"Some people get a cheap thrill out of detachment." -- Matsumoto

"Art -- in other words the search for the beautiful and the perfecting truth, in his own person, in his wife and children, in his ideas, in what he says, does and produces -- such is the final evolution of the worker, the phase which is destined to bring the Circle of Nature to a glorious close. Aesthetics and above Aesthetics, Morality, these are the keystones of the economic edifice." -- Proudhon

"Nowadays a Cage concert can be quite a society event." -- Cardew

March 1, 1977

To Dr. William Fielder, Chairman
SECA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

A representative of SECA has formally asked me to write a paper on Bay Area photography concerning the avant-garde. This information, I am told, will be printed with other essays in a comprehensive index listing names, dates, places and reviews of photographic exhibitions held in San Francisco and the Bay Area during 1976. The objective nature of an index represents a significant change in the distribution of information because it is not limited to a system of arbitrary choices. John Berger puts it this way: "I have come to see that the arranging of artists in a hierarchy of merit is an idle and essentially dilettante process. What matters are the needs which art answers." An accurate index could be a fundamental step in this direction.

However, the theme of the avant-garde, as it was loosely presented, seems outside the scope of my activities since I am neither critic nor historian. In fact, the term itself projects an image of extremist doctrine that hardly relates to issues that concern my work, namely: normalcy, language, structuralism and the problematic of photography:

To Minor White
Arlington, Mass.

Robert Leverant sent me your request for examples of my work. The work may appear oddly simple. It relies on a non-visceral content deprived of sex and sympathy. The meaning is confined to measuring, locating, limiting or defining a photograph that is reflexive of itself. The expression of imagery is secondary to an insistence on ideas and their release through the agency of photography. The work is formulated by language and not by a reading of nature. Scanning, serial imagery, the objective use of perspective are internal to the methodology. The formats employ coding devices that encourage the viewer in a rereading of the photographic process. In this context, time and language are equal to the "classical elements of light, tone, expressiveness and likeness . . . "

This kind of photography, referred to as "conceptual," has had only incidental exposure within the museums of San Francisco. You might say that museum policy as it specifically relates to photography has been distinguished by the exclusion of these issues. I am not talking about anti-photography or documentary evidence that supports the activities of other art forms like Earth art, Body art, Performances and Installations. No, I mean problematic photography in which questions are posed in opposition to a set of standards, which has produced a tradition of commodities whose value at any level of the structure is more economic than aesthetic.

Problematic photography contradicts the assumptions of conceptual art and photography whose operant form is a "law that can be shown on the basis of certain rules to exclude no logical possibilities." The comfortable autonomy of conceptualism can now be viewed as merely hermetic exercises in a competitive struggle for economic survival in the marketplace of art. And the "felt" image of humanistic photography is simply inadequate in deciphering the codes that determine our perceptions of reality. "The 'creative' principle in photography," writes Walter Benjamin, "is its surrender to fashion. Its motto: the world is beautiful. In it is unmasked photography, which raises every tin can to the realm of the All but cannot grasp any of the human connections that it enters into, and which, even in its most dreamy subject, is more a function of its merchandisability than of its discovery. Because, however, the true face of this photographic creativity is advertising or association; therefore its correct opposite is unmasking or construction." Neither repetitive practices nor the perfectibility of the photographic print can reverse the tradition of the "unmasked" photograph that freezes the dialectic of the tradition into a program of connoisseurship. This linear tradition cannot sustain itself indefinitely through the practices of analogy, mechanical advancement, or purity. It must bear some responsibility to contemporary reactions and mental adjustments forcing critical issues into a present frame of analysis.

A museum ought to provide space for intellectual examination of photography. Of course nothing may be wrong with a series of choices that determine photographic examples for promotion, but it is in relation to these decisions that the outsider is forced into a state of alienation and subversion. I must confess that prolonged counter-activity has produced within me a sense of paranoia to the extent where I now have a picture of the museum as an instrument of repression.

I hardly see any reasons for disguising the frustrations that contribute to my point of view even though the rumor was false!

