Cotton concludes in Chapter 7: Revived and Remade surveying work that builds on existing work, either through some form of imitation, or through combination. This work is highly self-referential and often somewhat cynical, as if to demonstrate wit or cleverness. She cites as a seminal example the work of Cindy Sherman, who mocks photographic conventions by recreating them in carefully staged images featuring herself as model. The work of Nikki S Lee is compared as somehow similar, but Lee’s anthropological approach – spending time getting to know and blend in with different subcultures before shooting herself in these guises – seems more authentic than Sherman’s mockery and seems also less concerned with form or style and more with content.
Leonard and Dunye’s archive of a pseudo-historical character – The Fae Richards Photo Archive – seems to fall somewhere in between, a playful fiction that builds on tropes, something like Lucas’ Indiana Jones. Richard Prince has been in the news recently because of his Instagram exhibit, but he is mentioned here for something that sounds far more interesting – re-presenting billboard art with all the text stripped out. One of the few projects reviewed in Cotton’s text that I have actually seen is Susan Meiselas’ mammoth archival project Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. One that I would very much like to find is Jocham Schmid’s collection of discarded photos, Pictures From the Street.
And that is the end of the book, which finishes rather unceremoniously with no concluding summary. I suppose Cotton did what she set out to do by pointing the reader to major trends and a number of projects or artists worth following up. I was disappointed to find Cotton’s discussion limited to Western artists and Western art traditions and look forward to a broader discussion in the next survey text recommended for an OCA course.
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