(Essay reprinted from the book We Represent Ourselves to the World: Stephen Prina's Galerie Max Hetzler, 1991 By Jenelle Porter, with essays by James Meyer and Wilhelm Schürmann Published by UCLA Hammer Museum and UCLA Department of Art, 2004)
The first 176 pages of this book are devoted to the presentation of a single artwork, Stephen Prina's installation Galerie Max Hetzler, made in 1991. In its installed form it consists of the following elements: 163 sepia-toned gelatin silver prints, over-matted with ivory-colored rag board and finished with walnut-stained mahogany wood frames; 163 acrylic labels screenprinted with text; 9 architectural models made from ivory-colored rag board, encased in acrylic and mounted on walnut-stained mahogany veneer plywood pedestals; and an enormous graphic, painted in ivory latex on the wall, floor to ceiling, that reads, "We represent ourselves to the world."
Galerie Max Hetzler was created as a site-specific installation for the art gallery of its title, located at that time in Cologne.1 It presents, by way of photography and architectural models, a history of the gallery's exhibitions and locations filtered through Prina's highly devised and analytical interpretative system. As an installation it has a specific physical existence, one governed by the space it inhabits and the time, the history, it documents. This book allows yet another form of time and space for its "installation": a re-presentation of the work for the page, a location that allows a renewed consideration of its rich contents and ideas. This essay is structured around three themes, as introduced by Prina's own words, that are critical to the work: photography, art in architecture, and site-specificity. Finally, the operation of Galerie Max Hetzler in a book as a site for "installation" will be considered.
Galerie Max Hetzler, 1991, comes out of a consideration of that which is made by galleries as well as that which is presented by them. On one level, galleries are photographic factories. Exhibited works are documented—as isolated objects and as installed for public view—in photographic form, and then added to the archives. The stuff of the Hetzler archives became the raw material for me to form into an artwork.
-Stephen Prina
A gallery's photo archive is composed primarily of two types of photos: those documenting the exhibitions installed, and those reproducing individual artists' works. The raw material Prina speaks of, and which Galerie Max Hetzlerconcerns itself with, are the photos of the installations themselves, the documents that record how the art was installed in the gallery. Hetzler opened his first gallery in 1974, and Prina made Galerie Max Hetzler in 1991—a span of 17 years that saw the organization of 163 exhibitions. These 163 exhibitions generated, as one might imagine, thousands of images—a photographic factory indeed. An inconsistent format and quality characterized the photos in Hetzler's archive: transparencies, negatives, 35mm slides, black-and-white photos, and even photocopies of absent originals. In addition, these photos were taken by different photographers over the years, ranging from gallery employees to professionals, all of whom left their aesthetic judgments imprinted on the captured views.3
For Galerie Max Hetzler, Prina chose one photo from each exhibition and then rephotographed the selected shots as standard four-by-five-inch, black-and-white negatives. The negatives were contact printed in order to retain the closest relationship to the rephotographed state. A conventional aspect of photography's repertoire, contact printing is the most direct means of making a print from negative film: the negative is placed directly on sensitized paper, then exposed to light. There are no additional technical procedural steps in the dark room. In the case of Galerie Max Hetzler, the four-by-five-inch black-and-white negatives are printed as four-by-five-inch images. Each print was then toned sepia, a process utilized by Prina as a formalizing and serializing technique that essentially renders every photo monochromatic.4 The artist recognizes the nostalgic connotations of sepia, but also asserts that toning a photograph is merely another technical process that can be created in a photo lab, yet another aspect of photography's repertoire. We must ask, however, what does sepia, with its inherent historical and emotional baggage, signify when it is used to treat seventeen-year-old as well as more recent photos? For Prina, the toning creates an effect of uniformity, an effect critical to the overall aesthetic organization of the piece. This effect of uniformity both obfuscates and exposes the truth value of the archive, creating as it does a purported level field upon which all images can be evaluated equally.
To properly evaluate Prina's raw material we must consider the function of the installation shot. In general, installation photographs are documentary in nature and not typically viewed or used as art objects.5 Instead, they are evidence of an exhibition's occurrence, a particular type of photo not often exhibited or published except perhaps as a contextual document in a historical exhibition or book. In addition to recording the exhibited artwork in a static, presentational mode, these photos represent less tangible notions: the work in relation to the space it inhabits; one artwork's relationship to another; scale; and temporality. But why are installation shots so compelling? And what is their particular significance here?
