critical analysis.Footnote ⁷ The only option available to the contemporary critic, according to Kozloff, was a speculative foray into the realm of artistic intention. By maintaining a proper balance between “credulity and incredulity,” the critic, Kozloff argued, might eventually ferret out the artist's intentions, and thus come closer to determining the true “nature of the object.”Footnote ⁸

Thus, when a number of painters began working directly from photographs, their images seemed to provide critics with a clear, external standard. No longer would one have to struggle to comprehend the internal formal logic of the work, or to puzzle out the idiosyncrasies of an individual artist. Photorealist paintings appeared to ask nothing of their audience other than a comparison to the precise visual reproductions of the camera. Bechtle's meticulous renderings, for example, served to distance him from Bay Area figurative painters like Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, both known for their sensual handling of paint, and, in Diebenkorn's case, an insistence on the painter's personal relation to his subject matter as crucial to the work's success. As Bechtle explained in 1973, traditional realists and figurative painters were

The photorealists, in other words, only wanted what painters were assumed to have been pursuing since the time of Zeuxis and Parrhasius: to create two-dimensional images indistinguishable from the objects they depicted.

For Ivan Karp, along with a number of others, the attempt to erase this distinction seemed incredibly progressive. Photorealist painting was successful, he argued, because it allowed the beauty of even the most ordinary objects to shine through: “just as a fresh, ripe, homegrown tomato seems suddenly so terribly important [photorealism] may reawaken us to the dormant joys of observation.”Footnote ¹⁰ And as much as this assertion may make these paintings sound nostalgic, Karp felt that this was at best only half the story. Certainly one could find in their works a longing for things past. But the loss these artists mourned was not simply that of figurative representation, as was often assumed. If this were the case, he argued, their works would have appeared far more sentimental. To the contrary, these artists’ reliance on the camera had in many ways negated that type of cathexis. They had looked not to evoke an “emotional response,” but to treat objects as “emblem[s] representing nothing but [themselves].”Footnote ¹¹ The photorealists, like anthropologists of the contemporary world, treated all things equally “in both their power and vacuity” in an attempt to reintroduce viewers to the world around them.Footnote ¹² They had, it seems, recognized the beauty in contemporary life, and the result was nothing less than “a democratic triumph.”Footnote ¹³

For historian and critic Linda Nochlin, however, the result of the photorealists’ professed desire for objectivity was a focus not on the things depicted, but on the presence of the paintings themselves. In trying, and, more importantly, failing, to replicate the mechanical vision of the camera, she argued, the photorealists had offered one of the first truly new, and, more importantly, truly contemporary developments in postwar American art. More than the pop artists, who made use of popular imagery only to subordinate it to the formal conventions of modernist abstraction, the “New Realists” had exploded Clement Greenberg's myth of modernist painting as a continuous progression toward the work of artists like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland – work that, no matter what one might say regarding the “modernist” imperative of its reduction of means, seemed to have little to say about contemporary modes of perception. This, of course, is what the “New Realist” work offered. If painters like McLean, Audrey Flack, and others had attempted simply to resurrect realism in its traditional form, to invoke “the meretricious mini-platitudes of a self-styled ‘old’ realist like Andrew Wyeth,” their work would have been merely retardataire.Footnote ¹⁴ Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the “New Realists” valued metonymy over metaphor, concerning themselves with the “accuracy of ‘meaningless’ detail” that would tie their works “so firmly to a specific time and a specific place.”Footnote ¹⁵ But this link to their “specific time” and “specific place” meant that the “New Realism” would, at least on the surface, appear different to the work of earlier realists. Quite simply, realism in the 1960s, insofar as its aim was to present that which was “essential simply to being at a concrete historical moment,” could not look like that of the 1860s.Footnote ¹⁶ The objects captured in these paintings of photographs would obviously proclaim their contemporaneity (think, for example, of Bechtle's many paintings featuring late-model cars, or Richard Estes's city streets). But, more importantly, the unapologetic adoption of photography asserted unmistakably that the artist's eye had been fundamentally transformed by the technological developments of her/his time. The camera had so altered the individual's relation to the world that any failure to address that change – whether in the form of a spurious “old” realism or monochrome abstraction – amounted to an act of either ignorance or stubborn denial. By subordinating the will of the artist to the lens of the camera the “New Realists” succeeded in making the “impress of the immediate present” instantly recognizable.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet in her eagerness to highlight the underlying similarities she felt united the “New Realists” and a painter like Courbet, Nochlin failed to mention perhaps the most striking difference. Much as she seemed prepared to condemn contemporary abstraction and the nostalgic “realism” of Andrew Wyeth in the name of realism's tradition of social and political commitment, in her discussion of the “New Realists” Nochlin rather curiously allowed the question of content to fall by the wayside. She repeatedly insisted that the use of the camera was the primary distinction between the “New Realists” and nineteenth-century realists like Courbet, framing their differences in terms of technology rather than ideology. For this reason, while she pointed to Courbet's 1865 Portrait of P.-J. Proudhon to illustrate realism's presentation of a “concrete rather than an ideal … reality,” she chose not to comment on the political significance of “concrete reality” in nineteenth-century political thought.Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, the essay turns to a discussion of the presentation of “concrete reality” in contemporary cinema, stressing the relationship between the “New Realist” painting and European “avant-garde” film. Both painters and filmmakers, she wrote,

