Though Crimp’s show sounded the starting bell for the Pictures Generation, it was hardly determinative. His selections were necessarily limited and didn’t include the two artists—Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince—who would become the group’s biggest names. But the exhibition illustrated a new concept defining disciplines across the board: Postmodernism, which, in the case of art, undermined the modernist faith in stylistic progression. This was reflected, perhaps, in the variety of avenues the Pictures Generation explored.
The Pictures Generation and Performance
Robert Longo, Cindy, 1984
Artwork copyright © 2024 Robert Longo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image copyright © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York.
Certain members of the Pictures Generation brought over various genres from Postminimalism, most notably performance art. Matt Mullican, for example, would have himself hypnotized to produce works of art onstage, an approach that filtered Surrealism’s concept of automatic drawing through the acts seen on variety programs like The Ed Sullivan Show. Robert Longo mounted near-static tableaux operating in a kind of theater of stagecraft; one comprised a projection of a cinematic freeze-frame between live actions by an opera singer and a pair of men wrestling in slow motion on a rotating pedestal.
These artists also understood the way documentations of performance art divorced the genre from its kinetics. This schism had already been exploited by Photo-Conceptualists like William Wegman, whose photographs and videos depicted stupid pet tricks featuring his trusty Weimaraner, Man Ray. Following through, Laurie Simmons bridged the gap between Photo-Conceptualism and the Pictures aesthetic with scenes of toy housewives puttering around dollhouse ranch homes as a comment on suburban conformity.
Meanwhile, Longo also linked static artwork to performance with his “Men in the Cities,” a series of monumental charcoals based on photos of subjects having balls thrown at them: Twisting and turning, they were caught in poses responding to a violent act directed at them from outside the frame.
But the artist who most effectively crystallized performance as image was Cindy Sherman with her breakout photographic suite, “Untitled Film Stills.” In these photos she donned costumes and makeup to inhabit archetypical female roles from movies—ingenue, vamp, bombshell, innocent—that referenced not only Hollywood, but French New Wave and Italian neorealism as well. These images also alluded to the dress-up fantasies of girlhood and were derived from a sort of Method acting project in which Sherman came to her day job at Artists Space’s front desk attired as a 1950s secretary.
The Pictures Generation and Appropriation
Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4, 1981
Artwork copyright © Sherrie Levine. Walker Evans photograph copyright © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Digital image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Licensed by Art Resource, New York.
Appropriation of imagery from the media was an essential tool of the Pictures Generation, though in a way that differed from how Pop artists borrowed from popular culture. Where Andy Warhol et al. saw an antidote to the self-seriousness of Abstract Expressionism, the Pictures Generation found ideological baggage.
As practiced by Pictures artists, appropriation often employed re-photography, a sort of doubling of the photographic image that reduced it to a sign and nothing more. Whether pursuing this specific methodology or not, the Pictures Generation’s use of appropriation generally fell into two interrelated categories: one in which imagery was set adrift from its original context; another in which it was shorn of its authorship.
Examples of the former could be found in the work of Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, and Sarah Charlesworth. Born in 1945, Goldstein was the oldest participant in the “Pictures” show, an elder statesman whose practice highly influenced the rest of the Pictures Generation. In the mid 1970s he produced a series of film loops of various performative scenes (fencers fencing, a dog barking, the shimmering outline of a diver formed in lights as he leaps through the air) that, unlike the work of Sherman or Longo, were completely immune to readings. Later he produced paintings, many of which evoked the power of fury, whether in nature (lightning storms, volcano eruptions) or history (aerial bombardments during World War II). These compositions were largely airbrushed by an assistant, which not only separated them from Goldstein’s own subjectivity, but also imparted a sheen of impenetrability to evocations of the sublime.
Brauntuch explored the split between imagery and memory, creating ghostly white-on-black renderings on paper and canvas that seemed pregnant with meaning and yet totally opaque. Typically relying on archival photos of the Third Reich, these scenes detonated like time bombs of recognition once their source became apparent.
In her glossy photomontages, Charlesworth likewise devised methods of distancing her subjects from the viewer by isolating silhouetted cutouts from magazines on bright-hued monochrome fields mounted in color-matching frames. She frequently paired images, as in one instance where a 1940s evening gown was juxtaposed with a prone woman mummified in S&M bondage gear—a piquant apposition of Hollywood glamor and fetishism. Her work deconstructed the exigencies of desire, whether it involved sexuality, spirituality, or mass consumption.
At the same time, certain Pictures Generation members, notably Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, took appropriation to a new level, turning it into both genre and subject. Eschewing artistic embellishment, these artists presented iterations of images that were unchanged, identifiable—and even copyrighted—as their own.