Installation photos of art on walls are the stuff of art history. They exist as markers of curatorial process, of institutional history, of an artist's progression through ideas. They are working documents for study, poured over by curators examining past exhibitions, by registrars as visual guides for installing works, and by scholars to illustrate the history of exhibitions.6 They are in many ways tinged with nostalgia because of their unique role as vehicles through which many viewers "experience" an exhibition. Installation shots of key historical exhibitions are critical for considering the unique qualities of the temporary exhibition; for subsequent generations, the only way to "see" these shows is by way of photography. This becomes especially relevant when speaking of exhibitions that have become, in retrospect, tipping points of shifting artistic and curatorial practices: Primary Structures(1966),When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head (1969), and Information(1970), to name only a few.7
One of the defining characteristics of the installation photo is its absence of human subjects, and only a few photos in Galerie Max Hetzler document people. Since these photos are often intended as recording devices of static rooms, there is usually no need to capture people; they might, after all, obscure the view. Brian O'Doherty writes about this particular aspect of the installation shot:
Indeed the presence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion. The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not—or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study. This Cartesian paradox is reinforced by one of the icons of our visual culture: the installation shot, sans figures. Here at last the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being there, one of the major services provided for art by its old antagonist, photography. The installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space.8
The installation shot, as an object, is intended to document for all eternity that which existed at a specific place during a specific time. It is a document of art's relationship to its surroundings.
Some photographers, though, choose to include people—viewers blurred by long exposures—to provide scale, or possibly to show that the art experience also includes the people who look at it. This choice is often a subjective one made by the photographer, the curator, or the artist. This leads us to another type of installation photo, one intended to record the use of a work—the artwork in action. A photo of viewers interacting with, and thereby creating, Hans Haacke's MOMA Poll (1970), for example, is intended to depict the true character, or actual function, of an artwork.
The installation photo is not merely a recording document, but an index—a trace of an event. It stands in for what no longer exists, what is absent. In this sense the installation shot shares much with others of its ilk: photos of performances, happenings, site-specific works, and land art. Land art, especially, has affinities with how photography is used in Galerie Max Hetzler. With land art projects of the 1960s and 1970s, photographic documents became not just evidence of the work's existence but also objects for exhibition and, ultimately, sale. Something intended originally to represent a fleeting, distant, or often geographically difficult-to-access reality became itself the object of focus, the marketable artwork. This new-found commodity status, reinforced by the photograph's unique situation as the only sellable proxy for an otherwise unattainable artwork, in turn funded additional works. In addition, these photographic records became key to the study of art history, reinforcing the importance of this type of work. As the final litmus test of the photodocument-as-artwork, these images were associated not with the photographer who made them, a person therefore relegated to technical status, but with the artist who created the pictured work. Of course, many of the artists acted as their own documentarians, extending a sculptural practice to a photographic one as it became necessary.9 For many viewers, the photo of the work not only represented the site-specific sculpture, but was the only way to see, and therefore experience, the work—the very same situation that arises when viewing Galerie Max Hetzler.
Besides having status as artworks, photos of land art exist as indices of marks made in the landscape—an index of an index. An index is the transposition of an event into a mark: a stain, footprints, dust, paint skeins on canvas. These things, actions, or objects are evidence that something occurred in time and place, a thing then fixed by photography. According to Rosalind Krauss, the photograph "is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection."10 A photo has the unique capacity to make permanent the impermanent, to freeze and then substitute for the impermanent. One example of the impermanent is the temporary exhibition, a fleeting event visually recorded only by the installation photograph.
Another instance of impermanence is the site-specific artwork, a type of temporary exhibition. Because early site-specific works, especially with land art, were not destroyed but often left to deteriorate, they are, as Craig Owens calls them, "an emblem of transience, the ephemerality of all phenomena."11 He then suggests the "allegorical potential" of photography due to its primary role as the preserver of the site-specific work. For Owens, allegory has the "capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear."12 He discusses allegory's reemergence during the postmodern era as a critical tool newly adopted by artists interested in appropriation strategies, site-specificity, and seriality ("one thing after another")—strategies very much present in Galerie Max Hetzler. As Owens further elaborates, "A conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present—these are [allegory's] two most fundamental impulses."13
Owens' revival of allegorical strategies is echoed in Prina's revitalization of the Hetzler archive. In designating the archive as raw material, Prina borrows, or appropriates, what has already been made. He then extends it with rephotography. Owens continues: "As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image."14 But if photography in this vein is allegorical, it is because it can offer "only a fragment, and thus affirms its own arbitrariness and contingency."15 Galerie Max Hetzler, a fragment of an archive, will tell its allegorical tale if we desire to read it. For some, the work is a reminder of shows visited, in person, over time. For those without this privilege, Galerie Max Hetzler offers a different type of viewing procedure by way of photography. O'Doherty has written, "… avant-garde gestures have two audiences: one which was there and one—most of us—which wasn't. … The photographs of the event restore to us the original moment, but with much ambiguity."16
My research led me to focus on the installation views in the archive in that, in this form, the artworks are shown both in relation to architecture and in the state in which they met a public.
