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Among the Idolaters: Three American Photographers

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Now one uses artworks to lure poor, exhausted, and sick human beings to the side of humanity’s road of suffering for a short lascivious moment…
— Friedrich Nietzsche (1887)

All that is ever put on display is on the pornographic side of things…
— Botho Struaß (2007)

The image has lost its power. It has been drained by its most ardent purveyors, who have photographed the world to oblivion. Now, we barely look at images as they flicker by our glazed perceptual apparatus. 

Three recent photographic shows are symptomatic of this condition: Ryan McGinley’s decade-old Yearbook at Shepparton Art Museum promises ‘full frontal’ nudity, as though penises had the power to shock (or excite). McGinley’s Yearbook plasters the walls of the gallery with hundreds of overlapping nude photographs, featuring cheery faces and jumbled background colours that provide a kaleidoscopic sensation. Daniel Jack Lyons’ portrait series Like a River, part of the PHOTO 2024 program, portrays members of a community in the Careiro region in the centre of northern Brazil. It promises to rejuvenate the increasingly mainstream queer movement with an exoticism it cannot deliver. Finally, Steve McCurry’s Icons at Seaworks in Williamstown suggests a deflated attempt at a prestige exhibition.

The idea of a ‘yearbook’ evokes a ritualistic valedictory book filled with unflattering images of high school students. Unlike Mike Kelley’s Day Is Done (2005-06), which unearths and recreates bizarre ‘extracurricular activities’ found in high school yearbooks, McGinley’s Yearbook simply strips its subjects. The gimmick of the nude no longer draws much attention, but the gambit of Yearbook is that en masse they might provoke a response. Instead, they recede into wallpaper, the echo of grungier times when pinups adorned bar walls.

Art gallery, the walls are completely covered with photographic portraits with colourful backgrounds.
Ryan McGinley, YEARBOOK, installation view, Shepparton Art Museum, 2024. Photo: Ryan McGinley.

These nudes have no hint of carnality insofar as they do not present a convincing representation of flesh but a flat, glossy surface — a wall plastered with form. The use of human figures as wallpaper is illustrative of Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘mass ornament’. Originally theorising the Tiller Girls, Kracauer describes these figures as shorn of ‘erotic meaning’, embodying ‘the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires’.1 More acutely, for Kracauer, the mass ornament organised a ‘godless mythological cult’.2 Idolatry is the appropriate category to outline the effects of a godless cult. Revering mere bodies, then mere images of bodies, we begin to forget the values that informed the representation of the nude human figure and enforced delicacy and tact against the bare-all ethos of the pornographic (and therapeutic) culture surrounding us. 

Strangely, the bifurcated reactions of outrage and adulation both indulge in this fetish, attributing powers to the image beyond any formal properties it may possess or reflection (even judgment) it may provoke. McGinley’s wallpaper nudes neither outrage nor provoke because their flattened banality disavows the ‘vertiginous category of experience to which art belongs’.3 As Theodor Adorno argues, ‘Aesthetic images stand under the prohibition on graven images.’4 Any purchase the image has on truth or beauty requires it to overcome the general prohibition on representation, as seduction or illusion.

McGinley uses ‘nondescript backgrounds’ so that his photographs ‘appear timeless. To exist nowhere.’5 This makes the images — to the minimal extent to which they are individually differentiated — a bouquet of muted colour interspersed with pointless black and whites. The effect is less the celebration of diversity and more a mosaic of arbitrary colours compensating for a homogeneity of tone and expression. The figures evince the kind of commercial joy that adorns the fashion magazines in which both McGinley and Daniel Jack Lyons display their work. They suggest movement in the same way an activewear commercial might — by frustrating the desire for movement that it evokes, displacing it. 

