RE:CIRCULATION No. 012. The Pictures Generation was named in 2009. For thirty years before that, its artists were filed under other headings, and the printed matter recorded every decision.
ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA, Untitled Film Stills #30, 2006, artist postcard, Raster Gallery, Warsaw.
Number 30
A postcard from Raster Gallery, Warsaw, 2006. A woman in a staged interior, in colour, titled Untitled Film Stills #30. The artist is Aneta Grzeszykowska. Over a year she restaged all 70 of Cindy Sherman’s black-and-white Film Stills, the composition and make-up “strictly observed”, the clothes and settings found in Warsaw.
It is an inheritance claimed in public. It also asks the question this issue follows: how does a group of artists become a history, and who decides what it is called?
Five artists, then thirty
The name has two sources. Pictures, Douglas Crimp’s exhibition at Artists Space, New York, ran from 24 September to 29 October 1977 with five artists: Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith. Sherman was not among them. She entered the argument in print, in Crimp’s revised essay in October, spring 1979.
In 2009 the Metropolitan Museum’s The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 hung more than 160 works by 30 artists under the same word, with Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, David Salle, Sarah Charlesworth and Louise Lawler among them.
Between the exhibition and the history lie three decades in which nobody knew the name would stick. The publications from those years record how these artists were read before the verdict.
1991: London, first issue
“Diamonds and Dirt: Richard Prince’s Greatest Hits”, over Untitled (Cowboys), 1987. frieze, Issue 1, London, 1991.
frieze Issue 1 runs a spread across the fold, “Diamonds and Dirt: Richard Prince’s Greatest Hits”, printed over Untitled (Cowboys), 1987. Around it sit an undecided Turner Prize shortlist and Gavin Turk’s Cave, the degree show he was failed for that summer. Prince arrives not as one of a New York group but as a lead story for a London magazine still deciding what it would become.
1992–93: the city, the abject
The Power of the City / The City of Power, Whitney ISP Papers No. 1, 1992.
Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Whitney ISP Papers No. 3, 1993. Cover: Robert Gober.
The Whitney’s Independent Study Program published its papers as a numbered series. No. 1, The Power of the City / The City of Power (1992), sets Barbara Kruger among Guy Debord, Daniel Buren, Lady Pink, Rammellzee and David Hammons: a case in an argument about who gets to occupy and rewrite urban space. No. 3, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (1993), turns Julia Kristeva’s theory on the Whitney’s own collection and places Sherman beside Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and Mike Kelley. Two years, two headings, neither of them Pictures. (RE:CIRCULATION No. 005 looked at what that catalogue remembers and its later history forgot. Our copy has since left the archive.)
1995–2000: gender, lineage, Pop
Féminin–Masculin: Le sexe de l’art, Petit journal, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1995. Cover: Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991.
In Paris the Centre Pompidou’s Féminin–Masculin: Le sexe de l’art (26 October 1995 to 12 February 1996) traced two lines of descent across about 500 works, one from Picasso and one from Duchamp. Our copy is the Petit journal, the fold-out guide visitors carried round the galleries, with a Guardian review of 7 November 1995 still inside. Sherman is on the artist list, as an heir to Duchamp.
The Guardian, 7 November 1995, kept with the guide for three decades.
Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, 1999.
Four years later New York University’s Grey Art Gallery drew a family tree. Inverted Odysseys (1999–2000) set Sherman beside Claude Cahun and Maya Deren, born 1894 and 1917, as explorers of the self as fiction. The gallery does not claim she knew their work, and we have found nothing to say she did. The lineage belongs to the exhibition.
JEFFREY SPALDING, ABCs of Pop Art: America, Britain, Canada, Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, 2000.
In 2000 Jeffrey Spalding’s ABCs of Pop Art placed David Salle under America, among Pop’s heirs. Nine years before the Met hung him as Pictures Generation, a museum survey filed him as Pop.
2013: Prince does the filing
Walter Dahn: 4th Time Around / (My Back Pages), curated by Richard Prince, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, 2013.
In 2013 Richard Prince curated Walter Dahn: 4th Time Around / (My Back Pages) at Venus Over Manhattan, New York. The two had met in 1990 at Dahn’s show at Gladstone Gallery, and by 2013, the gallery said, Prince had collected Dahn’s work for two decades. A co-founder of Cologne’s Mülheimer Freiheit painters is a long way from Artists Space. Here the Pictures artist is no longer the one being placed. He chooses the paintings, the order and the title.
2026: back to 1976
INTERNATIONAL LOCAL, A che punto sei? / Where Are You Standing?, Venice.
In 1976, a year before Pictures, Sarah Charlesworth, Joseph Kosuth and Anthony McCall worked together as International Local and made A che punto sei? / Where Are You Standing? for the 37th Venice Biennale: a poster mapping the Biennale as a maze, with separate routes for professionals, artists and the public. That year Charlesworth began stripping the text from newspaper front pages, the work that became Modern History.
In 2026 the poster returned to Venice inside Kosuth’s exhibition at Casa dei Tre Oci, The exchange value of language has fallen to zero. Charlesworth, who died in 2013, is back in the city as one third of a collective, inside another artist’s show. Where is she standing? It depends which history you read.
Before the verdict
Laid out by date, these objects show a canon being made. The same artists appear as urban critique, as the abject, as the gender question, as heirs to Cahun and as Pop. Each publication fixed a reading at the moment it was printed, before anyone knew which would last.
Reverse of the Raster card.
That is why they matter now. For a researcher, each is a dated position: evidence of how the work was read then, not how it has been read since. For a collector, each is the moment before consensus, held on paper. Grzeszykowska’s card belongs with them. Made in 2006, three years before the Met’s survey, it claims Sherman’s work as something to inherit without waiting for the name.
The objects that stayed inside the name are in the collection: Pictures Generation Ephemera.
Any of these objects can be seen at the archive. Write to us and we’ll open an Online Viewing Room around them, or book an appointment to see them in person.
Request a viewing room · Book an archive visit
Further reading: RE:CIRCULATION No. 005 · The Video Artists of Abject Art · RE:CIRCULATION No. 006 · The Fourth Man Goes Solo.
New groups from the collection reach the newsletter a week before anyone else. Sign up at the foot of any page.