During the period 1971-1975 I have had plenty of opportunities to show my work in a museum context. This may seem contradictory or even hypocritical based on previous statements expressed in this letter. However, the idea of "context" for which most artists seek as an adjunct to their forms of expression slowly evolved in my thinking to a point where it became inseparable from the content of the work itself. The retrospective lessons that produced this change can be listed as follows: a.) The space for which an artist yearns, i.e., the gallery or museum, is temporal and inadequate to the demands of purposeful or radical art. b.) In relation to the art system as a whole, the independent artist is defenseless and depends categorically on values similar to those of an entertainer. c.) Rejection is usually not personal; it is more insidious because it operates ostensibly as a curatorial process that is nothing more than a fiction concealing the economic interests of the material structure. d.) So-called "high-risk" exhibitions, particularly in photography, are limited to marginal space within the museum, while the depth of resources are devoted to the historical survey reflecting the hierarchic reference (an obsession) of bourgeois art. e.) This tradition is not prolonged by creative internalization, it is mediated by a system of clichés known as the press release, review and the picture-book catalog.

Besides these two there are other spaces challenging museum practices directed towards contemporary art.

There are the "floating" structures: the seminar, the museum, the radio and cable television. There's BLUXOME STREET and LANGTON STREET. SITE. THE FARM. CAMERAWORK GALLERY and WEST COAST PRINT CENTER. All use photography. Some of the photography shown in these spaces looks as good as the photographic prints hanging in museums. However, the image as object is something I am resistant to. But in the new time/frame South of Market, in the meadow-like loft of 70 Twelfth Street, photographic exhibitions have been mounted on a scale equal to the museum.

The two shows I am familiar with are WEST COAST CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHERS, March 1976, and PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE, October 1976 -- exhibitions detached from the crippling criteria of "quality" and the guarantee of security.

In the two exhibitions, WEST COAST CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHERS and PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE, nearly 150 photographers and artists participated. The former show was a "free-form" installation of photographic works in which scale, serial imagery, camera perspectives, construction, and methodologies were projected on a level of sculpture without resorting to a confusion of graphic processes. It was "straight" photography, only ripped out of the prison-house that extends mentally from Carmel to Rochester and vice versa. The term "conceptual" was strategically joined to the title of the exhibition more as a purgative to the photographic system than for reasons of classification.

On the other hand, PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE was devoted exclusively to theory and to the problems of structure. Here, the meaning of photography, artist, and curator was examined extensively by participant, spectator, reviewer, and the book -- PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE.

Influential traditions are built and generated in and by print and, traditionally, critics and curators have summarily dismissed ideas and exhibitions that are outside the dominating ideology; and the burden of proof is always carried by the artist. Some controversial issues can be tolerated within the frame of the exhibition because it represents merely a tiny node in a system transmitting comparatively weak vibrations through the medium as a whole. Without a text, the reference point of departure, the museum or gallery, cannot alter the course of action open to artists, i.e., the next exhibition, for which they must line up for competitive slots in the schedule. The system, consciously or unwittingly, keeps artists separated one from the other in an exasperated search for recognition. A generation of new art forms from Happenings to Contextual art are the results of this systemic frustration, no matter how ideological they may seem in appearance.

In print, however, artists bridge the spatial gaps with a medium that is essentially portable. With the advent of the "artist's book," the proliferation of cheaper printing processes, the arrival of ARTWEEK, INTERMEDIA, LEFT CURVE, VILE, BOMBAY DUCK and LA MAMELLE, to name only a few, artists have found a temporary communications network relatively free of institutional manipulation. Even here photographic artists have had to de-emphasize a classical reluctance to allow their work to be printed in an inferior state, and to overcome the sentimentality of language as it has been associated with the image. More significantly, this wave of publications allows artists to view themselves on a serious level of commitment, and, at the same time, enables them to assimilate the maximum impact of language.

In the area of photography where I have witnessed and participated in projects involving groups of artists expressing ideas and information pertinent to themselves and reality, it is evident that commitment, individually and collectively, in duration and intensity, is the raw material that holds it all together. There are individual conflicts within a faction and there are contradictions of taste and experience between factions; but a coalition of skills can emerge whose sense of accomplishment can make the gallery, the museum, the institution, psychologically obsolescent.

This complex of skills, ideas, ideologies is under persistent threat of financial crisis. The depth of context as it now exists should produce a set of intellectual patrons whose interests will reflect a maturity beyond the possession of objects and social mystification.

Very truly yours,
Lew Thomas

This essay first appeared in San Francisco Bay Area Photography (San Francisco: SECA and the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1976). It was subsequently reprinted in Thomas, Lew, Structural(ism) and Photography (San Francisco: NFS Press, 1978), pp. 98-101. © Copyright 1977 by Lew Thomas. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Lew Thomas at lthomas16@aol.com.