Uninteresting pictures

art and technocracy, 1968

Joshua Shannon

pp. 227-244

in: Timothy Scott Brown, Andrew Lison (eds), The global sixties in sound and vision, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

On the morning of November 23, 1968, Douglas Huebler sat on 42nd Street, taking pictures with his eyes closed. Having focused his lens on the Vanderbilt Avenue crosswalk, he shot ten photographs, each time tripping the shutter, as he archly put it, "at the instant that the sound of traffic approaching 42nd Street stopped enough to suggest that pedestrians could cross the street." The result, which Huebler flatly called Variable Piece #4, New York City, November, 1968, was suitably, if comically, dull: ten indifferent photographs of mid-town pedestrians (Figure 13.1). In keeping with Huebler's practice at the time, these images were exhibited in no particular order, together with a signed typescript coolly recounting the procedure.¹