James Coleman (October Files)

OCTOBER

FILES

JAMES COLEMAN

5

JAMES COLEMAN

OCTOBER FILES Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, Mignon Nixon, and Malcolm Turvey, editors

Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson Eva Hesse, edited by Mignon Nixon Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph James Coleman, edited by George Baker

JAMES COLEMAN

edited by George Baker

essays by Raymond Bellour, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, Jean Fisher, Luke Gibbons, Rosalind Krauss, Anne Rorimer, and Kaja Silverman

OCTOBER FILES 5 The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. All images, diagrams, and quotations from the artist’s works © James Coleman. All rights reserved. This book was set in Bembo by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data James Coleman / edited by George Baker ; essays by Raymond Bellour . . . [et al.]. p. cm. — (October files ; 5) Includes index. ISBN 0-262-02541-8 (hc. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-262-52341-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Coleman, James, 1941– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Conceptual art— Ireland. I. Baker, George (George Thomas), 1970 – II. Bellour, Raymond. III. Coleman, James, 1941– IV. Series. N6797.C585J36 2003 700'.92—dc21 2003043640

Contents

Series Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Anne Rorimer

James Coleman 1970–1985 (1985)

Jean Fisher

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman (1983)

Jean Fisher

57

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE (1993)

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

37

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead ) (1996)

Luke Gibbons

19

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman (1983)

Raymond Bellour

1

73

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle (1995)

Lynne Cooke

A Tempered Agnosia (1992)

Kaja Silverman

Live Vocals (2002)

139

113

83

vi

Contents

Rosalind Krauss

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” (1997)

Rosalind Krauss

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph (1999)

Index of Names

211

185

157

Series Preface

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar period that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art in significant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. This discourse is theoretical by its very nature, which is not to say that it imposes theory abstractly or arbitrarily. Rather, it draws out the specific ways in which significant art is theoretical in its own right, on its own terms and with its own implications. To this end we feature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elaborate different methods of criticism in order to elucidate different aspects of the art in question. The essays are often in dialogue with one other as they do so, but they are also as sensitive as the art to political context and historical change. These “files,” then, are intended as primers in signal practices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time. The Editors of OCTOBER

Acknowledgments

Many of the essays in this collection have been revised or expanded for republication here, in some cases quite significantly. “James Coleman 1970– 1985” by Anne Rorimer was originally published in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985). “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” by Jean Fisher first appeared in Open Letter 5–6 (Summer-Fall 1983). Her essay “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” was published as an eponymous catalog (Londonderry, Northern Ireland: The Orchard Gallery, 1983). “The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)” by Raymond Bellour was originally published as “Les morts vivants (Living and Presumed Dead)” in James Coleman (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996) and has since been collected in Bellour’s L’Entre-Images 2 (Paris: P.O.L, 1999). “Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE” by Luke Gibbons first appeared in Artforum 32, no. 4 (December 1993) and has since been collected in Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork:Cork University Press, 1996). “Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle” by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was first published in James Coleman: Projected Images, 1972–1994 (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1995) and has since been collected in Buchloh’s Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). “A Tempered Agnosia” by Lynne Cooke first appeared in James Coleman (Lyons: Musée d’art contemporain, 1992). “Live Vocals” by Kaja Silverman is an expanded version of one of four essays on Coleman published by the author in an exhibition catalog for the Lenbachhaus Munich, entitled James Coleman (Ostfildern-Ruit:

x

Acknowledgments

Hatje Cantz, 2002). “. . . And Then Turn Away?” by Rosalind Krauss was first published in James Coleman (Vienna and Brussels: Wiener Secession and Yves Gevaert, 1997); the current version then appeared in October 81 (Summer 1997). Her “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph” was published in a preliminary version as “First Lines: Introduction to Photograph” in James Coleman (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1999); its current version includes passages from Krauss’s essay “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999). The editor wishes to thank Hal Foster for his support, Roger Conover, Paula Woolley, and Matthew Abbate for their assistance and expertise, Lisa Pasquariello for last-minute aid, and the authors for their willingness to participate in this project and to reexamine essays long since sent to publication. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Kaja Silverman for the intensity of her reexamination, a “communication” that has opened up a dialogue with transformative effects upon the editor’s own work. Thanks are also due to Rachel Haidu for inspired assistance in the task of translation, to Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne for facilitating travel to Ireland, and to James Coleman and Aebhric Coleman for making this publication a possibility in every other way. The editor was also supported in this endeavor by a Faculty Support Grant from the State University of New York at Purchase.

JAMES COLEMAN

Projections, 1958–71 Two projected 8 mm color films, silent, profile spot, pastel drawing. Studio installation, Milan.

James Coleman 1970–1985 Anne Rorimer

In 1968 James Coleman began to assimilate in his work a recognition that “art can never totally be reduced to a concept of simple acts of selfexpression.”1 From his first exhibited pieces of 1970 to present achievements, Coleman has evolved a significant and diverse body of work that gives new parameters to traditional image-making processes. Like other artists of his generation, he has chosen to adopt a variety of media, including film, photography, video, recorded sound, and live performance. While each work possesses its own distinctive features, one may, for the sake of discussion, observe to date three separate phases in his oeuvre. As such these may be divided into periods that encompass perceptual installations (1970–74);installations involving a psychological, social, historical, or cultural dimension (1975–79); and works that take place in a theatrical context (1980–85). Works of the early 1970s differ from, but lay the foundations for, Coleman’s later works. An examination of a number of individual pieces from this period reveals the nature of his intent at the beginning of his career. In retrospect, it might be said that Flash Piece, when shown at the Studio Marconi gallery in 1970, set the stage for all of Coleman’s ensuing work. Although by no means predicting the future complexity of his work, it introduced a new element for consideration with respect to the experience of viewing. Flash Piece consisted of four instantaneous electronic flashes of light (1/800 second)—two blue appearing in between two yellow—directed upon the gallery wall in six cycles of three minutes each. The sequence of flashes was spaced as follows: yellow to blue, 60 seconds;

2

Anne Rorimer

blue to blue, 35 seconds; and blue to yellow, 85 seconds. While the time between the individual cycles differed, the cycles themselves were exactly three minutes. As a result, The spectator, reacting to the light flashes (which operate to divide the intervals), will perceive the “event” period as of variable duration. In fact, the length of this duration, difficult to memorize, and its variable location within the cycle . . . lead to different perceptions of time.2 As the above description suggests, the significance of this work lies in the way it drew attention to the viewer’s sense of time insofar as time as measured and time as experienced did not coincide. By thus indicating how memory is a factor of perception, Coleman included the perceiver’s response within the subject matter of the work as a whole. Rather than producing a finite, stationary object, he created a piece which not only dealt with the effect of time on seeing but also incorporated the subjective reception of the spectator within the work’s total meaning. From the start, Coleman has been concerned with the way in which something is seen rather than with the thing itself in isolation. Projections (1958–71), for example, studies a specific object in relation to a location in time as well as in space. The work includes a pastel drawing of a beech tree in Tullamore, Ireland, done by the artist when he was seventeen. The pastel hangs on the wall in line with two Super 8 mm film projections. While the first projection shows the site where the tree once stood, the second focuses on the surface of the remaining stump. Projections adds a new note to the landscape tradition and extends the notion of painting to include other methods of rendition. Coleman’s use of film allows him factually to record change over a twelve-year period by documenting a particular spot in existing time. The location stays the same, but the scene changes with the passing of time and the disappearance of the tree. The filmed tree stump bears witness to the formerly present tree while the growth rings of its cross section mark the years. Through views of before and after spanning a period of years, this work allows the passage of time to be captured visually. The work of art, like the stump, thus serves as a gauge for our knowledge of the past in terms of the evidence of the present. The tree survives only as a representation, however, not as a living presence. Whereas Projections gives definitive, straightforward evidence of the part played by time on what is seen, a work entitled Memory Piece (1971)

reflects on the role of memory with regard to perception. If the former work is about time as an external factor for visual change, the latter investigates the internal operation of memory in its attempt to hold on to reality in terms of the past but with reference to the present. In Memory Piece Coleman replicates the mnemonic process. He accomplishes this by means of two tape recorders. The first tape recorder supplies a text of about three to five minutes in length. The participant in the work may hear the original text just once and, having attempted to memorize it, must record it on the second machine. This text, in turn, must be recorded once again as remembered. The activity may be repeated, theoretically, ad infinitum, or until the nearly inexhaustible supply of tapes runs out. Previously recorded texts are not accessible, and as completed, are kept in a provided storage unit. Paradoxically, one cannot repeat the past, but memory retains the knowledge of its existence nonetheless. Memory Piece documents memory functions—that is, how the mind is responsible for change and loss as it accumulates, filters, transmits, and distorts. The storage unit, in essence, becomes an archive of mental processes. The person who participates in this piece activates a work which exists as a record of transformation, not as a graspable object or image per se. It is work shaped by the perceiver who is the one to realize the nature of memory and, in so doing, realize the work itself. In the following year, Coleman introduced language into his work as a means of inducing the active participation of the spectator. For Stereo (or Mono-Dialogue) (1972), two loudspeakers, hidden from sight, were installed at opposite ends of a room. At alternating intervals the speakers emitted phrases that gave the impression of coherency and demanded differing degrees of attention. As described when first shown: A voice coming from a two track stereophonic tape delivers words or short phrases, from opposite ends of the room. The spectator (or rather, the listener) . . . is assailed by these vocal statements in a very complex rhythm, so that the intervals between them can be either brief or long, and the words more or less accentuated or even completely unstressed:making a greater or lesser impact on the listener and at the same time creating the impression of their being correlated, or deriving from the other by evoking their semantic meaning or phonetic value.3

James Coleman 1970–1985

3

4

Anne Rorimer

According to the artist, the work at one moment would lure visitors to one side of the room, or at another, to the other side—as if they were in the middle of multiple conversations attracting their attention—in their attempt to catch the potentially more forceful statement or interesting information.4 Although specific narrative content could not be construed from the text, the text exerted control upon the spectators, directly involving them—in their desire to assign meaning—within the structure of the work. As one writer has observed, Coleman’s work requires the “confrontation of the spectator with his or her act of perceiving.”5 Instead of seeking to re-present reality in the form of a static image, Coleman explores the interval between viewer and viewed. The content of his work derives from his investigation of the gap that separates what is seen from how it is seen. A work of 1972 called Pump serves as a kind of visual anecdote elucidating the rationale behind Coleman’s approach. During the continuous cycle of a Super 8 mm film projection, one observes the interior of an empty bucket hanging beneath the spout of a pump. Water rushes out of the spout to fill the bucket. Once the water has settled, the image of the bucket’s interior appears just as it did without the water. The empty and full bucket look exactly the same despite the intervening information. The work thus reminds us that what is seen in the present has a past and a future, to which the mind has access through memory and anticipation, and which a single, fixed image does not suggest. Slide Piece (1972–73) examines the nature of single-image representation. Three versions of the work exist, one in Italian, one in French, and another in English. A slide projector synchronized with a tape recorder allows the same color slide (a photograph of a deserted city square taken by the artist in Milan) to be projected in coordination with a text. The text, recited by one speaker, is the aggregate of separate descriptions made by various individuals who were asked by Coleman to characterize what they saw within the photograph. While concerning itself with a static image, Slide Piece takes place in time. It is a collection of verbalized viewpoints, and possesses no thematic beginning or end. The text brings the photograph to life, so to speak, and—functioning on the basis of accumulation—gives the work its openended quality. No two descriptions are the same. The multiple readings subject what otherwise seems circumscribed, definitive, and matter-offact to potentially endless visual interpretation. Marked by precision, the descriptions concentrate on detail, and no one of them can register the

Seagull, 1973 Double-screen slide projection with synchronized audio.

contents of the whole at once. The intricacies of description—whose vivid, poetic, or even amusing turns of phrase add to the richness of the piece—display the fact that a totality may only be perceived in time as a sum of its parts; and, equally important, is dependent upon the viewer’s own outlook. Subsequent installations, in 1973 and 1974, build time and viewpoint as factors of seeing into the resulting work. For the first of these installations, Seagull (1973)—also conceived as a work using boats on a river— Coleman divided the gallery in half, placing screens from floor to ceiling at the ends of the two rooms. On each of the screens he projected a continuous sequence of slides, with an accompanying soundtrack, of a seagull on a river arriving, picking up pieces of bread, and departing. Because of the wall between the two slide projections, viewers of the work could observe only one sequence of gulls at a time. Unable to be in two places at once, they had no means of knowing if the image of the bird, on its entry and exit from left to right in both instances, was the same bird going from room to room in a complete circle or if two birds were traveling in separate circles within the individual rooms. Viewers could not decipher whether they had seen the same bird twice or two different birds. The

James Coleman 1970–1985

5

6

Anne Rorimer

viewers’ confinement to one series of events in conjunction with their memory/anticipation of a parallel set of circumstances determined their temporal and spatial relationship to the work. Similarly, Installation Made for Location (1974) brought the question of the viewer’s location in time and place to bear on the structure of the work. Each time the work was exhibited, Coleman utilized elements of the existing architecture. At the Ulster Museum in Belfast, a window with a balcony, off of a corridor that adjoined the main exhibition area, perfectly suited his purposes. Earphones, placed in opposite locations to the left and right sides of the window, contained prerecorded tapes. On each side of the window, respective tapes described the balcony, first in terms of what the person using the earphone on the other side of window was seeing (and in terms of what the present viewer would see, or could have seen, as well). When he installed this work at the Rotterdam Arts Foundation in Holland, Coleman took advantage of two columns at the center of the exhibition space. The texts of the tapes, symmetrically installed in relation to the columns, in this case were identical. From either side of the two columns they delineated for the observer how the columns would be seen from the other side. The same work was also shown in the “Contemporanea” exhibition in Rome. For this installation, Coleman set up earphones in an underground parking lot. The recorded text, as in the Rotterdam piece, spoke of the opposite viewer’s perception of spotlit, linear car park divisions. Despite the variations of each installation, the underlying principle of each work remained the same. The identical optical relationships pertained to the past and future as well as to the present. The mental projection of what had been—and was to be—seen, or else what the other viewer saw, involved the spectator in the activity of seeing. Memory and anticipation were reflected in the knowledge of the other spectator’s viewpoint and by the viewer’s own experience of the past and future “present” in the installation. Two related works of 1974–75, Playback of a Daydream and Images, further illustrate the mechanisms of perception that the preceding installations exposed. Taken from a textbook on perception, ambiguous images which may be read either as a duck or a rabbit in the former—or as a goblet or a face in the latter—provide the imagery of these two works. Playback of a Daydream is projected on the wall as a film, whereas Images takes the form of a half dozen or more individual metallic paintings on paper pasted to the wall.

Playback of a Daydream, 1974 Projected 16 mm black-and-white film, silent. Continuous cycle. Installation view.

Both Playback of a Daydream and Images produce an unending interaction between the image and the spectator, who alternatingly sees a duck or a rabbit (or a face or a goblet). The viewer, through knowledge, can specify that a duck was seen or that a rabbit will be seen or vice versa, while viewing one or the other in the present. However, the viewer cannot determine which image takes precedence or where one begins and the other ends, visually or temporally. By showing the phenomenon of the alternating duck and rabbit as a film, moreover, Coleman pointed out how an immediate visual experience and the documentation of it, in this case, could not be distinguished separately. In the process of drawing the goblet/face painting, the artist maintains that he tried “to get in between the space of when one image became the other.” Each painting represents this impossible task and is slightly different. Although the perceptual present dominates, knowledge of past and future intervenes. The work itself, therefore, steps in to postulate where the viewer might stand in relation to the mechanisms of perceiving. The “ambiguous figures” signal the end of Coleman’s predominantly perceptual installations. As of 1975, more complex aspects of perception

James Coleman 1970–1985

7

8

Anne Rorimer

enter into the work as psychological, historical, and cultural factors of experience are taken into account. Photographs of two faces projected larger than life-size on a wall on either side of a large pillar provide the visual component of Clara and Dario, as conceived in 1975. The faces of these two figures change position in relation to each other and in tandem with a narrative text on an audiotape. The text pertains to two adults, referred to as Elsa and Andrea, who intend to revisit the place of their childhood romance near Lake Como in the north of Italy. The text is composed of descriptive reminiscences of a time gone by, which arise out of an intention, never carried out, to return to where they had spent the memorable moments of their youth. As the text begins, “io penso che . . . ,”6 the viewer is immediately given access to the thoughts of the speaker, who continues, “non so se ho voglio di partire in questo momento.”7 During the course of the narrative, the carrousel of slides completes two cycles. Half of the text repeats itself, in reverse and in alternation with new material. The specific subject matter of the text—the proposed journey that leads to a reflection on the past—is thus reflected by the very structure of the text itself. The faces projected on the wall turn back and forth, to and from each other, sometimes—or sometimes not—in response to the words of the audiotape. The absorbing nature of the text in conjunction with the presence of the faces draws the spectator into the work. Rather than presenting a straightforward story, the work—turning back upon itself as it does—revolves around and involves the viewer, who is brought in on the romantic reverie. The artist specifically intended to create an emotional rapport between the spectator and the two figures, who occasionally exchange glances. In this work, as in life, nostalgia for the past and desire for the future combine in the experience of the present.8 The subject matter of Clara and Dario transcends the particular to become a discourse on separation and reunion in time and place:“Che tardi! Ormai non parto più”9 is followed by “ma si! Rimani . . . parliamo ancora”10 at the end of the first cycle of the piece. The text is deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is a monologue or dialogue. Elsa and Andrea are simultaneously divided and connected as images, separate and fused as psyches. They mirror each other, both visually and within the text, in a work that ultimately is a reflection upon the interaction of the inner self with the present in view of the past and future and in relation to another.

Clara and Dario, 1975 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration. Installation at Studio Marconi, Milan, 1975.

As a psychological meditation, Clara and Dario paves the way for the intense psychological drama of Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), a Super 8 mm black-and-white film in a continuous seven-minute loop with a synchronized audiotape. For this work, Coleman adapted original documentary footage of the historic 1927 boxing match between heavyweight champion Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. Projected in an enclosed, blackened, tunnel-like space, the film flashes on and off in front of the viewer, who is surrounded by darkness. The fast, abrupt appearance and disappearance of the image results in the experience of an afterimage in between the frames. The effect is that of “a low pulse similar in frequency to that of a heartbeat,”11 while breathy words and signs, issuing as if from Tunney, are uttered in the same staccato rhythm. Tunney’s thoughts and the blows, given and received, interlock as the viewer has the impression of being both in the fight and in the mind of the fighter. The subtitle of the piece, ahhareturnabout, refers to the fact that the fight of 1927 was the rematch for Tunney to retain his championship title after the famous fight of 1926. The work was inspired by Coleman’s interest in the idea that Tunney was the world champion in 1926, yet had to reaffirm that distinction in a second bout the following year. As he has

James Coleman 1970–1985

9

10

Anne Rorimer

pointed out, the interim represents a precise moment in Tunney’s life during which he simultaneously had and did not have a certain status. During the fight he must regain what he already “is.” That moment in time opens Tunney’s identity to question. In the fight, therefore, one witnesses his struggle for mastery, title, and personal status. Box dramatizes the interrelationship between the inner and outer self and between the individual self and society. The physical and mental sides of Tunney’s being are made apparent when language, conveying his thoughts, plays against the visual record of his actions. By fusing sound and image, Coleman is able to portray the interior and exterior person at the same time. The script emphasizes the association between mind and body with phrases such as “ooh . . . aah . . . the liver . . . the liver,” while it also alludes to the desire for power:“the sticks . . . not capital’s . . . right.” Tunney is not merely flesh and blood, a body and a soul, but an individual striving to maintain his contested role—and, ultimately, his self-image— within the social order. Installations following Box, including Strongbow and A-Koan of 1978 and The Ploughman’s Party of 1979–80, refer to the ambiguities and dichotomies within the social order itself. As in Coleman’s preceding pieces, audio and visual elements play upon and against each other, enabling the artist to create works that reflect on the contemporary situation and the state of society in general. The earlier two of these works, Strongbow and A-Koan, were conceived for exhibition in Ireland. Referring to the separation of the country into two sectors, they both contain political overtones. In Strongbow, Coleman juxtaposed a spotlit replica of a twelfth-century tomb effigy from a church in Dublin close to the exhibition space, its hands clasped in prayer, with a spotlit video film of two hands clapping. One of the clapping hands was red and the other green. As the hands moved back and forth, they left ghostlike traces while their colors mixed on the screen. At the same time, the accompanying sound effects in repeated cycles gradually rose from a hushed silence to a resounding boom. The clapping hands, in actual motion, near the stationary figure of Strongbow, carved in stone for posterity, might seem to have awakened the sleeping monarch, whose reputation, carried down through the centuries, has been maintained by history. Strongbow, a Norman invader and king, is a heroic figure of legendary note from the annals of Irish history. Having married a Celt, he stood at the crossroads between the original Celtic and the imported Anglo-Norman cultures. The old never completely rec-

onciled itself to the new, and the color of the hands in the video connotes the division of Ireland into North (red) and South (green). In this work, Coleman links the historical past to the present and confronts the contemporary media. Distinctions are maintained, yet the politically colored red and green hands blur optically, as well as symbolically, on the video screen. The sound of the television reaches a crescendo as the hands continue to move back and forth in ceaseless repetition while Strongbow, a motionless effigy, paradoxically lives on in spirit. Television, a representational device of the media as well as an artistic medium, comments on itself. Without directly addressing the past, yet within its range, the television clamors for attention. Although echoing the noise and confusion of the present, it offers no particular insight on the past nor resolution for the future. In a related manner, A-Koan amplifies, quite literally, the idea of senselessness. The title of the piece, as it sounds in Gaelic, means “a lament.” Having been invited to participate in the Galway Arts Festival, Coleman employed for his work a child actress to recite a short text as if she were crying for her mother: “I’m ready, I’m calling you, I’ve done a poo . . .” Megaphones transmitted the voice of the wailing child while the Irish flag blew violently above in the breeze. The words of the child, which were repeated over and over again, in combination with the frenetic activity of the flapping flag, produced an eerie aura of helplessness, with the self-directed summons of the little girl remaining unanswered. The work itself elicits no logical interpretation, but articulates instead a lack of rational response. The Ploughman’s Party displays the pretension and artifice that has infiltrated contemporary culture. To this end, the work plays on the image of the plough:heavenly constellation and instrument of earthly (and earthy) labor. The plough, set at the end of a velvety, white room, figures as the centerpiece of the installation. Made from a piece of iron, which has been covered in gold leaf, the plough takes on the curving, almost rococo shape of the constellation (also known as the Big Dipper) for which it is named. Blue neon lights, highlighting the gilded iron from behind, and white light from a projector illuminating it frontally give the object its corporate sign and jewel-like look. Upon entering the room with its posh interior, the viewer also hears the voice of a man speaking with an affected accent in double-entendres related to culture and cultivating. He lapses into French phrases and adapts advertising imagery to his talk of perfumes and other such products. The Ploughman’s Party capitalizes on culture. Accord-

James Coleman 1970–1985

11

12

Anne Rorimer

ing to Coleman, the work is about the power of propaganda and merchandizing in a society where a symbol of labor, the plough, may be transformed into a purely decorative tool of the cultural system. In the last five years, Coleman has extended his method of working from stage environments to the domain of theater, where image and text, performance and narration, are woven together within the framework of the viewer’s actual viewing time. So Different . . . and Yet (1980) is the first of these ensuing works, whose meaning derives from the theatrical context in which they are presented.12 The artifice of The Ploughman’s Party carries over to So Different . . . and Yet, a 50-minute video installation. On the screen of a television monitor, a male piano player and a female model—the latter poised on a chaise longue and successively changing from one stock pose to another—together relate an intricate narrative, which is punctuated by piano music. The images on the video screen are richly colored and back-lit to give them the unnatural quality of the color found in advertising brochures. Set against a deep-blue background, the male figure at the piano—with horns growing out of his head—wears a black tuxedo, while the female speaker is garbed in a shiny green décolleté evening dress, one leg wound with a red ribbon. The narrators’ contrived deliveries, French accents included, are filled with verbal cliché. The story, told in the first and third person, is composed of two intertwining plots and begins on the premises of the dress shop of Vanna, the female narrator, and Laura. It is made up of an accumulation of hackneyed, though riveting, episodes that are associated with sensational romances and thrillers. The two intersecting narratives share several of the same characters. The incidents are held together by phrases such as “meanwhile, back at the dress shop,” but the traditional sequential narrative—with a beginning, middle, and end—is disrupted, shattered into fragments of literary convention replete with characters who, despite constantly changing identities, retain a stereotypical nature. So Different . . . and Yet is, in one regard, about revival and re-creation, with the evening dress functioning as the unifying element of its plots. The work harbors multiple possibilities for interpretation on a specifically political level or in more general terms. The dress—which, after all, is green—may be read as a symbol of “an Irish nationalism which has never been destroyed”13 or considered in relationship to aesthetic issues. To what extent is “the latest creation,” an “updated version of the old dress,” transformed and to what end, with what significant results? Brought “into line with today’s fashion,” at one point in the spoken text, it is again “out-

moded” by the conclusion of the tape, having been replaced at the previous point by an imitation, a fake. As the narrators/performers recount the complex series of events, one witnesses the various machinations of the work’s fictional structure rather than being told what happens as a result of connected incidents leading from one to another. The work does not provide a window onto a fiction that is posited as a duplication of real life. Instead it exposes the underpinnings of this activity. In So Different . . . and Yet, artificiality and deception assume an authenticity and authority because of the way the alluring devices of its media are revealed. As Jean Fisher has commented, the audience is “captivated by [the speaker’s] image and her unfolding narrative” and “also alienated from both,”14 since the viewer becomes aware, perhaps, of the enjoyment of being taken in. The work as a whole, therefore, achieves an independent reality through its thematic attention to role playing and to the illusions of society as well as to its own illusory content. Coleman’s first work to be performed live, Now & Then (1981), further deals with the subject of illusionism.15 Its scenario is based on the reverie of two adults who in childhood had crawled into a shop window and pretended to be mannequins. Now grown, they reenact their childhood fantasy of bringing themselves in line with the latest fashion. A pianist accompanies the two performers as they demonstrate some twenty different ramp-walk poses in a symmetrical manner and, alternatingly, half-sing, half-recite a text. They are elaborately dressed—he in a yellow suit, she in a pink and blue frock and bonnet—in a style evocative of 1950s fashion. Yellow and pink spotlights saturate the colorful atmosphere with artificiality. The reality of the work is, paradoxically, fabricated upon the display of interwoven fictions. As in Clara and Dario, adults romanticize a bygone past “when time seemed to stand still.” In addition, Coleman brings the idea of role playing—as he did in Box—to bear on the broader meaning of the piece. The adults-cum-children imitate the postures of the adult world of fashion, whose styles likewise attempt to recapture the past. The text alludes to the way in which the fading outdoor light increases the indoor light. The changing light transforms the transparent window of the shop into a mirror, allowing the fantasizing adults to see their reflections in the glass. In Now & Then the static interface between past and present, interior and exterior, surface and depth, artifice and actuality becomes blurred. In the glamorous dream world of fashion depicted here, selfimage and projected image fuse.

