Composed of works from the Michael Lowe
collection, "Using Photography" consists of
Conceptual Photography primarily from the 1960s
and 1970s, as well as performance based
photography. Both categories blur traditional
views of photography as art or documentation and
present photography as a more notional pursuit.
As curator Donald Karshan suggested in 1970, "…
the initial role of photography in Conceptual art
was to document actions or phenomena. … The
naive view that underlies much early photography
by Conceptual artists was that the camera was an
‘opinion-less copying device’, it was a way of
pointing at or indexing something in the world.”
The works in Using Photography alternate
between original photographs and various photobased
media that use photographic imagery as a
point of departure. Many of the artists’ books,
posters, and other documents presented served as
vehicles for photo-based art in the 1960s and
1970s. The democratic nature of printed matter
appealed to artists less interested in the grand
gestures of art production and focused more on
the dematerialized aspects of art. Some pieces
draw from their roots and were intended as
informational works, however public fetishization
and private collection has elevated the status of
such pieces to rare commodity, much to the
consternation of some.
Artists include Vito
Acconci, Marina Abromovic, Christian Boltanski,
Robert Cumming,Jan Dibbets, Hans Peter
Feldmann, N.E Thing, Les Levine, Mike Kelley, Jim
Shaw, and Giuseppi Penone, among others.
Michael Lowe is a private dealer and collector
specializing in conceptual and minimal art of the
1960s and 1970s. His collection and private gallery
are housed in the former 1913 Cincinnati Freie
Press Company building located in downtown
Cincinnati.