The groundwork for their efforts was laid by Roland Barthes, whose 1967 essay The Death of the Author posited that interpretations of text shouldn’t be based on the writer’s intentions but rather on individual readers’ interpretation of the work. But Barthes’s catchy title was soon taken literally, and in the art world in particular, Douglas Crimp’s idea of liberating representation from the represented was soon taken to mean usurping its ownership as well. Both Prince and Levine pushed the envelope on that score.
During the 1970s, Prince had worked at Time Inc., where he filed advertising tear sheets. Though he’d been working in a mode resembling Abstract Expressionism, his job inspired his huge leap into repurposing such images, with no frame of reference beyond their appearance as an artifact. Unlike Warhol and his use of silkscreened half-tones, Prince made no evident connection between his source material and its new iteration. Rather, he presented the original as it was, except for the fact that it was now a photograph instead of a page torn out of a magazine. Starting with a series of wristwatch ads featuring male models, he eventually created his signature borrowings of the iconic cowboy used to sell Marlboro cigarettes. As in the case of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, this image became as closely associated with Prince as it was with the product.
For her part, Levine mined 20th-century art history, leveraging its milestones in a manner similar to Prince’s treatment of the Marlboro Man. But unlike Prince’s work, which celebrated machismo while pretending to undermine it, Levine’s could be seen as a feminist jape at modernism’s masculine self-aggrandizement. Her most notorious series, “After Walker Evans,” usurped the famed photographer’s Depression-era images, revealing the exploitative subtext of its sociological intentions.
The Pictures Generation and Text
Jenny Holzer, from Survival (1983-85), 1985
Artwork copyright © 2024 Jenny Holzer/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image courtesy of Jenny Holzer/Art Resource, New York.
The use of text as the focal point of objects, if not an outright substitution for them, was a hallmark of Conceptualism that was carried over into the practices of Pictures Generation artists, most conspicuously Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. Neither shared the rage for dematerializing art, however, choosing instead to explore the role of text in fostering mass consumption. This largely meant advertising, of course, but Holzer and Kruger weren’t interested in ads, per se, but rather in the strategies of persuasion behind them. Both artists parodied the semiotics of authority by adopting a fictive voice meant to mimic the mechanics of messaging—splitting, once again, representation from what it was meant to represent.
True to the practices of Colab, Holzer, for example, posted flyers around Lower Manhattan bearing inflammatory aphorisms (such as “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT”) that she dubbed “Truisms.” These would become further reified as animated LED signboards and other objects.
Meanwhile, Kruger amalgamated stock photos, words, and punchy graphics to offer meta-textual commentaries on the zeitgeist. For such signature works as Untitled (I shop therefore I am), which featured a hand holding a card printed with the eponymous slogan, she drew on her tenure as art director for Mademoiselle magazine. But instead of stimulating consumer appetites, Kruger used her skills to expose the corrupting influence of late capitalism (though the latter would have the last laugh as her style was lifted to sell stuff).
Abstraction as Image
Allan McCollum, Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates, 1982 (cast and painted in 1984)
Artwork copyight © Allan McCollum, courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.
Somewhat counterintuitively to the undermining of representation, two artists, Allan McCollum and James Welling, invested abstraction with pictorial attributes, turning it into another form of imagery—which is indeed how it exists in reproduction. Welling created black-and-white photos, for instance, featuring closeups of crinkled aluminum foil, or draped dark fabrics with white flakes collecting in their folds. McCollum, for his part, cast seemingly infinite permutations of the same small plaster relief sculpture: a black rectangle surrounded by bands suggesting a mat and picture frame; in essence, McCollum was compressing the preconception of what an art object resembles to its component parts.
The Pictures Generation and Painting
Walter Robinson, The Eager Ones, 1979
Courtesy of the artist.
Though the work of the Pictures Generation was often grounded in photography, some of its members pursued painting, the most salient being David Salle. Salle initially worked in a Photo-Conceptualist mode (creating, for instance, a series of women staring out of kitchen windows while holding cups of instant coffee whose jar labels were pasted below). But later he turned to limning evanescent compositions in which outlines of random images floated over others rendered in more complete tonalities—a trope whose lineage went back through Sigmar Polke to the late paintings of Francis Picabia. Salle combined material taken from snapshots, cartoons, and art history into ever more baroque aggregations of pictorial stuff infused with a mean misogynistic streak. Salle soon became one of the names synonymous with the Neo-Expressionists, who followed on the heels of the Pictures Generation.
More consistent with the Pictures tactics perhaps, was another Colab associate, Walter Robinson. Basically a self-taught painter (he’d studied philosophy in college), Robinson became known for appropriating the lurid covers of mid-century pulp-fiction paperbacks, painting them as they’d originally been before the addition of text.