James Coleman 1970–1985

13

14

Anne Rorimer

During the last several years Coleman has succeeded in integrating language, performance, and sound in a totally original manner. His most recent works cross traditional boundaries to borrow from the disciplines of literature, theater, and music, although their fundamental inspiration and form remain pictorial. As the artist maintained in an interview: I never did feel I abandoned painting. Long before I ever began to introduce other media into my work—when I began to lose interest in a simple retinal reality—I began to sense a feeling that I needed to take cognizance of the psychological dimension. To do this I initially used film to document, and later on, as a device of expression. I realized that my medium was also part of things as much as my mind or eye was.16 Ignotum per Ignotius (1982–84) and Living and Presumed Dead (1983; second version, 1985) analyze, in different ways, the fundamental nature of visual representation in its relationship to reality.17 The earlier of these two works, Ignotum per Ignotius, utilizes two simply dressed performers and prerecorded sound.18 On a basic narrative level the work centers upon an inquiry into the cause of a death. It takes place as if it were set in a funeral parlor or a lawyer’s office. A male and a female player perform successive roles: detective, suspect butler, lawyer, family members, and the corpse. The standard “who-done-it” and “who-will-getthe-inheritance” situations afford the basis for the work’s other levels of investigation. The laconic speech and abrupt gestures of the players, interspersed with strains of different kinds of music, convey the story, in which, according to Coleman, an “applied rationale does not yield the expected results.” The guilty party turns out to be the one who has attempted, through language or cultural encoding, to impose a system of interpretation on that which cannot yield its essence or spirit. Later on in the performance the female figure, dancing her fingers childlike on the floor, endeavors to recapture a nostalgic and simplified interpretation of the performed event up to that point. The dance is abruptly terminated by an invisible force which propels her hand to inscribe on the wall:“A Message is Found.” This resurrects the male performer as corpse who attempts to cover up the inscription. As in the case of the writing hand, the canceling hand is visually consumed to a bloody stump. Prior to the finger dance, the two performers had approached one another, symbolically removing each other’s masks in a gesture of transferal to the hand. Traces of the body and, by

symbolic inference, the mask are left on the wall. As the artist has pointed out, “the mask may be equated with the representational aspects of human activity, and the projected image of the self is now transferred to the hand, the instrument of implementation.” The work closes with the two performers attempting to scrape away the red paint and replace their masks in order “to recapture the representation of the self.” Living and Presumed Dead further examines the complex modes of representation. Its meaning derives from the union of several aesthetic forms, in this instance the orally narrated epic with intervals of music, the theatrical performance, and the photographic slide presentation. On a purely narrative level, the work involves four protagonists: Abbas, Borras, Chris or Capax, and Mr., the villain whose past dealings are obscure. The many details of the plot may briefly be summarized as follows: Capax was an acrobat, performing with daggers and fire, and dicing with death. He was “presumed dead” after cutting his throat during a performance. However Borras, his lover, has searched for him for many years in the belief he was still alive. Abbas rescues Capax . . . and discovers that he is disguising himself as his father to avenge his father’s murder.19 Drama, adventure, and confrontations fraught with incidents of mistaken identity contribute to the story’s association with legendary tales, myths, and literary genres in which heroic pursuits are coupled with the quest for truth. For the current exhibition, Coleman has revised the work’s earlier visual content. He has replaced the previous black-and-white line drawings, which were projected on the wall to illustrate the story, with slides that show a cast of twenty characters lined up frontally across a stage. The cast includes live actors and several mannequins, all colorfully and flamboyantly dressed. The costumes locate the individual characters in different historical periods—in either the Middle Ages or the Restoration—and in differing social strata. A goblin, a skeleton, an elf, and even a fairy with magic wand complete the cast. As the narrator unravels the story in synchronization with the projected images, the characters appear in different places in the line. An optical dissolve system is timed so that the successive photographic images fade into and out of one another. Playing on the realistic aspects—yet fictitious nature—of photography and theater, Coleman links the two together in an unprecedented

James Coleman 1970–1985

15

16

Anne Rorimer

manner. Despite the interchange of character positions, the slides display the same image of the theatrical cast throughout the accompanying narration. As in Slide Piece, Coleman here subjects one view to many interpretations. Telescoping historical time and the social spectrum into a single, two-dimensional scene, he succeeds in capturing the past—as portrayed by the costumed figures—and the present within the frozen moment of the photograph. By means of the optical dissolve mechanism, furthermore, he animates the static image of the photograph. Paradoxically, the stationary image is thus set in motion and changes while remaining the same. On many levels Living and Presumed Dead depicts the multifaceted, layered fusion—and confusion—of reality and fiction on literal and aesthetic planes. The narrative abounds with references to perception and deception. Representation of the action within the story takes place in the zone where theatrical make-believe and real life intercept each other. The characters retain their masks and costumes while they stand in a row as if they were posing for a series of publicity stills. Additionally, the line-up of the entire cast, ready to take a bow, occurs in that interval when the play has ended but before the actors step out of their fictional roles. As the photographic images merge into and out of each other, the characters dissolve into one another and appear to exchange roles continuously. The narrative resists interpretation as a series of events determined by a logical sequence of cause and effect. Instead, the narrative provides a structure for the creation of characters who function to unmask the artifice in which they play a part. Living and Presumed Dead exemplifies the way in which the work of James Coleman expands the definition of pictorial representation to encompass new thematic content, thereby extending the previous boundaries of artistic expression. His work reveals the reality of its own fictional structure as art and, in the process, provides a framework for addressing the fictional constructs of the self and society. Notes

1. James Coleman, quoted in Richard Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” The Crane Bag 6, no. 2 (1982), p. 130. 2. Descriptive subtitle in Lisa Ponti, “How Does Your Garden Grow: Documenti e discorsi sul lavoro di James Coleman,” Domus 570 (May 1977), p. 53.

3. Gillo Dorfles, “Mono-Dialogue by James Coleman,” in Irish Exhibition of Living Art, exh. cat. (Dublin: Project Art Centre, 1972), p. 14. 4. James Coleman, conversation with the author, April 1985. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent statements by the artist quoted in this text were made at this time. 5. Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin:Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1982), p. 13. 6. “I am thinking . . .” 7. “I’m not sure if I’ll leave just yet.” 8. See Fisher, “James Coleman,” p. 7. 9. “How late it is! I guess I’m not leaving.” 10. “Stay! Do stay . . . let’s talk awhile.” 11. Fisher, “James Coleman,” p. 34. 12. See Jean Fowler, “So Different . . . and Yet: Language and Theatre in the Work of James Coleman,” Circa 17 ( July-August 1984), pp. 18–24; and Dot Tuer, “Feminine Pleasure in the Politics of Seduction,” C 4 (Winter 1985), pp. 22–23. 13. Luke Dodd, “Five Recent Works by James Coleman” (B.A. thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 1985), not paginated. 14. Jean Fisher, “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” (1983), reprinted in this volume, p. 28. 15. See Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” Art Monthly 49 (September 1981), pp. 17–18. 16. Coleman, quoted in Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” p. 127. 17. On Ignotum per Ignotius, see Jean Fisher, “James Coleman and Operating Theatre,” Art Monthly 61 (November 1982), pp. 11–13; on Living and Presumed Dead, see Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” (1983; reprinted in this volume). 18. There have been three versions of this work to date, two of which used prerecorded sound and one of which used live harmonium music. 19. Mark Francis, “A Story Projected: LIVING AND PRESUMED DEAD,” poster (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1983).

James Coleman 1970–1985

17

So Different . . . and Yet, 1980 Video installation. Installation at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London, 1980.

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman Jean Fisher

Plays are normally acted as if the stage had four walls not three; the fourth being where the audience is sitting. The impression given and maintained is that what happens on the stage is a genuine incident from “real life,” which of course doesn’t have an audience. Acting with a fourth wall, in other words, means acting as if there wasn’t an audience. Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues Brecht’s Dramaturg states a condition common to naturalistic theater, commercial cinema, and “narrative” painting, which, while creating a semblance of reality (the Renaissance window on the world), nevertheless situates the viewing subject in an imaginary position outside the real time and space of the action. Brecht recognized that this was an authoritarian mode of representation, which held the audience in a pseudodominant and uncritical relation to it. By contrast, he advocated a thaëter which, imitating reality without reproducing the illusions of naturalism, would allow the audience to share actively in its experience. Brecht emphasized the performance in which the actor produced an illustration of the gestus, a dramatized recitation defining, not character motivation, but the social significance of the action.1 I should like to discuss how, in the work of James Coleman, the visual image is an anchor for a dramatized recitation whose psychological implications for the spectator invite certain comparisons with performance art and theater.2 In visual art, it was Marcel Duchamp who initially raised the question of the social and psychological status of the art object and the spectator’s

20

Jean Fisher

contribution to its production of meanings. Duchamp’s “readymade” gestures, directed against the valorized object of the museums, argued for art that was founded in life: an art that “obliges the spectator or reader to become himself an artist or poet.”3 This implied a move away from the object as a self-contained and pregiven reality whose meanings were imposed by the producer, toward art as a context in relation to which the spectator introjects and reconstructs his or her own reality; that is, the work itself becomes a “theater” in which the spectator is a “co-performer.” Of the various ways in which artists have attempted to demolish the “fourth wall,” two tendencies are germane to performance art: one stemming from dadaist-futurist activities and traceable through New York happenings, Fluxus, and situationist events of the fifties and early sixties, in which the artist initiated a spontaneous “intervention,” often in the street and akin to an impromptu “theatrical” spectacle; and another, more contemplative approach, in which the artist presented the viewer with an installation event which engaged his or her perceptual and associative faculties in real time and space (for example, minimalist sculpture, manifestations of structuralist cinema, and conceptual art). Performance art, emerging from such diverse trends in the late sixties, encompasses a wide range of activities about which it is impossible to generalize. However, a performance may be broadly characterized as an event of fixed duration executed before a collective audience with the artist as principal executant. While it indeed presents an organized spectacle of live bodies and props, it differs from orthodox theater in two major respects: the action is performed in real time, not the logical time of fictional narrative; and usually the artist functions not as a fictive character whose definition or motivation is the rationale of the narrative, but as a signifier in the production of meaning of the action. The audience’s relationship to the performance artist remains, however, ambivalent, since what is enacted is often a narcissistic display which, while it avoids viewer identification with the character typical of theater, nevertheless also fails to provide a reality into which the audience may enter. On the contrary, the viewer is often held at a distance in an exhibitionist-voyeur relationship (one might cite certain performance strategies of Joseph Beuys or Vito Acconci). An ensuing tendency toward the valorization of the artist himself is reinforced through oral dissemination which virtually mythologizes the performer. In such cases, the “fourth wall” remains intact. James Coleman is not a performance artist. He suppresses his own presence as an “author” in the interests of the text, whose structure as work

of art restores the spectator’s “performance.” The work presents a projection, an installation, which both draws and comments on the languages of representation using various time-based media with narration and within a defined space. Coleman uses time as a primary signifying element referring directly to the spectator’s perceptual and mnemonic faculties. His text unfurls and reveals itself in the real time of one’s experience. It is, moreover, a continuous cycle, an endless repetition: a narrative with no implied prehistory, whose inauguration is whichever point the viewer enters its cycle. Thus, unlike conventional narrative, there is no end that would satisfactorily explain a beginning. The spectator’s desire for unity—for the resolution or masking of those contradictions that are the contingent reality of one’s life and which is the lure of fictional (especially naturalistic) narrative—is not gratified. Coleman nevertheless exploits repetition, a characteristic of the diegesis: those enigmas and returns of the action which temporarily suspend the forward impulse of the “plot.”4 Repetition, according to the psychoanalytic schema, is a ritual of return whose logic was clarified for Sigmund Freud through his observation of the Fort! Da! game, in which the child— perceiving his mother’s comings and goings, and attempting to accommodate this traumatic loss—stages the disappearance of an object to experience the pleasure of its return. But this staging refers to an alienation of the self and the symbolization of its desire for the other through representation.5 Repetition becomes the symbolized refutation of the moment of loss, an act which thereafter enacts that which, effaced in perception, cannot be remembered, but within which—as Lacan somewhat enigmatically describes it—the subject “is there to rediscover where it was . . . the real.”6 The real, the immediacy of an often traumatic lived experience, is what is betrayed by discourse, which henceforth mediates the subject through the agency of the signs of language. This incommensurable difference, or “lost history” of the subject is, however, reenacted in a constant vacillation of repetitions-in-transformation, but an “originary” moment can never be recovered. In much of Coleman’s work repetition is presented in changing contexts. One’s perception of what is repeated becomes converted into memory, but with each successive recurrence and each new juxtaposition there is a shift in what is signified. In recognizing this transformation, viewers become aware of themselves as perceiving subjects, which suggests that the work functions in that ungraspable space between perception and its conscious representation: the “space in which the space of the Other is situated, in which the subject is constituted.”7

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

21

22

I Matti, 1968–72 Project notes, 1972.

Jean Fisher

In 1968, Coleman conceived I Matti [The Crackpots], which was to be a filmed performance by three actors, designated A, B, and C, one of whom, C, was to assume the subjective role of the spectator, critically observing the others’ game, yet simultaneously desiring to intervene in their mutual reality. During the course of the piece, the protagonists were to interact on each other’s sense of identity through a confusion between fantasy and reality. This complex work was never fully realized, but it provided the basic plot for those works which followed, namely, a time-dependent sequence of interactive events whose causal relationships would be determined by the audience through an interplay of immediate perception, memory, and anticipation. In simplifying I Matti, the artist focused initially on the spectator’s direct perceptual experience. Flash Piece (1970), and several subsequent installations, utilized (dis)orientating spatiotemporal transformations to enhance the spectator’s self-awareness as a perceiving subject, and to comment on the way that one invests representations or objects with meaning.8 This dialogue continued in Slide Piece (1972–73), with two significant additions: instead of “abstract” contents, the audience is presented with a vocal soundtrack and an “ordinary” pictorial image, extending meaning outside formal art language into everyday perceptual reality. Slide Piece positions the audience in the role of the spectator-identified madman of I Matti, presenting the viewer with a wall-sized image of an unpopulated urban street, repeated in continuous cycle. It is an image analogous to Christian Metz’s cinematic “other mirror,” which, like Lacan’s Mirror Stage, “alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the double of his double . . . desire as a sure effect of lack and endless pursuit.”9 The commentary, delivered by a male voice, directs one’s attention to features of the image described from several subjective viewpoints, creating a dialogue between the sameness of the repeated image and the different details of each description. Through information accumulated over successive and remembered accounts, one develops a changing relationship to the image. The spectator, however, becomes subject to a psychological tension, deriving on the one hand from his or her captivation by the image and the lure of the commentary, and on the other from a disturbing sense of being controlled by an outside “will”—the “other” as the unseen commentator. To resolve this entails the displacement of imaginary subjectivity to a progressive identification with the narrator who, one finds, sets up a subtle complicity with the viewer:

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

23

24

Jean Fisher

Slide Piece, 1972–73 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

Considérons maintenant le carré qui a pour base la ligne ornementale chromée de l’auto à gauche et, pour côtés, le petit arbre qui se trouve derrière le clignotant et le bord gauche de la photographie. Or, le tronc du petit arbre, en penchant légèrement, efface une partie du L, de TOTAL sur le kiosque de la station d’essence, touche l’angle droit de la fenêtre du premier étage de l’immeuble au fond, continue à monter et rejoint le bord de l’image. Retournons à gauche . . .10 This complicity, expressed through the first person plural present tense— “considérons . . . retournons . . .” [Let us consider . . . Let us return . . . ]— is the means by which the narration enters the immediate reality of the spectator’s thoughts. One is given only what is present and verifiable in the image, and while the narration describes the objects within the image, it also continually returns the spectator to the fact that it is an image, so that one does not remain ensnared in an imaginary illusion in which the signifier itself, the photograph, is transparent. While this text exists in the syntagmatic plane, the texts of subsequent works are encoded paradigmatically, allowing the viewer to enter into a freer flow of associative verbal and visual images. With the introduction of

the human image, the work also begins to speak of how one’s imaginary relationship with the image-object becomes displaced into the symbolic realm of interpersonal exchange. In the original installation of Clara and Dario (1975), a double slide projection with synchronized sound, the audience is confronted with wall-sized faces of a man and a woman, cinematic “close-ups” encouraging the viewer’s emotional identification. They are posed to suggest an intimate conversation, and yet are separated architecturally; they are therefore perceived both as individuals and as a couple, a construction which points toward the self ’s dual identity as both separate, yet inseparable, from the other. This visual duality is reinforced through a narrative which, although containing equal contributions from both partners, is spoken in a single voice. Their conversation is narrated as a twopart cycle, each part of which differs in its order of sequences, and through whose reordered repetitions the audience develops differing interpretations of the couple’s identity.11 As in I Matti, their responses are interdependent, their sense of self mediated through their relationship to each other. Clara and Dario also speaks about how one projects an idea of one’s historical sense of self through the image of the present. The couple “invent” a childhood idyll that the spectator enters through their present. A past is wistfully recalled as an imaginary tableau vivant, a piquant first romance enacted by two adolescents who may have been themselves, but who over time and innumerable life encounters have evolved other identities. With Clara and Dario the spectator recognizes his or her own sense of longing for another, earlier self, whose image cannot with certainty be determined as a memory or a fantasy. Memory produces a private image of the past, but one that maintains an uneasy coexistence with a present social identity while, simultaneously, projecting us into the future and the knowledge of our eventual death. Coleman explores this cruel temporal dilemma in his installation Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), using the return fight between Tunney and Dempsey in 1927, in which Tunney was defending the title he had won the previous year.12 Coleman’s interest in this historical event stemmed from a consideration that the challenge to a return bout precipitated a crisis in Tunney’s sense of identity—at that moment he was both “champ” and “not-champ.” As a consequence, it was his own sense of coherence that he was fighting to maintain in the second match. Coleman orchestrates short passages of film footage interrupted by lengths of black leader with a soundtrack comprising an insistent pulse

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

25

26

Jean Fisher

Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977 Projected 16 mm black-and-white film. Continuous cycle. Extract of voice-over script.

similar in frequency to a heartbeat, and a monologue of gasps, grunts, and abbreviated phrases representing Tunney’s physical exertions and thoughts during the fight. Through the pulsating rhythm of this continuous loop we catch glimpses of the protagonists circling the ring, seemingly into eternity. Tunney, like Sisyphus, is trapped in a perpetual repetition in which he must forever play out the fantasy of mastery over the other, eternally delaying his own death. Box is emotionally shocking by virtue of the manner in which its visual and acoustic space encloses the viewer as if in the mind and body of the boxer: the viewer becomes both voyeur and participant in an erotic struggle with his or her own otherness. The play on circularity in the work—its structural periodicity, the movement of the boxers round the ring, and Tunney’s thoughts—induces

a near-hypnotic state of attention in the viewer, through which the seemingly irrational spoken text begins to acquire sense; indeed, the effect is sensual in its ability to play on the rhythmic chords of the viewer’s mind and imagination beyond the merely visual. Elliptic as dream thoughts and images, it propels the audience into a labyrinth of associations whose meanings oscillate in and out of the image. Phrases concerned with the immediacy of the fight are interwoven with oblique metaphors that seem to refer to Irish identity (“Murphy’s the best . . .”13); to the individual in conflict with an authoritarian Other, specifically the English colonial authority in Ireland (“. . . the wood . . . the sticks . . . not capital’s . . .”);and a type of public, historical immortality contrasted with a realization of individual, physical death (“. . . the liver . . . an evergreen . . . soul . . .”). Neither prose nor poetry, the text may perhaps be described as an exteriorization of an interior monologue, or “inner speech”: a preconscious/conscious reverie of abbreviated and apparently disconnected phrases and mental images saturated not with “meaning” but with “sense.” As the film theorist Paul Willemen (quoting Vygotsky) says, “the sense of a word is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness (and unconsciousness) by the word.” Inner speech is “a discursive process determined by the social and psychological histories that combine to produce that particular individual in that time and place.”14 Coleman’s dramatized recitation addresses itself to listening, not to reading. This is due in part to its use of phonetic puns and of fragmentary phrases that do not locate a subject as such; but it is also the result of the way that the voice produces meaning, relying as much on what Roland Barthes described as the “grain of the voice” (enunciation) as on those expressive qualities which are signifiers of character in theater.15 Insofar as it is a performed recitation, Box may be said to be “theatrical,” but in presenting an associative rather than syntagmatic narrative, it is not typical of conventional theater.16 Coleman’s use of language may perhaps be understood partly by reference to an Irish dramatic tradition revitalized by J. M. Synge, who first expressed in drama those convoluted poetic but politicized idiosyncrasies of Anglo-Irish vernacular syntax stemming from the translation of English to and from Gaelic.17 Like Synge, Coleman has a high regard for the oral art of storytelling. Until comparatively recently it was common in the rural districts of Ireland to find an audience gathered intimately around the teller (seanachaí) to hear him spin his tale. This tale (an scéal) would have been known to the listeners (and indeed they would have disputed any deviation

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

27

28

Jean Fisher

in the narrative), but it was through the drama of the delivery—the power of the voice, the elaboration of gestures—and in the telling that meaning was created in the minds of the company. Storytelling is a unique kind of “performance,” but it is a dying art, mostly relegated to childhood; and in Ireland, television has been largely responsible for its passing. It is with some irony, therefore, that Coleman chooses to present a storytelling performance as a video installation, So Different . . . and Yet (1980).18 Television has a certain intimacy: one sits facing the screen as the company once gathered round the seanachaí; and yet its intimacy is an illusion, lacking that human exchange of experience fundamental to the storytelling situation. Coleman exposes this ambivalence through a play on our relationship to the TV image. The principal narrator is a female model wearing a shiny green dress who, through a sequence of coquettish poses and gestures familiar from fashion photography, seemingly addresses herself to the camera/audience. The piece is a single continuous take in which the camera moves imperceptibly in relation to the model, simulating the effect of a live performance. But while viewers are captivated by her image and her unfolding narrative, they are also alienated from both. The gestures are slow and stereotypic; the narration is spoken in stagy French accents; the pianist in the background wears horns; and the chromo-keying technique denies a naturalistic space and coloration, all of which accentuates the work’s artifice, distancing the spectator from that sympathetic identification with the image of naturalistic theater and TV broadcasting.19 Orthodox broadcasting does not, moreover, sustain a lengthy and uninterrupted narration; it cannot hold our attention span without constantly changing mood and tempo; so that in front of So Different . . . and Yet the viewer is uncomfortably caught between fascination and repulsion. The narrative itself is a potpourri of fictional clichés, in which a motley of “characters” surrounding a central “hero” switch sides and identities in functions reminiscent of those described by Propp for the folktale.20 The motor of the narrative and the real visual focus of the work is the green dress worn by the narrator: an “heirloom” which is the object of desire for the protagonists and whose transformation to a more fashionable style initiates the plot. It is indeed a fetishistic, metonymical substitute for desire, which in terms of psychoanalytic theory is the subject’s desire for impossible unity, and for which the usual closure of mythic fiction is—at least momentarily—a catharsis. So Different . . . and Yet does not, how-

Now & Then, 1981 Performed by Olwen Fouère, James McHale, and Roger Doyle. Project Arts Theater, Dublin, 1981

ever, provide such satisfaction. Iconographically it is circular—the dress, initially outmoded, is again out of fashion by the “end” of the narration. The narrative closes with a further enigma of character identity, which sends it spiraling into another possible plane of interpretation. Coleman’s dramatized narration is extended live in Now & Then (1981), a work performed by two actors and a pianist before a collective audience. Now & Then draws together themes inherent in earlier work: the interdependent identities and nostalgia of Clara and Dario; and the conflict between private self and social mask of Box (which becomes translated into the sociohistorical masquerade of style and fashion in So Different . . . and Yet). Now & Then initially presents the audience with a tableau vivant, which suggests that one is an onlooker at a shop-window display of fashion mannequins. They are flamboyantly dressed: a male figure wears a yellow satin suit in the style of the 1950s, while a female model is dressed in the post-punk style of the ’80s. Brightly colored spotlights accentuate the atmosphere of artificiality. Through its evocative play of associations, the performance gradually becomes the mirror to the spectator’s own

