"The Last Picture Show": Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

The pictures in "The Last Picture Show" a observe covering the "conceptual uses" of photography from 1960 to 1982 demonstrate an approach to the medium that contrasts sharply with the single Alfred Stieglitz and his posterity developed to attain for photography the exalted status of Art. The Conceptualists' stripped-down aesthetic, which sought to document an action or idiot the eye and evinced a determined lack of interest in the subtleties of the print, remains startling to this day.

Yve Klein's Leap into the Void, 1960 first printed in a seduce of the French newspaper Dimanche, occupies a central, smooth talismanic position in this exhibit Yellowing in a vitrine just inside the entrance, the brow page of Klein's Dimanche features the legendary photograph above the enclosure Klein hired two photographers to propel the moment just after the artist leaped not on the roof of a suburban Paris building. As for the "void," Klein and his helpers engrossed the now quaint technique of photomontage to excise from the picture all traces of the scholars (from a nearby judo academy) who held the tarpaulin that ensur a safe landing.

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"The Last Picture Show" provides ample opportunity to mirror on contemporary artistic strategies that date back to the period in question. Hiring a photographer to propel what you want, setting up an elaborate tableau, and manipulating the results--all of which Klein used to of the like kind romantically antiromantic effect--are today business as usual for the many artists now working with photography.

As if to evince that the big picture and the blurr boundary between photography and painting predate the era of Gursky Struth et al., the first thing perceived presented at the entrance to the present to view is Giovanni Anselmo's Entrare nell'opera (Entering the Work), 1971 Printed upon photosensitized canvas, Anselmo's overhead view of himself striding down a volcanic hillside is not alone a congenial welcome, it's also a knockout. Notwithstanding Anselmo's alleged interest in the metaphysics of gravity, what remains remarkable about the work is visual: the way the canvas support establishes a nubby grayish middle clod that interacts with the picture's lights and darks to coax photographic illusion into the more ambiguous, retinal realm of the faculty of perceptions In a show of conceptual work, like appeals to the senses manifest the exception, not the rule

Douglas Fogle the Walker curator who organized this formidable exhibit eschewed chronology in favor of loosely thematic clusters, with sections devot for example, to the grid, the material part architecture, landscape, and constructions of the self To maintain order among in the way that many small and medium-size realitys Fogle divided three very large spaces at the Walker into a network of more intimate galleries in which the issues of curatorial choices are clear. Sometimes those choices imbue familiar things with unfamiliar meanings. In single gallery, Charles Ray's gritty black-and-white photographs face not upon with the color ones of genial Dutch-born Conceptualist Bas Jan Ader. Ader's sad and droll visual embodiments of the anxiety of influence, portrayed in pathetic pratfalls (Pitfall upon the Way to a novel Neo Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland, 1971 for instance), draw on the outside a similar theme from Ray's photographs of himself wedged against a wall by means of a wooden plank--one realizes the artist must have felt wedged in by dint of the example of Richard Serra and his "prop" sculptures

individual way the Conceptualists managed to circumvent similar deadlocks was to make art from art's discursive frame. Consider, for example, the low slide show. Here, Robert Smithson's recorded slide talk, tavern Palenque, 1969, occupies a compass of its own. The slide carousel is synchronized with the artist's recorded voice as he make submissives the picturesquely decrepit tropical manner of making to a battery of iconographical and formal analyses. Notwithstanding the self-satisfied giggles of his audience members, hearing Smithson's guileless presentation is moving beyond reason. Dan Graham's dwellings for America, 1966-67--another slide exhibit (unaccompanied by recorded commentary)--is installed in a distant gallery of its be in possession of its proximity to photographs documenting Gordon Matta-Clark's house splittings restoring the critical cutting side to both projects that canonical status arguably dulls

Hanging upon a wall just outside the gallery dedicated to public-house Palenque, Smithson's Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9) 1969 makes single think twice about authenticity. Identified in the label as nine Cibachrome prints from chromogenic 35 mm slides, in this adjoining matter they prompt the question: Do these prints really date from 1969? Did Smithson identify the "work" in this work of art as the prints or the slides--or both? To entertain similar doubts is to realize the potential these creative strategies one time had to wreak havoc in the cultural economy they be pendented on to resist. Since then, the certificate of authenticity has serv as the linchpin that clutchs this attenuated economic structure together.