This is the effect of the fashion image: to evoke desire without actually delivering pleasure, displacing desire onto the object of consumption.6 Applied to ‘art’ portrait photography, the effect leaves the viewer with the impression of fun and liveliness without any depth. Like Lyons’ river-side boardwalk setting, McGinley’s Yearbook seems installed to be passed (over). Style has reached such a point of saturation that people do not clothe themselves to be seen but to be glanced at, and unclothe themselves not to be seen at all. ‘Eve’, suggests Elizabeth Bowen, was much more herself when she began putting flowers in her hair than when she just sat about in just – no fig-leaves. And she was much more herself than ever when she had got the fig-leaves on, and you and I are much more ourselves than she was.7

These exhibitions serve a restless eye — they are styled to catch the eye but never hold it. 

The achievement of this uniformity is an effect of style without substance. As Byung-Chul Han writes, ‘The ideal consumer is a person without character. Lack of character enables indiscriminate consumption.’8 The tradition of portraiture presented people as ruddy, indented personalities at the expense of smoothness. 

Boardwalk by a river, there are five boards will photos of people in the water, and one advertising a 'Queer Photo' exhibition,
Daniel Jack Lyons, from the series Like A River, 2019. Queer PHOTO Installation View.
Curated by Brendan McCleary. Presented by Midsumma and PHOTO Australia. Photo: Will
Hamilton-Coates. Courtesy PHOTO Australia

The commercial sphere is where smoothness achieves its highest fulfilment, and McGinley and Lyons’ work emerges from commercial contexts. First appearing in Vogue Brasil, Lyons’ Like a River abstracts from the turbulent socio-political context, striking, as one writer noted, a ‘serene note’.9 Despite this, Lyons wants the images to be ‘rooted in some form of positivity or celebratory space, even if the sociopolitical context appears dire.’ Lyons renders the sociopolitical context mute against the affirmation of both ‘deep [I]ndigenous traditions and modern identity politics’.10

Lyons and the PHOTO 2024 festival present the images as ‘queer’, presuming the American version of this identity category has seamless universal application. We should note, as Roger Lancaster argues, sexual and gender identities in Latin America, as elsewhere, remain largely determined by socioeconomic factors like class.11 Class is the strongest determinant of ‘empowerment’ that no amount of representation can amend. One of the most striking images has been described in some publications as ‘Wendel in Drag’.12 As Sarah Moroz writes, ‘his love of drag is, however, tempered by circumstance.’13 As Lancaster suggests of his informants’ pursuit of sexual identity,

When they strive for gayness, an unstigmatized identity, cosmopolitanism, modernity, they are effectively striving for a middle-class existence. And how could it be otherwise? Therein lies their unhappy predicament: they lack the material wherewithal to get what they want.14

In this context, and despite Lyons’ highly circumscribed humanitarian intentions (‘When I was younger, I used to really think that art could be an advocacy tool to create systematic change, at a high policy and human rights level… The change that I’m more interested in creating is on an individual level’), it is hard to discern how the images might participate in ‘empowering communities’ other than as representing them as participants in globally integrated ‘modern identity politics’.15 Lyons suggests that, ‘There was also a very intense desire among the queer community to be seen.’16 The problem the series must overcome, given the context in which it is displayed and the decision to excise specific contextual details, is the possibility that what the images show is not a queer community, located in time and space and engaged in wider struggles, but the (globalised) queer community of the Vogue-set and Footscray pedestrian.

Idolatrous culture that we are, we appear to have been seduced by the idea that representation is affirmation. Culture, as Herbert Marcuse theorised, once held an ‘affirmative’ function that elevated an idealised world essentially different from the factual world of the daily struggle for existence, yet realisable in every individual for himself “from within,” without any transformation of the state of fact. It is only in this culture that cultural activities and objects gain that value which elevates them above the everyday sphere. Their reception becomes an act of celebration and exaltation.17

Marcuse voiced a suspicion of the distracting or compensating function of this affirmative culture, insofar as it valorised the attainment of other-worldly goods like virtue instead of the attainment of material improvements in our real world. As he notes, and as Lyons affirms, affirmative culture inhabits the space of individual interiority, where it can roam as free as fantasy.

