New Crop: Exactly Two Hundred Fifty Images from the Rhode Island School of Design Archive (Room B03, 20 Washington Street), Volume Three of Eight from "Buildings and Open Spaces," Presented in its Entirety and in the Order that Each Was Removed from the Archival Storage Box.
October 15, 2004 – November 15, 2004
Rhode Island School of Design
Red Eye Gallery
30 North Main Street, 4th Floor
Providence, RI 02903
Essay by Ben Carlson: Photographers have been photographing architecture almost since the medium’s invention. The history of modern photography can be traced from Eugene Atget’s photographic albums of turn-of-the-century Paris through August Sander’s photographic catalogue of Cologne. Yet it wasn’t until Ed Ruscha’s snapshots of every building on Sunset Strip and Dan Graham’s banal photographs of suburban New Jersey homes that photography was valued at the price of the other fine arts[1]. As Conceptual Art ushered in what Benjamin Buchloh has called the aesthetic of administration, photography turned towards the archive as a model.
“New Crop,” the current Red Eye Gallery show, is rooted in this shift from individual image to larger archive. In “The Body and the Archive,” Allan Sekula writes, “the archive exists not simply as a material network of territorialized realms of knowledge. The archive also casts its ‘shadow’ as a unifying principle lending coherence across these segregated domains” (October, no. 39: 10).” The archive, as Sekula argues, is not just the sum of the individual images. The archive’s organizational logic has a normative function where each individual image is standardized through its inclusion in the collection. The creation of typologies, such as the Water Towers photographed by the Bechers, or Los Angeles real estate as photographed by Ruscha, is the method by which the archive controls deviance. Any minor variation takes on the greatest significance and becomes the center of the viewer’s attention. With so much the repetitiveness, small variations are that much more apparent. Why is that water tower so different? The archive’s structure sets the limits of what may be included – anything outside its parameters is impermissible, anything else just doesn’t make sense.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault defines the archive as “the systems that governs the appearance of statements” (129), meaning that the archive is what determines the terms and limits of what may or may not be said. For an individual image to make sense in the archive it must conform to these typologies. Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk can be read as a test of these limits. Photograph after photograph takes the same, boring studio approach to a variety of small fires. Finally, on the last page we find a startling photograph of a puddle of milk. Why is this photograph so different? Why is this photograph so nonsensical?
The book is an exaggerated example of the archive’s normative function. This normative function is as apparent in the RISD Archive as it is anywhere. The RISD Archive is a way to preserve the memory of the schools buildings and open spaces, but it is also a public relations tool through which the school creates an idealized self-image. In a sense the archive is RISD’s official memory, yet also a construction. The photographs in the archive are taken by professional photographers and are carefully edited to create a particular impression of this institution. Within its precisely controlled structure there are only certain permissible things that may be said. As we can see by looking at New Crop, there are only certain ways that the buildings and open spaces may be photographed if they are to be included in the official memory. How recognizable are the spaces we occupy day after day? What this new crop makes most evident is the divergence between official memory and personal experience.
Essay by Ben Carlson, exhibition organized by J.P. Biondi and Miranda Burch and installed by Dan Noyola and Richard Saunders.
[1] See Jeff Wall’s “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” for an in depth account of the shift.
