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How small histories can have great impact: artist Jeremiah Day examines the photography of Walker Evans, places it in a broader framework and tries to penetrate its ultimate significance. ‘Mass production of uninspired photojournalism and photography without thought becomes anonymous merchandise. The air becomes infected with the ‘smell’ of photography (…). I feel that only the integrity of the individual photographer can raise its level (…).‘When I first looked at Walker Evans’ photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: “To transform destiny into awareness.” One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?’1– Robert FrankAt one moment in a lecture at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, the French writer Alain Cueff suggested that we were re-entering a period where not only mass media but the fine arts would be primarily understood as part of a collective production, like in the age of cathedrals. That perhaps the window beginning roughly with Manet and ending with, say, Warhol, Smithson and Beuys, the era of an individual artist and his or her oeuvre, was closing. ‘Galleries don’t show artists, the artists show the galleries’, a friend of mine commented ten years ago already. The ‘big’ names and organisations in the gallery world function like the old Hollywood studios, producing interchangeable, disposable stars. And the artists themselves aim and think and work in terms of social function, like business-people, or social critics, or ‘knowledge producers.’ Still, the highest evaluative criteria, the main mark of quality, is self-reflexivity, an acknowledgement of the framework, historical precedent, or a gesture towards the social underpinnings of the work, its context. Even the genre of site-specificity now is a form of applied art: the artist is flown in to stage a temporary critique by pulling some problem of social justice or ‘historical memory’ out of the hat. This focus on self-reflexivity, this inwardness, which is one of the values shared both by the private and publicly-funded wings of the ‘art world’, most likely results from our own distance from the centre of public attention, our marginality. Working against a backdrop of so much ‘visual culture’, there is a lot of flash and noise emanating from one big show after another full of clever gestures. Perhaps the public realm itself has been diminished – likely so, but endless critique has not enabled a reckoning of how to work in such a terrain. Our mirror-games have become a poor substitute for relevance and consequence, like the false gravitas of the poseur.In 1962, the magazine of the Situationist Internationale included a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, a painting that first publicly appeared in the Salon of 1819. Referring to a mishap at sea in which sailors’ lives were lost due to the incompetence of an imperial commander, the painting was intended and understood as a critique of the political status quo. Desperate, dying and lost, the sailors were an allegory for the general state of affairs under Napoleon’s successors, and the distance from the mother ship was taken to be the distance from the promise of the Revolution. Large, with a powerfully simple composition in which the overall scene of the raft is itself in dialogue with the individual sailors on it, the painting already attracted minor fame when it was first exhibited. Later it made a comeback as a symbol, first during the failed revolution of 1848, and again in the Paris Commune of 1871. It was this history – this capacity of art to function as an abstract and yet didactic symbol – that the Situationists were evoking. Crucially, in comparison with the supposedly critical or political art of our own time, in which footnotes and subtext (or a press release) are needed in order to explain its meaning, the Raft of the Medusa does not depend upon knowing the history of France to be convincing. It is precisely the opposite – the painting is what convinces one that the history of France might well be worth looking into.‘There was a necessity, a need – which was very exciting for us – to describe the world. The Communist world had described how it should be and not how it really was…. We – there were a lot of us – tried to describe this world and it was fascinating to describe something which hadn’t been described yet.