The Pictures Generation
"The Pictures Generation" by Randall Anderson, Fall 2009, p. 137
In the early 1980s, I framed a photocopy of an art-magazine reproduction of a Sherrie Levine appropriation of a Walker Evans photograph. It seemed a logical conclusion to the appropriation chain, and I can see now how it pointed to the problem with so much of the art made by the Pictures artists: there were simply too many logical conclusions. It was a closed loop system; you’d go around and around until you’d experience photocopy fatigue, a copy of a copy of a copy. The most interesting work broke this pattern, slipping sideways and making material shifts while revealing the socio-political underpinnings of how images function in our culture.
The Met’s exhibition “The Pictures Generation” highlights the period between 1974 and 1984 and features a group of artists who became the force behind the 1980s boom. Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, David Salle, Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine, the power chords in what became a rather repetitive and eventually redundant tune, loom large in the show. But it’s the lesser-known names that provide the melodic hooks that stick in your mind: Thomas Lawson, Paul McMahon, James Casebere and Troy Brauntuch. These artists lifted source material from popular culture, reinvesting images with meaning and reinventing them as agents for change. They were not complicit with the production modes of their sources, but maintained a measure of critique (and integrity) that lends credibility to their work. Both Lawson and McMahon, for instance, reworked images from the popular press, stripping pictures of their sentimentality and questioning the expectations of the consuming public.
There appears to have been a eureka moment in the mid- to late 1970s when artists clued in to the mechanisms at play in representational media. This exhibition points to the obvious influence of John Baldessari’s activities at CalArts. By manipulating found visual material, he unpacked the processes involved in seeing, undermining what we think we know by carving perception up into its constituent parts, then reorganizing the fragments into new and surprising arrangements of the information that comes at us. Building on Baldessari’s deconstruction of images, the Pictures artists provided a destabilizing shift, presenting the mundane as a way in, then blindsiding familiar readings and creating fissures and cracks in our knowing. They framed an experience of doubt—a rare moment of potential and renewal.
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