It's Art, But Is It Photography? Robert Smithson's - Uturn.org

scape as referring to a set of subjective issues becomes the issue. Agreed? [Feeling a sneeze
coming on, B gets up, whips a towel out of the bathroom, getting it to his nose just it time.]
Excuse me.
A: [Ignoring the sneeze.] Agreed. But to what extent was this more objective attitude ‘just
in the air,’ and not the direct influence of Smithson and other conceptualists’ work? I think
most influences on traditional photography prior to seventy-seven stemmed from the
rebellious younger photographers who were attempting to push the boundaries of the
medium beyond Szarkowskian strictures. Many photographers weren’t very aware of
Smithson’s photo works . . .
B: As significant photography.
A: Ya, as significant photography. Until, that is, Sobieszek’s exhibition catalogue framed
that imagery as worthy of connoisseurial notice by the photographic community.
B: I personally don’t think they were as unaware of Smithson you say. I think photorati then
sensed that for Smithson language came to
play a central role in his work. As photographic
modernists, any taint of language—photography
as text rather than as a
work—threatened photography’s purity
and, as such, was anathema.
A: Still, a tough call.
B: You know, from what I’ve seen in my
New Forms and Concepts classes, the
students these days don’t draw the kinds of
distinctions once made between using and
working in the medium. The photograph
understood as text erases such distinctions.
They accept the more conceptual employment
of the photographic medium as a
given. Language takes on qualities of an
object—Smithson frequently employs
language as purely visual material, like in
his nineteen sixty-six pencil drawing A
Heap of Language—and images take on
qualities of language. In “Earthwords,”
Craig Owens notes the eruption of language
into the aesthetic field in the nineteen
sixties as occurring with all the force of the
Snap Shot Notes—Pertaining to “Double
Nonsite” (1968) Robert Smithson
Hugunin/31