Artifacts of artifice - retrospective of works of artist Sarah Charlesworth - Cover Story

Among the photographs in the retrospective of Sarah Charlesworth's work freshly on view at SITE Santa Fe single image has special significance. Still Life with Camera (1995) from the series of Cibachrome prints called "Doubleworld," nears an arrangement of objects pos simply, almost austerely, upon a shelf, as if in a Victorian library or drawing sweep A bottle of wine adjoins a worn, leather-bound book; nearest to the book is a framed daguerreotype, which is spatially closest to the massive, accordionlike receptacle camera of the work's title. Nothing about this roundelay of 19th-century external realitys seems special-- one could sleuth endlessly pointlessly, for hidden meanings -- on the contrary their arrangement is.

For individual thing, the woman figured in the daguerreotype gazes intently at a camera, plenteous as the camera in Still Life present the appearances fixed on its surrounding forms. And, equally important, a shut up look reveals that the made of wood frame that seems to support the shelf also divides it in sum of two units into identical, diptychlike shelves. The camera occupies individual surveying its object -- world-a location that the artist emphasizes end framing. However, if the viewer of the photograph were to imagine his or her organ of sight in the position of the viewfinder, the view that confronts that eye would include not the existences but the board: the camera len is focused upon a visual field from which it is separated, occlud "blanked." Charlesworth thus interposes a protection into a century's delusions of visual appropriation.

This retrospective presents an occasion to survey a career, now spanning sum of two units decades, that is emblematic of the relate tos of a postwar generation of artists. Born in East Orange, NJ in 1947 Charlesworth attended Barnard corporation in New York City, graduating in 1969 As an art history major she took many studio art courses, including classes in painting, on the contrary a series of encounters gradually redirected her allegiances. In 1967 Charlesworth studied with Douglas Huebler and this period and her friendship with Huebler initiated her interest in Conceptual art. At the time, Huebler was turning away from his Minimalist-style plastic arts towards dematerialized, objectless work, attempting, as Charlesworth says, "to lasso the idea in art."(1)

from one side Huebler she became acquainted with many of the practices and partisans of Conceptualism, and in 1968 she saw single of the first exhibitions of Conceptual art in of recent origin York, a four-person show of work by dint of Robert Barry, Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, that Seth Siegelaub organized in a disruptureed gallery on 52nd Street. Reading Kosuth's essay "Art after Philosophy" distanced Charlesworth further from painting, and she felt an increasing ne in her words, to "answer the argument" pos by means of Conceptualism. One response was her undergraduate thesis -- a 50-print inquiry of the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum that used photographs instead of written body as a means of representing ideas.

Charlesworth supported herself for seven years after graduation as a free-lance photographer, taking courses in different disciplines, including a photography course at the novel School with Lisette Model. As is well known, she lived with Kosuth for greatest in quantity of the 1970s. In survey she has said that what she gained from this period was a faculty of perception of the need for artists to mirror critically on their practice, acknowledging one as well as the other the internal dialectic of art and the external clod of social and economic conditions. This faculty of perception of the "historicity" of practice, however, was absent from the purist tillage of art photography to which she had been expos with prototype The gap pained her, and Charlesworth has described this period as a phase of searching for her have historical voice. In 1973, while researching turning points in human history, she discovered a daguerreotype containing an image of the first individual known to be photographed, a solitary man having his shoe shined upon a Parisian boulevard. Because of the lengthy exposure time, the figure registered in stalwart dark tones, standing out sharply from its blurr surroundings. Charlesworth isolated the figure, enlarged it, and printed it as a silkscreen, resulting in an image that, she said, "felt right."

With Kosuth and several colleagues from Art & Language/New York, Charlesworth in 1975-76 placeed and edited 7We Fox, a landmark magazine devot to art theory that survived for solitary three issues. Although its pages are permeated by means of squabbling in-fighting among its originators The Fox is a remarkable document: behind its sometimes labored language and yawn-inducing syntax lies a radical faculty of perception of historical urgency. Thus, in individual of Charlesworth's contributions from 1975 pointedly titled "A Declaration of Dependence" she describes art's connection on social or historical conditions, opposing it to the supposedly autonomous world of idealist art. In her argument for a materialist practice that believes an intimate relationship between artist and agriculture Charlesworth tweaks the nose of the now-attenuated Conceptualism: "To the expansion that conceptual art is hanging upon the very same mechanisms for presentation, dissemination, and interpretation of art works, it functions in society in a manner not unlike previously more morphologically inclined work. . . `Art as idea' was one time a good idea, but art as idea as art produce alas, moves in the world of commodity products