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

29

30

Jean Fisher

constructed self-image. As the work evolves, patterns of choreographed movements are interrelated with a partly sung narration, complemented by the additional voice of the piano. The figures do not address each other directly; each is situated in a private world of thoughts and reminiscences. Gesture and narration move back and forth in time, so that as the female character’s modernity encourages the male character to project forward, he seduces her into nostalgia for the past. Gesture refers to the public, projected representations of the subject through fashion, as well as to private images from childhood inflected through the memory or fantasy of the adult. There is a complicity between nostalgia and desire. The child’s desire to emulate the adult accompanies a vision of the past (“. . . peering down into the grass stalks . . . folding and pleating . . .”), while the adult’s nostalgia for moments of his or her youth is articulated with the desire to imitate the style of the latest fashion (the self ’s identification with a social ideal). The narrative thereby contrasts the child’s forward impulse into the future with an adult desire to delay through nostalgia (repetition), dual maneuvers which render the present ungraspable and the past idealized and artificial, described at a moment in the narration as Lovely afternoons in silence In black and pink shadows. Like So Different . . . and Yet, Now & Then does not conceal the codes inherent in its use of language. As a performed recitation, it is a “presentation,” not the “representation” of orthodox theater whose psychologized characters are signified through acting—the attempt to render player and character as congruent. Coleman’s players perform not acting but action, central to which is the ritualized gesture, a demonstrative sign that we recognize not as an equivalent of “nature” but as a culturally determined artifice, returning us to Brecht’s proposals for eliminating the “fourth wall.” In this respect, as theater, the work possesses much in common with Japanese No¯ and Bunraku. Neither the mannequin nor the marionette is a representation of an individual with whom the spectator may form a sympathetic identification; instead, they are formalized projections, or signifiers, of social status or human archetypes. In Coleman’s work, the projected image is the visual motif around which his dramatized recitation weaves a temporal web, reflecting back upon the social and psychological implications of the image. This articulates both

one’s seeing and one’s listening, but sound is not necessarily located in the image nor, with the exception of Slide Piece, does it always refer to it directly. Consequently the spectator is faced with two simultaneous texts whose signifiers do not always coincide in the same signifieds. It is therefore the responsibility of the perceiver to insert himself or herself into this perceptual space in order to draw meaning from it. We might say that the work functions as a metaphor of the way one’s imaginary, symbolic, and real relationships to the world are mutually articulated through representations, but that the work also structurally situates the viewer in the oscillation between them. In their reference to the viewer’s direct perceptions, the images of Slide Piece and Flash Piece place the spectator primarily in the imaginary, functioning as the objectified other of the gaze; whereas the dual images of Clara and Dario may be described as playing with the Oedipal, setting up something that the spectator recognizes as a relationship both within and outside of his or her self, and thus moving one into a consideration of the effects of the symbolic order of society where the subject is posed as a signifier of a relation rather than a fixed entity. It is however in touching on the register of the real, an experience that (as yet) eludes the signifying demands of discursive or symbolic formations, that Coleman’s work has its greatest resonance. Despite the assumptions we derive from discourse, language or representation in itself is not transparent; its meaning is not readily available “at a glance” but carried by the context of its use. There is, then, a paradoxical lack of coincidence between the image or work and the thing to which it refers that renders the latter unknowable in its entirety. Coleman’s work exploits this aporia of language. Significantly, his images are not fixed, and in experiencing their narrativity and repetition one’s perceptions become transformed into memory, enabling the building of a spatiotemporal, or “historical,” relation with the work, but one nonetheless that does not lead to closure. It is at this juncture that the verbal narration gains resonance, functioning as a relay that extends the spectator’s relation to the image into a broader sociohistorical context. The audience’s role as listeners is central to the production of meaning here. In speaking of how in reading we mentally identify a narrated event, Roland Barthes mentions that, while “to read is to name, to listen is not only to perceive a language, it is also to construct it.”21 Such is the essential condition of the spectator’s relationship to Coleman’s narration, through whose multilayered signs and discontinuities the audience

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

31

32

Jean Fisher

struggles to construct their meanings by connecting with their own past and future, becoming themselves the subject of the text. As Brecht’s Actor says, the notion of “continually observing oneself and referring back to one’s own experience can easily lead a man to alter the text.” To which the Dramaturg responds, “alterations demand a great deal of art”; it is “not the play but the performance that is the real purpose of all one’s efforts.”22 Likewise, in the case of Coleman’s work, priority lies not with the art object as such, but with the dynamic of reception and the performative potential of language, gesture, and image. Thus it is not outside but inside the viewer-listener that the unity of Coleman’s “text” is constituted. In its insistence on attentiveness and response and hence on the immediacy of its experience, the work engages the viewer as a participant not as an observer. This experience is not based in any prior knowledge, which would imply a conscious speaking subject. On the contrary, in the face of the work’s constant slippage away from any determinable referentiality, the viewer experiences a suspension of knowledge, a rendering “speechless,” a loss of boundaries between subject and object. In other words, the work induces moments of desubjectivation, a state of uncertainty that can be referred back neither to a subject nor to a psychological state. Nor is it a return to some presubjective state, but it is instead an experience of the condition of our relation to the limits of language itself where it fails to “speak for” us. The spectator is placed in the position of continuously having, as Barthes says, to “construct language,” which is to say, to invent meaning. Hence, in its play of indeterminacy, the “place of the spectator” in Coleman’s work is the site where an encounter with the real—the ineffable difference between perception and memory (representation), between pure language and discourse—begins to unravel symbolic certitude. Through meanings established and perpetuated in its discursive systems, society tends to reinforce the imaginary; it emphasizes “sameness” and “difference,” playing on the subject’s desire to unify itself with an ideal other—these days most often derived from media personalities. When we speak of our identity, we are speaking not of an independent entity, but of something which is both relative and defined sociohistorically. In this way society binds us to itself, guiding both our perceptions and the meanings we extract from them in order to maintain its own coherence and “truth.” It is this disparity between mediated reality and reality as individually lived and perceived that Brecht sought to expose in his alienation effect. In

Brecht’s thaëter, this effect “consists in the reproduction of real-life incidents on the stage in such a way as to underline their causality and bring it to the spectator’s attention. This type of art also generates emotions;such performances facilitate the mastering of reality.”23 Coleman’s project is not dissimilar in its aims, because one crucial question asked by it is how we might creatively reinvent a world dominated by “received” information which cripples any sense of subjective agency. In revealing the mechanisms of discursive formations and the ways by which we are inserted into them, Coleman’s work exposes the ideological framework at the root of social discourse, drawing us out of our apathetic unawareness of the meanings inherent in it. Thus, his work is “political” not in the conventional sense (it is never “prescriptive,” nor does it present a “position”), but in the fact that it challenges the very basis of ideology: those relative, socially determined values projected and reinforced through the representations of culture that ensnare the subject in a system of predetermined meanings and relationships which, because familiar, seem “natural” and unquestionable. If Coleman’s work plunges us as spectators into equivocal territory, it is to remind us that even though we may be irrevocably possessed by language, in testing its limits we are better able to understand the nature of this possession. Can one ask more of art than this? Notes

This essay was written as a (perverse) response to an invitation to write on performance art for a special issue of the Canadian journal Open Letter devoted to “Performance and Cultural Politicization.” 1. Brecht’s gestus is a combination of gesture and attitude (a play, a person, a sentence can all have a gestus); see Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1965), translator’s note, p. 46. 2. By “dramatized recitation” in Coleman’s work, I mean a kind of dialogical monologue allowing, as in Brecht’s thaëter, the “subject to be approached from several points of view” (ibid., p. 106), and in which gesture and props combine to reveal the artifices of the performance as distinct from theatrical naturalism. 3. Octavio Paz, “The Castle of Purity,” in Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Donald Gardner (New York: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 87. 4. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19. 5. See Jacques Lacan:“Fort! Da! It is precisely in his solitude that the desire of the little child has already become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is henceforth his own affliction.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), p. 104.

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

33

34

Jean Fisher

6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 45. 7. Ibid. 8. In Flash Piece, the viewer’s conventional experience of time is disrupted through the intermittent repetition of an event within a narrative structure: a consecutive series of fixedtime cycles is defined by two yellow light flashes. Between these yellow pulses there occur two blue flashes whose intervals vary from cycle to cycle, creating a provocative event, which breaks the spectator’s anticipatory relationship to it. 9. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” trans. Ben Brewster, Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975), p. 15. 10. [Editor’s note: This passage from the French version of Slide Piece has been left untranslated, as the voice-over of each version of the work is slightly different. Thus an English translation of the passage would not parallel the English version of the piece.] 11. Clara and Dario are discussing an impending train journey, which one of them is about to make to a place they had known in the past. This projection into the future engenders a train of reminiscences, which introduce “Elsa” and “Andrea.” Through the interweaving of third- with second-person narration, which also moves between the preterite and the present and future tenses, ambiguities arise that create uncertainties about the identities of Elsa and Andrea and their relationship to Clara and Dario: Are they childhood playmates, or the latter themselves as children? The piece recalls the film text of Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1961), whose presentness contains a past of several alternative possibilities. 12. Box is a black-and-white Super 8 mm film in continuous cycle with synchronized soundtrack, situated somewhere that might evoke the public placement of a TV for watching sports events—like above a bar. Edited footage of the original film of the fight appears intermittently; consequently, as with Slide Piece, viewers are made aware of themselves in relation to the medium. 13. “Murphy” is both a common Irish name and the brand name of a beer. 14. Paul Willemen, “Cinematic Discourse: The Problem of Inner Speech,” Screen 22, no. 3 (1981), pp. 85 and 81. 15. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 66. 16. Parallels may be drawn with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, whose “sense” becomes clearer when read aloud; and with passages of the later dramatic work of Samuel Beckett, such as The Mouth’s disjointed monologue in Not I. 17. Of particular relevance is J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World [1907], reprinted in W. A. Armstrong, ed., Classic Irish Drama (Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 69– 134. 18. So Different . . . and Yet presents the viewer with a video monitor mounted in a sparsely furnished room (a TV showroom?) and spotlit to simulate the artificiality of a color TV brochure. The “program” is a story narrated by two performers: a female model and a pianist in the background who complements the narration with a repeated refrain interspersed with quotations from Irish folk songs, popular and classical melodies. The performers are the actress Olwen Fouère and the composer Roger Doyle, who also collaborated in the production of Now & Then.

19. The pianist’s horned head refers specifically to a hero of Irish mythology; but it also suggests the mythic structure of conventional fictional narrative. 20. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 21. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image, Music, Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), p. 102. 22. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, p. 74. 23. Ibid., p. 102.

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

35

Strongbow, 1978 Video installation. Resin cast, plaster mold, Sony Art Couture monitor, audio equipment, and speakers. Installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2000.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman Jean Fisher

“Who are you?” “Where did you come from?” These questions, posed at the outset of Living and Presumed Dead (1983– 85), a slide and audio projection, have an “everyday” simplicity that masks an immense dilemma. For how are we to answer such questions? We may specify a name, a profession, a location—and yet these nominations are wholly inadequate to describe the totality of experience and feelings that constitute the being who answers “I.” Behind the drama enacted between this “I” and its idea of itself stands the enigmatic figure of the hero, a cultural icon whose significance to the fields of representation and identity formation is explored in various ways in Coleman’s work, and is again under investigation in the scenario of Living and Presumed Dead. Living and Presumed Dead opens with an illustration of a group of youthful “players” who are dressed in personalized interpretations of period and contemporary fashions. They adopt poses complementing the roles suggested by the costumes: that is, they form a cultural typology, not a group of psychologized characters, signified through visual display. The scene becomes animated when a female figure, Borras, emerges from the group and brusquely accosts a flamboyantly dressed youth, demanding, “Who are you? Where did you come from?”—clearly marking him as a “stranger.” Borras’s first question establishes the issue central to Living and Presumed Dead and, although expressed in different ways, to all Coleman’s work since the photographic piece Suzi (1966–67)—namely, the problem of what constitutes “individual” identity.1 The second question is already

38

Jean Fisher

Suzi, 1966–67 Selected image from project. Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, 1966.

installed in the first since an answer can be given only by reference to the past life or “history” of that individual, who is, nevertheless, in part constituted by it. What is self-evident, but of crucial importance to this discourse, is that these interrogative statements are made in language and can only be understood and answered through language. In other words, the “subject” must symbolize his or her identity within language as representation: as “I” in contradistinction to what is “not I.” Throughout Coleman’s

recent work, the manipulation of verbal language as representation, often through montaged fragments of stock phrases, runs parallel to his use of visual representation. The latter expresses the constitution of cultural identity through the visual codes that determine the outward appearance and mannerisms of each of his “players” in relation to the set of circumstances in which they find themselves, as well as through a variety of objects or signs that signify some aspect of the self or its positioning in society. Through Borras’s questions, the youth (whom we later learn is Chris disguised as his father Capax) is presented as the first figure whose enigmatic identity initiates and motivates a plot of violence, murder, and love. Chris refuses to answer Borras, who believes he is her long-lost lover, Capax, whose image she keeps in a locket. Chris wishes to maintain his disguise in order to create a scenario that will threaten and flush out his father’s murderer. He is rescued by the intervention of the girl Abbas who, in the ensuing struggle with Borras, receives an ear injury. When Chris inexplicably attacks Abbas with an ornamental dagger, damaging an eye and leaving her unconscious, both she and Borras have reasons to seek him out. This primary narrative is articulated with a second story, the mysterious disappearance or death of Capax. This is presented simultaneously as a narration and as a dramatization—a “play” within the “play,” as it were— which dislocates our sense of temporal continuity. The absent Capax is, moreover, “present” as a recurrent image: as Chris’s disguise, as the portrait in Borras’s locket, and, finally, in the transference of the disguise to Abbas during the reenactment that forces the murderer to repeat his crime. Even in this brief plot synopsis it is possible to recognize the familiar features of the classical narrative, from the mythic tale to modern crime fiction: the quest to solve a mystery and its implementation by the hero. In this work, the diegetic functions of the mythic hero are dispersed amongst the various dramatis personae: Chris’s initial search for his father’s murderer; the trials of Abbas, represented by her perceptual impairments; Borras’s execution of the villain (Mr.) and her inevitable death.2 Like the heroic role itself, the ornamental dagger also changes hands, functioning as a talisman giving superhuman powers to the holder—it relays the power of destiny. But it is the figure of Capax that undergoes repeated “resurrections,” both in the representation of the past through storytelling and the dramatization (which suggests that Capax symbolizes an aspect of language itself ), and as the identity which the other “characters” variously assume and emulate. Capax, therefore, is the “immortalized” figure who stands as cultural icon, role model, and supreme authority.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

39

40

Jean Fisher

In addition to its narrative content, Living and Presumed Dead presents a cluster of metaphorical conundrums expressed through the roles played by the objects: the costumes, the dagger, the portrait in the locket, and the “insignia,” or ideogram, tattooed on Chris’s body by his father. The insignia is the true enigma of the tale for it holds the secret whose maintenance is the motivation for Capax’s murder and whose interpretation is the real object of the quest. In its most literal sense, the mythic tale is a story of individual action. A young male (seldom a female) of exceptional qualities is singled out by the gods to resolve a problem that the social group is impotent to combat. So it is that, in Living and Presumed Dead, Capax provides the disguise by which Chris will disrupt and threaten the complacency of a social structure that has harbored a disharmonious element, the unsolved crime of murder. The traditional tale, however, carries a moral, for while it describes the hero/individual’s beneficial role in society, it also warns of the penalty should he transgress its Law. Or, put another way, transgressive energy becomes a threat once it has served its purpose and returned a social system to harmony and stability. Thus, Oedipus is ostracized, while the Irish Cuchulainn, Christ, and Borras are punished by death for acts which finally overreach the bounds of social acceptability. Sacrifice, of course, leads to legendary martyr status. The potency of this mythic structure, sufficient to survive innumerable cultural and temporal transformations, suggests that the hero’s significance lies elsewhere than simply as literary entertainment. If we dig deeper, we discover another level which suggests that the mythic hero functions as a paradigm for the individual’s transition from the anarchy of childhood to maturity and acceptance into the adult social order. Myth is a particular narrativized form of language that allegorizes the socialization of the (male) self according to a persistent and ambivalent ideal stereotype. Instrumental language is, however, a social institution that “comes from the dead”; we are all born into preexisting linguistic codes embedded within which are culture’s belief structures and collective fantasies, and it is through their negotiation that we must find a place in the world as functional subjects. Coleman speculates on how far one’s sense of reality is conditioned (and stultified) by predetermined and commodified images of subjectivity (projected above all through television), in which the hermeneutic key to the enigma of selfhood—the father’s “insignia” tattooed on Chris’s body—is invariably held by a figure of the symbolic order. Chris’s search for the

meaning of the insignia can perhaps be read as a dual quest: the search for origins and for destiny, in and against his stigmatized place within the social order. How the individual negotiates a sense of self between private and collective desires and social constraints appears to be one of the central themes of an earlier work by Coleman, Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977). In contemporary popular culture, the male figure that most closely resembles the archaic hero is the athlete, and particularly the boxer, whose body, tuned to the peak of physical performance, is capable of “superhuman” feats of strength and endurance. It is through the spectacle of his ritual combat or “trial” that the audience, predominantly the less privileged classes (from which the boxer himself characteristically emerges), identifies by proxy with triumph over adversity. Box suggests some of the poignant internal conflicts endured by such a hero, figured through the Irish boxer Gene Tunney. The artist presents us with a continuous film loop of fragments from the original footage of Tunney and Dempsey’s return fight in 1927 whose hung verdict remains a legend of boxing folklore. As we catch glimpses of the boxers circling the ring and each other between passages of black film leader, we hear a commentary representing Tunney’s circling thoughts—an interior monologue of fragmented, abbreviated phrases and nonverbal utterances—together with a low pulse whose frequency is that of a slightly accelerated heart rate. Through its rhythmic sensuality, it foregrounds the erotic physicality of the fight, turning voluptuously on Tunney’s anxiety about death and mortality, and oblique references to the present and the past—the immediate struggle, Ireland’s (colonial) history and nationalist myths. Tunney’s anguish seems to stem not directly from the contest with Dempsey, but from an internal conflict between his private sense of self and the heroic image conferred on him by a public whose relationship to him is nonetheless capricious. He knows that he possesses power as the heroic role model only as long as he maintains his success as a boxer; should he “transgress,” however, through a failure to fulfil this expectation, the public will then exercise its power as the Law and punish him by depriving him of his champion status. But is Tunney’s private self so imbricated with his public image that to lose the sense of the one is to lose identity altogether? Tunney fights, perhaps, not to win the bout per se but to ensure that the self maintains its illusion of coherence. Suspended simultaneously as “champ and not-champ,” his tragedy is that he must perpetually sustain this split in

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

41

42

Jean Fisher

the self, for he is trapped in the endlessness of Box’s structural repetition which echoes the fight’s real-life suspended verdict. There can be no release in “death” because the fight is never concluded. No hero could be more unlike Tunney than Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s antihero of Ulysses: an unassuming man of inaction whose passivity suggests a resignation to the unresolvable problems of life. Coleman’s commissioned work for the 1982 Joyce centenary was an homage to the author which, rather than presuming to approach this literary hero directly, was offered through the humble character of Bloom. The piece was intended to provoke a contemplation on Joyce’s oeuvre without imposing its own identity and thereby relegating the author’s achievement to secondary status. The reflection centered on temporality and place. On the portal of No. 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, Coleman hung a garland of xeranthemum leaves, a plant whose symbolic meaning—“cheerfulness in adversity”— perhaps sums up Bloom’s persona.3 A sterling silver replica of the garland was hung in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin: a lasting memento which would symbolize the permanence of Joyce’s literature and the city in contrast to the natural garland whose inevitable decay would stand for the transience of life.4 Joyce’s own heroic literary status was inextricably linked to the city of Dublin. There is a parallel here with Chris’s relationship to Capax, since the status of Dublin in Joyce’s work has the authority of a symbolic father:like the tattoo, the city donates to the son his language and identity but in the end becomes the very factor that limits and frustrates him. As we know, Joyce dealt with the problem of his identity in exile and through the reinvention of language. But as Bloom the Jewish exile makes his nomadic trips through the city streets, so Joyce searches the past through the labyrinth of memory to find his own artistic selfhood. Strongbow was an exile of a different order, but perhaps no less uncertain of his identity than Chris, Tunney, or Joyce. During the twelfth century, this Norman knight was invited into Ireland to settle a dispute between two Irish kings. Strongbow himself seems to have been beguiled by Ireland and its people since he married and died there; so perhaps like Tunney his private and public roles became confused. Strongbow (1978) shifts the search for identity into a sociohistorical context through the displacement of this heroic figure into a contemporary setting that questions our relation to cultural mythologies. In Coleman’s installation a cast of the knight’s effigy lies in silent repose in a darkened room;his united hands and worn features are caught in a single shaft of light. Nearby, a video monitor

Ulysses Project, 1982 Eccles Street, Dublin, 1982.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

43

44

Jean Fisher

presents the image of another pair of hands, one red, the other green. They begin to clap, slowly at first, then quickening to a crescendo sufficient, we might say, to wake the dead. But Strongbow slumbers on, impassive to the discordant drama enacted in his presence, or simply impotent to intercede in the ongoing conflict between the present sons of Ulster. The clapping hands in Strongbow remind us of the Uprising’s invocation of Ireland’s other slumbering heroes, Finn and the Fianna, who as role models likewise failed to assist in the struggle to realize the dream of restoring a precolonial Irish identity that would have any productive value for resolving the problems of present reality. It is the one-time benign image of Strongbow that has undergone transformation into the rancorous emblem of colonization: a father symbolic of an alien authority, dead but ever-present in the memory of conquest. However, as Coleman has recently intimated in Ignotum per Ignotius (1982–84), “the sword is no antique”: mythic battles live on in their perpetual recounting. But rattling the arms of heroic fiction produces a blind spot. Myth is a universal fiction occupying a timeless space, and both Strongbow and Ignotum per Ignotius seem to imply that to seek the gods and heroes is only to find the implacable distance that separates them from mortal space, from a workable reality. The supernatural hero embodies collective aspirations and dreams of transcendence. Through his perpetual resurrection in narrative, the hero defies time and in so doing provides the social group with a cohesive sense of identity and continuity. And yet, to misinterpret this metaphorical role of the hero, to dwell in an image of the past, mythologized or historical, is nonetheless to risk a pathological view of reality and to court a failure of the present. It is this confusion between “reality” and “fiction” that Coleman explored in Kojak and Zamora (1975–). Although this work remains unfinished, it is an important reference point for the artist’s subsequent explorations of the complex relationships between cultural mythologies and commodified identities, lived experience and subjective agency. As his starting point, Coleman took the much-publicized murder trial of the young Puerto Rican boy Romney Zamora. His defense based its case on the psychiatric claim that the boy was so influenced by watching television that he could no longer distinguish reality from fiction, proposing therefore that the boy’s crime was the result of his “acting out” an identification with his media heroes, Kojak and Superman (whom he nevertheless fantasized he could outsmart). Kojak/Telly Savalas was called as a witness in the defense’s attempt to establish that the representation of violent crime on TV

Kojak and Zamora, 1975–( ) Project documentation.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

45

46

Jean Fisher

perverted the young’s sense of values, a strategy that at the same time placed the actor in a morally ambiguous position. Coleman explores Zamora’s confusion of identity through the interrelationship of two plots representing “reality” and “fiction”: the making of a film with Kojak and the “real” Zamora, and the film story itself of Kojak and Zamora-as-Superboy in a crime investigation that includes the latter’s trial. The difference between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly ambiguous as the two narratives collapse into each other. The work was intended as a video installation which cross-referenced with the media’s intervention in the Zamora case. It was the first live TV broadcast of a murder trial which, with the additional presence of Kojak/Telly Savalas in his customary role as a crime investigator/witness, created a fictionalized spectacle from a real-life tragedy (itself replicating the problem of the TV crime series) and gave the mute and confused boy a moment of “stardom.” Coleman’s fiction suggests that Zamora’s “other” unspoken crime is his attempt to usurp the role of the hero-father, for which Kojak as the embodiment of the Law punishes him. Zamora falls victim to the discrepancy in culture between what is sanctioned in fiction, as representation, and what is censored in real life, and where this positions individual agency:one might argue that Zamora, in a sense, commits murder “in good faith.” He is trapped in his fantasy of an idealized self just as Kojak/Savalas is caught in the fiction of his own representation. As in Strongbow, this hero finally emerges as the representation of a paternalistic value structure which cannot accept the consequences of it own mythmaking machinery. The self ’s desire to identify with another who appears more perfect than itself, and less subject to societal constraints, leads it to nominate cultural figures which set the style for its behavior and sense of selfhood. Unlike the heroes of mythic narratives, however, contemporary celebrities like Kojak/Savalas are not models that confront the complexities of life but are reflections of the traditional role model distorted through the desires of a materialist society whose values are based on the status of glamour and wealth. Manufactured to the expediency of fashion and profit, these are images of a technology of consumerism in which desire itself is exploited, in which “reality” becomes increasingly a mediated and collective fantasy, and in which, indeed, “acting out” prescribed roles becomes the only available form of agency. At the end of Living and Presumed Dead, Chris has shed his disguise and stands naked with his enigmatic tattoo. Unlike the mythic hero, he has not

Kojak and Zamora, 1975–( ) Project documentation.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

47

48

Jean Fisher

solved its mystery and must be resigned to the absence of meaning. Perhaps now, like Bloom, he is more freely able to transform his fantasy of an “absolute truth” into a workable reality. Coleman’s Tunney and Zamora, on the other hand, cannot perform the suture that will reconcile the “real” and “projected” selves and consequently must suffer a forlorn alienation. Zamora and Chris remind us that one of the central features of fantasy and the symbolic power of the hero is dramatization: an enactment in language, a narration of the subject whereby it creates itself as a representation. If, however, the moment it enters into preexisting social codes the subject is directed to narrate itself only in the terms that culture has established for it, can one imagine individual agency outside of such prescriptions? The work so far discussed focuses on the question of identity formation through the singular figure of the hero; other works deal with the more abstract socializing function of instrumental language through which the subject is constituted into a collective order. Whereas Kojak and Zamora reflects upon the limits of our inscription in language, Now & Then (1981) perhaps can be described as a reverie on our formation in language.5 In both So Different . . . and Yet (1980) and Living and Presumed Dead, style of dress and gesture are signs which refer to the social role of the subject; they create an image for public consumption, indicating the social territory with which the desire of the self for an integrated identity is coerced or otherwise encouraged to identify. In So Different . . . and Yet, the antique green dress, like the dagger in Living and Presumed Dead, is a talisman which changes hands and undergoes transformation, but which also functions as the fetishized object of desire. In Now & Then the two figures narrate their idea of themselves through interdependent temporal movements which develop themes of earlier works, such as Clara and Dario (1975) and So Different . . . and Yet.6 The first theme is the subject’s narration of the past inflected through apparent memory of childhood images and role models; the other is the subject’s present and fantasized reflections on its desire to be like culture’s currently fashionable images, recalling Zamora’s confusion between self and TV persona. Through this complex reverie the past reveals itself as an idealized fiction, continually being retold (like the retelling of the hero’s tale) through the private and collective fantasies of the present. Perhaps we contain the anomalies and uncertainties of the present only by reworking them (“folding and pleating,” as the narration says) into the continuously transforming narrative of our own history. Perhaps Zamora’s real tragedy was that he had no history to speak of. Is “real-

Ignotum per Ignotius, 1982–84 Performed work for theater. Performed by Isabel Carlos, Rui Orfão. Music by Roger Doyle. Theatro Estúdio Citac, Coimbra, Portugal, 1983.

ity,” then, but a comic masquerade in which our heroic fantasies shadowbox with that cluster of roles that culture deems appropriate for us to perform, a mime play of shifting representations in which, trapped in our solitude, we may be as mute as Strongbow and Zamora? Language—which donates our sense of self but also limits that sense of self within socialized boundaries—perhaps this is the key by which Ignotum per Ignotius, Coleman’s second performed work, invites us to unlock some of the complexities of identity formation, and whose decoys and metonymic substitutions lead us back again into the abstract enigma of the mythic self. Although it is not a play—indeed it transgresses many of the codes of Western naturalistic theater and performance and seems closer to pantomime—it is nevertheless a drama of recitation, actions, and music performed, as in Now & Then, by two players. The simple setting, sculptural lighting, and prerecorded harmonium music suggest a church or funeral parlor. While the first player confesses a guilty secret, the second makes a sequence of moves indicative of a coming-into-life, which is the coming-into-language of the drama itself:

