As part of Paris Internationale 2019, 1856 presented “Everything is fine” with work by Patricia L. Boyd, Ian Burn, Lauren Burrow, and Fred Lonidier.

The work of art is possibly one of the only commodities with equal claim to both private and civic space. It is due to how artworks are embedded in our social relations that we recognise their different values: as historical artefacts, as objects of appreciation (“beautiful” or sensible to taste), political critiques, private financial investments, modes of communication, public documents of the national imaginary—the list goes on. However, the line that divides private and civic has become ever more indiscernible in recent decades—for instance, the erosion of public infrastructure and state industry, private capitalisation on culture and entertainment, the withering of the 8 hour work day, the return of 19th century work conditions, and the ongoing enclosure of our personal lives by a new technological industrialism. In response we might ask, in a reflective manner, what capacity the work of art has to represent these problems at the different points of its reception. The four artists selected here, at different times and with different methods, have asked this of their work.

Curated by Nicholas Tammens. Designed by Ziga Testen.

More on information can be found here.

Published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 24 September, 2016–2 January, 2017), The Uses of Photography examines a network of artists who were active in San Diego between the late 1960s and early 1980s and whose experiments with photography opened the medium to a profusion of new strategies and subjects. Working within the framework of conceptual art, these artists introduced urgent social issues and themes of everyday life into that seemingly neutral territory, with photographic works that took on hybrid forms, from books and postcards to video and text-and-image installations. If photography had come to occupy a new, more prominent position in the art world of the late 1960s, largely within the context of conceptual art, much of the medium’s radical potential nonetheless remained latent.

Tracing a crucial history of photoconceptual practice, The Uses of Photography focuses on an artistic community that formed in and around the University of California San Diego, founded in 1960, and its visual arts department, founded in 1967. Artists such as Eleanor Antin, Allan Kaprow, Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Carrie Mae Weems, to name a few, employed photography and its expanded forms as a means to dismantle modernist autonomy, to contest notions of photographic truth, and to engage in political critique. The influence of these artists is felt throughout the global contemporary art world today, yet their common roots in San Diego—a military town far removed from the art world—has rarely been acknowledged. While these artists are celebrated internationally for their individual achievements, this exhibition is the first to explore how their practices emerged at a critical time and place.