Retour de Rome
Photographs by Clara Gutsche and David Miller

May 1 - 31
Opening May 1, 7 - 11pm

STILL REVOLUTION

In 2002, Gutsche and Miller photographed Rome over a period of six months. Retour de Rome is focused on a complex history marked by pervasive change. The work, though grounded in architecture, is chiefly about human relationships to man-made spaces and buildings. The images captured by the two photographers distill the chaos, richness and surfeit that is Rome, suspending moments in time and history.

RECONSIDERING ROME
by Eduardo Ralickas

It is often overlooked that for several centuries, Rome was the destination of choice for emerging pan-European image-makers who were tempted by the promise of social ascendancy one could then glean from the newly consolidated – and rising – field of the Fine Arts. Whether one was an artisan or a craftsperson, one went to Rome in the hopes of polishing one’s aesthetic education and attaining artistic maturity, that is, in order finally to become a master or a fully fledged artist, in the modern sense of the term. Rome, that urban space in continual flux lying between an irretrievably lost Antiquity and a perpetually unfinished Renaissance, embodied the very notion of a spiritual incubator: therein were born the great ones; therein were engendered new forms.

Countless generations of painters and sculptors treaded down the Roman road to secure their artistic Patent of nobility, which could be granted, one then believed, only by pilgrimage to the places of art and architecture, by being in the very presence of masterpieces one only knew through pictures. Once the sojourn was completed and the desired metamorphosis consummated, one went home (to Paris or to some province) and exhibited, as per customary practice, one’s latest body of work to the delight of the rapacious novelty craving public. Such works, as well as the signature they bore, were now endowed with a symbolic capital guaranteed by the seal of the “Italian climate”. Two entities were fostered by means of this centuries-old pattern (which disappeared only when Rome lost its stronghold as the capital of civilized culture): the “author function” and the “work of art” – the latter term denoting the most reactionary of meanings, for it eclipses an entire range of dubious political functions once ascribed to images and their magic. One ought not to forget Walter Benjamin’s succinct phrase here: there is no work of culture which is not at the same time a work of barbarity.

Such exhibitions were commonly called “Retour de Rome”. The question that arises given the present context is: From what are we returning now? Indeed, Clara Gutsche and David Miller’s artistic collaboration allows one to assess the historical constructions that underpin our current notions of artistic identity. Their practice as documentary photographer at the fringes of the contemporary art world (which has always had some trouble integrating image-makers who do not conform with dominant notions of authorship) provide key insights given their particular vantage-point. In some respects, to “return” from Rome is to pose the question of the social function of art, as well as to challenge the status of the artist and of his or her media choices. Moreover, to “return” from Rome with a documentary body of work when the art milieu’s tastes lie elsewhere is openly to declare a series of refusals, not least of which is the refusal of the traditional artist function (which does not adequately encompass that of photographer or documentarian).

Gutsche and Miller’s “returns” are numerous: there is a “media return” directed at the topographical tradition in nineteenth-century photography, which they have clearly mastered; there is also an “historical return” which is signaled by the show’s hanging, which echoes the historical “Retours de Rome”; of course, one can speak of a “literal return” from the Eternal City, where they both lived and worked for several months to produce the works at hand; and lastly, there is a critical return”, perhaps the most important of all, a backward glance at postmodernism, which is now a historical fact upon which one may reflect.

The strength of this two-tiered project (which already bears in its breast the seeds of irony, that echo, as Sperber and Wilson have it, of other people’s sayings, which one mentions without using) is to have orchestrated a dialogue with postmodern photography in a language that is wholly modern. In fact, documentary photography is practiced here without paying heed to the various deconstructions of the eighties. Moreover, it is as if such critical operations had never really touched documentary practice in the first place, which pursues its course quite naturally.

At the heart of Gutsche and Miller’s project lies a confrontation between the photographic medium and the concept of the fake – in this light, Rome is the very site of doubling: Rome harbours roman copies of lost Greek originals, imperfect copies of Old Masters, pictorial copies of “eternal” monuments that only live on through postcards or their ancestors (i.e., vedute and topographical paintings) etc. Ultimately, if it is no longer pertinent to ascribe to postmodernism the novel idea of an aesthetics of quoting, it follows that photography is thus free to pursue tasks other than those of exposing the structure of the fake at every turn – other tasks, such as that of framing everydayness in places such as Rome – the banality of tourism and crowds included. The historicity of the photographic document is being replayed here as one bears witness to a form of “situated” critique, to the work of critical reflection motivated by a sociologically informed praxis.

The result is far from banal: the viewer is in the midst of a heterogeneous collection of tableaux by means of which he or she can travel, (re)disover a seductive topography, and above all relive (without any appeal to the notion of originality) an experience that is paradoxically singular yet conventional. And out of which is made the tourism of the gaze.

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