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

49

50

Jean Fisher

I’m only a newcomer. Start the proceedings! It’s a simple story . . . Meaning, we are told, will not be revealed by applying logic: “Anyone wearing binoculars is looking for trouble.” This discourse between the drama as a representation and the performance as a performed reality continues through various narrative displacements:the deliberate operation of the sound props; monologue with recitative and singing; ritualistic actions and abrupt “twitches” seemingly out of context with the narrative flow, indicating shifts in time or space, or connections between consciousness and the unconscious processes. The plot dovetails a plane of “myth” with one of “reality.” “Start the proceedings!” suggests a trial: the initiation of the hero quest, as well as the investigation of a mysterious death in a crime story. Various “characters” in the plot are symbolic of the social order— the priest, the lawyer—while the plot itself follows many of the moves in the heroic tale: a supper, a betrayal, a reference to crucifixion, and the lament that closes the work: Dreams a shadow Lacrymosa Infants scowl Lacrymosa What is being mourned perhaps is the death of “innocence,” the loss of the Edenic undifferentiated and fantasized self before the symbolic order of language trapped us in its socializing constraints. This sense of loss may be what links Ignotum per Ignotius to Coleman’s enigmatic A-Koan (1978), an installation whose continuous film loop presents an image of the Irish tricolor flapping wildly above a cluster of large public address loudspeakers. The accompanying soundtrack combines a low sonorous tone with a child’s voice calling plaintively to its mother: Mummy, I’m ready I’ve done a poo I’m calling you . . . Several of the work’s signifiers suggest “speaking,” or language (the gaping “mouths” of the loudspeakers projecting the voice of authority; the small

Ignotum per Ignotius, 1982–84 Performed work for theater. Performed by Olwen Fouère and Roger Doyle. Shaffy Theater, Amsterdam, 1982.

voice of the child); others suggest silence (the flag is soundless; the child’s call is unanswered). Thus between image and sound there is an oscillation between “utterance” and “muteness.” Between need and the unanswered demand, the child speaks: but the sense of unutterable loss that pervades A-Koan links coming-into-language to the longing for that loss by which desire itself comes into being. Like most of Coleman’s recent work, Ignotum per Ignotius has a narrative structure (a “revelation” in time, although not one that one would commonly anticipate) expressed through a narrator—one who tells. What Ignotum per Ignotius “tells” is the enigma of death, the ultimate mystery, and the phantasm which underlies mythic fiction and perhaps all representation. For what is storytelling but a retelling of that which has already passed away, a representation of that which is no longer present? From its beginning, which must acknowledge an end, the conventional story narrates the process of its own death, an entropic move that invites comparison with

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

51

52

Jean Fisher

the story of the self whose entry into language (the inauguration of selfdramatization) marks an acceptance of the limits to life. But this acceptance is not without resistance; like the body, language works to sustain itself against dissolution in death. The returns and repetitions of the plot of the mythic tale and its continual recounting—the epic journeys of Cuchulainn, Gulliver, and Ulysses; Scheherazade’s 1001 nights of procrastination; the continuous cycle of Box—these are strategies of deferment by which time is suspended and death is postponed. If in narrative we seek knowledge of death without its finality, perhaps what we find comforting in the hero is his continuous cycle of death and rebirth that conquers the power of time and provides a sense of continuity to life. But repetition serves another, related function. In Clara and Dario, Now & Then, and Living and Presumed Dead, repetition is the continuous restaging of memories: a renarration of the past in terms of the present, which serves to bind the threads of life into a semblance of coherent meaning, and through which the dissociated self manufactures the semblance of a unified identity—it represents itself, it creates a history. In Ignotum per Ignotius there is also a mnemonic revision seeking the causes and the resolution of the self ’s present uncertainty:“I needed to reinvest.” But as in Living and Presumed Dead and Strongbow, there is an ironic edge, for at the same time a question arises whether or not this search for unified and coherent meaning through a “knowledge” that obligates language to rules and institutions is predicated on an absurd contradiction: that what we seek we nevertheless embody in a concept of all-knowingness—the supreme authority or “cosmic father,” which is itself unnamed and unknowable (this is the meaning of ignotum per ignotius). And the more we search for unity and certitude, the more we seem, like Tunney and Chris, to encounter a mute and abyssal nothingness. What Coleman’s work makes clear is that cultural mythologies are representations that enable us to utter and define a place within the symbolic order, but at the same time, they present a fiction that not only masks the anomalies of life but also tends to deprive us of belief in our own sensuous relation to the world, and hence to cripple individual agency. Instrumental language, the Law and its institutions, are donations from the “cosmic father,” the substance of culture which supports the myth of man’s divine origin and heroic destiny. But the price paid for this disavowal of nature is a rupture between the identificatory demands of society and the desire of otherness of private dreams and fantasies. It is through this conflict that the

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Storyboard (detail).

group must establish a collective identity, and each “subject” within the group find its own sense of reality. The child must sustain this conflict as soon as he enters the symbolic realm, but while this enables him to articulate a subjectivity that guarantees his place within society, it simultaneously confronts him with his separation from the “maternal body” (nature) and the sense of wholeness with which this body endowed him.7 Living and Presumed Dead articulates this split: for while it is Borras, the woman, who holds the key to Chris’s imaginary identity (his inheritance, or physical likeness to the father in the locket), it is Capax the father who provides the son with his symbolic identity (the ideogram/tattoo). The “subject,” then, eternally divided, henceforth is motivated by the desire for a coherent identity—to “reinvest,” to find the meaning of the insignia—which can only be realized in death. Life contains, therefore, both a resistance to and a drive toward death: the dream of immortality and the fear of an endless alienation. At the end of Living and Presumed Dead, we find that neither Chris nor Abbas is able to interpret the insignia; like the erased message in Ignotum per Ignotius, perhaps it was never intended to be deciphered. At the end of his quest Coleman’s hero finds only the impossibility of meaning:both origin and destiny remain ineffable. The enigma articulated by the hero is

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

53

54

Jean Fisher

that the self occupies the space of an absence: at the very moment the self comes into language, it “dies” and is simultaneously resurrected as an other with which there can be no reconciliation. Coleman therefore inverts the significance of the cultural hero. In his work there is no graspable center to satisfy our desire for closure, or coherence, only a continuous decentering that speaks of the impossibility of unified meaning, of not one ideal self but a mask of relations, of not one reality but a play of many shifting realities that is our constant negotiation between past and present, memory and desire. Through its complex layering of signs and narrative disjunctions, Coleman’s work undoes the sutures in instrumental language, in those discursive codes which would present the world as a seamless unity. In disengaging language from the inertia of its representations, what is liberated is that voice of unreason through which language and the self may renew their configurations in the world.8 Notes

This text was written around a version of Living and Presumed Dead which was to be presented as a strip story of commercial-type illustrations. The narration, read by Noel Purcell, was a reminder of Ireland’s tradition of the storyteller. The images of the later, more familiar version consist of a sequence of photographic stills of mannequins and stock “characters” reminiscent of the masks of commedia dell’arte or medieval street theater, organized in variable juxtapositions as if taking a curtain call. This motley throng recalls the cast of narrated characters in So Different . . . and Yet and Ignotum per Ignotius, and, together with Coleman’s references to genres of popular or mass culture, makes clearer the work’s relationship to the popular carnivalesque. What is important here is the political dimension of the carnivalesque as a disarticulation of normative discursive language, whose effect is to precipitate the viewer-participant into the uncertain, liminal territory of “becoming-other.” 1. For brief descriptions of this and other work, see James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin:Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1982). 2. For the classic analysis of such “diegetic functions,” see Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas, 1968), p. 25. 3. James Joyce used this address in Dublin as the home of the fictional Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. 4. Ironically, this familiar and popular landmark on Eccles Street was itself bulldozed not long after Coleman’s xeranthemum wreath had withered away. 5. Now & Then was Coleman’s first work to be performed live. It is a double narration performed to music by two players posing as male and female mannequins dressed in the fashionable styles of the fifties and eighties, respectively. 6. On Clara and Dario, see again the exhibition catalogue cited in note 1. 7. The reading of Coleman’s work presented in this essay makes general reference to Lacan’s discourse on the self and language. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in

Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968); and Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977). 8. Given that Coleman’s work centers on an interrogation of the language of art and our positioning in relation to it as viewers, the title Living and Presumed Dead may also be seen as a sidelong reference to the interminable debate on the status of painting as an efficacious medium for reflecting on contemporary reality since the advent of photography. The “hero” in question might then be the author-artist, who is no longer—according to postmodern critique—the modernist, unified, transcendental subject of knowledge.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

55

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead ) Raymond Bellour translated by George Baker

Between the living and the dead. Between life and death. Between film and photography, theater and painting: between all the forms of representation linked to these extremes of motion and stasis, there lies a perverse and precise art, one dedicated to a future still partly unknown, and of which James Coleman is the inhabitant. There is a piece by Coleman that—through its title and the ambiguous situation that it creates—can serve as an index of this fluid field, the interstices and edges of which Coleman has filled with thirty years of work in every genre and subgenre, in projects ranging from the most minimal to the most expansive. Modest and not very well known (but recently reexhibited), the work was given the title Images (1975): seven almost identical paintings arranged as a horizontal series that can be followed by the viewer in either direction. Lit violently, in fact in such a manner that the flood of light seems to dissolve the little that one can make out, the seven images display a metallic silver ground against which two lines trace a single motif. The motif is recognizable but fleeting, transformed by each movement of the viewer’s eye or body. In effect, it is just as possible to perceive the work as presenting an abstract space or a vague shape pinioned at the work’s center, as it is to see in it two faces that suddenly emerge from either side to face each other with shifting expressions. Or yet again, because its recent appearance was in an exhibition on what is called the “Cinema Effect,” it is even more tempting to see the paintings as giving rise to the image of seven miniaturized movie screens, or seven immeasurably enlarged still frames from a film.1

58

Raymond Bellour

Series of Images, 1975 Installation at Studio Marconi, Milan, 1975.

Spectatorial displacement, perceptual ambiguity, an indeterminate classification and apparatus: James Coleman’s art is wedded to such a succession of interference. And these obstacles only increased in number and type as soon as his work opened itself—with a single-mindedness paradoxically driven by a love of the heterogeneous—to all the major issues of the day while still finding a part of its strength in the dimension of local memory. Coleman achieved renown from the moment of his earliest works, which broke with the conceptualist fallacies of an international art scene in which he nevertheless quickly became one of the canniest members. He was trained abroad, in France and in Italy, where he worked for a long time before returning to Ireland. Coleman seems to owe the force of his work to the contradiction that makes of him an internal exile in his own country as well as a nomad who carries this country with him wherever he exhibits and develops his art. The good fortune of Irish literature has always been that it is a “minor” literature, divided in its language and pushing the language of its colonizer, now its own, to points of rupture, so that the occupier is displaced from his own territory to the extent that it is reclaimed by the use of language as an act of sabotage.2 The good for-

tune of the Irish artist is perhaps to confront a similar situation with the particularity proper to a culture constructed in opposition to a realism of the image. Initially this opposition was due to the legacy of religion and magic, but subsequently it became part of the historical destiny that has forced Ireland for more than three centuries of terror and disaster to face what we might call the unrepresentable.3 There is such a thing as an Irish iconoclasm, an iconoclasm that finds a way to use words to the detriment of images, even as it treats words as the images of words in order to extract from them the symbolic weight of the local, archaic, and territorial attachments that tempt all “minor” cultures. Here we can locate the force specific to an iconoclasm that—while inspired by the analytical and illusory gestures of contemporary art—finds the tools for a critical deconstruction of figures and meanings just as much in the remains of its own culture. It is for this reason that among Coleman’s works, and especially among those that belong to his great reinvention—the slide projection with voice-over—the piece Living and Presumed Dead seems to occupy a privileged position: in this work, cultural and archetypal references become an unprecedented means of inquiry into what the image can do, what the image must do, and what new type of observer it constructs. Like all of the numerous examples where Coleman foregrounds the textual component of a piece through its sheer quantity and density of variation, the challenge in dealing with this work is to know where to situate oneself in relation to the information that comes or seems to come from the text. The information given is excessive, elliptical, linked to a succession of images whose meaning it inflects, but whose perceptual complexity disallows in return the ability truly to linger over the words—words which in any case never linger themselves, and from which, one suspects, something essential is constantly slipping away.4 There is thus a temptation: to stop the text, to freeze it, or rather, to go no further than it, in an attempt to understand what is accomplished among the images; and especially to grasp, in an illusion of mastery, what is happening at any given moment between the words and the images, in the room or the hall where we are. This is a largely vain effort, one that can only lead to a delirium of interpretation. For it is precisely interpretation that is being targeted here and that before being destroyed—like the Carthage of our childhood Latin primers—opens this condition to the possibility of another delirium, one far more agonizing and seductive. Given the dangers of such interpretation, one understands better why Coleman has been so resistant to the idea

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)

59

60

Raymond Bellour

of allowing all or part of the texts of his installations to be published, why he refuses even simply to distribute them or to respond to their meaning. For their meaning—constructed from a scintillation of possible meanings, endlessly torn down and recombined—does not, properly speaking, exist. Or it exists only in proportion to the parodic displacement—effected through flashes, overly grand schemes, empty turns, and abrupt sensations—of which it has now become the object. We should not then attempt to reconstruct the narrative, or rather the fanning network of narratives, burgeoning forth from the carnivalesque voice of the vaudeville actor Noel Purcell, who as the narrator plays all the voices of the living and the dead in this work. It seems advisable to content oneself instead with the state in which the narrative was initially presented upon the first showing of Living and Presumed Dead in London in 1983. In this preliminary version, the “projected narrative” consisted only of a series of drawings that were meant to sketch the main characters in a schematic way, close in spirit to the method of comic strips or early animated films: Living and Presumed Dead concerns a cast of characters, Abbas, Borras, Chris or Capax, and an unidentified man, whose past relationships are confused and complex. Capax was an acrobat, performing with daggers and fire, and dicing with death. He was “presumed dead” after cutting his throat during a performance. However Borras, his lover, has searched for him many years in the belief that he was still alive. Abbas rescues Chris, who appears identical to the image of Capax, from his past and discovers that he is disguising himself as his father to avenge his father’s murder. . . .5 There is thus no shortage of murder, and of fathers, and of Hamlet’s ghost, in a plot where the doublings include sexual ambiguities as well. But this entire system of symbols is always already travestied, dilapidated, spent in a series of stereotypes and of logics without issue. It is worth emphasizing that Coleman has always pointed out that, in order to build his narrative and to work out its permutations, he had recourse to Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and to the seven principal “functions” and the seven protagonists that Propp isolates within the finite number of possible situations found in the Russian folktale. Of course. But it is just as clear that Propp’s “functions” have no more real validity here than the subject positions schematized by Freud or Lacan in the Oedipus complex and its theater. One could even argue that in ascribing his work to them, the “functions”

that Coleman plays with come much closer to the logic of the “mytheme” as analyzed by Lévi-Strauss. In his critique of Propp, Lévi-Strauss prevents permutation from ever reaching arbitrariness; and above all, it is never on the morphological level alone but on all the levels of language, taken as a model, that the folktale, like the myth, must be grasped so as to establish the structure of the world of which it is a part.6 If, following the inverse of this logic, everything in Coleman’s work seems arbitrary—thanks to a kind of teeming oversignification—that would be in keeping with the collapse of the structure of a world in which memory, denuded and redistributed as dislocated perceptible elements, is still able to transmit emotion and warmth, but never meaning, due to the irreversible cleavage between affective potential and psychic distance. An intense, almost joyous melancholy thus radiates from the flute of the musician Brian Dunning, a music—seemingly half classical and half based in folk traditions—that modulates the thousand-and-one accidents of a tale that ends where it began. One is touched by various words and phrases emitted during its course. They seem to turn around a secret: around identity and belief, love and death. It is as if they were from a play or a novel where the voices themselves so perfectly recapitulate those of previous books that we believe the plots are actually happening to the characters that the images parade before our eyes. And yet such is our dissociation that nothing overcomes it; nothing can cross its barrier. The absolute separation for Propp between characters and the functions that they are expected to perform returns here in the impossibility truly to relate what one hears to what one sees, without however ever being able to cease attempting to do just that. (In this respect, Coleman’s work is ironically Proppian.) On the wall that serves as a screen, there are twenty characters arranged in a straight line, as if on stage the moment just before or after a curtain call. They shift positions continuously, and more or less drastically, dramatizing the full length of this fictive line, at the mercy of 157 projected images (not counting ten black ones) whose unequal rhythm can be heard through the staccato punctuation of the computer-controlled slide projector. Of course, everything is knowingly, even perversely calculated; the changes in position as well as the gestures, the attitudes as well as the affects put on by these strange frozen actors all seem intended to respond to the utterances of the soundtrack. And this they certainly do. But as with the “method” of Raymond Roussel so well described by Foucault—where the simple change of a phoneme suffices to change the direction of the whole story (“les bandes du vieux pillard”/“les bandes du vieux billard”)—

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)

61

62

Raymond Bellour

the visual arrangement of the characters in a single line and their continual permutation, feeding off the material disjunction between sound and image, make it very difficult to follow this story even if it is obstinately mimed by one after the other of them. Or better, try to follow the trajectory of one or more of the characters trotted along the entire length of the line, through all the dissolves and blanks that punctuate the passage from image to image—a movement of whirls and eddies that, however much it fulfills the minimum narrative contract, detaches from the fullness of the text and initiates a genuinely hallucinatory, zigzag relationship between image and sound. The viewer emerges conscious of this but defeated—or worse, with a false sense of victory, if he or she places the desire for mastery above that which the reality of the work permits. The only true recourse is to abandon oneself to the intellection of that which the projection is and can become during the twenty-five minutes that it lasts. Or longer. For, like Finnegans Wake with its infamously circular last line, the projection takes off immediately from the last image, rearranging the characters as they were at the beginning—in an order that, of course, has already been forgotten. Where are we during this time, in this empty space where we can wander, seat ourselves upon the ground, rove along the line of permutations, get close to the image, touch it without anything happening? Where are we during this seemingly unfettered time during which each viewer must find his or her own distance and imagine his or her own path through the work? We are, first of all, placed squarely in a space of memory, the grand memory of reference. While in costume, makeup, and sometimes even masks—including among them a fairy, an elf, a goblin, and a skeleton— these male and female characters from diverse epochs and places force images upon one’s memory in the same way as does the text: the Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the comedies, as much as the theater of Yeats or Synge; the Irish legends of the mythological cycles as much as the nineteenth-century novel. ( Just look at the governess holding a book in her hand, like something right out of Jane Eyre or The Turn of the Screw.) However, even memory freezes in front of the image, getting nowhere thanks to the particularities of the mise-en-scène. No one seems to have asked Coleman if one of the inspirations for Living and Presumed Dead might be the long, final short story in James Joyce’s The Dubliners, namely “The Dead.” This would have to be considered with its supplement, John Huston’s last film, made of course after Coleman’s installation (1987), but today almost indissoluble from the text, so vividly does it—the last testa-

ment of an American director of Irish origin—capture the original story. (As Duras once put it, in a tone of distraught complicity:“Before the madness of Huston, the cinematic madness of Huston.”)7 What is striking is the same idea in “The Dead” of a procession, a parade of characters, the occasion for which is the annual party given by the Misses Morkan. It is as if their successive arrivals, their positions during the dance, their presence around the long table, their leaving singly or in groups, as if all this represented mentally what Coleman initiates through the stubborn line of his figures. In this story where “the most striking characters seem like each other’s possibilities,”8 death fulfills a double role. It is figured first through the characters dedicated like automatons to “paralysis,” circling around themselves as much as around others for the duration of the long evening. But death here also carries the force of a bygone desire, one that suddenly focuses the current relationship of Gretta and Gabriel Conroy upon the image of a dead man whom Gretta once loved. This dead man is thus more alive than the living, but his memory merges with the snow that Gabriel sees falling on Ireland and on the world—these are the last words of the story—“like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” One can best understand the singular strategy deployed by Coleman in Living and Presumed Dead by reconsidering the relationship between these two types of death (which correspond to two moments in the short story, to the fashionable display of the reception and to the visionary intimacy of the conclusion in the hotel room). Or one can think instead of the film and the way it imparts to these two states the reality of living images produced through the use of depth, proportion, positioning in time and space—in short, through types of shots. Among Coleman’s numerous completed projections, from Seeing for Oneself to I N I T I A L S, from Background to Lapsus Exposure, this is in fact the only time that he maintains the constraint of a single frame within which all the characters involved in the dialogue—and the others of whom nothing is said—are presented equally, despite the gap that one experiences in their roles. Reluctant to use the close-ups that sustain in cinema the flow of time and create the sentimental identifications that he purges from his characters, Coleman did however choose to frame the “heroine” of Lapsus Exposure in just such a manner, going even so far as to produce an enigmatic complicity with her that the dreaminess of the voice-over only echoes. Nothing of the sort in Living and Presumed Dead. Progressing so to speak in the distance and through simple changes of place—staged and restaged in the same way one shuffles a deck of cards—these figures aligned with a sort of

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)

63

64

Raymond Bellour

Background, 1991–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

indifference give us the illusion that at each moment the entire story is laid out, as if the full logic of the story’s development could be encapsulated despite its ceaseless progression. One senses this in the actors’ voices and stiff gestures, which correspond rather well to the functional immobility of the work’s episodes, coded and recoded by a narrative art that seems to find resolution only in our analytical and theoretical responses to it. The result is a multiplication of the work’s photographic effect. It is the singular and perhaps unique force of this installation to push the photographic effect to the extreme signaled in its title. For in itself, the photograph is already that object which displays as dead that which is living, becoming itself presumed dead, immobilized forever and yet frozen alive. The interspace of the still-image projection—between photography and cinema—contradicts this destiny of photography, from the moment that it dramatizes the photograph, concatenates it by a sort of quasi-movement. Chris Marker’s La Jetée has become the crucial example of this within cinema, transforming death and its moment—indeed the very image of this moment—into the film’s subject, and working this to the full by the combined forces of editing, music, and commentary. The commentary’s reflexive character increases, rather than suspends, the film’s pathos and

search for the sublime. This feature of coordination that the photograph thus receives from cinema finds itself attenuated within the conditions of a museum, where the projection becomes more material (if only because of the physical presence of the slide projectors) and the spectator’s situation is transformed. Replacing the frozen vision of cinema, the aleatory nature of the situation of a visitor-become-spectator materializes when the decision is made to perceive an object through the angle of greatest coherence—despite the fact that it is by definition open to any number of approaches. But here again, potential solutions differ or diverge. Consider, for example, Allen Street (1994), the beautiful series of projected photographs by Beat Streuli, taken with a zoom lens in a New York courtyard among a group of African-American adolescents. There is no voice-over, no music, no story—nothing but an immense wall covered from floor to ceiling by a series of images, grouped in short sequences and linked together by dissolves.9 These shots focus quite closely on the body, and their motion is wedded to the rhythm and the relationships of the frames that the dissolves link together, to the surprise that offers up one spontaneous pose beneath another (a face seen head-on that had first been seen in profile, a smile appearing where there had been none). The photographic interruption—that freezing of movement that lasts forever—here

Background, 1991–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)

65

66

Raymond Bellour

seems eminently variable (this is the intimacy of the work, its depthless mystery);as each image is offered up only to fade into another, the moment of stasis is never experienced as an interruption, or a sudden eruption of the tragic. It only prepares a movement that will resume, an example of the sweetness of what Lacan called the “moment of seeing,” as if for the pure love of the body, experienced in the simplicity of anonymity. A tender as well as carnal play on the advertising image—this is the charm particular to Beat Streuli’s work. In Living and Presumed Dead, on the other hand, the horror of what Lacan named the fascinum is unrelenting.10 It is the response of the image to the text, to its coded truculence, to the role played ( jouée) by death in this story, constantly foiled (déjouée). The impact of the image stems first— one cannot repeat this enough—from the line of figures that we are asked to take as living beings, although they are not only playing dead but indeed seem to be so. This is what is at stake. It is not insignificant that such a project could initially do without actual bodies, contenting itself instead with drawings, with body-signs. And they continue to remain signs, as always because of the stark uniformity of the line. Approaching this line in order to increase the intimacy with a character solves nothing: the horror proper to that which is indistinct is now added to that which is frozen. There is but one point—variable but singular nonetheless—from which a viewer can both see everything and experience the transformations undergone by the line. For with each dissolve, the scene is reborn; after each short-lived eternity, it is reinstalled. The fascination thus emerges from each arrested movement through which an actor finds himself or herself frozen, whatever the expressions or the gestures dictated by his or her role (for example the string of gazes that one cannot pin down as being directed either within or beyond the frame). In this, one finds oneself confronted with a generalized freezing of the image; in place from the start, it is subsequently diffracted in as many different ways as there are characters through which to verify its effect. The turn of the screw in this subdued horror lies in the realization that five of the characters are not actors at all but mannequins, constantly rearranged, feeding off of this indecision between life and death. For they move only in their function as extras, like a population in reserve, forming a type of chorus between the actors and the viewers. To the extent, let me repeat, that such an obsessional choice becomes almost natural and dictated by the work’s design, one can choose similarly to follow a specific character from image to image in order never

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

to lose sight of him or her: a stubborn alternation of sameness and difference that in itself justifies a full screening. For example, take the governess with her book—closed, open, half-open, closed again, open once more— a book into which other characters seem to glance upon occasion, a book that seems to follow the thread of the story as if to demonstrate the extent to which the story is born from it. And this continues until the very last image, where the young woman pulls herself up straight behind Borras, who is kneeling in front of one of the three Capaxes cloaked in fire—the false Capax, a puppet made by Abbas to fool the real one, according to one of the most appealing summaries of this story11—and presses the closed book against her chest, as if to indicate definitively that the story is over. So, in short, what really happens to the viewer caught up endlessly in these variations, in these micro-extenuations of an elaborate horror of stasis? Curiously, this: in following like a panicked insect the transformations affecting these always frozen bodies, an actual movement is born, like a jagged cutout returned from the trick mirror of the scene. This movement is attached to the jubilation that penetrates the body of the spectator thus given over to the mad traversal of his or her own thought. Between cinema and photography, theater and painting, this singular species of tableau vivant

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)