That is to say, one should not waste time looking for any identifiable meaning in these images. Whatever the “New Realism” might reveal about contemporary modes of perception, its true significance lay in its literal impenetrability, its tendency to render form and content indistinguishable. These paintings and films invited the viewer to leave interpretation behind and to attend strictly to matters of form. As Nochlin explained, misinterpretations, or “overinterpretations,” of these works should be seen as the result of “an inveterate tendency to reduce form to a kind of handy, disposable container for content.”Footnote ²⁰ Only through careful attention to the images themselves could these works be understood. In the end, therefore, the point of “New Realist” painting, at least according to Nochlin, was not to document the existence of its chosen objects, but, by faithfully reproducing the appearance of those objects, to assert the objectivity of the painting itself. The works’ ambiguity was the result of these artists’ attempt to forestall interpretation. Their reintroduction of “subject matter” in this fashion was not so much about bringing recognizable content back into the work of art, but about pressing the world of recognizable things into the service of aesthetic form.

Much as Nochlin's reading of the “New Realism” appears to clash with Karp's, the two are nonetheless united in one important way. In their haste to portray these artists’ use of the camera as an attempt to celebrate the beauty of the everyday, to approximate contemporary modes of perception or the existence of objects, or simply to deny our efforts to interpret the resulting images, neither of these critics thought to question the relationship between photography and objectivity. Looking back on these discussions more than thirty years later, this seems almost surprising. For, as Jonathan Crary, Alan Sekula, and others have since made clear, the presumed objectivity of photographs has never been entirely self-evident.Footnote ²¹ Yet even without the benefit of more recent histories of the medium, there is something odd about these authors’ willingness to let the objectivity of an imaging technology go unquestioned. After all, in 1965, the same year that Kozloff struggled to pin down some model of artistic intention, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu assailed popular assumptions regarding photography's status as an “objective representation” of the material world, seeking instead to theorize what he called the “photographic intention.”

