Display or Displacement? Featuring the Object of Art in Photography

CIHA - 33. Internationaler Kunsthistoriker-Kongress, 15. - 20. Juli 2012 in Nürnberg

Photography acts as a powerful instrument of representation when it serves as a referential space for cultural artifacts. Considering the parameters of photography as a display for the object of art the paper ventures to approach aspects of the photographic mise-en-scène to advance to an understanding of cultural translation and transfer processes via photography. Their ramifications can be described as appropriation and displacement which have shaped the role of the photographic image as a contact zone for diverse cultural implications and discourses on the object of art from Modernism to the present. While Surrealist photography experimented with assemblages of objects from diverse cultural contexts, contemporary photography reflects the display modes of the artwork and the dynamics of acculturation processes as for example Louise Lawler’s allegedly documentary views that focalize the artwork’s value systems or cultural displacements implied by changing presentational settings. Referring to a selection of exemplary works from the 20th and 21st centuries, the paper argues that the photographed art object exceeds the represent-tation of its material appearance and must be seen as a complex system of display functions connected to various forms of meta-representations and in this sense also as an instrument of cultural analysis of the art object’s status.