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it in formalist or auteurist boundaries’ (226). Similarly, Crimp insisted thatphotography is postmodern in a way that painting can never be, and that as suchphotography as a medium has ruptured the paradigms of art, history, representa-tion, and subjectivity that subtend the discourses of aesthetic modernism. BothCrimp and Solomon-Godeau also valorized photography’s inherent ambiguity,insisting that its opacity is a ‘critical’ tool, one that reveals our (modernist) desiresfor meaning from pictures, an opacity that Craig Owens (1980a, 1980b) wouldalso laud as ‘allegorical’ in his promotion of photography’s postmodernity.Notwithstanding the critique of representation, then, postmodern photog-raphy theorists wanted to have their representational critique and their essen-tialized photography, too. Despite claiming the primacy of representation overmedium, postmodern theorists nonetheless declared photography to be the medium of postmodernism, and claimed that the characteristics of photog-raphy made it uniquely suited to postmodern ‘institutional and/or represen-tational critique, analysis, or address’ (Solomon-Godeau 1984: 76). Crimp andSolomon-Godeau both charged that photography history had ‘repressed’ or‘disavowed’ photography’s numerous discursive histories, and so, Crimp (1980:91) suggested, ‘it seems that we may accurately say of postmodernism thatit constitutes precisely the return of the repressed’, and thus the ‘return’ ofphotography, heralded as uniquely postmodern.In ‘Pictures’, an essay developed from an exhibit Crimp curated that intro-duced the works of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch, JackGoldstein, and Robert Longo, Crimp celebrated the dissolution of purity inartistic media. Citing Michael Fried’s 1967 ‘Art and Objecthood’, in whichFried advocated Greenberg’s formalist criteria for media, and warned that whatlay ‘between the arts’ was ‘theater’, Crimp characterized postmodern art practiceas wilfully occupying that ‘corrupted’ space and employing ‘film, photography,video, [and] performance’ in works that evoked the very temporality condemnedby Fried. 17 Crimp and others lauded works by Levine and Sherman for decon-structively referring beyond themselves rather than self-critically referring to themselves. Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’, Levine’s appropriation of high artphotographs as her own, Prince’s appropriation of Marlboro Man advertise-ments, and Longo’s performative tableaux were ‘pictures’ first, ones that drewupon familiar images to serve unfamiliar or opaque ends deemed ‘critical’ – notof themselves, in modernist fashion, but of the unreflective consumption ofsuch images in mainstream culture and of their underlying social conditions.Although the tactics may have been different, the modernist model for thisacclaimed postmodern critical practice is the historical avant-garde. Avant-garde‘anti-aesthetic’ art – entre guerre movements such as Dada, Constructivism, andSurrealism – traditionally excluded from formalist modernism, often deployedphotography and, specifically, photomontage, toward critical ends: namely, as acritique of traditional and even early twentieth-century art that had attainedto bourgeois respectability and profitability. More significantly, the historicalavant-garde’s various negations were aimed at the bourgeois society responsible