II

For Bourdieu, the photographic intention was to be located not in the individual will of any particular photographer, but in the social field itself. Simply put, as an imaging technology, photography highlighted the historical constraints on the forms of subjective expression. To understand photography, he argued, one must not rely on psychological analyses seeking to explain the practice in terms of individual motives or desires, for that approach enabled one “to penetrate no further than psychological functions as they are experienced, that is, to penetrate no further than ‘satisfactions’ and ‘reasons’, instead of investigating the social functions concealed by those ‘reasons’, and whose fulfillment moreover procures directly experienced ‘satisfactions.’ ”Footnote ²² Though one might anticipate that photography, “which has no tradition and makes no demands,” would be the medium of individual improvisation, according to Bourdieu photographic practice could not be more formulaic.Footnote ²³ The distinguishing characteristic of photography, he argued, was not its democratization of artistic expression, but the way in which individuals holding cameras tended to see only a limited number of objects and scenes as photographable. The images produced thus presented neither subjective expression nor “realistic” or “objective” copies of nature. They were instead the results of a socially delimited practice of “selection, and … transcription.” “Photography,” he wrote, “is considered to be a perfectly realistic and objective recording of the visible world because (from its origin) it has been assigned social uses that are held to be ‘realistic’ and ‘objective.’”Footnote ²⁴ Thus the point of his analysis was not to ignore questions of form, but to demonstrate the ways that, “whether in its rhythms, its instruments or its aesthetic, the social function that allows [photography] to exist also defines the limits of its existence.”Footnote ²⁵ The aesthetics of photography were inseparable from the images’ social efficacy. To comprehend this point, one needed only think of the sheer number of images that seemed to reproduce the “strained, posed and stereotyped photography of the family album.”Footnote ²⁶ No matter how the individual photographer felt about the stilted, standardized images s/he produced, taking formulaic pictures of reunions, weddings, birthdays, etc., nevertheless appeared to be “just as inevitable as the … ceremonies [those pictures] solemnized.”Footnote ²⁷

In her 1984 essay “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” Rosalind Krauss takes issue with Bourdieu's apparently reductive treatment of photographic aesthetics. The sociologist's treatment of photography, she contends, fails to come to terms with its true importance as a medium because, in spite of his quarrel with those who simplistically equate the camera with objectivity, his analysis nevertheless assumes that pictures are in some important way transparent. That is, he treats the photographs he encounters, whether they function as records of a family gathering or as amateurish imitations of paintings, as simple social indices, never once considering that the medium itself may in fact be the source of its own peculiar aesthetic logic. Or, one might say, its own peculiarly anti-aesthetic logic. For the importance of photography, in Krauss's analysis, lies in its ability to collapse the traditional assumptions of aesthetic theory “from within.” The photograph's status as a reproduced image, she explains,

Resisting the common temptation to dismiss the reproductive or repetitive as simply “derivative,” Krauss suggests that the conceptual link between photography and reproducibility in fact constitutes the camera's most important contribution to contemporary art and critical thought. Photography's significance lies in its tendency to evacuate the language of classical aesthetics, revealing the tendentiousness of any judgment of quality, originality, and so on. It “deconstructs” art, distancing it from itself to show the impossibility of separating artistic form from the stereotypical or “culturally already-given.”Footnote ²⁹

In chastising Bourdieu for overlooking the possibility of a “discourse proper to photography,” however, Krauss neglects a crucial moment in his essay. In discussing the standardized, rigidly frontal poses of family photographs – just when the reader expects him to argue that photography demonstrates the ways in which the self, insofar as it is always social, is inseparable from the position it occupies in a particular field – Bourdieu indicates that the pose may be a form of self-fashioning. The pose constitutes “the extreme form of [the sitters'] relationship to others,” he writes; it is the sitters' attempt to control the way in which others perceive them:

In attempting to fix the identity of the sitter, the photograph, insofar as it is determined by its social function, paradoxically opens up the possibility of her/his nonidentity. The pose, ultimately an apotropaic gesture, seemed to hold the potential to turn the “photographic intention” back on itself. It revealed the extent to which photography's objectivity was both a function of its social utility, and always necessarily incomplete. Any attempt to offer an exhaustive account of the “photographic intention,” therefore, would founder on the pose, yielding in the end only uncertainty. The “deconstructive” approach to the performance of self that Krauss found so fascinating in the work of Cindy Sherman was, as Bourdieu recognized, already at work in the photos of birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings he so detested.Footnote ³¹

