Thomas Struth's Museum Photographs and the Textual Experience of Photography

Thomas Struth's museum photographs are pictures of people in museums looking at paintings. In each of these photographs, Struth exposes a relationship between a depicted art work and its audience. Struth captures a moment in which the museum visitors repeat the form of the painting at which they look through their poses, clothing, gestures and/or groupings. But as one looks at people looking, one also doubles and therefore belongs to the object being viewed. One might even imagine a photograph being taken of one's own back while looking. In this way, Struth challenges the viewer's position as an exterior subject.Several critics and curators have suggested that these photographs participate in a critique of the museum setting and/or the experience that it provides. However, the fact that one is implicated as a participant in this situation complicates the possibility of assuming an exterior critical position. Thus Struth's work raises questions about where one stands in issuing a critique of experience.It is in working through these questions, and in exploring the character of experience itself, that a connection to writings by G.W.F. Hegel and Georges Bataille is explored. In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel traces the narrative or process by which the subject comes to take possession of his or her experience. This process, according to Hegel, involves coming to recognize negativity or death as integral to one's being. Bataille later critiques Hegel's project, asserting that the very nature of experience, as put forth by Hegel, exceeds possession. That is, Bataille takes Hegel's claims about death and negativity so seriously, that he applies these to Hegel's own text. This argument between Hegel and Bataille about experience establishes the character of experience as that which constantly surpasses itself. This is quite close to the chain which Struth's museum works set forth, as the experience of each photograph extends beyond the viewer's own position. In that this experience is always moving outside its own bounds, we might better say thatStruth's experience is self-critical.Thinking about Struth's work as a chain of shifting relationships leads to a question about what exactly Struth comes after. Similarly, connections between these photographs and these written works raise questions about the medium in which Struth's project participates and the history to which this series of photographs belongs.Included is a discussion of Struth's place within the history of photography, as well as the relationship the museum photographs posit between photography and painting. There is a discussion of Benjamin Buchloh's suggestion that certain works by Struth bear a relationship to sculpture through a reenactment of impossibilities. It is here that the act of writing—especially as elaborated in a text by Jacques Derrida—becomes important.Derrida reads Bataille's reading of Hegel and writes another text, acknowledging his participation in the chain which they set forth. In doing so, Derrida asserts that each text requires another text to come after it to reveal the way in which meaning overflows the language which attempts to hold it. Thus, Derrida holds that writing and experience have the same structure, or that experience is importantly textual. In this way we mightunderstand Struth's work, with its necessary historicity, to be a form of writing. Thus Struth's museum works engage in a type of history writing, and carry implications for understanding the practice of writing art history. These photographs make evident a necessary relationship between art, history and writing, which has been at work all along in the history of art. The author, then, necessarily acknowledges her own participation in Struth's chain through the writing of this paper, and through her creation of a place for the reader who will follow.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History of Art

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

1998

Author dc:creator

• Napier, Ellen Bethany

Contributors dc:contributor

• Melville, Stephen

• Art History

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1364223682

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1364223682