Cover Editorial - AfterImage

Publication Date: 01-SEP-04
Publication Title: Afterimage
Format: Online - approximately 1273 words
Author: Chalifour, Bruno

 

After thirty two years of existence of our magazine, the cover of the first issue of the thirty second volume (July/August) puzzled several of our readers. Some emailed, some called, some emailed and called. The cause of this sudden agitation in a period of vacation was the mention of Ronald Reagan's dates of birth and death and four lines summing up four stages in his life: "Actor, General Electric Spokesman, Governor of California, and President of the United States." Obviously the Reagan legacy is highly controversial, as was expressed in the streets and avenues of New York City on the occasion of the first day of the GOP Convention in Madison Square Garden. For many of us, the way with which Ronald Reagan dealt with education, first as a Governor of California, then with the arts and the NEA as a President of the United States was simply outrageous. Hardly was the new administration in office that it proposed a 50% cut in the funds allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts. The proposal did not pass, others argue, and in fact "the NEA may have been better-off under Reagan than under many other presidents. Democrats included." In the category of creativity though, points should be awarded to Ronald Reagan and his administration for helping coin and define the arguable concept of "Freedom Fighters," finance the Contras against the government of Nicaragua, lie about their wrong-doings, and go on arming and financing the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. More "creativity" was to come, as we all know, converting former "allies" and "freedom fighters" into the now infamously famous "Axis of Evil." Being an outsider to the debate when it first roared (in fact it probably started in the late 1960s on Berkeley campus), my intention with the last cover, was to create enough "tease" without being transparent, and let our more knowledgeable readers fill in the dots. We have received emails that we will publish in our next issue and we hope to receive more. We would like to read a variety of points of view away from the systematic eulogy we had from the usual media. After all, such a quote as, "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not" sounds quite contemporary except for the fact that it has become more unlikely to hear the current administration acknowledge "facts and evidence." Another creative side of the Reagan era was to feed another wave of global paranoia and create a response to it, ironically labeled "Star Wars."

Where have all the ICBMs and the million of dollars they represent gone? This was an underlying question in the work by Paul Shambroom that Afterimage recently showcased. His most recent work looks at how American democracy works at its most genuine level. It was show-cased in Montreal last fall, in Arles this summer. This work stands as a perfect example of a new trend for artists using documentary work as a base for their reflection on our world, and as the raw material for their art. The new term for it is "conceptual documentary," it involves a thoughtful and analytical distance with events. Martin Parr, as the artistic director of the 2004 Rencontres d'Arles, organized the core of this international festival around this concept. It was also central in the Month of Photography in Montreal with Vincent Lavoie. Strangers (the first international triennial exhibition at the International Center of Photography), as well as at this year's edition of Houston Fotofest on the theme of "Water."

I doubt that there can be any serious artistic creation without any conceptual underpinning. The twentieth century has shown that when a conceptual raison d'etre had not been explicitly formulated by the artist, a curator or a critic would step out to palliate the lack. This participation of the critic in the artist's reputation, if not work, may at times have been far-fetched, and even totally artificial. In many cases though, it was more than appropriate and bridged the gap between artists and their public. It is a strong metaphoric and symbolic content as well as a close relationship with esthetics that has established art as we know it. Its evolution has followed in the steps of our society moving toward more education, secularization, and commodification (three notions that do not have to overlap!).

The goal of this issue of Afterimage is to present you with two very different approaches of "Conceptual Documentary," as we see it. We are showcasing in the following pages the works of two artists separated by two, even three generations of practitioners. Their intentions are similar but their strategies are quite different. Milton Rogovin stands as the example of an almost self-taught artist whose practice involves more time in the presence of his subjects than in the conceptualization of his strategy. For Ann Stoddard, an installation artist, the production of meaningful art is the result of an intense analysis of tools and practices of power. Instead of human contact, as is the case with Rogovin, her audience and subjects (both artists manage to blur the line between subject and audience) are submitted to the very practices Ann Stoddard set out to denounce. She expects her viewers to gain some awareness from the confrontations that she creates, an awareness that she hopes can be invested in activism. Without any doubt. Milton Rogovin's work is more light-handed and somewhat subtler. The relationship with his subjects is also definitely a closer and less confrontational one. His work, though, has the same power of demonstration as Lewis Hine's or Jacob Riis's.

Both artists however share the same conception of how dystopian our world has become. Our common daily experience has become closer to the nightmares of such powerful visionaries as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, or Ray Bradbury. For these novelists and essayists, the societies that they described were clearly products of their minds: these evolved dysfunctional societies have become our reality. This realization makes Stoddard want to engage her audience, incite them to participate and fight passivity. She gives them tools to overcome the acceptance of the unacceptable. She chooses the very tools of mass surveillance and control as her own tools. In a rather typical postmodern approach, she reappropriates them and redirects them toward her own agenda, one of conscientious civil disobedience.

Both strategies, Milton Rogovin's and Ann Stoddard's, coexist and inform each other. They, in fact, complement each other and inform the viewer on the social, cultural, and generational contexts that generated them. Together they tend to effectively "leave no audience behind" simply because both of them engage their audiences. The notion of "conceptual document' may be the emperor's new clothes It is also a symptom of the evolution of visual documentary work, a response to the funneling of its market, and of a concentration of the means of its diffusion. The notion of a "concerned artist" is not a new one either, it is still one that is clearly needed in our days of loud obscurantism.

For this issue we also chose two other articles: one by Thomas McGovern, another one by Seth Thompson that echo our two feature texts. Our next issue will propose a comprehensive interview of Austrian director Andreas Horvath about his controversial movie This Ain't No Heartland, as well as an interview of Eugene Richards after the release of his new book The Fat Baby by Phaidon, and the retrospective exhibition he just had in Perpignan for the 16th International Festival of Photojournalism. Visa Pour l'Image.