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PARTISAN REVIEW
artists. Photography is the link which connects the seemingly
different enterprises of photo-realism and conceptual art, or the
kind of earth-projects dependent upon documentary presen–
tation and artist's video.
At this point in time it is not just the heightened presence of
the photograph itself that is significant. Rather, it is
th~
photo–
graph combined with the explicit terms of the index. Every–
where one looks in seventies' art, one finds instances of this
connection. In a work by Dennis Oppenheim made in 1975
called
Identity Stretch
the artist transfers the image or index of
his own thumb print onto a large field outside of Buffalo by
magnifying it thousands of times and fixing its traces in the
ground in lines of asphalt. The meaning of this work is focused
on the pure installation of presence by means of the index. And
the work as it is presented in the gallery involves the documenta–
tion of this effort through an arrangement of photographs where
the panels that comprise the works of Bill Beckley are also
documents of presence, fixed indexically. A recent object com–
bines photographic enlargements of fragments of the artist's
body with a panel of texts, giving us the story of his physical
position at a given time and place. Or David Askevold's work,
The Ambient,
is likewise made up of photographic panels
captioned by text. In his case, as in Oppenheim's, we find the
index pure and simple: the images are of the cast shadows of an
outstretched arm falling onto a luminous plain. The appended
. text speaks of an interruption of meaning. All three of these
works involve the filling of the empty indexical sign with a
particular presence, a physical presence. The implication is that
there is no convention for meaning independent of or apart from
that presence.
What I am saying about the ubiquitousness of photography
within "high art" at this time is that photography must not be
seen as a minor art, a subsidiary form of painting that is now
coming into its own. Rather, it is an entirely separate sign
system, one whose nature is to resist an internally generated
means of symbolization and which is now recasting the relation–
ship between the work of art and its system of producing
meaning. Further, its logic is the preeminent experience of a
