tried, convicted, and executed in the early 1950s for
treason as a result of Cold War paranoia in the
United States after World War II. The placement
of an iconic image of historically contentious figures
where one would expect an advertisement jars the
viewer from the idle distraction that one usually
experiences in this public structure. Other artists
from the 1980s, such as the Americans Annette
Lemieux and Barbara Kruger, similarly combined
appropriated imagery and sculptural constructs to
provoke reflections on the latent meanings of images
in the mass media.
Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s politically charged
work combined aspects of the work of the 1960s
and 1970s in its use of photography to document
the artist’s experiences in a particular site or loca-
tion and the adoption in the 1980s of the visual
techniques of presentation in the mass media.
Recording his interactions with communities in
poverty-stricken and war-torn third world coun-
tries, Jaar combined sculptural elements that
referred to a particular situation of his subjects,
with images of them, often placed in lightboxes.
InGeography=War, 1989, for example, images of
African people affected by chemical waste poison-
ing are placed within lightboxes, which themselves
are suspended above an array of large steel barrels
filled with water that reflect the images. Jaar’s use
of the barrels and the water (a direct reference to
the leakage of chemicals from similar barrels into
the peoples’ water supply) to ‘‘re-present’’ the
images demonstrates a unique synthesis between
sculptural elements and photography.
Artists in the early 1990s continued to use the
combination of photography and sculpture to articu-
late political concerns. Robert Gober, for example,
incorporated an image of himself as a model in a
wedding dress advertisement in fabricatedNew York
Timesnewspaper stacks. The newspaper headlines
had been deliberately ‘‘placed’’ to emphasize issues
relating to deaths from AIDS, combining with the
image of Gober-as-bride to reflect on notions of gay
identity. The bundle of newspapers—a fixture on the
streets of New York City—not only presenting an
oddly familiar and decontextualized structure within
the gallery space, but also made a quietly provoca-
tive statement about the status of AIDS treatment
and those who suffered from the disease in the Uni-
ted States and elsewhere. Matthew Barney’s produc-
tion stills of his surrealistic video and film epics on
the crises of masculinity at the end of the millennium
were placed within sculptural frames that were simi-
lar to the props and spaces depicted in the videos,
films, and photographs. Other artists in the 1990s
and into the 2000s have tended to eschew themes
overtly dealing with political issues of identity,
returning to the more conceptual practice that char-
acterized the interactions between photography and
sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. Los Angeles-based
Charles Ray’s 1992 work,No, presents a self-portrait
of the artist, who is represented as a lifelike manne-
quin. A related photographic installation,Yes, 1990,
depicts Ray experiencing LSD in an image that is
bent almost imperceptibly and hung on a slightly
convex wall. Italian artist Guiseppe Gabellone’s
photographs of the elaborately constructed sculp-
tures that he fabricates become the sole record of
that sculpture’s existence as an important part of the
process is the subsequent destruction of the sculpture
upon completion of the photograph. Further ad-
vances in (and increased availability of) digital
image creating processes have created greater possi-
bilities for younger and emerging artists to fuse the
photograph and three-dimensional structures in the
years to come.
DominicMolonRobert Smithson, A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey), 1968,
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of
Susan and Lewis Manilow.
[Photograph#Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
Photo#Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, New York]PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCULPTURE