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Andy Grundberg, New York Times, 1/31/82
“In the past, Taussig has seemed to photograph with one eye
on the camera and the other on the competition. He is, it is fair
to say, an extremely smart photographer, but his acute awareness
of both photographic history and current fashions on the gallery
circuit always has made his work seem overly self-conscious. For
much of the 70's he made color prints depicting the facades of buildings
in Southern California, where he lives and teaches; besides looking
vaguely Constructivist, these pictures could not help but give one
visions of a head-on collision between the work of photographers
Michael Bishop and Grant Mudford. More recently, Taussig produced
a series of diptychs in which he shifted his vantage point by slightly
shifting his feet. As impishly puzzling as these peerings appear
to be, they could not fail to remind one of formal territory staked
out earlier and with more elan by Eve Sonneman and Jan Groover.
Taussig's new photographs at Robert Freidus Gallery (158 Lafayette
Street, through Feb. 13) are a refreshing change. Not that they
renounce self-consciousness - rather, they make explicit Taussig's
dependence on the wealth of photographic imagery that impinges on
him. The 35 prints are called ''Optical Collages''; each appropriates
a famous image from photographic history and fractures it through
a combination of mirrors and lenses that the photographer places
on the image before rephotographing it. The result is a Cubist-looking
jigsaw puzzle impervious to solution. Consequently, pictures such
as Stieglitz's classic ''The Steerage'' of 1907 and Edward Steichen's
well-known 1936 fashion photograph of three models and a white horse
have to be reconstructed in the mind before they become decipherable.
Such cavalier treatment of the medium's greatest accomplishments
may seem like desecration to some, but Taussig clearly intends to
pay homage, albeit in Duchampian fashion.
Taussig's appropriation of the past in these pictures is explicit
and thus palatable (and even fashionably post-modernist - Taussig
is a quick study, after all); however, his appropriation of the
present remains unexamined. One wishes, for example, that he had
victimized one of Victor Schrager's still lifes, which themselves
consist of appropriated illustrations and reproductions, or one
of Barbara Kasten's Constructivist-derived pictures, in which mirrors
are used to scramble the viewer's sense of space. Admittedly it
is more difficult to bracket the present with quotes than the past,
but it would be worth trying since the ''optical collages'' seem
to borrow formal and conceptual elements from Schrager's and Kasten's
work.
One also might wish that Taussig's vocabulary of collage were wider;
as it is, his style quotes only the early 20th century, although
his subjects range from a Muybridge photograph of the 1880's to
a Duane Michals of the 1970's. The abstractionist fragmentation
he achieves with his mirrors and lenses is attuned perfectly to
the spirit of Moholy-Nagy, and even possesses an ironic edge when
applied to the Stieglitz and Steichen pictures, but it seems inappropriate
and labored in the case of Diane Arbus's ''Child With a Toy Hand
Grenade,'' which was taken in 1962. Nevertheless, Taussig has achieved
something remarkable here, transforming himself from a photographer
whose images seem derivative to a photographer whose subject is
the derivation of images.”
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