{"id":8402,"date":"2017-03-01T17:00:33","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T17:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=8402"},"modified":"2020-07-28T20:59:12","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T20:59:12","slug":"art-journal-open-presents-to-record-to-interpret-to-comment-by-anna-craycroft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=8402","title":{"rendered":"Art Journal Open Presents \u201cTo Record, to Interpret, to Comment\u201d by Anna Craycroft"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Anna<\/a>
Anna Craycroft, The Earth Is a Magnet<\/em>, 2016,<\/strong> installation view, part of The Artist\u2019s Museum<\/em>, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, November 16, 2016\u2013March 26, 2017 (artwork \u00a9 Anna Craycroft; photographs \u00a9 Berenice Abbott\/Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc; photograph by Charles Mayer)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anna Craycroft\u2019s new project for Art Journal Open, \u201cTo Record, to Interpret, to Comment,\u201d does many things at once.<\/a>1<\/a><\/sup> From the outset, the Brooklyn\u2013based artist poignantly makes an imperative gesture, asking readers to reconsider how we come to know what we think we know about the history of modernist photography. Reproducing personal notes, letters, and technical documentation drawn from the rich archives of the Bernice Abbott collections at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the New York Public Library, Craycroft eloquently explicates her own twenty-first-century interpretation and commentary on Abbott\u2019s twentieth-century technical prowess. She notes how in the 1940s, Abbott invented Super Sight, a studio process for macrophotography, and also patented a camera designed on what Abbott called the \u201cdigital principle,\u201d which synched the depression of the camera\u2019s shutter by the photographer\u2019s finger with the blinking of her eye.2<\/a><\/sup> Rather than a revisionist account or counter narrative to the dominant strains of modernist photographic art history, what emerges is Craycroft\u2019s own conception of the medium: \u201cthe photograph lays claim to an incident, but it is not the incident. It exists between making and telling. The photograph is a testimony of its own event.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

As you read and click through the links to primary material, visual evidence, and anecdotal accounts that Craycroft has organized and annotated for Art Journal Open, you will learn of Craycroft\u2019s efforts to record, interpret, and comment on Abbott\u2019s immeasurable influence as an inventor, educator, archivist, curator, author, and activist alongside her own contingent subjectivity. Taking note of Abbott\u2019s pointed response, \u201cI am photographer, not a lesbian,\u201d to photographer Kaucyila Brooke after she requested permission to present images of Abbott\u2019s work in her paper for the 1986 CAA conference panel \u201cHomosexuality in the Arts: Broadening Our Critical Perspective,\u201d Craycroft here interprets Abbott\u2019s statement as a \u201cdeclarative refusal.\u201d Noting both the paradoxical nature of Abbott\u2019s denunciation and the privilege of historical judgement, Craycroft reminds us that Abbott \u201ccame of age before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and made a name for herself as a photographer during McCarthyism,\u201d helping to contextualize the extremism of the current political climate and its oppressive rhetoric on the role of women and nonconforming gender roles that continues to foment into official policy. Craycroft compellingly argues that for Abbott, \u201cphotography was an orientation.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> \u201cWhen I think of Abbott sublimating her private self into her photography, it reveals a new strength in the work. Rather than leading with individualist heroics, hers is a proud position of bearing witness,\u201d Craycroft writes in her Art Journal Open essay, \u201cI love the contradiction here, as witness is commonly considered a second-class status of subjugation, something that is foisted on one, rather than a choice. For centuries it was the only option available to women who may have wanted to act but were refused. Even to witness is to be involved and to effect change, albeit indirectly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo Record, to Interpret, to Comment\u201d also acts as a tertiary space between two current exhibitions featuring Craycroft\u2019s work in Boston and Los Angeles: The Artist\u2019s Museum<\/em> at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Tuning the Room<\/em> at Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. For The Artist\u2019s Museum<\/em> (November 15, 2016\u2014March 26, 2017)<\/a>, the curator Dan Byers invited Craycroft to collaborate on the exhibition, during which she was able to, as she writes, \u201creflect on how the range of Abbott\u2019s practice expands the parameters of an artistic discipline beyond the limitation of being either singular or plural,\u201d which resulted in her multivalent installation, The Earth Is a Magnet<\/em> (2016). In addition to Abbott\u2019s photographs and archival materials, The Earth Is a Magnet<\/em> features artworks by Craycroft\u2019s own peers to whom she invited to share her space within the exhibition: A.L. Steiner, Lucy Raven, Matt Keegan, Jill Magid, Katherine Hubbard, MPA, Mika Rottenberg, Erika Vogt, and Fia Backstr\u00f6m. Ben Maltz Gallery presents Craycroft\u2019s solo exhibition Tuning the Room<\/em> (January 28\u2013April 16, 2017)<\/a>, curated by the gallery’s director, Kate McNamara. \u201cThe measure and alterations of Craycroft\u2019s \u2018room tuning\u2019 are framed in relation to its setting within the art gallery of an art school,\u201d the press release for the exhibition notes, \u201cIn the wake of the U.S. presidential election, and in anticipation of the exhibition runtime falling during the first months of the new administration, Tuning the Room is a proposal to pay attention to the role that art and art education play in how voices are heard.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Above all, \u201cTo Record, to Interpret, to Comment\u201d enacts the very logic Craycoft associates with Abbott\u2019s own working methods in her essay: \u201cthat the singularity of her focus resulted in such a diversity of engagements reveals how the very discipline of being an artist can be inherently expansive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Gloria Sutton, Web Editor<\/p>\n

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    \n
  1. This project also manifests Art Journal Open\u2019s editorial goal of establishing benchmarks for representing artistic practice and research on the web. I want to thank Anna Craycroft herself for her ongoing generosity in sharing her work and working methods, and acknowledge the contribution of CAA\u2019s associate editor for digital publications, Alyssa Pavley, who managed the technical side of bringing the images to the web. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Anna Craycroft, \u201cTo Record, to Interpret, to Comment,\u201d Art Journal Open, at http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=8039, as of March 1, 2017. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Anna Craycroft, (A)<\/em>, in The Artist\u2019s Museum, exh. cat., ed. Dan Byers (New York: Prestel, 2016), 78. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Ibid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Anna Craycroft: Tuning the Room<\/em>, at http:\/\/www.otis.edu\/ben-maltz-gallery\/anna-craycroft-tuning-room, as of February 29, 2017. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Gloria Sutton<\/p>\n

    Art Journal Open presents “To Record, to Interpret, to Comment” by Anna Craycroft<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":8159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-projects",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8402"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14037,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8402\/revisions\/14037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}