Rosalind Krauss - Photographys Discursive Spaces - 9350 Words

Photographys Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View Rosalind Krauss Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, The Crisis in the Discipline. (Winter, 1982), pp. 311-319. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28198224%2942%3A4%3C311%3APDSL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8 Art Journal is currently published by College Art Association. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please†¦show more content†¦The lithograph belongs to the discourse of geology and, thus, of empirical science. In order for it to function within this discourse, the ordinary elements of topographical description had to be restored to the image produced by Fig. 1 Timothy OSullivan, Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake (Nevada), 1868. Fig. 2 Photolithograph after OSullivan, Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Published in King Survey report, 1875. Winter 1982 311 OSullivan. The coordinates of a continuous homogeneous space, mapped not so much by perspective as by the cartographic grid, had to be reconstructed in terms of a coherent recession along an intelligibly horizontal plane retreating towards a definite horizon. The geological data of the tufa domes had to be grounded, coordinated, mapped. As shapes afloat on a continuous, vertical plane, they would have been ~ s e l e s s . ~ And the photograph? Within what discursive space does it operate? Aesthetic discourse as it developed in the nineteenth century organized itself increasingly around what could be called the space of exhibition. Whether public museum, official salon, worlds fair, or private showing, the space of exhibition was constituted in part by the continuous surface of wall, a wall