Abstract
This thesis presents an investigation into the photography produced by artists in the 1960s and 1970s, based on a discursive analysis of texts that the artists themselves wrote at the time. I propose that the specificity of the conception of photography from the 1960s and 1970s is the outcome of a complex process: inhabiting a wild exteriority of the visual arts discipline at that moment, photography is chosen by artists as an important strategy in a discursive dispute for definitions of art which results in its constitution as an object to the visual arts discipline. This investigation unfolds in three chapters: Sources of Research; The Photography-Whatever; Photography and Artistic Practices – Discourses of Artists in the Years 1960 and 1970. In the first chapter I carry out a discussion on the artist’s text and its relevance for understanding the art produced in the 1960s and 1970s, by means of a comparative analysis of four books that gather texts of artists of the time, in order to clarify how these writings are included in the theoretical field of visual arts, through their republication, which arises as a re-presentation (with a consequent displacement from their original contexts, editing, and often cuts), and so interferes with their existence and meaning for the artistic knowledge. In chapters 2 and 3, I present the result of a research that seeks to extract, from speeches of artists dating from the 1960s and 1970s, the role played by photography in their artistic practices in the larger context of art of that period. I pursue the idea of photography as a device of depersonalization of the artist as creative genius, as a special character who produces special objects and therefore distinguishes himself from other people. Such quality of the photography-whatever is stressed in texts of artists from those years in a celebration of the possibility of anti-art that resulted from the usage of photography as a medium, through an appropriation of the least special techniques and materials available at that time for the production of pictures and was opposed to the art that they called traditional or conventional. I also focus my attention, in the artists’ texts, in how they approach their own work, in order to withdraw three roles that photography can play in their artistic practices: the photograph as a document; the photograph integrated into the artistic practice; the photograph as an art work. While trends drawn from the ways of appropriation of photography as a medium for production, these groups have the task of organizing, by similarity and difference, the discursive approaches of the artists about their practices, based on how they developed their doing and determined the locus of their work – in other words, that which, for each of them, constitutes the work of art itself among the various elements that comprise his artistic practice. Photography in the arts exists by virtue of the discourse – both visual and textual – that takes it as an object, and in this sense it was being invented for that time, in the writings and works of the artists. The presence of photography in the artistic practice in the 1960s and 1970s, approached by means of a research into the discourses of artists, has shown itself as a complex establishment process of photography as an object to the artistic knowledge, an object of which one can speak and for which a specific vocabulary is formed, enabling it to place itself as a new medium among others (and in relation to them) for artistic production.
julianagisi 