“Multiple Choice”
One of the most thoughtful and inherently polemical series of photography exhibitions recently has been conducted at P.S.1 by Carol Squiers, who has avoided current squabbling over fine art, media, and artist-employed photography to direct attention toward its use. This is a curatorial practice, then, that conceives of photography discursively—as a medium operating throughout disparate, often intersecting circles within society—so as to focus on the textual, contextual, and rhetorical strategies uniting these separate spheres. “Multiple Choice” extended this stance to reveal certain critical junctures between esthetic and social issues underlying appropriated imagery.
The idea here was to ask four artists (Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, and Mark Tansey) who use media or other photographic sources to select and arrange one group of images apiece. In this manner Squiers abrogated her conventional curatorial prerogative, returning it to the artists in a critical comment on the way curatorial decisions at once legislate and institutionalize individual choice. But the artists, in their selections, performed a similar operation on society, indicating the existence of a “curatorial” stance within the range of representations at large. For if their selections can be seen as clues to the collecting habits that inform their appropriative strategies, showing the range of devices and types of images brought to bear in the work itself, they are also reflections on those paradoxically imposed “choices” confronting individuals within “mediacratic” consumer society. All the images display repetitions of types, of rhetorical modes, and of generalized visual effects that point toward the mechanisms of power masquerading in the supposedly neutral field of imagistic multiplicity. They imply that we are rarely “free to choose,” but are exercising institutionalized options, making choices emanating from elsewhere.
Hence each selection suggests a critical position toward both esthetic and social production. Tansey’s contribution, for example, is an extended sequence of black and white images, all taken from ’40s and ’50s magazines, that figure situations involving window frames, shades, gates, prison bars, and other two-dimensional, gridded surfaces, along with photographs treating modes of making and covering surfaces. The substance for a future “History of Modernist Painting,” Tansey’s images imply reflection both on the reduced metaphors underlying esthetic discourse and on the restrained range of the social situations that provide their primary reference. Prince’s File 29, 1978, contains a veritable “edition” of advertisements collected from different magazines that present situations of hallucinating similarity. In each, smiling single figures or family groups are conjoined with products and placed in parallel poses so as to convey the exaggerated yet pointedly limited rhetoric that supports consumer suasion, programming individual choice. The manner in which meanings are imposed and altered according to context is evident in Lawler’s arrangements of photographs of paintings and sculptures, in which the different readings resulting from the artist’s curatorial decisions serve as analogues to the varying determinations of value placed on objects as they circulate within society. And Kruger’s assemblage of 15 commercial magazine covers, all dating from March 1983, plays on those graphic modes by which stereotypical images are rendered as choices for consumption, thus reinforcing constructed meanings and roles. Concealed within curator Squiers’ simple “choice,” then, is a series of echoing analogues to the delegation of authority within society.
—Kate Linker
