“Photography into Sculpture”

A day after the opening of curator Peter Bunnell’s 1970 exhibition “Photography into Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, New York Times critic Hilton Kramer unleashed a torrent of high-keyed vitriol. “The printed photograph generates its own standards of purity and truth,” Kramer peremptorily declared. “To use the printed photograph as mere raw material, then, for some three-dimensional construction is, inevitably, to violate the integrity of the photographic process.” This Greenbergian posturing quickly degenerated into a finger-wagging ad hominem attack on Bunnell, which, for good measure, included a patronizing potshot at the show’s prospectively enthusiastic audience for their “ignorance.”

Now, more than forty years later, Bunnell’s exhibition, which is being almost completely restaged in Los Angeles as a part of the mammoth collaborative exhibition series “Pacific Standard Time,” has lost most of its power to shock and appall. What it has gained, however, is a newfound sense of historical relevance. The show collects works by twenty of the twenty-three artists in Bunnell’s exhibition, who were experimenting with sculptural approaches to photography enabled by new techniques and technology that, as Bunnell stated at the time, began to shift the understanding of photographic art toward “interpretation and craftsmanship rather than mere record making.” These artists hailed primarily from the West Coast and Vancouver, but their center of gravity was indisputably located in Los Angeles, where Robert Heinecken had established himself as the nascent movement’s aesthetic and theoretical lodestone at UCLA. Indeed, four of Heineken’s students have work in the show, and his work, which is represented primarily by Fluxus-like puzzles adorned with deconstructed nudes, remains some of the strongest offered. Other works by artists such as Richard Jackson, Michael Stone, and Jerry McMillan have maintained their freshness, while some pieces in the show have fared less well, falling victim, primarily, to the passing of aesthetics of psychedelia into the realm of the cliché.

However, the show’s greater significance stems from its excavation of an alternative, lesser-known photographic history that has become increasingly relevant in light of the work of young artists such as Kate Steciw, Letha Wilson, Sara VanDerBeek, and others, suggesting that photography’s present may be spurring on the process of revising its past.