67

68

Raymond Bellour

forces the body into thought. It relentlessly produces the enigma of the perception of an image in terms of both plot and story—simultaneously the index, symptom, and symbol of memory—starting however from the fully stopped events of which it is composed. And these full stops are individuated by each odyssey of perception through all of these shots, through the pieces (pans)12 and fragments of images, through their transitions, through images in infinite regress, images of other images.13 Coleman did once push such an experience to its extreme limit, no doubt to prove both that it was possible and that the majority of his works put it in play. This project took him eleven years to perfect. It involved appropriating at first thirteen and then ultimately nine frames from a tracking shot used in a film: James Whale’s The Invisible Man of 1933. We are not informed about this source, as the context of the shot is impossible to pin down, and yet Whale’s title is suggestive in terms of the goal of Coleman’s process. The stills are projected in the form of slides according to a dual principle of delay:the first concerns the forward thrust of the projection, which opens onto an almost infinite duration because each full projection of the slides takes four hours to complete, repeats in reverse, and then begins again; the second concerns the lighting, which works so that the luminosity of the two slide projectors used in the installation is regulated according to a principle of inverse proportional variation. The latter results in a sort of discrepancy, a long imperceptible gap between two images projected as one whose figurative content is difficult to discern. But this gap does finally become apparent, gradually doubling the contrasting black-and-white lines of the original image with a pale shadow that ends up in part substituting itself for them. To this experience, barely sustainable by the powers of perceptual attention and the physical body, Coleman has given the name La Tache Aveugle (the blind spot).14 Which is simply to say in another way what Deleuze has said, echoing Leibniz: “I am forever unfolding between two folds, and if to perceive means to unfold, then I am forever perceiving within the folds. Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object.”15 From this perspective, the photographic effect is given a second life, at the limits of that which can be articulated. It is like the utopia that drives one of the propositions of Coleman’s Charon (MIT Project) (1989), a meditation or reverie on photography, where Zeno’s paradox is reformulated from a temporal perspective. In it, a woman believes that the photograph is living proof that death does not exist. Ironically, she believes that dying itself lasts an eternity, because one’s life would flash before one’s eyes at the moment of death in an uninterrupted succession of images. Of course, the

final moment of this series would have to have in turn its own succession of memory images, and this without end, in infinite regress. No matter how close one is to death, it could never be reached. Sensing the imminent approach of death, the woman intends to prove her point by preparing herself to be photographed. Living and Presumed Dead is then not just a title. It is the dime-novel guise of a story that establishes itself only to be inverted in the mesmerizing life of the image, ceaselessly returning toward its viewer. In this, it demonstrates an aesthetic principle that seeks to push the limits of the conceivable into the register of intermediary states between motion and stasis, in objects as well as in thought. It is doubtless also through this a political allegory: Ireland—so long taken for dead, carrying and touched by death to its core—is perhaps also terribly alive.16 Notes

Translator’s note: A previous English translation of this text exists, completed by Michael Cronin and published in the Irish magazine Circa, no. 79 (Spring 1997), pp. 24–29. While I have consulted this text, it has proven largely unreliable, thus necessitating the work of retranslation. The present translation has benefited from a thorough revision at the hands of Rachel Haidu and from the suggestions of Raymond Bellour. A note on the essay’s title: Bellour’s “Les morts vivants” retains in French an ambiguity that the horror-movie connotations of my English translation somewhat foreclose. “The Dead Alive” might be a closer, if less elegant, rendition of Bellour’s French, the ambiguity of which is hopefully retained in the contradiction and the collision between Bellour’s “The Living Dead” and Coleman’s “Living and Presumed Dead.” 1. The exhibition “L’Effet-cinéma: art contemporain et cinéma” ran in Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg from 25 October to 22 December 1995. 2. On the notion of a “minor literature,” its capacities for deterritorialization, and its directly collective and political dimension, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), especially pp. 29–35. Their analysis of the German used by the Jews of Prague applies particularly well to the Irish example that they otherwise evoke briefly through Joyce and Beckett: on the one hand, this impoverished German can be pumped up artificially by “all the resources of a symbolism, an oneiricism, an esoteric meaning,” as one witnesses in the Prague School (Gustav Meyrink, etc.); on the other hand, it can be led to a point of exacerbated aridity that makes it vibrate with intensity, as in the case of Kafka. 3. Luke Gibbons importantly suggests how the traumatic memory of Irish history, attached particularly to the two great famines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (during which the country each time lost a large part of its population), has made a pictorial realism impossible in Ireland, and more generally has made impossible a belief in the mimetic force of the image, which has been driven toward a “disfiguration” more easily conferred on language than on the visual arts. One sees this, for example, in the work of Edmund Burke—too infrequently recognized as Irish—in his conception of the sublime. See Gib-

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)

69

70

Raymond Bellour

bons, “L’art et l’inimaginable: le verbe et l’image dans la culture irlandaise,” in Pascal Bonafoux, ed., L’imaginaire irlandais (Paris: Hazan, 1996). 4. Of course, there is a notable difference in the level of understanding for English-speaking viewers, especially Irish ones, and non-English-speaking viewers, no matter how well they understand English—the idioms packed into the text are potentially overwhelming, never mind the differences in pronunciation. But this also is not the main point. There might even be a precise inversion between the understanding of the narrative and the process that really belongs to the work. 5. This is taken from a poster on the back of which appear the elliptically cut-out and travestied figures of the four (or five) principal characters. Text written by Mark Francis. 6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “La structure et la forme,” in Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris: Plon, 1973). Lévi-Strauss sums up in the following way the opposition between formalism and structuralism, from the perspective of the connections between form and content:“For the first, the two domains must be absolutely separated, for only form is intelligible, and content is but a residue bereft of signifying value. For structuralism, this opposition does not exist: there is not on the one side the abstract and on the other the concrete. Form and content are of the same nature, susceptible to the same analysis. Content takes its reality from its structure, and what one calls form is but the coordination, the structuring, of the local structures that make up the content” (p. 158). 7. Marguerite Duras, Le monde extérieur (Paris: P.O.L, 1993), p. 222. This is from a transcription of an intervention on the French-German TV channel Arte from 1992. 8. This is cited from Hélène Cixous’s analysis of the short story, published as the introduction to the bilingual French edition, James Joyce, Dublinois (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1974), p. 49. 9. This, at least, was how the work was presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva at the end of 1995. Other presentations of the work have been made using the form of the triptych or even more numerous screens. 10. In the chapter “What Is a Picture?” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973; New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), Jacques Lacan opposes the “identificatory haste” proper to the “moment of seeing,” the initial time of the gaze, to the terminal time of the “fascinatory effect” that “has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life” (pp. 116–18). [Translator’s note: The term fascinum comes from this passage as well, which it seems useful in this context to cite in greater detail: What I noticed . . . was the suture, the pseudo-identification, that exists between what I called the time of terminal arrest of the gesture and what, in another dialectic that I called the dialectic of identificatory haste, I put as the first time, namely, the moment of seeing. The two overlap, but they are certainly not identical, since one is initial and the other terminal. . . . The terminal time of the gaze, which completes the gesture, I place strictly in relation to what I later say about the evil eye. The gaze in itself not only terminates the movement, it freezes it. Take those dances I mentioned—they are always punctuated by a series of times of arrest in which the actors pause in a frozen attitude. What is that thrust, that time of arrest of the movement? It is simply the fascinatory effect, in that it is a question of dispossessing the evil eye of the gaze, in order to ward it off. The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. The anti-life, anti-movement function of this terminal

point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly. The moment of seeing can intervene here only as a suture, a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic, and it is taken up again in a dialectic, that sort of temporal progress that is called haste, thrust, forward movement, which is concluded in the fascinum. (pp. 117–18)] 11. See Jan Debbaut and Frank Lubbers, James Coleman (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1989). For a more complete but also confused summary, cluttered with elements of interpretation, see Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), pp. 36–39. 12. I use this word in the sense that Georges Didi-Huberman has given it:“In the detail, the part can be isolated from the whole, while in the piece [le pan], the part swallows the whole.” See Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 314. [Translator’s note: It has proven difficult to locate an English word—patch, facet, section, segment—that encompasses the full range of meanings Didi-Huberman plays with in the term pan. Seeking to locate an experience opposed to art history’s reliance upon the “detail”—which shores up iconographic readings as a form of concentrated vision, a vision that has become transparent to meaning—Didi-Huberman turns to a description of Vermeer’s View of Delft by Marcel Proust, a description that itself turns around an infamous “petit pan du mur jaune.” This is from the account of Bergotte’s death (upon setting eyes upon this “petit pan”) in The Captive, the sixth section of Remembrance of Things Past, and the phrase is given in the English translation as a “little patch of yellow wall.” Taking up Proust’s use of the term, Didi-Huberman opposes the “detail” to the pan: a fragment that attempts to focus vision, meaning, and clarity, versus another where meaning evaporates, where transparency gives way to effects of materiality and opacity. The pan, for Didi-Huberman, is the “beyond” of “the detail principle” of art history; as a form of supreme contingency, it is compared both to the “symptom” of Freud and the “punctum” of Roland Barthes. I have chosen the inadequate translation “piece” for its connotations of sheer materiality and fragmentation, with none of the direction, focus, and completeness of a “detail.”] 13. Based on the idea of an impossibility of description and its extenuation within the works that make up Coleman’s project, a convincing formulation of this process has been given by Marie-Ange Brayer at the end of her essay “James Coleman: The Detective and the Secret,” Art Press, no. 179 (April 1993), p. 34. She particularly focuses on his film Untitled (Philippe VACHER):“The description winds around itself, multiplying possible identities and transforming the gaze into a cluster of chronologies wherein each temporal thread is called an ‘image.’” 14. On La Tache Aveugle, see Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this volume); as well as Arthur C. Danto, “James Coleman, Slide Artist,” The Nation (3 October 1994). Danto convincingly connects this work to Warhol’s experiment in Empire. 15. Gilles Deleuze, Le pli (Paris: Minuit, 1988), pp. 124–25. Italics in source. 16. This political reading would have to take into account other works: Box, Strongbow, So Different . . . and Yet, Line of Faith, and above all the theater piece guaiRE, on which see the eloquent account of Luke Gibbons, “Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE” (1993; reprinted in this volume). Based on the life of a legendary Irish king, this play’s performances took place in the castle that bears his name, his alleged fortress near Galway (Galway which Joyce used in “The Dead” as the setting for Gretta’s teenage love for Michael Furrey, and where Furrey dies).

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)

71

guaiRE: An Allegory, 1985 Performed work. Performed by Olwen Fouère. Set design by Dan Graham. Dun Guaire Castle, Kinvara, Ireland, 1985.

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE Luke Gibbons

“In using what I considered traditional symbols,” W. B. Yeats observed ruefully toward the end of his life, “I forgot that in Ireland they are not symbols but realities.”1 Culture in these circumstances cannot be reduced to an aesthetic pursuit at one remove from reality; it is a material force in its own right, as its role in turn-of-the-century Irish nationalism attests. Indeed, the later Yeats was tormented by the thought that some of his plays might have contributed to the violence of the Irish War of Independence, of 1916–22. He may have had in mind not just his incendiary Cathleen ni Houlihan, of 1902, but his less-known The King’s Threshold, staged a year later, which introduced hunger-striking into Irish politics as a form of symbolic resistance.2 Drawing on Irish legend, The King’s Threshold describes a struggle between Guaire, a seventh-century king of Connaught renowned for his generous banquets, and Seanchan, his chief bard. Guaire accuses the poet of an excess of words that is inimical to orderly statecraft, the practical obligation to attend to material needs and get things done. Seanchan responds with a hunger strike, which he sees as a way of releasing the imagination: “For when the heavy body has grown weak,/ There’s nothing that can tether the wild mind.”3 In early versions of the play the king yields, but in 1922, probably as a result of the death on hunger strike of Terence McSwiney, the nationalist mayor of Cork, Yeats gave the play a new, tragic conclusion. What is interesting here is the notion of narrative as an event informed by its historical moment:the “original” version of 1902 was no longer possible given the events of the War of Independence. The question is not just one of revision but of a story structured by the circumstances of its telling.

74

Luke Gibbons

James Coleman too has dealt with the Guaire legend, in guaiRE: An Allegory (1985), a complex reenactment of the myth using video, gesture, text, and music. And though his work is usually discussed in terms of a European and American tradition of conceptual art, guaiRE reveals it as deeply informed by its Irish context and situation. The Guaire of Irish legend would not have approved of exposing the legacy of the past to the vicissitudes of narration. In popular tradition, he was fighting with Seanchan because the poet could remember only fragments of the Táin Bó Cuailgne, a key repository of Irish mythology. Guaire asked Seanchan’s son to recover the original, as if the power of the state depended on preserving the continuity between past and present. It was precisely such narratives of return that Coleman countered in guaiRE. Narrative in this staged allegory did not just take the form of a story: it took place, the place in question being Dunguaire Castle in County Galway, supposedly Guaire’s stronghold. The initial act of restoration that Coleman contested by working here was the Irish heritage industry’s version of history: the “authentic” banquets laid out for tourists at castles like Dunguaire, to give the illusion of communion with the medieval past.4 Indeed, on the way into the “throne room” in which guaiRE was performed, the audience was shown the backstage of such illusions—a painter at work on the set, costumes being prepared. From the performance’s opening words, it was clear that Coleman’s Guaire too is obsessed with continuity—with lineage and pedigree, the foundations of his legitimacy as king. A prophecy has foretold that he will be overthrown by the son of his rival Ceallach, whom he has disposed of to assert his claim to the throne:“My will be done . . . a formula to dissect . . . thwart the course of destiny . . . the prophecy . . . Yet it can be employed to extend life . . . Nobody can rob me of my formulae . . . Buried deep inside.” “Will” here signifies not just volition but inheritance, which is in turn secured by the “formula,” an elixir of life (or death), but also the source of repetition and continuity in oral culture.5 In the legend, when Guaire has Ceallach murdered, the body is stuffed in a hollow tree.6 In Coleman’s work, however, an obstetrician rather than a coroner appears on the scene. It is as if Ceallach had been returned to the womb—as if Guaire had sought to remove his rival from affairs of state by inserting him into a maternal narrative. For Coleman, though, this insertion becomes a form of empowerment. The maternal gestures toward an alternative public sphere that jams the machinery of patrilineal power.

Though the voices of guaiRE’s “characters” are mainly male, they are articulated through a masked female actress (Olwen Fouère), the only onstage presence. At one point in the text her body is explicitly linked to Ceallach’s tree. Is the female body merely a hollow vehicle for a male line of transmission? Is it devoid of its own narratives? Marina Warner points out that the allegorical use of the female form to embody abstract ideas such as “Justice” and “Liberty” does not mean that these virtues are actually extended to women. Indeed, it often implies the opposite: the materiality of women’s bodies is emptied out to carry what are essentially masculine ideas. Hence the reduction of woman’s body to a shell in icons such as the Statue of Liberty: “The statue’s hollowness, which we occupy literally when we make the ascent to Liberty’s empty head, is a prerequisite of symbols with infinite powers of endurance and adaptability. She is given meaning by us, and it can change, according to what we see or want.”7 Yet an allegory that insists on the corporeality of the sign would seem to obstruct such instrumental uses of the female form. In guaiRE, the maternal body is such a figure. As the performance opens, the actress’s body comes alive, tentatively discovering itself from the inside. Her left leg twitches, but she grabs her right leg by mistake. She pinches her nipple and is startled by the pain. Her throne is a plaster head, on which is projected a face; it is as if she were giving birth. It may be, of course, that the mother remains a “relay” or extension of patriarchy, on the assumption that behind every maternal body lies a great man. This is no doubt as the king would like it to be. But guaiRE throws such notions into question; it is less allegory than a reflexive commentary on allegory’s workings. For Freud, every family romance contains the underlying anxiety that whereas “paternity is always uncertain, maternity is most certain.”8 James Joyce, writing within the colonial frame of turn-of-the-century Ireland, spells out the political implications of this anxiety when he has Stephen Dedalus exclaim in Ulysses that “paternity may be a legal fiction,” and is only as secure as the power of state and law to back it up.9 (Hence Guaire’s “my will be done.”) The anomaly posed by colonial Ireland to an equation of nation and fatherland was that Irish men lacked the control of the public sphere that paternal authority required. As Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford writes of the representation of Ireland in eighteenth-century aisling poetry, a genre in which the male poet would personify Ireland as a woman, “She is still a sexual object, for the poet lovingly describes her

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE

75

76

Luke Gibbons

physical charms, and occasionally she is shown as ravished by the invader. Colonization, however, has destroyed native masculinity along with political independence, and no true Irishman remains to mate with her.”10 Hence the colonial construction of the Irish body politic as female, with its corollary that without “manly” British rule, government was impossible in Ireland. (In 1898, Sir George Baden-Powell contrasted the patriarchal benefits of Ireland’s union with Britain to the “emasculated” self-government that would result from Home Rule, the latter resembling the dependency of a “southern señora on her father confessor.”)11 It may be, then, that these female personifications of the nation in some sense do mask patriarchal power on the part of the colonial administration, but it is not at all clear that this instrumental use of allegorical forms extends to the colonized culture itself. As Anne Owens Weekes writes, Gaelic Ireland’s distance from power meant that the entire population, both male and female, shared the condition of women in the metropolitan center: “Colonization, then, makes female both country and people. . . . ‘Excluded from landed wealth, from political life, from the “official” church . . . the Irish erected a counter-culture, not so much rebellious as evasive,’ also a strategy, like women’s, decreed by their similar repression, and one whose end was survival.”12 In these circumstances, the recourse to female imagery in poetry and popular protest turns the colonial stereotype against itself, positing an alternative “feminized” public sphere (imagined as the nation) against the official patriarchal order of the state. In guaiRE, this refiguration of female allegory finds expression through location, the ruins of Dunguaire Castle. (For Walter Benjamin, the ruin is the most evocative allegorical emblem, its fragments testifying to an unrestorable origin.) At one point the king’s anxiety requires that he “sponges his perspiration,” an action accompanied by the line “Sponging over a will.” The reference is to Lady Christabel Russell, who lived in Dunguaire in the 1920s. Becoming pregnant soon after her marriage, Russell was sued for divorce by her husband in 1924 on the grounds that since their marriage was unconsummated, she must have committed adultery. Yet examination by two gynecologists showed that she was a virgin. It followed that her son was the rightful heir, even if paternity could not be established. (Coleman’s sponge remark—a sponge which she shared with her husband was found in Russell’s bathroom—adverts to one lurid explanation of how she became pregnant.)13 It was as though the maternal body had ceased to be a

vehicle for the male line—as though the female had usurped the “meaning” it was patriarchally intended to carry. In one of Coleman’s recent works, Charon (MIT Project) (1989), a series of fourteen photographic vignettes, a baby gazes intently at the camera, and hence, as Lynne Cooke suggests, at “the photographer, who seems to be both father of the child and allegorical father of the image.”14 In guaiRE, allegory’s temporal lapse in the image, the delay between the sign and what it signifies, displaces the sovereignty of the eye. In Dan Graham’s set, a curved two-way mirror acts as a video screen behind the “throne,” providing the audience with a panning shot of the room from the point of view of the king. (For Michel Foucault, analyzing the birth of “classical representation” in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the individual subject/spectator is constituted by an identification with the king.)15 At the end of the performance, this pan dissolves into an image of the throne/ head on which the performer sits, with its lifelike face. The masked performer turns her back on the audience, and reveals her face—which turns out to be the face projected on the plaster head—but her reflection in the real time of the mirror is mediated by a time-delay video, which superimposes on the mirror/screen a flashback of her removing the mask. It is as if the mirror possesses memory. The “mirror stage” on which the performance literally takes place is not a medium of representation so much as a pretext for the uncanny, a reminder, in the phrase Jo Anna Isaak adapts from Joyce, of “the ineluctable temporality of the visible.”16 A conventional critique of allegorical idealizations of the female is that they privilege the relation of the image to other images rather than to women in the real world. This spiriting away of the physical body is addressed in Paul Muldoon’s “Aisling,” a parody of the eighteenth-century Irish visionary poems: Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora, Artimedora, or Venus bright, or Anorexia, who left a lemon stain on my flannel sheet? . . . In Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital a kidney machine supports the latest hunger-striker to have called off his fast, a saline drip into his bag of brine.17

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE

77

78

guaiRE: An Allegory, 1985 Performed work. Performed by Olwen Fouère. Set design by Dan Graham. Dun Guaire Castle, Kinvara, Ireland, 1985.

Luke Gibbons

Here the aisling figure is linked to the harlot (“the lemon stain”) and the hunger-striker, the anorexic bodies of all three sharing the rarefaction of the flesh. This image of decomposition assumes a different valency, however, if we recall Benjamin’s reclamation of the prostitute’s sensuality through the image of the ruin.18 The fragmentation of the ruin is an allegory of desire as well as of death, its incompletion finding expression in a ceaseless quest that acknowledges rather than reverses the passage of time. In guaiRE’s enigmatic maternal narratives, the denial of the body that is implicit in virginity is recuperated through the desire of the harlot. So, in the Russell case, the absence of an identifiable father was read as evidence not of parthenogenesis but of promiscuity—the likelihood of many fathers in her mansion. Outside the family structure, the maternal becomes a figure of erotic abandon. While Coleman was preparing guaiRE, such anxieties returned to haunt the Irish state in the forms of a divisive abortion referendum in 1983 and of the Kerry babies controversy shortly after. Two babies were found dead in County Kerry, at locations fifty miles apart. A young woman, Joanne Hayes, confessed under police questioning to the killing of the first baby, then withdrew her confession, admitting to the killing only of her own, different, child. The state insisted that she had carried, and killed, both babies—an implausible charge, for it was shown that the blood group of her own baby’s father was incompatible with that of the other infant. The prosecution then suggested that she had carried babies by two fathers at the same time—a legal fiction that even the power of the state could not uphold, even against a vulnerable single mother. Paternity had to be established at all costs, as if the inability to name the father called the legitimacy of the state itself into question.19 Clearly, allegory in guaiRE derives its impact not from a suppression of the real but from an anchorage in events, in narratives of time and place. Its engagement with questions of narrative, representation, and sexuality paradoxically depends on the contingency that, set in another time and place, it would be a different story. Erich Auerbach has noted the links between allegory and prophecy in scripture, both of which look through signs for other meanings; for Auerbach, though, prophecy differs from allegory in its insistence on grounding its interpretations in “literal truth” (for the early Church Fathers “refused to consider the Old Testament as mere allegory,” insisting that “it had real, literal meaning throughout”).20 Coleman’s guaiRE also retrieves allegory for history, except, unlike prophecy, it

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE

79

80

Luke Gibbons

denies that the real is the sole preserve of the literal. This version of allegory opens rather than closes narratives, establishing a gap between the present and a past that awaits completion. Notes

1. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 416. 2. See W. B.Yeats, Plays in Prose and Verse (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 423. 3. Ibid., p. 72. 4. “At Dunguaire Castle, the past is relived again and again . . . when guests from all over the world assemble at the nightly banquets set out by the Shannon Free Airport Development Company whose property the castle now is.” James Patrick Hynes, White-Shrouded Fort: A History of Guaire, the Hospitable, King of Connaught, and His Descendents (Mold: Studio 365, 1980), p. 61. 5. See B. A. Stolz and R. S. Shannon, eds., Oral Literature and the Formula (Ann Arbor: Center for the Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1976). 6. See Lady Ferguson, The Story of the Irish before the Conquest, 2d ed. (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1889), p. 15. 7. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Picador, 1987), p. 11. 8. Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 223. Freud is quoting an old legal tag, in Latin:“Pater semper incertus est,” while the mother is “certissima.” 9. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York:Modern Library, 1946), p. 205. See also Karen Lawrence, “Paternity, the Legal Fiction,” in Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton, eds., Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 89–97. 10. Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford, “‘Thinking of Her . . . as . . . Ireland’: Yeats, Pearse and Heaney,” Textual Practice 4, no. 1 (1990), p. 6. Butler-Cullingford observes that such personifications may project “male anxieties . . . of the need to control and subordinate the female sex,” anxieties introducing a fault line in the native patriarchal order—the weakness induced by colonization. 11. Sir George Baden-Powell, The Saving of Ireland: Industrial, Financial, Political (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898), p. 291. See also chapter 3 of David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 12. Anne Owens Weekes, Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 15–16. 13. See Eileen Hunter, Christabel: The Russell Case and After (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973). The controversy was reactivated after Russell’s death, in 1976, with litigation between her first son and her husband’s next son. 14. Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992), reprinted in this volume, p. 115. 15. See Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), p. 44. Foucault’s argument

recalls F. W. Maitland’s famous dictum, “For the first time, the Absolute State faced the Absolute Individual,” quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 63. 16. Jo Anna Isaak, The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1986), p. 23. 17. Paul Muldoon, Quoof (London:Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 39. See also Clair Wills, “The Lie of the Land: Language, Imperialism and Trade in Paul Muldoon’s Meeting the British,” in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1992), pp. 136–49. 18. See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory in the Modern,” in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laquer, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1987), pp. 220–29. 19. See Nell McCafferty, A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (Dublin: Attic Press, 1985). Joanne Hayes’s own book, My Story (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1985), was withdrawn from circulation due to a legal action following the state tribunal into her case. 20. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 30.

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE

81

Now & Then, 1981 Performed by Olwen Fouère and James McHale. Music by Roger Doyle. Project Arts Theater, Dublin, 1981.