This recognition, of course, only serves to raise once again the question of historical context. While photography provided an occasion for thinking through the conceptual trickiness of posing, it would be a mistake to dehistoricize this “deconstructive” potential of the pose as a necessary effect of the camera's invention. In the 1960s, after all, as Kozloff's essay makes clear, posing was common outside the photographic frame as well: virtually any individual or object one submitted to critical analysis eventually slipped through one's fingers. For this reason it is interesting to note that, as Bourdieu and Kozloff struggled to pin down their respective models of photographic and artistic intention – each one finding, in a tidy rehearsal of the Lacanian dialectic of the gaze, that the closer he came to the stereotypical or the individual, the more each of those concepts tended to pass over into its opposite – film critic Jacob Brackman wrote that the “put-on,” a pervasive form of ironic self-presentation, had “clog[ged]” critical judgment and “scuttle[d]” aesthetic standards.Footnote ³²

In the late 1960s, Brackman argued, the put-on had become something like a standard form of (mis)communication. “By means of a subtle transformation in the way artists deal with their public and people with one another,” he wrote, “we suddenly have reason to distrust a good deal of art, fashion, and conversation – to withhold a flat-footed response. More and more often, we suspect we are being tricked.”Footnote ³³ Where earlier practices like “kidding” or “joshing” presented untruths as truths only to reveal the ruse within a few moments – and thus call attention to the victim's gullibility – the “put-on artist” was more likely to continue his/her performance indefinitely:

The put-on artist, whether agreeing or disagreeing, merely recited a series of clichés. S/he seemed intent only on turning communication into a guessing game: the put-on “inherently cannot be understood.”Footnote ³⁵ Refusing to speak in the name of truth or an authentic self-identity, the put-on artist appeared merely to revel in her/his ability to evade the listener. Regardless of the perpetrator or the form, the result was nearly always the same. Rather than revealing an individual's “true” position, the put-on suggested the dubiousness of any “true” position. It rendered the stereotypical aspect of all positions palpable, thereby setting “straight” conversation adrift.

In the world of art, as Kozloff indicates, the popularity of the put-on had brought about a fundamental shift in the way audiences approached the latest works. Viewers had come to assume that a great deal of contemporary work sought to engage them not in some type of purely sensual communion, but in an elaborate “con game.” In response, Brackman suggests, critical arguments seemed to shift from determining what qualified as a “good” work to what constituted a “real” work. In this situation, of course, when a critic dismisses

Much like the interlocutor, forced to withhold her consent for fear of having been taken in by a conversational put-on, the cultural critic found her judgment rendered unstable as well.

