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Not Just Pictures: Reassessing critical models for 1980s photography

On 13 February 2017, the New York Times Style Magazine ran an article boldly titled “These ’80s Artists Are More Important Than Ever.” Penned by Gary Indiana, the article is part and parcel of a resurgence of interest in the Pictures Generation and art-making practices from the 1980s, more generally. For Indiana, what distinguishes the Pictures Generation, a blanket term for a group of “loosely affiliated” artists, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Robert Longo, among others, working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is their use of media culture as both subject and material. Predicated “by an interest in examining power and identity in a media-saturated, politically uncertain age,” this practice, Indiana contends, is especially noteworthy for its anticipation of “our present bedazzlement-by-pixels.”While much of Indiana’s characterization rings true, his emphatic insistence on the continuing prescience of the Pictures artists is arguably as tone-deaf to the realities of the 1980s as it is to those of the present. In fact, dating back to its emergence, the work of these artists was all too frequently based on a deep disconnect regarding constructions of power and identity more globally. This “coloniality of power,” to borrow Argentine semiotician Walter D. Mignolo’s term, and cool indifference of the Pictures Generation requires rethinking, especially in terms of the privileged position signaled by their particular embrace of postmodern thinking, which had a tendency to tout self-reflexivity and meta-critique. Moreover, though the number of artists included under the rubric of “Pictures” has expanded with each iteration, moving from Douglas Crimp’s pivotal exhibition in 1977 to his revised and now canonical October essay of 1979, through to Douglas Eklund’s large-scale Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition in 2009, a geographic and imperialist bias has been repeatedly reinforced rather than critiqued, despite postmodernism’s so-called broad call for pluralism. The essays and artist portfolio collected in this special issue, which developed in part from a panel on rethinking 1980s photography that was organized for the College Art Association’s annual conference in 2016, respond to such occlusions and, in so doing, complicate the historical, geographic, theoretical, and aesthetic accounts of this period. Photography is crucial to this reconsideration of art-making practices from the 1980s for several reasons. First the medium was central to the Pictures artists, who found photography’s status as a “copy” vital for the nimble ways it was embedded in everyday life and circulated through networks of mass reproduction. As Indiana points out, “the Pictures artists found [photography] the most congenial medium for what they wanted to do: to point at things already in the world, and make what they implicitly signified apparent.” Second, as a form of mechanical reproduction, photography also played a central role in