LEFT, RIGHT, INSIDE, OUT: ART AND COMPARISON
Mostafa Heddaya, 2022
SOMETIME IN JANUARY 2016, the Instagram profile known as “@whos＿＿＿＿who” went live. Who is who? A big question, in general. Anonymous and prolific, the account places apparently similar images, usually of artworks, in comparative assemblies published as single posts. At minimum, these posts feature two artworks, but often three, four, or more crowd the frame. Offered without explanation by their anonymous comparer, the resulting combos of artworks are blank screens for their beholders’ projections. The act signed @whos＿＿＿ who was inaugurated by a jaunty pairing of two works side by side: one by Nicole Eisenman, the other by Tyson Reeder—both pared-down portraits, bluish and casual in mark, of long-haired sitters identically cropped at the bust. The implications were left unspoken, fodder for the comments section. Was the perception of this formal similitude working historically, suggesting priority or source? Was it only a flash of eyeball cognition or gestalt feeling, a quick play of semblance in the happenstance time of a downward scroll? ( … )
( … ) Artists, for their part, are not only projected; they have been projectionists, too. “So much for art history,” Allan Sekula asides in his Meditations on a Triptych, 1973, a work pairing a trio of found photographs with a table and booklet in which Sekula engages in their social-historical interpretation (the piece debuted the same year Morellet’s callout of LeWitt appeared). Little has been said of the ethnographic special case of the artist as art historian. Inasmuch as such a minor tradition in modern art can be isolated, it is traceable, variously, in the work of a transnational cadre formed in the 1970s and ’80s— including Sekula, Frederico Morais, Park Chan-Kyong, and Lorraine O’Grady—as well as in the earlier postwar projects of Eduardo Paolozzi and Marcel Broodthaers. All of these artists could be described as writerly (if not as artist critics). All are somehow present, intentionally or not, to the Wölfflinian definition of art history: “the development of modern seeing.”( … )