For this reason, it is interesting to note the way in which Brackman explained the put-on's historical origin. This set of practices, he argued, had sprung directly from Susan Sontag's 1964 piece “Notes on Camp.” Her “disjunct essay in Partisan Review … was read by tens of thousands, but its reverberations affected the culture consumed by hundreds of millions.”Footnote ³⁷ What, in the early 1960s, had been preserved within the “classy preconscious” of American culture, surfaced in the wake of Sontag's essay as a mode of “popular consciousness.” That which had once been “an outlaw form was rapidly institutionalized”; what Sontag had described only as “a method of appreciation” had been taken up as “principles of manufacture.”Footnote ³⁸ Long before Madonna “struck a pose” and introduced a mass audience to voguing, the put-on had popularized the theatrically queer sensibility of camp. In the process, Brackman argued, that sensibility had been turned into a series of pointless jokes, a self-defeating evasiveness that undercut any attempt at meaningful dialogue. Brackman, anticipating the later work of Peter Sloterdijk, worried that irony had become the contemporary form of ideology. Unfortunately for Brackman, what he saw as the negative social and political effects of the put-on were not so easily stanched. Not unlike Sontag, who feared that her own attempt to come to terms with the “Camp sensibility” would result only in “a very inferior piece of Camp,” Brackman quickly discovered that any attempt to regain one's footing, to understand the put-on's relation to Camp by imposing the standard conceptual framework of a pioneering avant-garde and an imitative kitsch, was destined to fail.Footnote ³⁹ For, as Fabio Cleto has since pointed out, the inability to maintain this distinction was one of the defining characteristics of American culture in the 1960s. If anything, as Cleto puts it, by depicting camp as the dominant sensibility of that era, Sontag's “Notes” ultimately succeeded in describing the peculiar historical paradox in which the “‘democratic’ leveling of social (and cultural) hierarchies” seemed to be viewed with an oddly “aristocratic” detachment.Footnote ⁴⁰ The sociohistorical context in which camp emerged, the same conditions that enabled its popularization in the form of the put-on, thus made it impossible to right one's critical ship simply by reasserting the value of immediacy. For, as Sontag's, and later Nochlin's, difficulties made clear, no one could be certain what immediacy really was. Calls for meaningful dialogue, “sensuous immediacy,” and even “kynicism” will ultimately run aground on this very difficulty. Everything, to paraphrase Sontag, has been placed “in quotation marks” – not by camp or the put-on, but by the peculiarities of postwar American culture.

To be sure, if this had remained the problem of a few art critics, it would most likely merit little discussion. What makes the unavoidability of the put-on interesting is precisely the fact that it was not merely the problem of a few determined formalists. The put-on's cynical irony had tainted virtually every interpersonal exchange. One did not simply reenter the realm of sincerity by stepping outside the gallery. For this reason, Brackman's argument implies that any attempt to speak of “the sixties” without accounting for these tactics of misdirection would be foolhardy. To offer just one example, consider perhaps the most common target of criticism in discussions of late 1960s political activism: the sexist, homophobic rhetoric associated with the struggle for Black Power. From Eldridge Cleaver's infamous critique of James Baldwin to LeRoi Jones's claim that “Most American white men are trained to be fags,” the Black Power politics of that era have been cast repeatedly as guided by an unquestioned faith in the power of black masculinity.Footnote ⁴¹

When placed next to Brackman's analysis of the put-on, however, this overwrought machismo no longer seems so straightforward. Indeed, in describing one of the most common forms of the put-on, the actualization of a stereotype, Brackman depicts a conversation between a “benevolent progressive” and a “militant Negro” in which

Though Brackman asks us to read this as a cynical joke at the expense of the “benevolent progressive,” this embodiment of racist stereotypes was performed not as a signifier of some simplistic belief in the power of an “authentic” blackness, but a complex exercise in self-representation. It was, one might say, a way of posing as “black.” In this sense, in spite of his obvious disdain for these tactics, Brackman's depiction may offer us an opportunity not only to rethink the rhetoric and personae of Black Power spokesmen like Cleaver and Jones, but also to revisit any number of other curious moments in the history of that movement, from H. Rap Brown's extended meditation on “playing the dozens” with America to Huey Newton's admiration for the cleverly elusive significations of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Footnote ⁴³ And this, again, is just one example. The antiwar movement, the counterculture, gay liberation: virtually every grassroots, oppositional movement commonly associated with “the sixties” presented, in Brackman's eyes, yet another case of the kind of unresolvable misdirection he found so frustrating.Footnote ⁴⁴