-Stephen Prina
Prina's selection criteria is one of the key components of the system devised to make Galerie Max Hetzler. From Hetzler's archive, which included various types of photo records, Prina chose only images of art in situ in the Hetzler gallery space. Typically, many photos are taken of each exhibition in order to record each work, or at the very least, to capture many views of an installation. This allows for every piece in the show to be seen, for close-ups and overall shots, providing a somewhat complete record for the archive. An exhibition archive is usually augmented by photos of individual works of art as well as images of an artist's shows at other galleries or museums. But Prina selected only one image from each of the 163 exhibitions held at Hetzler's gallery, and then, only an image of a work in situ. In doing so Prina followed his own rules for the generation of the work. However, he constantly modified the logic of his selections, thereby creating a heavily edited, and subjective, exhibition history. These idiosyncrasies echo the fragmentary nature and unpredictability of historical records as well as the inherent incompleteness of any historical narrative.
The selection process produced a wide range of images. In the case of group shows, the selected photographic document might show only a portion of the entire exhibition, perhaps a work by only one artist of the several on view; another choice might document most of the artists in the exhibition. In the case of solo shows, an image of one singular artwork might be shown, or perhaps an entire gallery of work. One example (153 of 163) shows an empty room, part of a solo exhibition by Christopher Williams.18 In another photo, 116 of 163, showing two now well-known works by Jeff Koons, one is reflected in the mirrored surface of the other. The photographer has clearly moved away from objective documentation, and Prina selected it for this subjectivity. It stands out from the other images as a markedly disparate type of installation shot.
In many situations photos were taken in the artist's studio, prior to the work's installation at the gallery, a standard practice for a gallery seeking to publicize a show before its opening. In many of these cases, no additional photos were made in the gallery, creating a void in the installation documentation, a challenge to the system Prina had established for himself. Since only photos of Hetzler installations, of art in situ, were suitable for the purposes of the piece, a substitute needed to be established as a proxy. Prina chose a photographer's gray card—a simple tool used, because of its tonal range, to determine the appropriate exposure time for a photo. Like every other photo in the work, it was rephotographed for the purposes of standardization. This became the proxy, used repeatedly (56 times) in the sequence.19
The anomaly reinforces the importance of architecture, of the site, in Galerie Max Hetzler.20 Not only does Prina's work respond to art in architecture, but the look of the installation itself derives from the aesthetics of the architecture that originally housed it. During the seventeen years documented in this piece, Hetzler occupied many different spaces, from the very raw to the highly polished. Galerie Max Hetzler responds formally only to the gallery's location in 1991, when Prina was invited to exhibit. This Cologne gallery occupied the first two floors of a building commissioned by Hetzler and designed by the renowned German architect O. M. Ungers. Formally, Ungers' work is vigorously geometric and stylishly bold. In a poignant match of site to context, Prina's project can be further illuminated by Ungers' modified Neo-Rationalist theories, described by Kenneth Frampton as "a fragmentary urban strategy comprising forms of development limited in accordance with the topographical and institutional constraints of a specific task in a particular context."21 One could conceivably replace the words "urban" and "topographical" with "conceptual" and "architectural" to further explicate Galerie Max Hetzler.
For the gallery floors Ungers used dark, brownish-red ceramic square tiles. The use of wood was heavy, with large doors and baseboards, and the wood treatment was mahogany stained walnut.22 This type of design is rare for a commercial art gallery, where one can usually expect to see a white-on-white box, a space unencumbered by anything remotely decorative or obscuring. Prina responded to Ungers' bold, graphic statement by designing all the elements of the piece to be absorbed by the space, rather than exist in contradistinction to the architectural design of the gallery. The frames and pedestals, stained to match Ungers' treatments, complemented the gallery's aesthetic. The ivory rag board used for the models and the photos mats, and the particular tone of sepia, were selected to complement the wood stain. However, these choices are less logical than they might sound in description. Faced with the task of installation, Prina chose to work within a specified aesthetic system, rather than compete against it. The result is an overdetermined aesthetic.
The architectural models, nine in all, were created to represent the various locations occupied by Hetzler's galleries during the seventeen-year period. Just as the photographs are an index of an installation, the models are an index of brick-and-mortar buildings. Unlike typical architectural scale models, which are built to view exterior details in three dimensions, Prina's models were constructed as inverted massing models, as it is only the interior space that is necessary for the artwork, and at that, only the actual exhibition spaces in each gallery. (Office and storage spaces, for example, are not represented.) Volume was excised from a five-sided, rectangular box to show the details of the interior of the gallery space. Like the photo frames, the boxes have standardized dimensions, the measurements determined by the largest single-story plan (IX of IX).23 Two of the nine models are twice the standard width to accommodate the depiction of two-storied galleries, the two floors of which are placed side by side. In each model, the plan was uniformly situated in the top left corner of the box, and scaled according to the largest floor plan.