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

I have already remarked that memory is the great criterion of art; art is a mnemotechny of the beautiful. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846 Baudelaire’s remark seems to have sprung from an intuition of imminent loss, articulating the insight that his (and Manet’s) was the last moment of modernity when the aesthetic could still be related to the mnemonic. The statement’s normative emphasis clearly went unheeded in the subsequent unfolding of modern visuality, since the exact opposite of Baudelaire’s desire became the founding principle of modernism in the twentieth century: the triumphant annihilation of cultural memory. The orders to eradicate all remnants of the past, the imperatives to make it “new” and to be absolutely “modern,” remained strident from the inception of the avantgarde up to the late 1960s. Already a contemporary of Baudelaire, the politically reactionary Maxime Du Camp, would voice the first protofuturist proclamations for the need to assimilate artistic practice into the structure of science and industry, and would suggest that the imagery of the myths of antiquity should be effaced by modernity’s myths of technical progress: Everything advances, expands and increases around us. . . . Science produces marvels, industry accomplishes miracles, and we remain impassive, insensitive, disdainful, scratching the false cords of our lyres, closing our eyes in order not to see, or persisting in looking towards a

84

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

past that nothing ought to make us regret. Steam is discovered, and we sing to Venus, daughter of the briny main; electricity is discovered and we sing to Bacchus, friend of the rosy grape. It’s absurd.1 If modernism did not try to assimilate the governing techno-scientific paradigms, resulting in nonrepresentational painting and construction, it engaged in the mimicry of the commodity image, approximating congruence with the actual object in the collage and the readymade. If in 1912 the tabula rasa of abstraction promised liberation from the fetters of BeauxArts culture in favor of the new social and cultural hygiene of industrial society, it was with the same vehement conviction that minimalist abstraction in 1960 pronounced the shift from a purely self-reflexive empiricism to a phenomenologically defined perception, by assimilating the morphology and materials of technological and corporate design. Similarly, a prohibitionist tradition in literature was established and maintained, from the emphatic declaration of a structural linguistic foundation of poetry in the phonetic revolution of 1912 to Theodor W. Adorno’s final interdiction of all possibilities of lyric poetry after the Holocaust. While each generational account argued in different terms against the mnemonic dimension of culture, the declared enemies were identical and remained the same throughout the twentieth century: historical narrative, figural representation, theatrical enactment—in other words, all the conventions of depiction and figuration that painting had once shared with the other arts, theater and literature in particular. In contrast to visual modernity, however, literature, theater, and the cinema retained in all but the most radical instances (such as structural cinema and so-called experimental poetry) a complex network of interrelationships with the representational conventions that modernist aesthetics had set out to displace. Yet, even in structural cinema, the authors who had most systematically dismantled narrative and representation in 1960s experimental film reconsidered these conventions barely a decade later (e.g., Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew and Yvonne Rainer’s Christina Talking Pictures) without forgoing their originary criticism of the ideological implications and effects of cinematic narrativity. Structural film could never claim to be the authoritative and exclusively valid voice of cinematic modernity in the manner that its static visual counterparts always insisted on being definitive on a constantly changing stage (this was even truer in literature, where nobody would even have thought of doubting, for example, the validity of Paul Celan’s work, in spite

of its manifest deviation from the historical prognosis issued by Adorno). Perhaps, more importantly, theater and literature maintained a consciousness of their own discursive status as representation and fiction, an awareness of their origin in complex traditions of rhetoric and dramaturgy that—while displaced—were nevertheless sublated in the new forms (the way dialogue with Aristotelian theatrical conventions permeates Brecht’s epic theater throughout). By contrast, visual modernity of the twentieth century—at least in its most relevant moments—insisted not only on its absolute break with tradition, but furthermore on its proximity to, if not congruity with, the “real,” emphasizing its characteristic of immediate intervention within its parameters. The visual avant-garde claimed effects for these interventions that varied as widely as the positions from which it departed, ranging from the positivist ideal of empirical verifiability, forced to the extreme of the tautological (“the black square is a black square”), to another moment when the repressive force of abstraction as cognitive and perceptual purification promised a heightened degree of transparency, both in the construction of the object and in its modes of experience. Later yet, that very tradition— as, for example, in the conceptual art practices of the late 1960s—promised that a rigorous elimination of all remnants of symbolic space and rhetorical figuration could purge representation altogether, engendering a language of “mere” information, a photographic imagery of “pure” documentation and performative interventions, allowing for an unmediated presence and egalitarian exchange between performer and spectator. And inasmuch as modernist representational strategies insisted on being coextensive with, rather than fundamentally different from, the objects of the “real,” they also insisted on the aesthetic object’s almost miraculous inversion of object experience within the spaces of the “real”: to the extent that all object relations were increasingly controlled and had acquired the condition of the fetish, the aesthetic object had to inscribe itself mimetically within these conditions to generate at least the illusion—if not actual instances—of a critical negation of the principles of instrumentalizing rationality and fetishization. The aesthetic object claimed to situate itself in a manifest opposition against false consciousness constituted in ideology. One could argue, then, that one of the most crucial preconditions of visual modernity had been not only to disavow art’s mnemonic functions, but equally to annihilate the memory of its proper discursivity as visual fiction (e.g., its status within a long and complex system of representational traditions) as well as its conventionality (in the linguistic sense). This meant

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

85

86

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

concretely that visual modernism had to deny its functions of figuration and its rhetorical dimension. A critical departure from this positivist/empiricist fallacy of modernism in the field of literature is described by Wlad Godzich: The realm of the apparent holds the truth hidden away, so that its only means of access are the figures of the apparent;yet these figures are not known to be figures for they are the only mode of being that lends itself to knowledge. . . . In the (deluded) possibility of methodological absolutism, truth is meant to be visible in unmediated form, in and of itself, and especially free of figuration. In the realm that is ours, where we have shed any belief in the ineffable and know the impossibility of unmediated truth, we are indeed back in the figural; but more specifically, in a relation to the figural where the figural is known as figural. In other words, we are in the rhetorical, as Paul de Man has been showing us all along.2 While the beginnings of James Coleman’s work can be situated in the final chapter of modernism in the late 1960s, the formation of his independent work from the mid 1970s onward illuminates the degree to which the definition of his artistic project no longer depended on the modernist paradigm of a radical dismantling of traditions. Its intense critical dialogue with the—primarily American—context of postminimal and conceptual art opened the apparatus of the historical repressions constitutive of this last phase of high modernist and literalist art, precisely in order to reconsider the disavowal of rhetoric and figuration in these practices—questions already posed by postminimalism’s Italian counterpart, Arte Povera,3 and certainly articulated theoretically in Paul de Man’s simultaneously emerging reconsideration of modernist literary studies.4 The first works that Coleman installed in gallery spaces in Milan in the early seventies, such as Flash Piece (1970), shared all the features of the most advanced practices of that historical moment.5 While following a complex set of instructions from experimental-psychology textbooks and philosophical introductions to the principles of phenomenology, Coleman’s work suggested the radical dissolution of the aesthetic object, the deployment of quasi-scientific means and technical tools to engage the viewer at the highest level of a critically self-conscious participation, and the decision to focus increasingly, if not exclusively, on the available and constitutive conditions of perception.

Flash Piece, 1970 Programmed electronic flash. Installation view.

These are the premises that link Coleman’s early practice directly with the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham (who would become a close friend of Coleman at that time). Both Nauman and Graham had attempted to radicalize the implications of minimal sculpture, which in their view had remained implicated with the pictorial and the sculptural in spite of the minimalists’ claims to have literally incorporated a new spectator. Michael Newman situates Coleman’s work accurately in this historical context: While much conceptual art appeared in the form of a proposition or commentary, Coleman’s “pieces” of 1972–1974 involved the viewer in a process of investigation or problem solving (without necessarily presupposing a definitive solution) which his works continue to do to this day. . . . Through all these works, time, memory and causality are in question:How do different interpretations come about? What part do inference and memory play? Does this imply a continuity or discontinuity of the subject through time? . . . Coleman is concerned with the relationship between the identities of the subject and image as they are mutually “conditioned” or caused through time: Is it the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

87

88

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

subject who “projects” a different interpretation or the aspects of duck and rabbit which cause a change in the subject by inserting him or her in the field of representation? Does the continuation of the “absent” figure in the memory of the viewer “anticipate” its reappearance?6 The accuracy of the critic’s description, however, reveals also the scientistic literalism which Coleman’s work of the early 1970s shares with that of many of his contemporaries, a literalism embodied emblematically in his deployment of schemata from standard works of theories of perception (such as the “duck/rabbit” schema of perceptual ambivalence). But typically, in an effort at critical distancing from that aesthetic, Coleman has commented that the deployment of these schemata was addressed at undoing rather than enforcing the traditionally convenient scientific concept of ambiguity: I would never use the word “ambiguity,” I dislike it intensely. The “Duck/Rabbit” piece exemplifies that there is no ambiguity—but those are clearly two images, ambiguities are the result of the perception that insists on a resolution of those images.7 Conflicting definitions of spectatorship seem to determine the specific dialectic of Coleman’s works from the early seventies: on the one hand Flash Piece, in its functional and experimental deployment of colored electric lights, demarcates a polemical departure from the still primarily painterly and pictorial concerns of the work of Dan Flavin, who had recently electrified abstraction but who had repositioned the viewer in a space- and object-experience of traditionally passive and contemplative reception. On the other hand, the activation of spectatorship in Coleman’s installation (as in many works by Dan Graham from that time), with its emphatic disregard for any convention of pictoriality or plasticity, reduced the viewer to the dubiously emancipated role of the participant in an elementary scientific experiment on the phenomenological relation between memory and perception. This dilemma, constitutive of the radicality of postminimal work in general, resulted from an unresolvable historical contradiction:namely, that the work’s phenomenological and theoretical ambition could no longer acknowledge its specific status as an aesthetic object, nor admit its linguistic conventionality within traditions of artistic and, therefore, rhetorical figuration. At the same time, the work’s dependence on institutional and discursive legitimation prevented it both from actually abandoning its sta-

tus as a traditional aesthetic object and from claiming the status of a scientific or political intervention. This reductivist dilemma applies even more to Memory Piece (1971), which literally eliminated all traces of perceptual plasticity in favor of a programmatic foregrounding of the viewers’ public enactment of mnemonic processes. The work took the participatory dimension within a simply defined structure to its logical conclusion: with a vengeance typical of early seventies deconstructions of notions of authorship, the work effaced its artistic “original” textual definition only to have it replaced by a potentially infinite contingency of viewers’ memory projections. These recorded responses were superimposed on the artistic “urtext” as so many accumulated palimpsests which eventually made up the work in its entirety. As a result of its exclusion of visuality and its focus on speech and the subject’s enunciation, the work indicated another important shift: Memory Piece leads not only from the death of the author to the birth of the viewer but also from the dissolution of the primacy of the visual to the instantiation of the subject in linguistic articulation. Anne Rorimer’s minute and eloquent description of Memory Piece clearly indicates that the work generates a precariously circular viewing condition: Memory Piece . . . reflects on the role of memory with regard to perception. . . . Coleman replicates the mnemonic process. He accomplishes this by means of two tape recorders. The first tape recorder supplies a text of about three to five minutes in length. The participant in the work may hear the original text just once and, having attempted to memorize it, must record it on the second machine. This text, in turn, must be recorded once again as remembered. The activity may be repeated, theoretically, ad infinitum, or until the nearly inexhaustible supply of tapes runs out. Previously recorded texts are not accessible, and as completed, are kept in a provided storage unit.8 Spectators/participants are suspended within the sudden and radical emancipation from their status as mere viewers, only to find themselves restricted to the experience of the deconstruction of their traditional aesthetic expectations. What seems to have become evident to Coleman, then, was a dilemma similar to the one recently identified by Jürgen Habermas concerning the function of philosophy once it has become apparent that the philosopher can no longer pretend to provide privileged access to truth: namely, the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

89

90

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

question of how aesthetic objects can claim a specific truth value and how this claim can be legitimized. For Coleman, this problem posed itself first of all with regard to an artistic activity that demanded the absolute dissolution of the author’s privileged position and of the object’s special status, and secondly with regard to the condition that artistic practice had increasingly insisted on the necessity of abolishing the specific forms of experience it had traditionally generated. The contradictory nature of such a claim would become all the more evident once the aesthetic object had assimilated itself in its entirety to the condition of the scientific experiment, yet continued to operate exclusively within an institutional and discursive framework that provided definitions which were exclusively valid within the sphere of aesthetic experience.9 In order to resolve this dilemma in a complex process of critical differentiations, Coleman’s work had to engage with several problems simultaneously. The first one was the legacy of the neo-Kantian aesthetic of (American) modernism, with its emphasis on perceptual empiricism, selfreflexivity, and medium-specificity and its prescription of an essential and exclusive visuality as the sole legitimate modus of the experience of high art objects. The fallacies of this position had been brilliantly (and inadvertently) articulated in 1967 in the swan song of late modernist criticism, Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood.” In an almost desperate attempt to shore up the territory of American modernism at the moment of its definitive disappearance, Fried had uncannily singled out theater, precisely the domain of modernism’s utmost historical repression, as its primary enemy. In a statement sounding off its attack on minimalism with a peculiar hybrid of nineteenth-century phraseological and terminological borrowings from Walter Pater’s normative aestheticism and Max Nordau’s theory of degeneracy, Fried had pronounced a highly phobic prohibition against theatricality: Theater and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such. . . . The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater. Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater. Theater is the common denominator that binds a large and seemingly disparate variety of activities to one another, and that distinguishes those activities from the radically different enterprises of the modernist arts. . . . The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly

meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theater.10 It is certainly against this doxa of modernist visuality that Coleman directed his—at first gradual, and then almost programmatic—embrace of the conventions of theatricality and narrativity in his work after 1973. At the same time, he would have wanted to reposition himself in relation to postminimalism and conceptual art, work which had in fact already initiated a critical analysis of that modernist legacy, yet which had remained ultimately within the orbit of modernism’s parameters. It was precisely this work that had become the actual target of Fried’s polemical (and erroneous) association of the phenomenological dimensions of minimal art with the conditions of theatricality. Evidently, this duality of a simultaneous differentiation and critical negation of both the modernist as well as the minimal and conceptual aesthetic would have situated Coleman in a complicated dialogic relationship with the practices of his contemporaries.11 The key objection against the theatrical implications of minimal sculpture in Fried’s argument had addressed the fact that the presence of the beholder was programmatically foregrounded, in manifest opposition to modernist work that had been defined as autonomous and complete. Fried’s argument had actually claimed that a medium-specific object could be envisaged without considering either the spectator or the discursive and institutional framework constitutive of the specificity of aesthetic experience. With hindsight, the argument appears as a last attempt to maintain the traditionally defined and regulated place of the spectator and to prohibit the emerging comprehension of the necessary syntagmatic character of structurally produced (visual) meaning: Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. [Robert] Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art “what is to be had from the work is located strictly within (it),” the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.12 Coleman’s critical departure from this position, as for example in Slide Piece (1972–73), would therefore not just redeem perceptual phenomenology in explicit opposition to late modernist claims, but would radicalize the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

91

92

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

phenomenological as the reappearance of the theatrical. This all the more so since he would explicitly historicize the theatrical within its proper discursive conventions (speech and rhetoric, enunciation and performance), positioning it against the minimalists’ and postminimalists’ claims for a universal legibility of the phenomenological object or performance: after all, the performances of Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman had reincorporated the theatrical in both speech and gesture, but they did so precisely in total opposition to traditional definitions of theatricality. They had enacted theatricality as manifestly outside of the conventions of rhetoric, enunciation, and dramaturgy. In Coleman’s Slide Piece, a projected photographic image of an apparently banal urban site becomes the subject of numerous (between three and five) oral descriptions, recorded in the language of the country in which the piece happens to be installed. Each of these descriptions—in a Rashomon-like effect of diverse perceptions and narrative recountings of a singular incident—isolates utterly different aspects of the photograph. Each speaker/observer seems to follow a different perceptual logic, while the viewer follows the continuous sequence of the reiterative projection of identical slides. Slide Piece thus withholds perceptual information (or rather reduces it to the threshold of the most minute differences of an extremely slow, gradual perception) and emphasizes that perceptual objects are unthinkable outside or independently of the linguistic activation and consciousness of the viewer. Thus the work reverts attention utterly onto the level of reception. In fact, it is constituted exclusively in the polyphonous acts of reading, since the “work” itself provides nothing but an empty iconic point of reference for the activation of the speakers’ (and the viewers’) responses. “Theatricality” for Coleman meant at this early moment to displace the traditional concept of the visual object as the integrated and privileged locus of aesthetic knowledge or experience, and to dismantle it as the site of a supposedly autonomous visual specificity. Yet the interaction between Coleman’s work and the work of his immediate peers of the 1970s is even more complex than his critical differentiation from the modernist legacies of the 1960s. Within the very moment of conceptual art in which his work originated, Coleman reformulated his approach to language in distinct opposition to the preoccupations of conceptual artists whose work originated primarily from principles of analytical philosophy or structural linguistics. Whereas they had articulated a purely textual aesthetic in critical response to minimalism, and had offered up language as a matrix for artistic practice by defining it either according

to the philosophical model of the analytic proposition or that of the linguistic performative, Coleman’s work would now expand the range of linguistic conventions eligible for artistic practice to include rhetoric and dramaturgy, and—perhaps most important—the register that Roland Barthes would call the “grain of the voice”:the phonetic definition of subjectivity within the acts of enunciation. Coleman’s work would insist—once again in distinct opposition to conceptual art—on the necessity of sustaining the dialectic between the linguistic dimension and the dimension of visual and theatrical representation. Since the mid 1970s, his work has juxtaposed these extended registers of linguistic competence with an equally expanded conception of visuality, incorporating all those practices of theatrical and performative figuration that modernist visuality had excluded. Even though some conceptualists, such as Robert Barry or Lawrence Weiner, had already situated their work within an emphatic and often unfathomably ambiguous relation to both the language of theory with its instrumental logic and poetry with its seemingly random and arbitrary conditions, Coleman would now construct a manifest hybrid of linguistic functions, operating simultaneously within each of his projects: the performative, the rhetorical, and the dialogical/theatrical. It is certainly not accidental that the slide projection would become one of Coleman’s typical formats, a technology and presentational device first introduced into the visual arts in the context of conceptual practices of the late 1960s. For example, Robert Barry’s projections of typewritten or typeset slides (showing word lists to be read as accumulations of performative statements) opened the limited definitions of language functions given in the conceptual model of the analytic proposition, as did Lawrence Weiner’s Statements in 1968. By introducing the decisively temporal dimension of the linguistic structure, they displaced both the static visuality of modernist pictoriality as well as the problematic compromises with the visual in more recent photographic works that conceived the visual as “pure” documentary records. From the first installation of Slide Piece in 1973, Coleman would construct the visuality of the projection within the traditions of static pictoriality and the linguistic and performative dimensions of the projection within the hybrid conventions of linguistic temporality, theatricality, and narrative. As much as the photographic aesthetic of conceptual art is at the center of Coleman’s strategies from the mid seventies onward, his work never acquired the mythical status of conceptual photography as purely functional

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

93

94

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

documentation. On the contrary, the photographic image itself is constantly suspended in juxtapositions with language and pictoriality. Thus, the presentational format of the slide projection emerges as an ideal device to sustain the dialectics between the pictorial and the photographic, between narrativity and stasis, between language in its performative and theatrical modes. To the avant-gardiste triumphalism of certain forms of conceptual art, which prides itself on having shed the last fetters of visuality and advanced to a realm of pure linguistic performativity, Coleman’s work responds with skeptical contemplation and a countermemory of the forms of experience still embedded in the representational and linguistic conventions from which conceptualism had proudly divested itself. Similar to Marcel Broodthaers’s insistently posed—yet highly rhetorical—questions about the incompatibility between the language models underlying conceptual art and those originating in late nineteenth-century literary modernity, Coleman poses questions concerning the apparent incompatibility between the radically emancipatory forms of a linguistic and photographic critique of traditional models of visuality and the differentiated forms of linguistic and specular experience embedded in the traditions of figuration, rhetoric, and dramaturgy. Yet at no moment in Coleman’s work does countermemory as resistance against avant-gardiste triumphalism make the profoundly reactionary claim to have the privilege of historical continuity, or worse yet, to have renewed the forms of experience that the avant-gardiste enterprise had publicly and exemplarily declared as annihilated. Seeing, through Coleman’s work, Fried’s blindness concerning the phenomenologically refigured spectator, however, reveals that spectatorship was not the sole, perhaps not even the primary question that motivated Coleman’s critical contribution to the demise of modernist positions. Rather, his aesthetic of “theatricality” seems to have corresponded as well to the problematic implications of theories of subjectivity and signification that had been implicit since Duchamp’s declaration of the death of the author in the aesthetic of the readymade, and that had become theoretically explicit in the influence of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity on artistic practice of the 1970s. Most important, however, was the realization that Duchamp himself had already articulated a polemical revision of the universally accepted aesthetic of the readymade when engaging in the clandestine project of Etant donnés as an allegory staging the desire of figuration. The tableau vivant as a hybrid model between pictoriality and theater, between an aesthetic of randomness and one of extremely studied preci-

sion, had already attracted artists like Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris in the mid 1960s. That genre’s innate dialectic corresponded to their desire to deconstruct the traditions of virtuoso (dance) performance and simultaneously to adopt the antihierarchical logic of Duchamp and Cage (without ending up with a static object conception or the atrophy of orthodox minimalism).13 As a genre redeemed from obscurity and as the most outmoded and unlikely convention of prototheatrical display, the tableau vivant suited Coleman’s investigation of the phenomenological boundaries of minimalism and its followers: its fusion of choreographed movement and pictorial stasis, its synthesis of present immediacy and arrested temporality (making the present appear to be verging incessantly on the past), its aleatory choices from an infinity of possible moments fused with a decisive specificity— all of these were features of considerable interest in the elaboration of Coleman’s subsequent projects. Once again, though, his systematic engagement with the model of the tableau vivant in his work since the early 1980s—in performances such as Now & Then (1981), or his exceptional video work So Different . . . and Yet (1980)—not only seems to voice doubts about the restrictive and literalist interpretations of the modernist and Duchampian legacies in postminimal and conceptual work but, more important, seems to question the restrictive and orthodox applications of poststructuralist concepts of subjectivity. What emerges from a contemplation of Coleman’s work is neither a literal enactment of poststructuralist concepts of subjectivity (as many of his best interpreters have argued)14 nor the extension of Duchampian concepts of authorship and objecthood, but rather a critical complication of these concepts in a manner similar to Duchamp’s own critical revision of his readymade doxa and the prematurely proclaimed death of the artistic author in the return to the figuration of the Etant donnés. Arguments developed by Maurice Blanchot in response to the legacies of Foucault and the prematurely proclaimed death of the subject seem to articulate a position that parallels the critical complexity of Coleman’s dialogue with these legacies: For example, it is accepted as a certainty that Foucault, adhering in this to a certain conception of literary production, got rid of, purely and simply, the notion of the subject: no more oeuvre, no more author, no more creative unity. But things are not that simple. The subject does not disappear; rather, its excessively determined unity is put in question. What arouses interest and inquiry is its disappearance

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

95

96

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

(that is, the new manner of being which disappearance is), or rather its dispersal, which does not annihilate it but offers us, out of it, no more than a plurality of positions and a discontinuity of functions (and here we reencounter the system of discontinuities, which, rightly or wrongly, seemed at one time to be a characteristic of serial music).15 Such a “system of discontinuities” is certainly apparent as one of the structuring principles of Coleman’s work from the late seventies onward, and it is precisely in the emphatic juxtaposition of methodological fragments—in the work’s deliberately constructed incompatibility of visual and textual conventions—that its profoundly allegorical character manifests and mourns the inability of contemporary visual practices to contemplate subjectivity, construct narratives, and represent the process of historical experience. Yet it is evident that Coleman’s “system of discontinuities” resists at the same time even the slightest thought of a simple return to a centered humanist subject conception or a pre-Duchampian aesthetic. Coleman’s Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977) is almost programmatic in its reinscription of both figural representation and literary narrative into the traditional, perceptually determined object. A loop of found film footage is combined with alternating insertions of short units of black film leader and a soundtrack of an internal monologue scripted by the artist. Jean Fisher has observed with great clarity how the text operates in the structure of the work: Coleman’s dramatized recitation addresses itself to listening, not to reading. This is due in part to its use of phonetic puns . . . ; but it is also the result of the way that the voice produces meaning, relying as much on what Roland Barthes described as the “grain of the voice” (enunciation) as on those expressive qualities which are signifiers of character in theater. Insofar as it is a performed recitation, Box may be said to be “theatrical,” but in presenting an associative rather than syntagmatic narrative, it is not typical of conventional theater.16 One could understand Box’s subtitle, ahhareturnabout, not just as a reference to a strategy in the prize fighter’s arsenal of aggressive and defensive movements, but also as an announcement of a radical reversal of the paradigmatic features governing postminimal and postconceptual artistic production in the mid 1970s. As Coleman’s film loop follows mimetically an exchange

Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977 Projected 16 mm black-and-white film. Continuous cycle. Installation at Julian Pretto Gallery, New York, 1977.

of punches in rapidly alternating sequences of blackouts and image-sound flashes, it literalizes the optical beat that Rosalind Krauss has brilliantly described as the moment of departure from disembodied modernist opticality toward a phenomenological inscription, toward the grounding of visual experience in the range of the optical unconscious and its bodily foundations.17 Yet to the same degree that Box reiterates the experience of the perceptual pulse in the spectator, pushing it almost literally across the threshold of physical discomfort, this pulse alternates with an iconic sign of two fighters exchanging actual punches. Not only does this correspondence generate an effect of the doubling of the semiotic as the physical (bordering on a pun), but it also situates the image of bodily performance within a very specific historical event and within the confrontation of two historically identifiable protagonists. Box (ahhareturnabout) signals a major departure from American postminimalist aesthetics, since the bodies of Coleman’s performers no longer appear as neutral and naturalized transhistorical givens within a universally valid field of potential phenomenological inscriptions—as the body was still being presented in the work of Graham or Nauman in order to oppose the techno-scientific orthodoxy and morphology of minimalist literalism,

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

97

98

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

while ultimately still participating in its very logic. Jean Fisher succinctly describes the refiguration of the body in Coleman’s work in a more theoretical perspective, stating that “if the ‘body’ returns here, it is not as ‘nature’ but as a referent to the conflictual sociopolitical narratives that constitute the real conditions of experience.”18 In comparison to Flash Piece, which deployed the device of flashing lights as a phenomenological critique of opticality, Box reveals the degree to which Coleman’s approach was changing by the mid 1970s. In its manifest theatricalization of the performing body, this work weaves the reappearance of figuration instantly into a complex set of historical references and of immediate experiences and dialogic responses. Integrated within the perceptual pulse we now encounter both an acoustic as well as a representational and a narrative dimension, even though the seriality of the loop as well as the internal repetition still recall the structuring principles of sculptural work and structural film of the seventies. The stark graphic and grainy loop of found footage evokes the persistence of the iconic dimension in the images of Warhol’s paintings, and their incessant reminder of the inescapable condition of referentiality, even in the most rigorously serial structural order of pure repetition.19 Rather than simply initiating a return to a cinematic mode of representation, unleashing a false plenitude of narrative upon the spectator, Box operates clearly within the demarcations that the critiques of modernist practice themselves had articulated, since these restrictions of representation are the focal points of Coleman’s analytical approach as much as his resuscitations of figuration and narrativity emerge as the subversive strategy aiming to dismantle these restrictions. This dialectic of Coleman’s complex allegorical operations since the mid 1970s, in its attempt to criticize the inability of visual practice to engage in narrativity and figuration and at the same time to probe the possibilities of their redemption as fragments, is articulated in the continuous reworkings of these paradigmatic restrictions, in the opposition between the emphatic recovery of the mnemonic dimension and the rupture of the governing conventions of visuality. Thus, the viewer of Box is suspended in a continuous alternation—in a manner similar to the condition of undecidability in the “Duck/Rabbit” work titled Playback of a Daydream from a few years earlier: on the one hand, the visual pulse of phenomenological inscription and the indexical registration of the light-emitting projector; and, on the other, the historically specific event of the boxing match and its iconic representation.

