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Levitating before a massive rocky mountainside dusted with snow, the leaders of Germany's most powerful corporations sit at long tables. Some are attentive while others are distracted. The tables float in front of the rock face or perhaps are somehow mounted to it. Above the mountains, the corporate logos float against a flat gray sky. Below the mountains, a vast audience, seen from behind, looks up toward the board members. The audience, faceless and gray, is shrouded in darkness. Completed in haste to debut at his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in the spring of 2001, Andreas Gursky's Stockholder Meeting, Diptych was received at the time with a mixture of puzzlement and hostility. While the show was up, word of mouth had it that the image was "weird." Edward Leffingwell wrote in Art in America that "in the polyglot hubbub that was part of the experience of repeated visits to the galleries, viewers stopped to figure out this work. Some seemed uncomfortable with the technology that had helped to create this cut-and-paste Rushmore, voicing uncertainty about its implications." (1) Most were less charitable. Peter Plagens, in an otherwise positive review, wrote in Newsweek that the image, "sacrifices too much of what Gursky himself calls his 'connection to the real world' to the computer." (2) Michael Kimmelman, who wrote in the New York Times that Gursky's art "is instantly attractive to the point of alarm," similarly suggested that "Mr. Gursky's least successful work ... a hokey montage with flat-footed minimalist pretense, ratchets up the technical gadgetry until it becomes the subject of the art, an uninteresting result. When there's magic it entails traditional formal satisfaction." (3) Finally, Michael Fried, with an uncharacteristic lack of explanation, dismissed Stockholder Meeting in his 2008 book on contemporary photography as "one of the few outright failures in Gursky's retrospective exhibition." (4) The diptych has since been withdrawn. Versions of the MoMA exhibition that traveled to the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art all omitted the work. A Google image search similarly turns up no currently available electronic versions of the image. But the fact that the image seems destined to occupy a cul-de-sac within the artist's personal career should be no deterrent to its re-examination. Nothing reveals the social dimensions of pictorial rhetoric better than rhetoric that has been suppressed to the point of near-invisibility. This essay proposes an alternate framework for thinking about this image, one grounded in the history of photomontage. Quite simply, I suspect that if people look at Gursky's work in one hundred years (which at this point seems likely), this particular image will appear utterly signal. In stepping outside the boundaries of photography into photomontage, Gursky precisely limned the boundaries of his audience's receptivity. Almost a decade later, Stockholder Meeting remains a highly unusual work; its combination of nuance and bombast remains genuinely troublesome. On rereading the many contemporaneous commentaries on Stockholder Meeting, one is struck by the near-absence of the term montage. Only Kimmelman uses the word, as previously quoted, but fails to articulate its meaning. The current invisibility of the concept, and its importance to German photography of the twentieth century, underlies a critical lacuna. Recalling the origins of the Berlin Dadaists' visual technique, George Grosz retraced the formal and political origins of photomontage in one step: In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage ... we had no idea of the immense possibilities or of the thorny but successful career that awaited the new invention. On a piece of cardboard, we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student songbooks, and dog food, labels from Schnapps and wine bottles and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will, in such a way as to say in pictures what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words. … |