One model bears special attention. Hetzler's first gallery had been demolished by the time Prina began researching this piece. No floor plans or photo documentation could be located that might facilitate a reconstruction. Left with no additional resources from which to accurately depict the interior of a now-missing building, Prina decided to represent this space as a closed box, a model with no plan—a sealed cube. In its existence as the architectural representation of a blank, a void, it is analogous to the photographer's gray card as proxy—a recorded gap, a record of an imperfect historical document. The point at which these two voids in the archive merge is a key element inGalerie Max Hetzler's conceptual strategy. These voids are the noise in the system, points of resistance. Carefully considered by the artist, they become the part of the piece that hovers somewhere between document and figment.
The final element of Galerie Max Hetzler is a large slogan, "We represent ourselves to the world," painted on the wall in ivory to match the photograph mats. A contradiction of intention exists in the fact that the graphic is enormous, filling the entire installation, but the color in which it is painted renders it almost invisible. The supergraphic was scaled to form a backdrop to the framed photos, but was constantly interrupted by the photos installed upon it and whatever architectural details impeded its flow. It was not merely paused by doorways and windows, but literally erased by them, making it even more difficult to decipher. In the original installation there was no ideal vantage point from which to view this organizing device because of its deployment on two floors and in a stairway, as well as the gaps created by architecture.
The slogan, "We represent ourselves to the world," is a cue to larger motifs operating in Galerie Max Hetzler, motifs that inspired this book. How does the gallery represent itself? Prina proposes that it is through what the gallery makes, or produces—the exhibition photograph—as well as by its meta-statement of an art history perceived through the lens of one gallery. Is this a picture of a specific moment, or a symbol of many similar moments? How do artists represent themselves and how do we as viewers perceive this representation? How does art represent us, or how do we represent ourselves to it?
On one hand, representation connotes art world machinations: an artist is represented by a gallery, which signifies a certain commitment to promoting the artist in exchange for a share in the sales of the work.24 The gallery, for its part, as Prina demonstrates, represents itself through its exhibitions. It only hosts the art it shows, but it does make photographic documentation of it; and these photos become representative of the gallery's own particular history, its unique face to the world. The gallery is, in Prina's words, a "photographic factory." More important, the slogan signals a time during the 1970s and 1980s when artists sought to dismantle, through various means, accepted notions of representation, especially as it was channeled through photographic practices.25 Photography (along with appropriation) played a significant role because of its deployment by the media (in increasingly criticized modes) as well as its representative techniques. The camera was thought to be the symbol of all that was true and authoritative, but photography (enabled by its newfound vaunted status on the blue chip art market) also came under the scrutiny of critical, deconstructive processes. InGalerie Max Hetzler, the photos used are documents, representations of actual exhibitions, manipulated ever so slightly by rephotography. But in the adaptation of these images for an artwork that presents only a fragment of a larger history, photography is shown to have a subjective role, one facilitated by Prina's opinion about what is worthy of representation. Obfuscating this, of course, is the look of Galerie Max Hetzler—the long sequence of monochromatic photos appears to be an objective presentation of one gallery's history.
In a move conceived as a then current address of the state of working in a site-specific mode, the first appearance of Galerie Max Hetzler, 1991, was tightly fitted into the place from where all the materials of its making issued. … It was anticipated that, on subsequent presentations of this work, the arrangement of elements would strictly adhere to the design derived for the Hetzler location, whether it seemed as though that arrangement was appropriate for its next venue or not. The dislocation was a way of putting into check the positive affirmation assured in its first appearance
-Stephen Prina
As it evolved from Minimalism and Conceptual art during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, site-specific practice was circumscribed by a permanent site, whether in the landscape or within walls, and characterized by a transitory (and noncommercial) existence as an immobile object or experience. "Whether inside the white cube or out in the Nevada desert, whether architectural or landscape-oriented," writes Miwon Kwon, "site-specific art initially took the site as an actual location, a tangible reality, its identity composed of a unique combination of physical elements."27 The first wave of site-specific practitioners included Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Michael Heizer. In the 1970s, Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers, among others, began to address the notion of site, especially with regard to institutional space and theories of reception. Their work led to an expanded concept of site, moving it even more toward the contingencies of context and receivership, while still addressing the institutional paradigm.
At the time of the creation of Galerie Max Hetzler in the early 1990s, theories regarding the site-specific were under considerable renegotiation.28 Artists were again reconsidering the idea of a site-specific work or practice, and began to theorize the site as loosened from its ideological, and consequently physical, moorings. It became mobile, more a function of situation than site, something critics called "situational aesthetics." According to Benjamin Buchloh, "The idea of a ‘situational aesthetics' … implied that a work would function analytically within all the parameters of its historical determination, not only its linguistic or formal framework. Three concepts would become crucial for the definition of ‘situational aesthetics': first, the notion of material- and site-specificity; second, the notion of place; third, that of presence."29 Site became more clearly defined as contextually, historically, culturally, temporally, and socially contingent.