It is in the light of this programmatic declaration of the return to a historical subject that Coleman’s subtitle itself—ahhareturnabout—almost reads as an indication of a strategic move by the artist within the field of given artistic operations. Moreover, one could argue that within the general project of reconstituting a historically specific body to the universalist abstraction of phenomenology, Coleman insists on a sociopolitically specific body, structured by the discourse on national identity (in this case by presenting the Irish fighter Gene Tunney as the struggling protagonist who tries to save his boxing championship as much as his sociopolitical identity as an Irishman). The emphasis on this geopolitical specificity opens the way for yet another critical dimension in Coleman’s work: rather than claim a space of phenomenological neutrality or aesthetic exemption from the apparatus of spectacle culture, Coleman positions his work instantly within the spectacle’s own parameters by invoking the archaic imagery of the boxing match as one of the most charged metaphors of social conduct within capitalism and as one of the key topoi of modernity and its spectacular forms of mass entertainment.20 Precisely in his insistence on the historical specificity of the incident and its ramifications for the conception of a national identity constituted by means of the cultural construct, Coleman also opposes the totalizing claims of spectacle, for only in the extreme emphasis on the particularity of historical experience can the last vestige or the first index of unalienated subjectivity be found. Paradoxically, this specificity and concreteness can only assert itself with the allegorical hindsight of the cultural construct, because any insistence on a realization of that specificity of identity within the very sociopolitical reality that has totally obliterated it would instantly turn into the most reactionary conviction of nationalism and ethnicism currently played out on the stages of the disintegrated nation-states. A position similar in complexity to Coleman’s approach to the problematic intertwinement between cultural production and sociopolitical identity has been described by Seamus Deane with regard to Irish literature and its reception: To combat some fetishized version of Irishness on the political and social level often has, as a consequence, the acceptance of an equally fetishized notion of Art. If the Art is Literature, and if the Irish are agreed to be quite gifted in this area, then there is, inevitably, a resmuggled version of Irishness operating within the economy of the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

99

100

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

debate. Literature, art, poetry, the province formerly assigned to the 19th-century colonial version of the Celt, has now become part of a late-20th-century repossession of Irishness by those who would, in all other respects, reject the existence of such an essentialized quality. . . . The politics of such countries not only become less interesting than their literature, they are effectively erased by it. The inflation of the esthetic always leaves a political deficit. The recruitment of postcolonial literature to post-Modernity dooms the politics of postcolonial societies to pre-Modernity. . . . Postcolonial theory conspires at times with the very essentialisms that it aspires to rebuke;it permits the reintroduction of the “feminized” construct that it took so much trouble to expel, and it is persuaded to do so in the name of “Art.” In a similar, but also different way, feminism confronts this issue, wishing to assert for itself a radical independence that is over and over again rearticulated in the residually essentialist discourse it wishes to erase. Perhaps Irigaray’s way of going through it in order to come out the other side, or on the side of the Other, is the only recourse. A stereotype should not perhaps be demolished until it has been reinhabited.21 This dialectic seems to assume a central importance in the subsequent development of Coleman’s work, since in all instances the abstract universality of specular conventions and spectacular display is juxtaposed with an interrogation of the possibilities of temporally and geopolitically determined forms of experience. The conception of identity through aesthetic practice now seems to be constituted within unresolvable contradictions: the necessary cultural production of sites of subject articulation and structures of memory conflicts with the simultaneous, inevitably ideological enforcement of a mythical identity; and the same schism exists between cultural production as the most complex form of spectacularization and cultural practices as the last resistances against the global homogenization generated by spectacle. This becomes evident if one considers, for example, Coleman’s exceptional (and singular) tribute to the conventions of static sculpture in his work The Ploughman’s Party (1979–80).22 Conceived as an “Irish” contribution to an exhibition of Irish art in England in 1981, The Ploughman’s Party intensifies the confrontation between artistic constructions of identity and their immediate falsification within the process of spectacularization that cultural consumption now inevitably enforces. One of the rare static and nonphotographic works by Coleman, it consists of a forged-iron relief in the shape

The Ploughman’s Party, 1979–80 Projected slide image with audio narration. Blue neon, forged iron, and gold and silver paint.

of a plow (reminiscent of both the stellar constellation and the political emblem of Sinn Féin, the historical protagonist and name of the political party for an independent and united Ireland). Its surfaces covered with gold leaf, the “relief ” was installed in a room entirely lined with white felt and was lit from behind with bright blue neon light. As though the already insufferable association of a symbol of radical identity politics with a luxurious cultural construct of dubious pedigree did not suffice, the relief ostentatiously positioned itself within a derivative and hybrid aesthetic, fusing David Smith and Dan Flavin via an excursion through the legacy of Yves Klein. Played continuously, the audio component of The Ploughman’s Party reiterated the slippage from the symbol of a radical political cause to the luxurious pomp of yet another variation of installation art: an actor’s voice on a tape loop recited a textual montage written by Coleman that made the listeners slide through similar turns and inversions of language modes. In a perpetual phonetic and lexical glissando, the speaker articulated all the demarcations of class that can be revealed through enunciation and vocabulary. Ranging from a statement of peasant rules to the promises of perfume and jewelry advertisements, the recitation alternated in sudden switches

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

101

102

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

between the grainy voice of a subjectivity seemingly in its “natural” state uttering obscenities and the histrionics of a commercial using all the phonetic registers of seduction. This sculptural and phonetic grotesque—certainly Coleman’s most comical work—deploys the allegorical strategy of a simultaneous devalorization of all accepted linguistic and artistic conventions to induce the experience of a semiotic field run amok, and the travesty necessary for a cathartic emancipation from the aspirations to culturally or politically constructed identity in the present. Three years after Box, Coleman produced So Different . . . and Yet, his first and—for the time being—only work employing video imagery. As though he were constructing an archaeology of the genres and techniques of the specular and of spectacularization, Coleman moved from film and the mass-cultural athletic ritual in Box through the display of the fashion show in his performance Now & Then; from the phonetics of alienation in the juxtaposition of advertisement languages and the foundational discourses on identity in The Ploughman’s Party to his critical analysis of video/television conventions in So Different . . . and Yet; and from all of this to a culmination in the elegiac and declamatory embrace of the theater in Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85). Coleman’s archaeology of figuration appears to be engaged in the investigation of the intricate interrelationships between the history of scopic desire from its earlier embodiments in pictorial conventions to their subsequent desublimation and dissipation in mass-cultural forms. His archaeology of narrative traces the transformations of language experience from the poetic and communicative dimensions of theatrical dialogue and dramaturgy to their subsequent dilapidation in contemporary film and television and in the narrative structures of pulp fiction and the photonovel.23 In So Different . . . and Yet, a single color monitor is displayed in a large white architectural frame, generating a sense of an unusual sculptural formality while at the same time clearly opposing the televisual medium’s standard self-presentation as a “casual” universal presence, as a “natural” contingency of everyday life. Corresponding to the emphatic recognition of the continuous infliction of the electronic image on spatial and visual experience, a single fifty-minute take of the camera forces the viewer/listener to confront a continuous dialogue between a female and a male protagonist.24 They assume in rapid succession the roles of a number of increasingly intertwined and disparate characters within a trivial melodrama, unraveling for the patient viewer/listener the almost painfully unusual experience of a visual continuity and temporal duration that the medium’s mass-cultural

So Different . . . and Yet, 1980 Performed by Olwen Fouère and Roger Doyle. Rehearsal.

conventions strictly prohibit. Thus the work’s dialectic unfolds in the tension between the singularized image, its quasi-architectural presentation, the extremely attenuated dialogue, and its perpetual intertwining of seemingly incoherent, manifold narrative strands. The two voices alternate in an unpredictable slipping and sliding between French and English accents, a slippage reminiscent of that which had taken place earlier in the class-bound discourse of The Ploughman’s Party. Enunciations range from the “grain of the voice” of affected arrogance and pretense to the vilest language of hypocrisy and abuse. The narrative plots, recited in the most vapid French or haughty English pronunciation of platitudes, are jumbled and compressed, repetitive, fragmented and futile, and they generate an almost grotesque effect of a continuous cancellation of the listener’s desire for closure, resulting in the total suspension of any narrative logic or function. The conventions of visual representation appear on Coleman’s archaeological stage in the classical scopic trope of the reclining female figure, the very figuration and staging of patriarchal desire. Originally a pictorial and photographic topos, the female odalisque or gîsante emerges here as an allegorical device of the desire to “figure,” strangely displaced into a pseudo-theatrical performance on the video/television screen.25 A

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

103

104

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

most peculiar detail of the actress’s costume (a strangely outmoded green evening gown continually referred to in the accompanying narrative)—a spiraling red garland ornamenting her right leg from foot to thigh—seems to enforce in the manner of an abstract synecdoche the very mechanism of scopic desire that the figure embodies at large. In the same manner, the desire for narrative as an archaic mythical structure, deeply imbedded in the construction of subjectivity, now appears to have become itself the subject on display, with the female protagonist accompanying the narrative’s every twist and turn with a literal repositioning of her body and an adjustment within her repertoire of poses. The male actor, placed further in the distance, seems to generate the piano music accompanying the dialogue with the alternatingly haunting and sentimental or naively mimetic dramatic tunes that were once integral to silent film. This peculiar reenactment confronts us—as do the body language and costume of the actress—with an enigmatic sense of temporal dislocation, an outlived form of experience that suddenly acquires an uncanny sense of presence and reality in the evident contrast with the electronic equipment from which it emanates. After a period of careful observation, the viewer recognizes that the male protagonist, dressed in a white tuxedo, wears a pair of horns on his forehead that are no less astounding than the spiraling red bandages on the female protagonist’s leg. Clearly, this signals a return to the realm of mythical experience. Yet the mythical structure is to be found not by identifying the ethno-cultural sources of the horned male figure, but rather by recognizing that it is the technological image of television itself and the types of narrative production it enforces which have inflicted myth with a vengeance onto the aspirations for an emancipation from the cult value of images through their technological reproduction.26 Coleman’s allegorical operation reconstitutes the by now all but unimaginable experience of temporal duration to the viewer of the electronic image.27 Yet within the same approach, in an apparently complete reversal of the principles of real time and duration, the uninterrupted imagery confronts the viewer with a persistently fragmented and decentered narrative. It generates a radical negation of the viewer’s restless anticipation of narrative closure and provides, once again, the fundamental counterexperience to the governing principles of electronic image production. In the last of Coleman’s early works to concern us here, the slide projection Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85), theater itself seems to have taken the center of Coleman’s archaeology. Yet theater as the historical

matrix of spectacle arises here once again only to disintegrate in the very moment of its reconstitution into a series of pointlessly and perpetually shifting, projected photographic images. These images show a large troupe of actors in the masks and costumes of what appears to have been a popular play (one can, after a while, identify some of the figures as a fishwife, skeletons, goblins, acrobats and other garishly dressed theatrical performers, along with the strangely discomforting presence of shop-window mannequins dressed in street costumes). The large horizontal line-up of the figures suggests that we are, in fact, witnessing a final curtain call. Thus, from the very beginning of the slide sequence, the sense of the end of the play is present. It is only the voice of the narrator, Noel Purcell (an older popular actor from Dublin who performs the role of the narrator with a sublime differentiation of phonetic registers and dramatic tempi), that makes us anticipate an unfolding rather than a closure. As the narrator is threading through the complicated story of a number of invented characters, most of whom bear names in an unidentifiable language (Abbas, Borras, Capax), the spectator realizes that each individual projected slide alters the line-up of characters or their positions ever so slightly, even though the overall structure of the panoramic display of disappearing actors remains identical throughout the entire projection. The highly dramatic yet stark and graphic plot—an archetypal, Oedipal story of murder, mayhem, and love, with its convoluted and confusing traps and trackings—is related by the narrator with a vivacity that recalls both a first theatrical experience at the Grand Guignol and a first encounter with Greek tragedy. Thus the work generates almost an etiology of the desire for narrativity and spectacle by recovering those structures of individual and collective experience in which the desire for theatrical figuration still corresponded to a function in the formation of subjectivity. Roland Barthes identifies the fusion of oedipality and narrativity with extraordinary clarity; his description seems to account for almost every structural aspect of Coleman’s Living and Presumed Dead: The Oedipus complex is a narrative, but this narrative is never made known except through the subject’s discourse, where it is presented not as a unitary, monological narrative (even if it is a monologue) but as a form broken into fragments, repetitions, infinite metonymies. In its current effort, contemporary literature is at the level of that same expression of an apparently obscured narrative, one which has no other place (no other referent), however, than its own utterance.28

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

105

106

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

We must recall, however, that Coleman’s work deliberately situates itself in the discursive and institutional frameworks of visual culture, not those of literature. His work is inextricably bound up, as we have seen, with the domination of spectacle over visuality. But we still have to account for the tension that holds Coleman’s elegiac recovery of the origins of theatrical and narrative desire, and their allegorical staging in Living and Presumed Dead, to the peculiar photographic presentation of a series of continuously, if minutely, altered static images. Contrary to expectations, the photographic image in Coleman’s work does not provide access to a representational plenitude of which modernism supposedly deprived its spectators. Neither abolishing its semiotic radicality as a continuously fragmented allegorical image nor accepting that a new figuration—a representation of historical memory embodied in the conventions of cultural production and representation—was now impossible to attain, Coleman’s work engenders a peculiar dialectic. If the former function establishes the work’s critical opposition to spectacle, the latter positions it in critical distance from the limitations of the discursive practices of the sixties, their antirepresentational and countermnemonic identification with techno-scientific epistemes or with the paradigm of the commodity image. Each attempt to reconstitute narrative continuity

and closure, as with any effort to reconstruct mimetic representation, falls instant prey to the very mechanisms that aesthetic practice at this moment negates if it wants to constitute itself at all in the face of a continuous and totalizing demand of spectacle to demolish particularity and difference. This is all the more obvious in instances of contemporary artistic practice with which Coleman’s work could be falsely associated, practices that naively reclaim the realm of representation in the guise of an inscription within the contemporary “realism” of advertising imagery, or that aspire to constitute historical memory by claiming a possible continuity with the last instance of the mnemonic in painting in the art of Manet. What remains to be understood then is the necessity for Coleman to refigure—literally and semiotically—the status of the aesthetic object. Or, put differently, one might ask what determined Coleman in the late 1970s to fuse linguistic performativity, indexical visuality, and the rhetorical conventions of narrativity and of theatrical figuration, and to synthesize these seemingly irreconcilable elements into one of the most complex aesthetic projects of postmodernity? Denis Hollier has recently clarified in a brilliant essay the historical shift from the symbolic/iconic axis of traditional literary realism to what he identifies as the performative realism of indexicality. Overcoming the traditionally symbolic and literary dimensions of narrative fiction, Hollier’s definition of a “performative realism” seems astonishingly apt also for the semiotic changes brought about in Coleman’s continuous citations of theatrical and narrative conventions in his work since the late 1970s: Thus the heart of the matter is not a change in the referent, a passage from imaginary to real characters as one would do by leaving the novel for historiography; rather it is a change in the mode of enunciation; the passage to the real must be inferred not by a change of the object as much as by the entry onto the stage of the subject and its index. . . . The real function of photography is not so much allowing the narrator to dispense with the tiresome naturalistic ritual of the description of settings. It begins by indexing the tale. It makes it pass from a descriptive realism to a performative one.29 Notes

1. Maxime Du Camp, Les chants modernes (1858), as quoted by Robert Herbert in Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 4.

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

107

108

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Raymond Williams gives us a more recent critical description of this “naturalized” precondition of avant-garde attitudes toward the historical:“What we now know as modernism, and certainly as the avantgarde, has changed all this. Creativity is all in new making, new construction: all traditional, academic, even learned models are actually or potentially hostile to it, and must be swept away.” See Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avantgarde,” introduction to Peter Timms and Edward Collier, eds., Visions and Blueprints (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 5. 2. Wlad Godzich, introduction to Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. xxvii. 3. It is perhaps noteworthy not only that Coleman spent the late sixties and early seventies in Italy, being acquainted with most and befriending some of the artists of Arte Povera, but also that he actually co-curated an exhibition of Italian Arte Povera in Dublin in 1973. See Franco Toselli, ed., An Exhibition of New Italian Art (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Dublin: David Hendricks Gallery, 1973). 4. Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight was first published in 1972. (See note 2.) 5. As happens so often, we owe the most precise, differentiated, and legible description of Flash Piece to Anne Rorimer: “Two blue flashes appeared between two yellow in repeated three minute cycles. During each cycle, the time between the flashes differed, although spectators remembered them as being the same. Thus time as measured and time as experienced did not coincide. In this way, Coleman succeeded in introducing a subjective aspect of viewing—namely that of memory—into the subject matter of the resulting work.” See Rorimer, “Michael Asher and James Coleman at Artists Space,” in Michael Asher/James Coleman (New York: Artists Space, 1988), p. 7. 6. Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), pp. 26–27. 7. Author’s conversation with the artist, Dublin, May 1994. 8. Anne Rorimer, “James Coleman 1970–1985” (1985), reprinted in this volume, pp. 2–3. 9. Coleman’s critical response to this dilemma parallels that of other artists, such as Marcel Broodthaers and Gerhard Richter, but shares aspects of the positions developed within Italian Arte Povera that were temporarily and perhaps erroneously associated with postminimal and conceptual art. 10. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 ( June 1967); reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 139–42. 11. In the early 1970s—resonating with Fried’s condemnation—nothing would have appeared more disqualified as a point of departure than a programmatic reconsideration of the conventions of theatricality. Coleman’s decision to engage precisely with those conventions seems to have alienated audiences both in Europe and the United States, keeping his work in relative historical illegibility and delaying its recognition. Not surprisingly, audiences of the seventies were oblivious to artistic strategies from the origins of nineteenth-century modernism, obscured by their proper orthodoxies: when Manet needed to reposition himself with regard to the doxa of Realism, he drew upon the dialectic of historical memory and oblivion, in the same manner that the surrealists had redeemed figuration, sensing that only the contemplation of obsolescence could recognize the falseness of an orthodoxy of modernist instrumentalist concepts of truth.

12. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 125. 13. More intuitively, perhaps, than programmatically, Morris had already attempted to reestablish this tradition within the context of a minimalist performance in his peculiar piece Site (1964), which featured Carolee Schneeman reclining in the pose of Manet’s Olympia (1863). This intervention, however, just as much as Yvonne Rainer’s, would remain obscure and inconsequential in a larger theorization of the aesthetics of the sixties; yet both could now be recognized as precursors to Coleman’s systematic deployment of the tableau vivant. 14. One of the clearest and most convincing arguments positioning Coleman’s work in a poststructuralist perspective is Lynne Cooke’s excellent essay on the artist, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this volume, p. 127): In these recent works Coleman engages more closely with the medium in which representation occurs, and through that with the ways that media construct the subject— as much as the object—of perception. Because they are indexical, reproductive media of the kind that he employs necessarily refer beyond the realm of aesthetics. If all forms of picturing are intrinsically discursive, if all images require being read, and read in ways that involve and engage psychic, social, and institutional “texts,” Coleman in this and related ways is able to bypass the self-referential restrictions underpinning the high modernist concept of visuality which Rosalind Krauss [“Antivision,” October 36 (Spring 1986), p. 147] has aptly termed an engagement with “the intransitive verbs of vision.” Such an engagement “excludes the domain of knowledge, both moral and scientific, to revise the visual in the realm of a reflexive relation to the modality of vision rather than to its contents, to savor in and for itself qualities like immmediacy, vibrancy, simultaneity, effulgence and to experience these as qualities without objects.” 15. Maurice Blanchot, “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him,” in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), pp. 76–77. 16. Jean Fisher, “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” (1983), reprinted in this volume, p. 27. 17. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), passim. 18. Jean Fisher, “Inexorable Dissolve: James Coleman Blindsides Art,” Artforum (December 1993), p. 97. 19. Coleman has emphasized in conversations with the author that Warhol was one of the crucial figures in his own artistic development. 20. The image of boxers fighting calls up historical references to that topos, from Thomas Eakins to George Bellows and August Sander, from Bertolt Brecht to Ernest Hemingway. 21. Seamus Deane, “Critical Reflections,” Artforum (December 1993), p. 105. 22. Jean Fisher gives us the best description of this piece: The air of sorrow that gently murmurs through [some of Coleman’s] works finds its counterpoints in a subtle irony, which in its quiet debunking of myths, questions our understanding of the past. This duality emerges in the play of associations poetically woven into the commentary of The Ploughman’s Party (1979–1980). Coleman uses a central image, the plough, to reveal how, among other things, this powerful archetypal symbol oscillates through a number of significations: from an earthly myth and peace-

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux

109

110

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

ful utility, to the historic militancy of the Sinn Féin, to its corruption into mere decoration by a frivolous culture. The visual focus of the piece is a gilded Rococo-style translation of the constellation, which hangs shimmering in an evanescent blue light; an Ultimate Object. Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1982), p. 20. 23. Coleman has emphasized the extent to which his late-1960s encounters with the Italian model of the fotoromanzo influenced his selection of photographic display formats as much as the construction of his narratives (for example, his work Seeing for Oneself, which is entirely structured in the manner of a fotoromanzo). Narratological studies of pulp fiction (such as those of Janis Radway, or Tania Modleski’s study of the Harlequin romance novel) have been instrumental both in the development of Coleman’s selection of popular culture material and in his deconstructionist interest in the functions of fiction. 24. While the work is perceived as being the result of a single take, it actually incorporated two edits, which were performed for technical reasons. 25. Once again, Manet’s classically modernist figure of Olympia comes to mind in the peculiar display of Coleman’s protagonist, as in the tableau vivant by Robert Morris mentioned earlier. Frédéric Migayrou makes this historical association in his essay “James Coleman: le cas des figures,” without, however, coming to similar conclusions. See James Coleman (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989). 26. Michael Newman has suggested that the horns refer to “Cernunnos, the god with the horns of a stag, ram or bull, a symbol of fertility who was assimilated to Satan during the early Christian period.” As fascinating as the idea might be to trace Irishness and pagan sources in Coleman’s work as part of a broader investigation of the problematic condition of Irish national identity, the exactitude of the identification in this case seems to generate in fact very little in the reading of the work. See Newman, “Allegories of the Subject,” p. 35. 27. It seems appropriate at this point to recall the filmic work of Andy Warhol, who also recuperated a subversive antinarrative dimension by reconstituting an experience of actual time in his films of the sixties, most notably in Chelsea Girls. 28. Roland Barthes, “On the Fashion System,” interview with Raymond Bellour, in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 53. 29. Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69 (Summer 1994), p. 126.

Untitled: Philippe VACHER, 1990 35 mm color film, silent.

A Tempered Agnosia Lynne Cooke

We do not explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures—or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered them under some verbal description or specification. . . . The nature of language or serial conceptualization means that the description [of a picture] is less a representation of the picture, or even a representation of seeing the picture, than a representation of thinking about having seen the picture. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures “My work is not about true or false realities, it’s about consciousness of shifting realities,” argued James Coleman in a rare interview in 1983.1 “From the start Coleman has been concerned with disclosing the apparatus of perception and how reality is filtered through the mind,” Anne Rorimer recently wrote. One of Coleman’s most astute critics, she concluded her introduction to his work with the assertion, “he has succeeded in redefining the tradition of picture making usually associated with easel painting.”2 “Coleman is concerned with the relationship between the identities of subject and image as they are mutually conditioned or caused through time,” wrote Michael Newman in 1985 in a penetrating analysis of the construction of identity in Coleman’s work.3 Realities, perception, representation, picture making, and identity are all issues that have concerned James Coleman over the past twenty years. They variously weave through a complex oeuvre which—as Rorimer argues, perhaps following the artist himself—may be related to the tradi-

114

Lynne Cooke

tion of (easel) painting but has been couched to date in media tangential to it: video, film, slide tape, theater, and performance.4 If the terrain Coleman has mapped during this period is at once broad and yet cohesive, within it emphasis has fallen differently at different moments. In his work of the past few years, questions concerning the materiality of the medium together with its codes and conventions seem to have become the principal subject under review, though not, of course, to the exclusion of all other concerns. Coleman’s earliest works, from the beginning of the seventies, had involved reflexive examinations of the medium in phenomenological terms, or the invocation of narrative as the inevitable product of dealing with any medium like film in which time and sequence were integral components. Subsequently narrative became a central issue in itself, not merely as the product of the process but as a genre in its own right, as istoria, the telling of significant events in ways that presuppose rhetorical tropes and standardized fictional modes. In his works from the end of the eighties, by contrast, questions relating to visuality are now identified as transitive in that they directly invoke the sociocultural context that shapes and frames them. The type of reflexivity that results may warrant distinguishing Charon (MIT Project) (1989), La Tache Aveugle (1978–90), Untitled: Philippe VACHER (1990), and Line of Faith (1991) as a new subgroup within Coleman’s oeuvre as a whole. With this recent veering of attention to other modalities, not least to the technologically and historically conditioned character of the reproductive media, Coleman has relinquished the use of visual clichés and canonical aesthetic models he employed previously in favor of material with a particular specificity. At the same time his erstwhile privileging of language has given way to a framing of visual imagery by its own traditions and histories. In confining himself to the art gallery or museum for most of his output, Coleman has made evident his continuing dialogue not only with the tradition of painting, but with its current debates. Painting continues to act as a repressed leitmotif, a correlative to whichever of the offspring of the mechanical image—photography, film, video, slide—he is employing on that occasion. If, given the importance it accords verbal narrative, Charon (MIT Project) (1989) is in certain respects a transitional piece, it foreshadows Coleman’s work of the nineties in significant ways. It is composed of fourteen episodes whose subject is always, despite great internal differences, photography.5 Visually and episodically discrete, these vignettes are linked aurally by the use of a single voice for the key protagonist (who ranges from

Charon (MIT Project), 1989 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

male to female, old to young, white to black) and theoretically by the overriding theme of representation. Each section begins with a description of an image and an account of the circumstances of its genesis. The narrative functions analogously to printed captions accompanying still photographs, providing the frame through which the imagery is comprehended. Normative and ubiquitous uses of photographs in the contemporary world, uses far removed from the artificially controlled parameters of so-called art photography, take center stage here: reportage, journalism, fashion, advertising, snapshots, surveillance, and investigation. Nonetheless, many issues that have recently formed the central debates within the discourse of photography surface, though never programmatically; it is part of Coleman’s achievement in this piece that they do so with such wit and aplomb. In one episode, the subject muses that if a photograph is a trace of an exclusive and irrecoverable moment, then photography could serve as the means of defying, or at least endlessly stalling, that closure which death inevitably brings. In another, a baby looks steadfastly toward the camera and hence possibly at the photographer, who seems to be both father of the child and allegorical father of the image: what are thought to be the baby’s thoughts must remain as open to conjecture as the meaning of any other photograph before it is captioned or otherwise contextual-

