James Welling in Conversation with Hal Foster

1

James Welling in Conversation with Hal Foster

Photography, “Pictures”, Subjectivity, Gnosticism

Hal Foster: As you emerged from CalArts in the mid-1970s, did you identify with the category “photographer,” or were you drawn to the rubric “artist who uses photography”?

James Welling:At the time I identified with “artist who uses photography.”In my MFA show I presentedboth photographs I printed and photographsI appropriated from magazines.I didn’t consider myself a photographer. And right after CalArtsI wasmaking sculptures and working in video and painting. It wasn’t until 1975, about a year after graduating, that Ibought a 35mm camera and started to really think about photography.

HF: Which came first, an interest in the practice of photography or an interest in its history, or were they coeval for you?

JW:I was always interested in making prints. At Carnegie-Mellon and at CalArts I’d go in the darkroom and make a few enlargements,always with someone helping me.

HF: Are you an autodidact in photography?

JW: Yes, completely.

HF:In terms of photo history too?

JW: Before I got to CalArtsI had the most rudimentary sense of photo history from Life Magazineand other mass media outlets. I’d heard of a few photographers--Robert Capa, Edward Weston, and Eliot Porter. My dad owned a Speed Graphic, and the instruction manual contained photographs by Barbara Morgan. At CalArtsmy exposure to the history of photography consisted of one lecture on Robert Frank by the photo historian Ben Lifson. No one in John Baldessari’s class cared about Frank. I was interested in Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry, and Hanne Darboven.

HF: What about Paul Strand? You mention him in other interviews.

JW: I first became aware of Strand when I reada Hollis Frampton review ofStrand’s retrospectiveatthe Philadelphia Art Museum. Then I saw that showwhen it came to LACMA. Strand became important to me a few years later whenI stumbled on his 1968TheMexican Portfolio in the CalArtslibrary. I was completely blown away by the photos. But I’d been prepared by Frampton’s essay.

HF:Hollis Frampton is not an obvious artist-critic to know about as a young person. How did you get onto him?

JW: Frampton wrote on photography and filmin Artforum, whichI discovered when I was still in high school. I read Artforum religiously for the next ten years and saw Frampton’s films whenever I could.

HF: What about your involvement in modernist photography? Your interest in the photogram, in “light sources,”in techniques that might be used for production rather than reproduction--all this calls out the name of Moholy-Nagy, but he doesn’t come up much in the literature on your work.

JW: RecentlyI looked at the sequence of events that led to my becoming a photographerin 1976, andI remembered that Moholy was very important at that criticalmoment. Ibought Painting Photography Filmin 1974.The following year I saw a show of Moholy’s photograms at Pomona College.

HF: Did they inspire your photograms of hands, or was that an indirect connection?

JW: Direct connection. ButHandswere the onlyphotogramsI made until 1998 when I started the New Abstractions. Moholy’s influence on me in the 1970s was stronger in thephotographs I made of Los Angeles architecture at night. Moholy lovedcities at night.

Apart from the lecture by Lifson, my photography education was completelyself-directed. Strand and Moholycame first, then Walker Evans, whose 1971 MoMA catalogue I poured over, thenDoris Bry’s book on Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott’s The View Camera Made Simple, and a Barbara Morgan show at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery. I was also very influenced by the New Topographicsexhibition at the Otis Art Institutein 1976. I particularly lovedthe work of Stephen Shore and Frank Golkhe.

HF:For many in your cohort photographywas mostly a bad object: it meant art photography, professional photography (e.g., photography in the service of advertising), or documentary photography. The first two were dismissed, and the last was taken to be naiveabout its own transparency as a document, its own status as a representation. But you didn’t have this prejudice; you stayed clear of abias against photography. You can see where I’m headed: How do you see yourfit, or lack of it, withyour own “Pictures”generation?

JW: I remember seeing an early work by Alan Sekula, This Ain’t China, and reading his incredible1975essayin Artforum on Edward Steichen’s war photographs. Sekula’s writings alerted me to theidea of photography as a bad object. But theorizingphotography that way and at that point, right when I was trying to find out what I could do with photography,wasn’t helpful to me. I continued to read theory, but I put it out of my mind when I made work.

When I began to use a large format camerain 1976,I saw the camera as a time machine. With the right subject and paper I could create a photograph that could have been made anytime within the last one hundred years. This is what I did in my Diary/Landscapephotographs that I began in 1977. Perhaps my early intuition about what photography could bealigns with the anti-transparency argument around the “Pictures” group. I was definitely trying to make a very dense photographic object.

Also important in my thinking about photography then was the idea of ventriloquism. I got the idea from thetitle of a Michel Foucault essay on Gilles Deleuze,“The StructuralistVentriloquist.” I loved the notion of ventriloquism.The idea that the vocabulary of photographycould exist independent of the subject, that I could throw my voice into a photograph, or that the photograph was creating its own voice, all that was very important.At that timetoo I was very taken by Roland Barthes’s essay “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills.”