Galerie Max Hetzler was made within these reinvigorated dialogues and it responded with yet another permutation of site-specificity. Prina often calls his work "system specific": he works within, and responds to, systems, in this case the archive and installation tactics. In its primary installation at Hetzler's Cologne gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler was designed specifically for the architecture that would contain it. Every inch of available wall space in the gallery, including the stairwell that connected the two-floor space, was hung with photos. Prina calls his installation tactic for the work too site-specific, by which he means that the piece was intended to be claustrophobia-inducing, to territorialize the gallery space, to propose an overpowering statement about its spatial configuration. Galerie Max Hetzler consumed the gallery, and therefore the viewer.
Because the piece was so precisely designed for its installation, its appearance in Hetzler's gallery should be described. The framed photos were installed, beginning in one corner of the first floor gallery, chronologically along a uniform horizon line. After they wrapped the first level, the photos traveled up the stairwell, filled the second floor gallery, and then ended at the upper region of the staircase at the point it entered the second floor. As many as three photos might be stacked vertically, indicating simultaneous shows in three different Hetzler locations. The space between framed elements was determined by a measurement that would allow the sequence of 163 photos to wrap every available wall.
Hanging under each photo was a wall label with descriptive information: the number of the piece in the sequence of Galerie Max Hetzler (e.g., 114 of 163); the name of the show documented; the artists included in said show; the exhibition's run dates; and the number of the gallery location (e.g., VII of IX, representing the seventh of the nine Hetzler locations). They are akin to a standard type of museum wall label: silkscreen on a rectangle of clear acrylic. The models, each atop their own pedestal, were placed adjacent to the representative locale's chronological introduction within the photo sequence. It was at these moments in the sequence that viewers could decipher that they were standing next to the plan of the space they were seeing in the photos on the wall. This had the effect of simultaneously creating a shifter, a placement and a displacement—"I'm here, and I'm there"—as well as linking present and past.
The colors of the frames, mats, and photos conspired to meet all the aesthetic requirements of the piece simultaneously. The appearance of the piece in the gallery was rather monochromatic, composed as it is of browns and ivory. The photographs, models, labels, and the supergraphic all became an arrangement, hewing tightly to a serial mode. Here Galerie Max Hetzler enters the realm of curatorial activity, of the composition of like and unlike elements with the goal of attaining an overall harmony of scale and concept.30 In its installation, the tension in the work shifts from image selection to placement. On this aspect of curatorial activity in relation to similar artistic practices, Stephen Melville has written: "So here too the terms of curation—now taken as placement and display—and those of contemporary art making appear to coincide: the work, we may want to say, is no longer something that might or might not be displayed in one way or another, but has instead become continuous with the condition of the exhibition, and so presumably happens differently on each of its occasions."31
When Prina made the piece he knew it would be reinstalled at least once in a different location, as it was scheduled for exhibition at Hetzler's co-owned Santa Monica, California, satellite, Luhring Augustine Hetzler. The challenge of installing such a complex, site-specific work in another place became one of its central ideas, and Prina considered this part of the site-specific quality of the piece. It was determined that the piece would retain its exact installation character, which meant, quite literally, that the look of the Cologne installation traveled with the piece to each venue. By establishing this rule, the original site literally moves with the work to each new site. The installation, then, becomes something of a re-creation. Where there was a doorway in the Cologne gallery that interrupted the installation, there is a blank space of exactly this dimension in the new location. Where there was a stairway that hosted part of the sequence as it ascended to the second-floor gallery, in subsequent hangings, photos and the graphic inexplicably stair-step up a wall to nowhere in particular. This activity recurs throughout: wherever the precisely measured line of the installation was interrupted by architecture, it determined a pause, which is then transferred to the new location. Therefore, the precise measurements of the architecture of the first site become incorporated into the piece by way of transmission.
Since its first installation in Cologne, Galerie Max Hetzler has been installed three times in its entirety: first, as noted, at Luhring Augustine Hetzler, in 1992, where it occupied a large high-ceilinged, single-story building; next, as part of Prina's 1992 survey exhibition, "It was the best he could do at the moment," at the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, where it was installed alongside other artworks by Prina; and most recently, in 2001 at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. 32 These installations were defined by their inherent, or imposed, "deficiencies," with squeezed-out photos propped along the floor on brown paper (a reference to the way galleries often look during the installation of an exhibition, as well as a manifestation of uncooperative, failing architecture), and sequences interrupted by traces of architectural moments: windows, doors, and other breaks in the plane of the wall. In this way, Galerie Max Hetzler's subsequent permutations accumulate a heightened profundity, reminding us of a site-specificity intentionally inscribed but disjointed by a physical reconfiguration. The expanses of wall with no photos are unsettling. Just as the photographs evoke the idea of a fragment, the empty walls are perceived by the viewer as measures of absence, but the absence of what is constantly questioned.