… If something hasn’t been described than it doesn’t officially exist. So that if we start describing it, we bring it to life.’2– Krzystof Kieślowski In the films that Krzystof Kieślowski (often in collaboration with Krzysztof Piesiewicz) made before the collapse of Communism in Poland, we find a second model. Beginning with his first fiction film, Blizna (The Scar, 1976), and then culminating in the ten part television series Decalogue, Kieślowski similarly produced works that transcend their own circumstance and that, while functioning critically within the ‘party-line’ conformity of that system, do not depend upon an understanding of history to gain meaning. In some loose way, Kieślowski’s strategy was similar to Géricault’s: to convincingly narrate a minor episode (what the producers in Hollywood might call a ‘small story’) in such a way that the drama opens onto more general, even metaphysical questions. The Decalogue series, in which each film was produced in relation to one of the Ten Commandments, most obviously tacks back and forth between daily life (a doctor and patient, father and daughter, a peeping-tom) and the most famous proscriptions in our history. Often the relation is vague, and only at the end of the film is the connection apparent. As Stanley Kubrick stated about the film-makers, ‘They dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what’s really going on rather than being told.’3 It is not a coincidence that the more recent counter-point to the example of Géricault was produced in the ‘former East’. While the structure of political repression there was indeed brutal, the work of artists and intellectuals had a different importance and consequence than in our situation, not only because political issues were assumed to be the natural subject matter for art. Because of the monumental univocal ‘party line’, any description or utterance was understood as a possible challenge to the whole system. The power of describing ‘unofficial reality’ is something that we can only imagine from the viewpoint in which art must somehow compete with YouTube and Hollywood.At the end of his life, Walker Evans, quite famous and still quite poor, broke dramatically with his own, by then iconic, style. His depictions of 1930s America are almost instantly recognizable: wooden buildings and hand-painted advertisements, factory chimneys, mute farmers. The portraits Evans made of two Alabama families as part of his collaboration with the writer James Agee have become so widely reproduced that they seem to both evoke and define our understanding of the period. Broadly speaking, Evans’s photographic strategy was the ‘plain relentless snapshot’: straightforward, direct, unmediated.4 A failed writer, Evans admired Flaubert above all, and seems to have absorbed some of what is often called the writer’s ‘self-effacing’ style, in which the subjectivity of the author is withheld and, in its place, small details of the narrative build up into a fully realized ‘reality’. Or as Roland Barthes once said of Flaubert, ‘The writer here fulfils Plato’s definition of the artist as a maker in the third degree, since he imitates what is already the simulation of an essence.’5But at the end of his life, Evans dramatically changed his working habits. Instead of working with a large-format 8×10 technical camera requiring the use of a tripod and careful preparation, he began to shoot only Polaroids. The Polaroid Company had given him a free supply of film and he took full advantage: at the time of his death 2,600 Polaroids were found in his studio, and these are most likely only the ‘good’ ones. Besides the shift in image quality and the use of colour, Evans’s Polaroids are more intimate than his previous work, shot at a closer distance to the subject, but what remains consistent is the directness of the gaze, the focussed composition that is somehow simultaneously of its moment and yet resolves itself pictorially so completely that it transcends both its subject and author: the ‘relentless snapshot’. Pulling the small camera out of his coat pocket to make portraits at parties, to photograph debris on the pavement and commercial signs, Evans liked the ‘de-skilling’, the anti-technique of the Polaroid camera: ‘It’s the first time, I think, that you can put a machine in an artist’s hands and have him then rely entirely on his vision and his taste and his mind.’6 And signs. Signs – hand painted and mass-produced, commercial and industrial, ‘No Trespassing’ and ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola’ – had been a theme in his photographs from his early work, but in his last years, they became his primary subject. And not only did he continually photograph signs with the Polaroid camera, he would also collect them, buying and even stealing them while out on his working trips. Sometimes he would re-photograph them at home, either with the Polaroid, or as he grew weaker, have his assistant, Jerry Thompson, make the photographs under his direction. In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Evans a retrospective, and Yale University, where Evans taught, decided to show part of this large exhibition in the University Gallery. Alongside his photographs, at Yale Evans also exhibited some of the signs he had been collecting, under glass. He added a short wall text: The installation, here, of actual graphic ‘found objects’ may need little or no interpretation via the written word. Assuredly, these