Recasting Subjectivity: Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula

Article printed in Third Text ,V19, Issue 6, 2005.

Abstract:

The emergence of a globalised economic system demands an epochal shift in how we view society and culture. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s the manner in which we experience capitalism began to change. This process began slowly, and remains even now, several decades later, incomplete. In many ways the capitalist system we experience is indistinguishable from that analysed in 1848 by one of its earliest students, Karl Marx. But in other important ways it has changed, and this change has created a new descriptive term - globalisation. Globalisation thus represents a continuance of capitalism but also a distinctly new phase within it.

In this essay I examine how our visual language has been shaped by the changes wrought by globalisation. I will do this by studying the work of two photographers; Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula. Both of these photographers are currently demanding attention on the world stage - Gursky held a major retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001 and Sekula was included in Documenta 11 in 2002 and held a major retrospective at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 2003.

At first glance these two artists seem poles apart. Andreas Gursky comes from a younger generation of photographers who first found international success in the 1990s. His introduction to photography came from his family who ran a flourishing commercial photographic studio in Dusseldorf, West Germany. Gursky grew up well versed in the techniques and tricks of the commercial photographic trade and in 1979, after completing school, moved to Hamburg searching out his own career as a photojournalist for the booming German magazine industry. When Gursky confronted an initial failure in this path he changed tack and applied to study at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf.

Attracting lecturers such as Joseph Beuys and Bernd and Hilla Becher the Academy was a thriving hub of artistic experimentation and ambition which had a major impact on the German art world. Gursky ’ s peers included Thomas Struth, Tomas Ruff and Candida Hofer who would all go on to help generate the excitement surrounding new German photographers in the 1990s.

From the Bechers, Gursky received a highly rigorous education in conceptual minimalism. The Bechers ’ method consisted of taking sharply focused black and white photographs of many examples of the same thing, typically blast furnaces, gas tanks and industrial frontages, which were assembled into typologies and displayed in grid-like structures. The Bechers’ vision was relentless, for 30 years they returned to the same deadpan front-on vantage point to capture their subjects. The result is a body of work, stark in its conceptual minimalist vision, which presents the architecture of mid-twentieth century industrial capitalism.

Gursky graduated with a distinction from the Academy of Art in 1987 but was reluctant to continue with the Bechers’ rigorous technique. He started a series of experiments of his own; drawing on broader influences such as the Canadian conceptual photographer Jeff Wall, American photographers working in colour such as Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, and others who were experimenting with a different form of conceptual photography such as Jochen Gerz and Jean Le Gac. Gursky’s mature work draws on all these influences whilst also creating a body of work uniquely his own. He is most known for his huge photographs of hotel lobbies, crowds, offices, resorts, airports, and other manifestations of a globalised world.

Allan Sekula, on the other hand, comes from an earlier generation of artists. His interest in photography was sparked through his engagement with conceptual and performative art which was prominent in the 1970s. He started his degree in Fine Arts majoring in sculpture at the University of California in San Diego in 1969 but found himself interested in photography and documentation when recording a series of performances he conducted over 1971 - 1972. Influenced by the anti-Vietnam war movement, the proximity of a military base and encounters with military deserters, Sekula staged a series of art/activist interventions which he recorded through photography.

Through these experiments Sekula discovered that he was more interested in the process of documentation than the performance itself; his turn towards photography a natural evolution of this discovery. Through this transition, however, Sekula remained committed to some of the conceptual underpinnings of performance art - he has always regarded photography as a labour process and social practice not just as a finished product of stills. As a result he has travelled on cargo ships to create Fish Story (1989 - 1995), involved himself as a protagonist in the Seattle demonstrations in Waiting for Tear Gas (1999 - 2000), and helped with the oil clean up in Black Tide/Marea negra (2003).

Sekula ’ s practice has also remained connected to the political ideas from his time at university which began only a few “ months after the events of May ‘ 68 in Paris and less then a month after the riotous Chicago Democratic Party Convention ” . As Sekula explains, the political atmosphere was very tense: “ the Southeast Asian war was very present because San Diego was very militarised.” David Antin, John Baldessari and Herbert Marcuse - all lecturers at San Diego - helped spark an interest in Western Marxism, Fluxus and conceptual art. To these were added the feminist and anti-Colonial influences of student activists such as Angela Davis and Martha Rosler. Today Sekula is known as a critic, writer and artist.

These two very diverse artists both provide an important way of assessing how our visual culture has been changed by the process of globalisation. There are obviously many other artists whose work I could have chosen for this study. As just one example Documenta 11 has been described as a visual survey of globalisation and includes over 100 artists who could have usefully been included in this thesis. But I chose to focus on the work of Sekula and Gursky for the following reasons.

First, they both consistently return, through their subject matter and conceptual framework, to the themes of globalisation in their mature work. Secondly, they both work as photographers which provides a useful basis for a comparison between their work and an exploration of how the experience of photography is mediated by the process of globalisation. Thirdly, they both pursue a very different approach to globalisation which opens an interesting dialogue between their artistic practices.

In this text I examine how globalisation relates to the artistic practices of Gursky and Sekula looking at the manner in which globalisation has changed how we conceive of photography with particular reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theories of the simulacra and how globalisation has changed the relationship between time and space - or, what David Harvey calls time-space compression - and how these spatio-temporal qualities are reflected in the photography of both Sekula and Gursky. I also address how Gursky and Sekula’s artistic practice allows an exploration of the notion of the multitude - a term developed by Antonio Negri - by assessing how the rise of the global justice movement has allowed a return of a notion of mass collectivity into cultural theory.

My approach to globalisation has been informed by my own participation in the global justice movement. I have traveled to Indonesia to visit those involved in demonstrating for worker’s rights in the new global sweatshops and helped organise demonstrations in Australia for the global justice movement. This paper explores two simultaneously existing realities of a globalised world. One describes a world becoming, one which is visible in the work of Andreas Gursky and opens with the alluring, if also ominous, promises of globalisation. The other is the world Sekula draws our attention to; a world passing, one of injustice, exploitation, sweatshop labour and exclusion. My analysis of globalisation shifts between these two poles and is informed by the extremes of both.

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