Unlike other works of a significantly smaller scale, the large size and complexity of Galerie Max Hetzler lend it the appearance of a curated show rather than of a single artwork—which, of course, it is. Prina reinforces this constructed system through his numbering of the photos and the models.33 It is not a simple sequential numbering, but rather the component part is always listed with the final count—3 of 163, II of IX, etc. This strategy assists in the retention of the idea of sets, and in its reliance on part to whole relationships, references the index. Even if a component is physically missing from a sequence, a viewer would be able to conclude that there was a gap. Also, when a component is removed from a series and exhibited individually, the number indicates that though it might exist as an autonomous object, it is derived from a larger whole.
Galerie Max Hetzler is a synecdoche of a larger history that can also be extrapolated to represent itself in more compact versions of a complete, whole existence. Prina has chosen to show it in abbreviated form when necessary or possible. Galerie Max Hetzler is an edition of three, a condition that opens the piece to various permutations apart from those inherent to its regular installation procedures. The first edition is the complete piece: 163 photographs, 9 models, and the supergraphic.34 The second edition is partitioned into year-long sequences, composed only of the photos specific to each year. The third edition is divided entirely into its component pieces: photos and models are treated as individual units. Beyond its infiltrations of space as a complete piece, Galerie Max Hetzler can trickle into the world as smaller parts, each representative of the whole.
This book creates a new site for Galerie Max Hetzler: an exhibition in book form, a re-situation of the work from the gallery to the page. In this sense, it follows a practice explored by postminimal artists of the 1960s and 1970s who created artworks specifically for the print medium, which had expanded with newly accessible printing techniques such as offset and photocopy. Robert Smithson's Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan (1969), Dan Graham'sHomes for America (1966–67), and Edward Ruscha's books such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) are primary examples of artworks made especially for the page.35 Seth Siegelaub, an artist known for working with the highly transportable book form, has stated: "When art does not any longer depend upon its physical presence, when it becomes an abstraction, it is not distorted and altered by its reproduction in books. It becomes PRIMARY information, while the reproduction of conventional art in books and catalogues is necessarily distorted ‘SECONDARY' information. When information is PRIMARY, the catalogue can become the exhibition."36
Writing about Dan Graham in his seminal essay "Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," Buchloh outlines such primary and secondary practices:
Graham's dialectical conception of visual representation polemically collapsed the difference between the spaces of production and those of reproduction. ... Anticipating the work's actual modes of distribution and reception within its very structure of production, Homes for America eliminated the difference between the artistic construct and its (photographic) reproduction, the difference between an exhibition of art objects and the photograph of its installation, the difference between the architectural space of the gallery and the space of the catalogue and the art magazine.
By returning to the primary information used to produce Galerie Max Hetzler—physical materials that include photo negatives, floor plans, and hues specific to its installation—this book can exist as an exhibition, a primary site for installation, though one tempered by the contextual operation of the essays. But one cannot discount the subject of the piece itself as seen through its primary source material: photography. The raw material used for Galerie Max Hetzler is secondary by its very nature because it documents installations that took place in time and space. Photos of said installations remove the work once more from its primary existence, the condition of experiencing the work in person.
Making a book about Galerie Max Hetzler provides a means to challenge certain hierarchies of media and display. Foremost, it allows the work to be disseminated to a wider audience. But what happens to the system established by the artist to create and install the work for the gallery context? What happens when the piece is moved out of the gallery's walls, so much a part of its conceptual underpinnings, to the page, a location very much removed from the ideological and architectural implications of institutional space? How is site-specificity configured for/on the page? What procedures are required to transform three-dimensional objects to the two-dimensionality of the page? What can the page accommodate that the installation cannot? These questions, many of them intentionally unanswered, have informed the production of this book.
We determined that the only way to successfully transpose the work from one type of physicality to another was to reapproach the rules that governed the installed work. Therefore, certain design rules were established from the outset. First, a strict grid based on the installation procedure was delineated. In both "locations," a horizon line determined the placement of each element. In the gallery, the photos were matted and framed in colors specific to the original installation site and complementary to the overall tonal scheme of the piece. For the purposes of this book, it made little sense to present a reproduction of the framed work, but important to retain a similar color scheme. The character of the sepia and ivory colors was retained, but here a Pantone color was used to create a new color scheme. Photos are centered, one per page. The labels, presented in the gallery affixed to the wall, are here typeset in the same Helvetica font and situated under each photo. In short, the strict symmetry of the installed piece is synonymous with the page.
One anomaly of the printing process betrays a resistance of Galerie Max Hetzler to its reproduction on the page: the moiré effect that can be seen in nine of the images. A moiré pattern results when one dot or line pattern overlays an opposing pattern. Here, this occurs because the images were photographed from printed materials such as books or photocopies. In Prina's rephotograph, the pattern is mostly undetectable. It is only when an additional printing process is applied that a moiré pattern appears. These photos, then, become easily identifiable as representations of another kind of missing image, a type of proxy distinct from the gray card. The moiré effect is a byproduct of re-siting the piece for the book, one that reinforces a resistance related to the propping of photos along the floor in the installations that followed Hetzler's.