objects may be felt – experienced – in this gallery, by anyone just as the photographer felt them in the field, on location. The direct, instinctive, bemused sensuality of the eye is what is in play – here, there, now, then. A distinct point, though, is made in the lifting of these objects from their original settings. The point is that this lifting is, in the raw, exactly what the photographer is doing with his machine, the camera, anyway, always. The photographer, the artist, ‘takes’ a picture: symbolically he lifts an object or a combination of objects, and in so doing he makes a claim for that object or that composition, and a claim for his act of seeing in the first place. The claim is that he has rendered his object in some way transcendent, and that in each instance his vision has penetrating validity.’7This text, which Evans makes clear is not an ‘interpretation’, is rather a statement of purpose. The signs had been put under glass, presented just like his own photographs: artefacts of a moment in time, an intersection between Evans and a situation that is framed. And in claiming that these two gestures of appropriation are somehow equivalent, Evans’s text suggests that – more than any medium, technique or even questions of ‘art, or not art’ – the defining element between the two ways of working is this ‘claim of validity’, which simply is accepted, or not. In 1994, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York took over the Walker Evans archive, and Jeff Rosenheim, the Met’s photo curator, spent months organizing all of Evans’s negatives, prints, collections of picture-postcards and signs. In a recent conversation, Rosenheim was quick to make the point that Evans did not put his signature on the signs, and so it is unlikely that he himself thought of them as works of art. Rosenheim also mentioned that Evans had been a professor in the graphic design department at Yale, and that his exhibiting of the signs could be consistent with his role as an educator. These signs were not ‘readymades’, Rosenheim asserted. I’m tempted to follow Evans’s explicit blurring of categories and reply: It does not really matter. Unlike Duchamp, who found the question of ‘art, or not art’ productive, Evans’s exhibition reveals a kind of investigation and work that does not bother too much with semantics or social constructions but rather with ‘penetrating validity’. There is a risk in extending this comparison with Duchamp too far, but given the tremendous influence of his readymades, perhaps we can carry this line of thought further. As Texte zur Kunst founder Stefan Germer has written, ‘Duchamp took the separation of cultural and social spheres as his point of departure, demonstrating that it was not the specific quality of an object but only the place and form of its presentation that decided its status.’8 While this was probably not the entire point of Duchamp (didn’t he once remark about the beauty of bridges and plumbing?), this has become the definitive and highly consequential meaning of the readymades – a self-reflexive problematization of ‘what art is’ has become an underlying criteria and measurement for artistic quality ever since. In this way, Evans’s lack of consideration for the frame – his assertion that the signs were not transformed by their presentation in a gallery, but rather maintained their quality – seems to suggest a different evaluative criteria, a different measuring stick. The writer Fred Dewey suggested that these signs, even in the gallery, maintained their fundamental link to a broader human activity – they carried their context with them. For Duchamp’s urinal to have done the same ‘it would not only need to still be attached to the plumbing, it would need some guy peeing on it.’ ‘Do you think it is possible for the camera to lie,’ Evans was once asked. He replied, ‘It certainly is. It almost always does.’9 Jeremiah Day is artist, AmsterdamWalker Evans and the BarnA group exhibition curated by guest curator Jeremiah Day SMBA, Amsterdam21 November 2009-3 January 20101. Robert Frank, ‘A Statement’, U.S. Camera Annual, 1958.2. Krzystof Kieślowski in: Danusia Stok (ed.), Kieślowski on Kieślowski, 1993, p. 17. 3. Krzysztof Kieślowski, Krzysztof Piesewicz, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, London: Faber & Faber, 1991.4. Evans’s revision of publisher’s proposed text for jacket of 1966 edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, reprinted in Walker Evans at Work: 745 Photographs Together with Documents Selected from Letters, Memoranda, Interviews, Notes , Harper & Row, New York 1982, p. 136. 5. ‘The Reality Effect’, in R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 145.6. Interview in Yale Alumni Magazine, reprinted in Walker Evans at Work, p. 234.7. Walker Evans at Work (see note 4), p. 228.8. ‘Haake, Broodthaers, Beuys’, October Magazine, MIT Press, summer 1988, p. 65.9. Walker Evans at Work (see note 4), p. 238.