And although the work of the photorealists was, at least on its surface, quite different from these performances of politics, it is important to recognize that both ultimately problematize the assumed objectivity of contemporary imaging technologies. Once again, paintings like those of Bechtle, Goings, and others appeared to foreground the tension between the photographic and the handmade. Though they drew quite obviously on the types of subject matter and compositions found in family photographs, the paintings themselves were still nearly impossible to mistake for photographs. The slight differences or “imperfections” that marked them as something like an operation of paraphrasing – simplified colors, shadows, reflections, omitted details, and so on – were the very things that enabled them to, in Weinberg's terms, make photography strange. This seems to have been precisely what J. Patrice Mandel was driving at when he proposed to label these artists “new figurative painters” rather than photorealists, “New Realists,” super realists, or any other name that might indicate a concern for “reality” in their works. Their images seemed to want neither to present some form of trompe l'oeil illusionism, nor to capture an objective “truth” kept hidden in our daily experience. If anything, Mandel suggested, these “new figurative painters” had forbidden the viewer to mistake anything presented in their images for reality. In spite of the purportedly literal mimesis of their paintings, the amount of information that appeared on the canvas was almost always less than what was contained in the photographic source. Elements of the original image would be saved or discarded based on their role in the painting's composition. What was left could thus only be described as a “deductive image,” one in which “what is left out of the picture is … almost as important as what is put in.”Footnote ⁴⁵ What passed for “realism” in the mid-twentieth century, therefore, was nothing more than a process of abstraction. And these artists, recognizing their inability to “discover reality,” had chosen to engage in an elaborate series of tricks in which “the more accurate the picture seems, the more imaginative it is.”Footnote ⁴⁶

And while Brackman never makes the connection explicit, many of the put-ons he disparages as a form of pseudopolitics were developed in response to the media's claims to represent the truth of alternative cultures and grassroots movements. As many others have already made clear, most Americans' knowledge of the various forms of contemporary oppositional political activity was shaped not through firsthand experience, but by the almost daily barrage of media imagery depicting protests, demonstrations, and so on. In the late 1960s, images of opposition were a staple of the budding infotainment industry. For this reason, it is understandable that most historians' discussions of the mass media's relationship with grassroots politics have focussed on the power of a medium like television to undermine the political potential of virtually any movement it touched – its ability to “make and unmake” movements, to use Todd Gitlin's famous phrasing.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet in doing so, these authors portray the activists in question as something like the naive victims of media manipulation, too simplistically sincere in their commitment to a given political position and/or so convinced that the audience would understand and identify with their message that they were unable to recognize the dangers in speaking to reporters. The possibility that these individuals may have wanted something other than a form of straightforward mass communication – that they may have wanted, as Abbie Hoffman once wrote, to be a cross between Fidel Castro and Andy Warhol – is rarely considered.Footnote ⁴⁸ Brackman's text thus holds profound implications not just for our understanding of the art of the late 1960s, but for a great deal of what we now accept as the truth of “the sixties.”

Viewing the works of photorealists like Bechtle through the lens of the put-on allows us to see that their artistic and ideological indeterminacy may not have been the result of their apparently “styleless style,” but of their tendency to foreground the stylistic aspect of all forms of “objective representation.” At the same time, if, as Brackman suggests, the queer logic of the put-on was at work in much of the grassroots activism of that decade, then the assumed disconnect between the heated politics of the late 1960s and the apparently noncommittal works of some of that era's best-known artists can no longer be maintained. Moreover, the key to understanding the connections between those artists and activists lies neither in looking for the moments of “commitment” in works previously labeled “apolitical,” nor in simply translating the rhetoric of activist politics into the terms of formalist criticism.Footnote ⁴⁹ A more productive contribution to our understanding of the visual culture of late-1960s America might be found, as Brackman's argument indicates, in seeking out those moments when both art and grassroots politics seemed to acknowledge the impossibility of their own immediacy or “authenticity,” those moments when each one appeared to engage in an extended critique of truth and power. What might performances of a stereotypical “radicalism,” like the photorealists’ enactment of the clichéd desire for illusion in painting, reveal about the status of opposition in the late 1960s? Photorealist painting seemed to want to make the conventions of “objective representation” strange. It is high time that we, as historians, begin to make “the sixties” strange, recognizing the imbrications of earnestness and play, “direct action” and performance, “straight conversation” and camp, and art and activism that cause any attempt to apprehend the “reality” of that era to fall short.