To represent the nine galleries in the book, drawings were rendered using the same floor plans that generated Prina's models, just as the negatives were used as primary source material for the reproductions in the book. Devising a new way to present the gallery floor plans allowed us to further our thinking about how artworks might be "installed" in book form. The process determined that plan oblique drawings of the spaces were most suitable for the representation of the galleries. With plan oblique drawings, or oblique projections, the face of the drawing, in this case the linear drawing of the floor plan, is situated parallel to the picture plane. All other faces for interior walls, are represented in proportion and drawn at a consistent angle. This type of drawing coordinates the ceiling height of the gallery with the floor plan, converting by extrusion two-dimensional orthogonal projections into oblique three-dimensional data. The result is a drawing with no perspective, one that exists objectively regardless of the viewer's stationary position. Furthermore, plan oblique drawings as an informational device do not include people as agents of scale, in keeping with most installation photography.38
The page is considered like the five-sided box of the model, a plane upon which to delineate, or excise, space. Drawings, like the floor plans excised for the models, are situated on the page in a manner specific to their scale: each model is scaled to the largest floor plan. The result, by way of line and tone, are two-dimensional drawings that look strikingly similar to the three-dimensional models. It is as if one were looking into the page. As a design rule, one-story galleries required one page, and two-story spaces a two-page spread. Their placement in the book follows the timeline of the installation: plan drawings are introduced the year each gallery opened. The first model to appear was the architectural representation of the proxy model. The corresponding proxy here is a toned page with only a caption to signify its presence. The effect of the convergence between architectural space and photographic image that existed in the installation is quite different here. While plan oblique drawings allow one to comprehend volumetric space, the phenomenological experience of looking at a flat page is obviously unequal to that of looking into the three-dimensional space of the model.
The treatment here of the supergraphic demonstrates the most extreme departure from the installed version of Galerie Max Hetzler. It appears throughout the first forty-one pages of the book, until it has completed its statement. It is represented in a clear varnish so that it might exist as subtly as it did when installed, allowing yet another opportunity for dialogue about its particular role in the overall work. It is at once overscaled and barely present, a transparent tone that interpenetrates the page and the artwork. Unlike the placement of the graphic in the installation, writ large and positioned behind the photos, here the graphic is superimposed on the photos and the models it encounters. But in the end, the graphic is hardly there, creating a difference from frame to page much more pronounced than occurs with the other elements of Galerie Max Hetzler.
Like the example of Graham's practice provided by Buchloh, Galerie Max Hetzler anticipates its specificity to site, and therefore to re-sitings, a condition that now permits us to create one more site of re-presentation. However, the space of exhibition and the space of the page resist total collapse because the codings of site inscribed in each installation cannot be retained by the rigidity of the two-dimensional page. There is no architecture to negotiate; just a sequence of pages that will allow us all the space we need, or want. Nothing exists outside the grid of the page. The operation of the book encodes Galerie Max Hetzler with another type of presence, one reinforced by the absence of the installation itself. The marks of absence and transfer are here reinscribed in a permanent state that allows the work to be constantly "installed," whether on a bookshelf, on a table, or in the hand.
Galerie Max Hetzler is a multilayered work of art supplemented with ideas relevant both to the time and place of its making and to its present condition. In its treatment here, it becomes a methodology, a tool for understanding the complexities and contexts of any given artwork. The book can be considered a work of art itself, but one infused with the collaborative elements of graphic design, authors, and a reader. It is an exhibition and a book, a site of dialogue between the work and the texts it has inspired. What drew me most to Galerie Max Hetzler were its details, absences, relationships, visible points of resistance, and embedded, but constantly faltering, mobility. This book willingly embraces this last thread—after all, what is more portable than a book?
Notes
1 The gallery was also located at one time in Stuttgart; it is now in Berlin.
2 From a press release written on the occasion of the installation of Galerie Max Hetzler at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, March 2001.
3 One can detect a certain consistency of style in the later installation shots represented in the piece. One of these photographers was Wilhelm Schürmann, a prominent German collector and photographer whose stylistic preferences are clearly evident. He published a book of his photos and included some of his installation shots from the Hetzler gallery. Prina in turn used Schürmann's choices in Galerie Max Hetzler as a nod to, and recognition of, the subjectivity that indeed influences the allegedly objective installation photo. Schürmann recently explained that, after his entrée to the gallery as a collector, he was compelled to start making the gallery's installation shots himself because the quality of the photos was so bad. Conversation with the author, January 16, 2004; see also Schürmann's essay in this book.
4 Prina often uses toning, or a tendency toward the monochrome, as a specific formalizing, homogenizing effect. For example, in the exhibition catalogue for his 1992 show at the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, every image in the book is toned yellow. We also see this in his serial works such as Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet (1988–ongoing) and Monochrome Painting (1988–1989).