HF:“The Third Meaning” was a fundamental text for many of us. So theory did play a part in your early work. Also, first as a high-school student when youread Artforum, and then at CalArts whenBaldessari would comein with boxes of art catalogues, your relation to photography, to art in general, was a mediated one.

JW: I always responded tophotographyon the page. When I was younger, I rarely experienced the actual photographic object; it’s the printed picture that prompted me. When I saw that Strand retrospective, I didn’t really experiencethe work untilI saw the gravure portfolio in the library.

HF:How aware of your difference from your ”Pictures” colleagues were you? Was it a difference you were invested in, or one that was difficult for you, as an insider who was also an outlier?

JW: I saw the “Pictures” show at LAICAright before I leftLos Angeles in 1978,and I wasvery impressedby it.I was friends with two of the artists, Jack Goldstein and Troy Brauntuch, and after moving to New York I got to know Sherrie Levine. It’s important to remember that in 1979 we were pursingdifferent ideas about photography.

Photography afforded me a historyI didn’t have as post-studio artist. In Baldessari’s class there were so few guidelines. It was anarchy really: you could make a video, you could stage a performance, youcould write a text. I did all those things,and then I discovered that I needed a medium to grab onto. So you could say I was heading toward photography as some of the “Pictures”artists were trying to escape from it.

HF: This was right after CalArts, and you were still in Los Angeles. Did you do this research into photography on your own?

JW: I went to the Santa Monica Public Libraryand to a few photography galleries and exhibitions.

HF: But you didn’t like the street photography you saw there.

JW: Absolutely not.The “straight photography”world in the late 1970s was extremelystifling to me. Apart from a few odd photographers like Lucas Samaras, Les Krims, and Robert Cumming, the field was dominated by street photographyand documentary photography. While my photography friends worshiped Gary Winograndand Robert Frank,thesephotographers werejust not interesting to me. I found the work too mannered and too humanistic; they were not exploring the conceptual issues that motivated me.

HF:We’ve touched on your differences from the “Pictures” group. Whatabout your affinities?

JW: We were all aware of howphotographswork, how they can seduceyou with size, color, glossiness, and of course content. And we wereall interested in using these attributesfor our own ends. Also, initially, most of the “Pictures” artists, myself included, werenot strong technically.

HF: Sometimes intentionally so.

JW: Not in my case.

HF: You weren’t skillfully deskilled?

JW: I was just unskilled, andtrying my best to improve my skill level.

HF:“An awareness of how photographs work”: that’s the classic definition of structuralist method given to us by Barthes--to re-present a thing in a way that shows how it functions, how it signifies.

JW: It may be a structuralistidea,but I also loved the effects of photography and was very much involvedin discovering what I could do with the medium.

HF:Yes, that’s one difference: your work didn’t resent the uses and abuses of photography in the culture at large. It wasn’t about social-cultural critique or feminist critique, as it was for many of your peers. Your approachwas more epistemological; you were concerned with how we know or don’t know in relation to a photograph.

JW: In my early photographs of Los Angeles I was simply trying to expose a negative and get an image onto a piece of photographic paper.When I moved to New York in 1979,my work became more inward. In my mind the aluminum foil and drapery photographs describe an intensely interior space. While Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman were looking outward, you could say, I was holed up in my studio making these strange, abstract landscapes and still lifes.

HF: What do you mean by “inward”—subjective?

JW: Actually in my mind I was doing a send-up of subjective photography—subjective in quotes.

HF:Like Stieglitz’s “Equivalents”—abstract clouds that evoke subjective states?

JW: No, even worse. I was referencing theoverlooked SubjektiveFotografieof the 1950s. I was moving toward Minor White territory, and at the last minute veering off so that I wouldn’t be stuck with a subjective image.

HF:That’s not how they were read by critics.

JW: They might not have been read my work that way, but that’s how I understoodwhat I was doing. You have to remember that I was still experimenting in 1980. WhileI didn’t want to disagree with the postmodern analysisof my work, theoretical discourse,whether inAlan Sekula’sor Abigail Solomon-Godeau’swritings,didn’t present me with a way forward towork with photography. I was interested in this “dangerous” territory--subjective photography--whichseemed to be off-limits.

HF: The foil and dough photos were seen largely in terms of an uncertainty of the signified. It is clear that there is a referent—foil or dough. But what do they signify: Is it a waterfall?ashipwreck?and so on. That’s why critics like me were led to see the photos as a-subjective or post-subjective--more about the ambiguity of the signified than about the mystery of the self. Did your reading of Mallarmé have anything to do with those series?

JW:I discovered Mallarmé and Baudelaire when I was making Aluminum Foil. Mallarmé’swell- knownmaxim“Paint not the thing but the effect it produces” was very helpful to me. Those French poets, as well asBarthes, Foucault, and Deleuze, inspired me to create weird, subjective landscapes in the realm of photography.

HF: That’s odd. In the first instance, they are all different figures, and, then, in one way or another, they are all associated with a critique of the subject.