However, with the decline of bourgeois individualism, such a ‘protest against reification’ as embodied in cultural ideals is fated to ‘succumb to it in the end.’18 This is particularly true because the entire field of ‘culture’ (kultur) has been abdicated by those within it. As Judith Shklar observes of those who actively renounce the distinction of ‘art’, they ‘do not shrug off culture but nibble it to death’.19 In order for an image to take on affirmative powers, it requires a context in which images (and artists) select subjects and judge them worthy of representation. In a society so saturated with images, and in the absence of a cultural context that marks some images out from others as ‘art’, no such affirmation can survive. (This on its own is a reason to resurrect idolatry as a sin, in order to clear the field of images so that some may stand out as worth attending to.) Images have lost their suggestive power and become instances of exposure to the hegemony of the image-culture itself.

Photo of a woman with a burning match in her mouth, looking at the camera, wearing jewel-covered a cowboy hat and accessories.
Daniel Jack Lyons, from the series Like A River, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

Despite comparing working on Yearbook to working on the Sistine Chapel, McGinley is hostile to the division between art and commercial photography. Defensive about their role in subsidising his ‘more experimental work’, McGinley nevertheless asserts, ‘some of the projects I’m proudest of are editorial and commercial assignments…’.20 McGinley oscillates between a defensive posture that ‘my commercial and editorial work are not the same as my fine-art work’ and a series of comments that suggests their close integration.21 He complains that the ‘imposed divisions between commercial and fine art photography persist because people always want to keep you in a box’ and does not differentiate between the dissemination of his work ‘at the scale of popular culture —whether it’s through the influence of my artistic vision or on a billboard for a fashion brand.’22 McGinley seems actively invested in eroding the distinction between commercial and artistic photography, however his clout as a marketing photographer relies on the prestige of high art. Levi’s, he believes, created a campaign ‘based on my signature motifs and visual touchstones’, describing commercial assignments as ‘really collaborations with a company, bringing their brand identity to the world of my photographs’.23 And yet, as he has avowed, his photographs have no independent world (‘To exist nowhere’).24

This means they are perfect vessels for brands, and when nothing is being advertised, the aesthetic stylings of fashion and marketing photography persist, leaving a strangely empty feeling that something is being sold without quite being certain what it is. An emotion, an identity, a desultory lifestyle only available to New York City-based artist types, perhaps. Both McGinley and Lyons’ work is attributed the power of documenting subcultures, yet, it is no longer clear what subcultures mean within the rainbow ‘kaleidoscope’ of consumptive identities.

Culture, as Russell Jacoby muses, means ‘everything and anything’ these days. And why should we complain? ‘What is the danger if every group can be viewed as a “culture”?’, he asks, rhetorically.25 One consequence is that distinctions between commercial, artistic and documentary photographic practices are lost. Culture is simply different articulations of style that colourfully riff on a uniform political and economic system. 

This is visible in the comparison between Lyons and McCurry, whose portraits aspire to affirm and represent diversity while bathed in a benevolent humanitarian universalism. The difference is sentimentalised as style, while genuine cultural differences and, as Roger Lancaster reminds us, class and economic disparity are gently elided. The documentation of culture migrated from National Geographic to Vogue and so become the documentation of something called style, which is the epiphenomena of the economy; the decorations of capitalist triumph at the end of history.26 McCurry’s photographs specialise in the colour palette of Orientalism. They appeal, as older Orientalist images did, to the consumption of Western audiences, whose attitude ‘destroys the otherness of the other’, in the words of Han.27 

The brittle identities constructed from consumer style and our desiccated politics cannot sustain the depth necessary to support the image. Instead, it becomes a literal representation whose semblance of beauty and glossy surface afford a joyless experience, the shadow of pleasure and desire. In order to properly assess the meaning of an image, even its affirmative power, we need relief from the unrelenting bombardment of content. The project of affirmation-by-representation is undermined by the constant representation of everything and everyone. Ironically, the obsolete category of idolatry may serve more to restore the prestige of the image than the nicest photographic installation. 

Scott Robinson is a writer, academic and unionist, published in Overland, Memo Review, Index Journal, Arena, Monthly Review, Artlink, ArtsHub and elsewhere. He is currently associate editor at Philosophy, Politics, Critique.

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