5 Louise Lawler is one of the few artists who makes installation photography the primary subject of and context for her work.
6 At the time of Prina's 2001 show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, I was in the midst of organizing a re-hanging of the seminal Pictures exhibition, curated in 1977 by Douglas Crimp for Artists Space. To re-create the show, I used installation photos to replicate the original hanging as much as possible. Alongside each of the artist's works in the show I hung mounted enlargements of the black-and-white installation shots to demonstrate a disjuncture between past and present.
7 These exhibitions were curated by, respectively, Kynaston McShine (Jewish Museum, New York), Harald Szeemann (Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland), and McShine again (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Other installation photos that exist as important historical documents and touchstones include those taken of The Armory Show (New York, 1913) and the Exhibition of Degenerate Art (Munich, 1937); or numerous individual artist shows, including Joseph Beuys' Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (René Block Gallery, 1974), Yves Klein's Le Vide (Galerie Iris Clert, 1958), and Marcel Broodthaer's Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles (1968), to name only a few examples.
8 Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 15.
9 See, for example, the work of Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Long. Douglas Fogle's recent exhibition and catalogue, The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), brilliantly demonstrates how artists have used photography in this way.
10 See Rosalind E. Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). See also Krauss' use of Barthes: "Its unreality is that of the here, since the photograph is never experienced as an illusion; it is nothing but a presence (one must continually keep in mind the magical character of the photographic image). Its reality is that of a having-been-there, because in all photographs there is the constantly amazing evidence: this took place in this way." Roland Barthes, "Rhétorique de l'image," Communications, no. 4 (1964): 47; quoted in Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 2," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
11 Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," in Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1992), 56.
12 Ibid., 53.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 56.
15 Ibid.
16 O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 88.
17 Press release, March 2001.
18 Christopher Williams' show consisted of one work called Bouquet, for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo (1991). For the piece, he started with a cover of a French Elle magazine that pictured top fashion models wearing sailor hats bearing the name of each model's origin country. Williams then invited a floral designer to create a hand bouquet using flowers from each of the countries emblazoned on the hats. He then photographed the bouquet resting on a table, and hung this framed photo on a freestanding wall constructed in Hetzler's second floor. Williams instructed the installation photographer to document the empty first-floor gallery, since it was a part of his show. Prina selected this view of the show to highlight the importance of the easily missed moments and spaces that can occur in any given installation. Christopher Williams, conversation with the author, January 24, 2004.
19 A provocative example of Prina's application of the rule is a Gerhard Richter show that is represented by a gray card (since the installation was not photographed), a coincidentally apt substitute for his grisaille paintings as well as the monochromes and the mirrors (though not, one must add, the specific works displayed at Hetzler's gallery).
20 Hetzler's early gallery years betray many installation gaps, and in the chronological beginning of Galerie Max Hetzler we see an extended succession of gray card photographs. This signifies many things, a number of which are related to market histories: a gallery might not make installation pictures because the business organization is loose at best; there may be no money to hire a professional photographer; or perhaps images were lost, or borrowed and not returned.
21 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 296.
22 The description of the space is Prina's. Conversation with the author, January 27, 2003.
23 The dimensions of the models (including pedestals) are: two at 40 1/4 x 45 3/4 x 36 inches (102.3 x 116 x 91.5 cm); and seven at 40 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 36 inches (102.3 x 59 x 91.5 cm).
24 It should be noted that Prina was not at the time of the exhibition, nor subsequently, represented by Galerie Max Hetzler.
25 For two important essays on representation see: Brian Wallis, "What's Wrong with This Picture? An Introduction," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984); and Craig Owens, "Representation, Appropriation, and Power," in Beyond Recognition.
26 Press release, March 2001.
27 For more on the genealogy of site-specific practices, see Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), especially chapter 1.
28 For a comprehensive picture of these ideas, see James Meyer's thought-provoking essay in this book.
29 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture," in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 14.
30 It may be interesting to note Prina's activities as a musician and composer with regard to much of his work. Furthermore, see Mel Bochner's text on seriality and music, "The Serial Attitude," in Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 28–33.
31 Stephen Melville, "Promises, Premises," in Oehlen Williams 95, exh. cat. (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1995), 13. I must acknowledge that this catalogue was particularly inspirational during the organization of this book project.
32 This last permutation was subtitled "Ten Years After," taking place as it did ten years after the work's first installation.
33 Numbering is a device used consistently by Prina in his work.
34 Owned by the Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
35 For a concise history of the artist's book tradition, see
Johanna Drucker, "The Artist's Book as Idea and Form," in A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book and Writing, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 376–388.
36 Seth Siegelaub, quoted in Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: 1972), xiv.
37 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October 55 (Winter 1991): 124.
38 These drawings are related to axonometric drawings. For more on axonometric drawings, see the work and books of Peter Eisenman, including House of Cards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).