JW: I was reading this work in my own associative way. I wasn’t opposed to a critique of the subject, but that wasn’t the only thing I was thinking about. I was reading on a wide range of subjects, from schizophrenia to Buddhism to Gnosticism. I was particularly intrigued by the Gnostic idea of a world of light and dark.

HF:Gnosticism is also about a secret form of knowledge.

JW: Which I don’tsubscribe to, but nevertheless the texts suggested images to me.

Criticism, Industry, Architecture, America

HF: Let me ask you another question about critical reception. Twenty years ago, in a retrospect on the 1960s, Michael Fried commented that heand Carl Andre fought over the soul of Frank Stella, who was a mutual friend. Fried held that Stella continuedmodernist painting, indeed art as such, while Andre suggested that Stellaopened paintingup to Minimalist objecthood and ambient space. Now there is a way in which you too are a figure of contention. Early on Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and myselfall positioned you in terms of a poststructuralist postmodernism: ambiguity of the signified, uncertainty of the author, and so on. More recently, Fried, Walter Benn Michaels, and others like Todd Cronan have come along to say, “No, Welling is a modernist, concerned with formal autonomy and total intentionality.” The claims made for your work contradict each other openly. How do you view this contest? Do you care?And if you don’t, can you be truly detached from a critical strugglein which important stakes are involved?

JW: It’s true that I was initiallyassociated withthe postmodernist artists and critics. But as I’ve indicated, I was following my own path, one that wasn’t completely aligned with thosepositions.In 1986 I met Walter Benn Michaels,and he introduced me to literary theory and to an exciting set ofalternative reference points.

HF:But you do understand that the two sides are very much opposed.

JW: Of course.And I was extremely dismayed whenMichaels wrote about my project at the expense of Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman.I don’t see my worktaking sides in the way Michaels does. On the other hand,both Fried and Michaels did close readings of my work when I was beginning to photograph nineteenth-century architecture,and the conversations that followed gave me new insights into the work. And recently Todd Cronan and I had a very productive conversation about Minor White and pre-visualization. So in reference to this contest, I getideas from many different places. In the end I want my photographs to negotiateambiguity and intention as well as uncertainty and autonomy.

HF: But that very statement begins to erode the argument, in Fried, Michaels et al., that the work is fully intentioned.

JW:I have never been able tounderstandtheir argument about intention. I want my work to be read in multiple ways, some of which do not include my intention.

HF: Let me ask youabout a different set of associations. If you are pulled away from the “Pictures” group, what about the Düsseldorf School that emerged out of the Bechers? Did you follow that work? Do you see any connection, then or now, to your own practice?

JW: Even though my work may diverge from the“Pictures” aesthetic, I am much closer to my New York peers than to the Düsseldorf School. Thomas Ruff’s workhas an anarchic touch that I can identify with. Recently I’ve gotten to know Thomas Struthand Thomas Demand because they both spent time in Los Angeles, and while I admire their work it is very different from my own.

HF:So you don’t see your project as related?

JW: No.I’m much more interested in the ambiguity of the photograph.

HF:Let me ask you, then, about your subjects, some of which are related to those taken up by the Bechers and their followers. Why the turn to the industrial past--to railroads, late nineteenth-century architecture, and the like?

JW: Aftermy studio photographs of the early 1980s, I wanted to return to the nineteenth century, something IbeganwithDiary/Landscape.Inthe railroadI discovereda subject that originated at the same time as photography; it was also a technology thatdramatically changed the landscape of America.This connects back to my earlier thoughtsof photographyas a time machine. My interest in the nineteenth centuryled me to makeRailroad Photographs,Architectural Photographs/Buildings by H. H.Richardson, andCalais Lace Factories.In these projects I tried to photograph vestiges of the nineteenth century that are still visible in architecture or in industriallandscapes.

HF:How did you move from a nineteenth-century architect like Richardson to figures like Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Philip Johnson?

JW: In the mid-1980s I worked briefly as a preparator and photographer in the Architecture and Design Departmentof the Museum of Modern Art. The Mies van der Rohearchive was in the department, and I photographed models and drawings of Mies’s buildings.Occasionally Philip Johnson would shuffle into the study center where we worked.On a trip to Chicago in 1987 to photograph Richardson buildings,I visited Mies’sIllinois Institute of Technology campus and took some photographs,butat that point I didn’t know what to do with the material.

Some years passed,and I photographed the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois,but the project stalled because it was challenging to access the house. A few months laterI suggested to New York Magazinethat I photograph Johnson’sGlass House, and they gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted. I returned to the Glass Housea dozen timesover the next four years, experimentingwith an array of colored filters in different seasons.In myearlier photographsofnineteenth-century buildings,black-and-white gelatin silver prints wereappropriate for the massive, dark structures I was focusing on. By contrast,I felt that the transparency of the Glass House, its designdating back to the beginning of the modernera of color photography as well as Johnson’s friendship with Warhol,justified the extravagant colors I was starting to use.