A Tempered Agnosia

115

116

Lynne Cooke

ized. The brevity of each vignette, the circular or paradoxical nature of its content, plus the suggestiveness of the juxtapositions of one segment with another, together counter any danger of didacticism: the result is a kind of fleet-footed, fast-paced somersaulting from one aspect or facet to another. Photography was the first medium to seriously challenge painting as the quintessential mode of visual representation. It is, however, a composite entity, and one which, from its beginning, has taken diverse forms. Coleman’s fascination with certain of these aspects surfaces in multifarious and unexpected ways in his most recent art. Yet this work has simultaneously proved to be more pared, and less seductive to view, than anything he produced in the 1980s. La Tache Aveugle (1978–90) takes as its point of departure that moment in The Invisible Man when the protagonist, cornered by his pursuers in a barn, is shot and hence forfeits his immunity. His life had become dependent on his disembodiment: only in death does his visibility return. Not only the literal but the material source for Coleman’s work is a clip from the film made by James Whale in 1933, itself based on a novella published by H. G. Wells in 1897. In its play between visibility and invisibility, opacity and transparency, light and dark, the actual and the residual image, this tale contains a latent discourse on the character of film itself, as well as an examination of the nature of identity.6 In its first version, La Tache Aveugle was composed from thirteen consecutive images corresponding to actual frames which formerly would have taken approximately half a second of real time to roll. But here, transferred to the size of a cinema screen, these close-toned black-and-white images assume a monumental grandeur reminiscent of history painting. Denied the pleasure of a comfortable cinema seat and, along with it, that comforting illusion—normally integral to the viewing of a film—of entering into the depicted reality, the observer was left somewhat awkwardly footloose in the cavernous spaces of the galleries in which it has been shown to date. The transfer of film stock to the humble medium of 35 mm slide, the principal tool of art-historical pedagogy, which is then through the use of sophisticated technology given motion, permits Coleman to comment on the character of film, suspended as it is between stasis and motion, between painting and photography. Two computer-driven projectors monitor the images in such a way that one marginally different shot very gradually overlays another. This process of shifting from one image to the next is barely perceptible: if the degree of change is slight, the fact of it is nonetheless incontrovertible. The image, however, stubbornly remains blurred throughout, the scene illegible, the

La Tache Aveugle, 1978–90 Projected slide images. Continuous cycle.

subject virtually indecipherable. Where transparency and clarity are the canonical norms, opacity and indecipherability have been substituted, and whereas cinema aficionados typically suspend their (physical) embodiment to lose themselves in the phantasmagoric illusion of the actor’s presence, in this work the disembodiment of the actor becomes a vehicle to counterpoint the decenteredness of the viewers, who by having their normal modes of behavior disrupted are left with little choice but to review the modalities and practice integral to this art form. More than close scrutiny, something verging on strained attention is therefore needed to discern what it is that is under observation. By teasing and frustrating normal perceptual habits, Coleman is able to problematize the act of perception. In Untitled: Philippe VACHER (1990), his next work, he takes this investigation one stage further by using actual motion film, not a stilled extract, but then subjecting it to freeze framing. Once again he exacerbates the specularity of the situation, and once again, he allows the protagonist to make heuristic use of his own exhibitionism. One of Coleman’s most disarmingly simple works in recent years, this piece swings away from the subject, the agent effecting the construction, to the act of reception, the

A Tempered Agnosia

117

118

Lynne Cooke

reciprocation integral to perception. A seventeen-and-a-half-minute film, Untitled: Philippe VACHER opens with a close-up view of a man—a surgeon—seated in front of an anesthetist’s table. Suddenly, he slumps forward, overturning in the process several containers and operating instruments, including a large red bottle. But after only a momentary lapse he regains “consciousness” and re-rights himself, turning as he does so to face the camera/viewer. By this action he seems not only to acknowledge that he is aware of having been observed but to challenge the subject by returning his or her gaze. Distance is shattered. But whereas in Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977) Coleman had permitted this (inevitable) voyeurism to become transformed into a privileged if painful identification between the spectator and the protagonist, here, at the end confrontation supervenes. If the prominent spectacles—literally, optical frames—that the surgeon peers through enhance awareness of the barriers that have to be penetrated, they do so paradoxically at the very moment when his body, frozen in the final frame, threatens to evaporate and disappear. The whole unfolds not, however, as a seamless illusionistic depiction but in staccato jumps. The camera is held throughout in a fixed position; its static framing of the situation eventually begins to be felt as intrusive, for the duration of the film is sufficient for the viewer to become conscious of this as a somehow stilted, if not strained, effect. Even more disruptively, the film continually halts, momentarily freezing the frame, and then abruptly resumes: suspending the image against the machinations of time as a trace in the timeless present. Throughout its intermittent forward motion it is simultaneously bled of color until the final image resembles an early photograph, a mid-nineteenth-century black-and-white print to which some hand-tinting seems to have been added—the slash of red that clings staunchly to the bottle. Thus as the film unfolds in real time, the visual language seems to go backward in historical time. If projected at greater speed, it might rebind the multiple static images which, when projected in rapid sequence, would compose an illusionistic motion reality; if projected in reverse, it might replay the technological history of the development of film. This piece is consequently replete with echoes of the work of both Eadweard Muybridge and Eugène Marey. In 1962, Chris Marker made a memorable film, and filmic history, by composing La Jetée entirely from stills. While partially sharing this commitment to the shot at the expense of the sequence, and to montage over rhythmic unfurling, Coleman here seems to reverse Marker’s cumulative aggregate and so to bring motion film back to its origins in the static im-

age, pointing to its roots in black-and-white photography. An even closer parallel, however, might be drawn with certain works by Jean-Luc Godard whose analytic cast of mind, fascination with the normative genres—the conventions and devices of mass media and the popular arts—and preoccupation with the camera-in-presence over the invisible camera, have significant affinities with Coleman. In Passion (1982) especially, Godard explores the way that film seems to be positioned between stasis and motion, and between painting and photography. He constructs a number of tableaux vivants in which the actors mime the disposition of figures in famous masterpieces. At the same time he breaks the seamless illusion of conventional filmic reality in manifold ways, not least by the decomposition of movement and the employment of still(ed) imagery. In addition, the key protagonist of this film, Jerzy, a cinéaste and theoretician, is beset by difficulties stemming in part from his backers who are upset by what they perceive to be a lack of plot in the film. Coleman’s protagonist, like Godard’s, also seems to mime the constitutive elements of his role (at least in the terms that Walter Benjamin analyzed the figure of the film actor, as will be argued below); and in each case the actor at the center of the (semi-) illusionistic world provides an analogue for the action/activity of the maker. And each work also functions to effect a concealed comparison between painting and film. Coleman’s work stresses the dematerialization inherent in the filmic image, in contrast to the actuality integral to the painted image, by inscribing the indexical image of the film in the actualities of time, space, and place. Time is thus revealed as not part of an uninterrupted continuum, a seamless flow, but as something structured and constructed, and therefore subject to rearrangement. The literal time taken to view this work is foregrounded by means of the segmenting and fracturing of the temporality of the film on the screen; the actual space in which the work is apprehended is privileged over the depicted context; and the particularities of place are emphasized, not least by the physical behavior of the viewer in the experiencing of the work. Untitled: Philippe VACHER had its debut in a large gallery space in Lyons where the image was screened cinema-scale and directly onto one wall. As is customary with Coleman, the apparatus, a projector, was positioned so that it stood freely in the space. The mechanical whir filled the room as the spectators, bereft of seats and hence of any fixed viewing points, wandered casually through the space, almost unconsciously trying out different angles, different vantage positions. Coleman invokes that ritual attendant on the act of going to the

A Tempered Agnosia

119

120

Lynne Cooke

cinema yet paradoxically strips it of all transparence. In introducing a correspondence between perception and projection, he posits a mechanistic yet anthropomorphic metaphor for the way that meaning is constructed from what is seen: the eye as an optical apparatus rooted in the body. Coleman forgoes any resurrection of the various possibilities of painting within the realm of film of the kind that Godard seeks while nevertheless revealing the setting, the staging, the mechanics of the camera, and so forth. Instead, Coleman counterpoints painting and film as binaries, as interdependent modalities. However differently achieved, the result in both instances is a self-reflexivity in the film, plus a transitive notion of perception, and, for the artist, a new level of abstraction and self-consciousness within the fictive world itself. In their different ways both Godard and Coleman are thus involved with the means by which film and its representational apparatus (the projector and/or camera) construct the subject, with the specific form of subjectivity constructed, and hence with the structure of voyeurism in film as well as with an interrogation of the modalities of filmic representation. Coleman here engineers the act of perception so that the subject observes himself or herself shift roles from voyeur to object of the gaze; and therefore from one who bestows meaning to one who causes that activity to be brought under examination. Significantly, he now attempts this effect within the purlieus of film itself, forcing the observer to pay due attention to the particularities of the medium, and hence to consider the ways in which perception is organized by that medium. Yet he is never caught within the solipsisms of self-reflexivity that prevailed in much of the art of the sixties, for he always uses reproductive media, drawing on their rootedness in already existing and highly conventionalized imagery. Because his are indexical as well as iconic images, they draw the represented world into the artwork so that it no longer inhabits a separate sphere of existence. At the same time the viewer is never permitted to operate through idealist, disembodied sensory modalities: it is always on, in, and through the body of the receiver that visuality functions. Walter Benjamin argues, in what may well be the essay in contemporary art writing most quoted in the 1980s, that one of the key distinctions between film actors and stage actors is that the performance of the former need not be whole and unitary.7 Typically, the film actor’s performance is split into a number of mountable episodes which the editing adjusts and synthesizes. Furthermore film actors do not address an actual audience—as do their counterparts in the theater—but the camera. This, Benjamin con-

tends, permits the audience to take on the position of the camera, and hence to adopt the role of critic. Moreover, instead of representing someone else—the surrogate personalities whom they are playing—the actors present themselves. In this way, for Benjamin, art for the first time leaves the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where it could thrive, and the contrivances and devices by which this seamless fiction normally operates are made inescapably evident. Benjamin then goes on, in a celebrated comparison of the painter with the cameraman, to draw an analogy to a surgical operation:“The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician,” he claims. “The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. . . . [In so doing] the surgeon . . . greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.”8 While the painter attains “a total picture, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of this thoroughgoing permeation of reality with the mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment.” And that, Benjamin concludes, “is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”9 Contrarily, Coleman employs the circularity in this surgeon/cameraman analogy to unmask that very permeation of reality, to materialize the medium and make its codes inescapably evident. The footage for Untitled: Philippe VACHER was shot in a hospital using an actor who works principally for television. Coleman has likened the event that befalls the surgeon to the transformation from a “lived-body” to an “object-body,” terms he derived from a book by Howard Brody called Stories of Sickness. Examining the relationships between narrative and healing, Brody argues that “the practice of medicine can be seen in part as a story telling enterprise, and . . . the telling of stories can be seen as a social activity that can serve a healing function.”10 Certain sorts of events, he argues, can only be understood fully as portions of an ongoing narrative and not as disconnected events occurring in isolation. Too much medicine is “rule”- and “decision”-oriented, suggesting that an ahistorical, nonnarrative form of analysis is optimal: explanation is couched in general laws and statistical descriptions. Storytelling, by contrast, heals by restoring a disrupted connectedness, such that a diagnosis becomes indeed

A Tempered Agnosia

121

122

Lynne Cooke

a gnosis, a mode of self-knowledge that creates a cosmos in its image. Coleman concurs only to demur. To the extent that he constructs narratives, he does so in ways that make it impossible to ignore the fact that they are contingent, hypothetical, and partial; notions of wholeness and unity as they pertain to the self are fictional constructs. Thus there is a threat to both the viewer’s subjecthood as he or she becomes an object of the surgeon’s gaze, and to the actor’s, since, in losing consciousness, he momentarily becomes the reified object of perception. Not only is the foreclosure of meaning impossible, but the work becomes a modern allegory of seeing in which the relations of power and control implicit in the idea of scrutiny, and embodied in the notion of a “point of view,” are revealed through the apparatus of representation. For the piece seems to pivot on the dual character of the gaze—the gaze as a look that penetrates, cuts, or slices open the body, and as a look that petrifies and hence reifies. This duality operates both at the level of metaphorical imagery and in the very process of filmmaking itself: the surgeon takes the place of the anesthetist, the red slash is a kind of wound in the picture, the spectacles imply objectified perception. The footage is literally sliced and is dislocated into segments each of which in turn is immobilized, frozen. While filmic parallels may be most apposite, the tradition of paintings of the surgeon at work—which includes Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp and Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic—provides some instructive contrasts. Perhaps the most telling of these centers on the conflation of the patient’s body with the viewer’s body, and the dual role actively played by the surgeon as agent and object in Coleman’s version of this subject. In Line of Faith, Coleman betrays once more his abiding preoccupation with unmasking the notion of transcendental subjectivity that privileges an ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject. However, unlike the previous two pieces, it takes a subject from the past and refers to contemporaneous optical devices in order to reconsider the ways in which perception and visuality are historically governed and framed. Stereography, which prefigures and has telling affinities with cinema, is the principal allegorical tool on this occasion.11 Line of Faith was made for an exhibition of site-specific works entitled “Places with a Past” held in Charleston, South Carolina, in mid-1991; its raison d’être was provided by the history and sociocultural context of the city. Coleman’s point of departure was a famous Currier and Ives print of the Battle of Bull Run (also known as the First Battle of Manassas), which took place during the opening moments of the American Civil War. The

Line of Faith, 1991 Projected slide images. Continuous cycle.

artist reconstructed the scene with the aid of local reenactors (lay people who simulate specific Civil War battles). Far from using the occasion to correct errors in this notorious case of historical misreportage, Coleman staged his tableau vivant to mirror precisely the nineteenth-century composition. On one level his action speaks to the continuing manipulation of information by the press today—a subject with considerable topicality in the wake of the Gulf War, a war that is infamous in part due to the American press’s wholesale connivance with and submission to government mandates on how to cover it. Disengaging the historical moment from its literal transcription, embracing its potency as a metaphorical omen, Coleman confronts the present in which the specter of a totalizing mediation seems an increasingly real threat. Yet while his choice of theme grounded the work in the immediate contemporary culture, the larger issues derived more from the mode of staging and presentation than from the subject matter per se. Coleman took two shots of his reenactment from slightly different angles, then elided them by projecting them as slides in two carrousels stacked one atop the other, to simulate a simultaneous deconstruction of the nineteenth-century visual mode of stereography. Yet unlike the original stereopticon which claimed that it would reveal real objects both more

A Tempered Agnosia

123

124

Lynne Cooke

accurately and more tangibly—especially those in close focus—Coleman’s projected images eschew any claims to truthfulness. The backgrounds are aligned, but the foregrounds never come into precise registration:efforts to forge left and right into a single image are doomed, but nonetheless irresistible. The work manages to involve the spectator in a way not altogether dissimilar in its techniques of ensnarement from those used by Hans Holbein in his celebrated painting of The Ambassadors, at least as analyzed by Jacques Lacan:“The singular object floating in the foreground . . . is there to be looked at, in order to catch, I would almost say, to catch in its trap, the observer, that is to say, us. It is, in short, an obvious way . . . and one due to some moment of reflection on the part of the painter, of showing us that, as subjects, we are literally called into the picture and represented there as caught.”12 Anamorphosis plays on the very relationships which are assumed by perspective to be axiomatic, to be rationally ordained—those between the spectator and the single static viewing point, and those underpinning such conventions of recognition—in order to call into question received habits of visuality. In its conjunction of a war subject with a dislocation of standardized perspective, Line of Faith has a signal forebear in Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. Uccello’s singular use of perspective has been interpreted as an attempt to synthesize the new lessons of artificial perspective and pictorial illusionism with the observations of the detailed appearances of reality made by the ranging eye of the observer. The result is an effect which “carefully acknowledges the phenomena that accompany the turning of the head and eyes of the artist and the onlooker alike.”13 Typically in Uccello’s work, this quest to monitor the conventions of what was perceived as a more realistic representation than that formerly employed results in an idiosyncratic and far from seamless image. Finally, Coleman’s title, too, points to the subversion of what were long considered normative perspectival modes of representation. Ligne de foi is an idiomatic expression in French for a good or true aim along the barrel of the gun, an aim which is here neutered and rendered ineffectual. The difficulty in bringing into registration these elusive foreground images draws attention to the interface between image and gaze in the illusory projection, and involves precedents in the history of representation at the level of high culture as well as in their more recent counterpoints in popular culture. On one level this serves to bring into play questions relating to historical objectivity and accuracy. But there is more to Line of Faith than that. The nicety in the matching of the (simulated) optical technology with the (recreated) subject attests to the subtlety of Coleman’s thought:

these are neither merely arcane nor merely idle references. In his study of vision and visuality entitled “Techniques of the Observer,” Jonathan Crary argues that the stereopticon may stand as a paradigm for broad questions of representation, subjectivity, and cognition in that it offers a sovereign metaphor for describing the status of the observer. He writes: From the beginning of the nineteenth-century, a science of vision will tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of the makeup of the human subject, rather than of the mechanics of light and optical transmission. It is a moment when the visible escapes from the tireless incorporeal order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body. . . . [Henceforth] vision is always an irreducible complex of elements belonging to the observer’s body and of external data. Thus the kind of separation between interior representation and exterior reality implicit in the camera obscura [is replaced by] . . . a single surface of affect on which interior and exterior have few of their former meanings and positions.14 This articulation of subjective vision in the early nineteenth century is part of a major shift which for Michel Foucault marks the threshold of modernity. From this moment physiological optics comes to dominate the study of vision:observation is now posed as the play and interaction of forces and relations rather than as the orderly continuity of discrete, stable sensations as formerly conceived. Perception comes into being on the threshold between the physiological and the psychological. In this modifying of notions of the nature of vision, certain of the optical devices that spawned a new mass visual culture became inseparable from the new normative science of the observer, and the seeing body also came to the fore. Such optical devices as the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, and even the diorama were utilized both for purposes of scientific observation and as forms of popular entertainment. For Crary, the forms with which a new public consumed images of an illusory “reality” are isomorphic to the apparatus used to assimilate knowledge about an observer. What is most pertinent about the stereoscope for Coleman’s work is the fact that the effect it produced was not simply likeness but immediate, apparent tangibility. This vividness had to do with proximity, for its supposed superiority to painting lay in the fact that unlike painting, which treated distant views with more convincing illusion than proximate mat-

A Tempered Agnosia

125

126

Lynne Cooke

ter, the stereoscope focused on the near and insistent. Nor was it grounded in tangible matter as was painting; indeed, in radically restricting vision by blocking out the actual surroundings, the stereoscope focused all attention on the illusory. No other form of representation in the nineteenth century so conflated the real with the optical, an object with its image. The historical significance of the stereoscope lies in part in the fact that it radically repositioned the observer’s relation to visual representation, for it replaced a static monocular perspectival positioning with a decentered observer. Crary contends, The stereoscope signals an eradication of “the point of view” around which, for several centuries, meanings had been assigned reciprocally to an observer and the object of his or her vision. Perspective is not even a possibility under the terms of this technique of beholding. An observer no longer sees an image that has an intelligible or quantifiable location in space, but rather a hallucinatory composite of two dissimilar images whose positions refer to the anatomical structure of the observer’s body.15 With the stereoscope the viewer is no longer looking at something “out there”: the experience is a hallucinatory and fabricated one. The observer, coupled with the apparatus, becomes the agent of synthesis and fusion. In making a stronger claim of access to the “real” than other contemporary modes of representation, the stereoscope, tellingly, makes no claim that the real is anything other than a mechanical production. It thus encapsulates what has been hailed as a fundamental change in the scopic regime, a change that involved the shift from the paradigm of the camera obscura, and of a veridical vision between a bipolar subject and object, to the model of the body as a producer of nonveridical vision relatively indifferent to worldly reference. Locating the machinery of the projector within the gallery space, Coleman sets up a provocative analogy between this technology and the mechanisms by which stereography works, and draws attention to the interplay between the mechanics that produce the image and the cognitive apprehension that processes it. By presenting the work, initially at least, in a site that itself has historical resonance, and by staging it so that once again the perceiver witnesses it in ways that prevent any forgetting of the fact that perception is rooted in the body—is enmeshed in the flesh of the world, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it—Coleman maps contemporary no-

tions in which the subjectivity and the decenteredness of the spectator and the phantasmagoric all come into play for the first time.16 The psychological, social, and historically conditioned character of perception is thereby vividly manifested in ways that reveal it as inseparable from the filtering and conditioning of all media when conjuring or (re-)creating not only the past but reality itself. If the particular circumstances of this exhibition provided the opportunity for addressing questions pertaining to history— its portrayals and betrayals—at an allegorical level the work confirms once again the necessity of being weaned from any notion of a “true” vision. In these recent works Coleman engages more closely with the medium in which representation occurs, and through that with the ways that media construct the subject—as much as the object—of perception. Because they are indexical, reproductive media of the kind that he employs necessarily refer beyond the realm of aesthetics. If all forms of picturing are intrinsically discursive, if all images require being read, and read in ways that involve and engage psychic, social, and institutional “texts,” Coleman in this and related ways is able to bypass the self-referential restrictions underpinning the high modernist concept of visuality which Rosalind Krauss has aptly termed an engagement with “the intransitive verbs of vision.” Such an engagement “excludes the domain of knowledge, both moral and scientific, to revise the visual in the realm of a reflexive relation to the modality of vision rather than to its contents, to savor in and for itself qualities like immediacy, vibrancy, simultaneity, effulgence and to experience these as qualities without objects.”17 By contrast, many of Coleman’s works of the early seventies which took perception as their subject drew on the interrelationship between perception and cognition, and on the ways in which perception is grounded in the realities of time and place in a self-reflexive manner. Others, like Fly (1970) and Pump (1972), treated narrative as the logical outcome of the sequential unfolding of imagery in time. (In the latter, for example, the filling of a bucket of water from a pump ended with an image of a full container virtually indistinguishable from the starting shot when the bucket was empty: equally important, the whole event occupied one reel of film, and the transference from one reel to the other replicated the act of filling the container.) Because they operated in ways that meant the apparent subject bore directly upon the processes of construction, they effectively remained within the purlieus of “intransitive verbs of vision.” Only in his middle years did Coleman turn to the object of perception as embodied in fictional narrative, and hence to the subject, as psychologically, historically, and socially constructed. In

A Tempered Agnosia

127

128

Lynne Cooke

Pump, 1972 Projected 16 mm black-and-white film, silent. Continuous cycle.

so doing, he effected a transition from an intransitive to a transitive conception of vision. The earliest of Coleman’s mature works is a series from the beginning of the seventies that contends in diverse ways with issues of perception, its relation to duration and memory, its contingency, and its rootedness in subjectivity. Very much of their era, these works involve phenomenological experiments that incorporate the viewer’s heightened apprehension of the specific conditions of the site itself.18 In Stereo (1972), for example, two concealed speakers emit sounds from opposite ends of an otherwise empty room. Their alternation creates a kind of conversation that the spectatorturned-listener is challenged to assimilate when drawn backward and forward across the room as if in response to competing voices, or tales, apparently issuing from different parts of the mind, and thereby rooting consciousness in actual space and time. A second, seminal early work, Slide Piece (1972–73), shifts the focus to the relation between the eye and the mind, counterposing visual perception and verbal description to highlight the interface between cognition and vision as they mutually condition each other. This work consists of a single projector showing an image taken by the artist of a quotidian street scene in Milan. Each change of slide to what is in fact an identical image is accompanied by a different analysis of that image in the voice-over. Since choosing between the multiple meanings is neither appropriate nor valid, the subjectivity of any viewpoint in its competing claims to render reality is affirmed. Playback of a Daydream (1974) encapsulates the manifold and innerdirected character of vision. A film that alternates drawn images of a duck and rabbit, it hinges on the viewer’s recognition that acts of cognition are acts of interpretation and, at least in many cases, that interpretations are selective and partial, and not a matter of discerning an absolute and immutable truth. By implication, what is seen first—rabbit or duck—or what is accorded priority depends on the individual spectator and can no more be predetermined than it can be presupposed. Just as the identity of the image depends on the interpretative act (of naming) by the observer, so the observer is mutually constructed by the image, by how he or she apprehends the world. That this is a textbook example suits Coleman’s objective well in that its very ordinariness and familiarity ensure that attention is directed analytically to the act under review. Subsequently, however, Coleman has extended the almost skeletal character of these pieces, on the one hand by probing the social, psychological, historical, and philosophical character of his subject or thematics,

A Tempered Agnosia

129

130

Lynne Cooke

on the other by expanding the potential content of this ostensible subject matter, imbuing it with metaphorical and allegorical meaning. Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977) marks a highpoint in Coleman’s work from the later part of that decade in its wedding of economy with eloquence. In this work the densely impacted layering of footage and text introduces issues that bear on the psychology of the beholder in more complex ways than hitherto, by permitting an (at least partial) identification between the viewing subject and the object of scrutiny. A brief extract from the renowned Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey return fight of 1927 is projected as a film loop spliced with black leaders. Punctuating these momentary blackouts, syncopated to evoke the beat of a heart and/or the jabs of a punching glove, the soundtrack mercilessly reveals Tunney’s anguished thoughts and feelings as he struggles to overwhelm (once again) his opponent, and to demonstrate (once again) his worthiness to hold the title. Box is generally exhibited in a closely confined space whose walls have been painted black. Compressed into a claustrophobic chamber, straining to decipher an image that constantly fractures, and yet driven on by the desperation of the embattled hero’s inner monologue, viewers come to feel as if they inhabit the skull of the boxer, and so surrender their role as detached witnesses. This particular trial, or ritual combat, turns hypnotically on Tunney’s anxiety about death and immortality, and on what is necessarily an endless fantasy of mastery over the other. Since this Irish boxer’s private self and public self are so closely imbricated, the question arises whether losing the latter will entail the loss of his identity altogether, as Jean Fisher points out in her astute analysis of the work. The heroes of myth, history, or legend offer far richer models than those vouchsafed by their modern counterparts, soap opera stars. But while, at best, they embody models “of the self ’s ideal identity in the social group,” this identification is not to be enacted in actuality.19 To do so implies a fatal confusion of fantasy and reality, as Coleman’s unfinished piece Kojak and Zamora (1975–) attests, based as it is on the true story of a Puerto Rican teenager who committed murder as a consequence of “television intoxication” with a media star.20 Tunney is but one of a number of figures whose roles have been closely scrutinized by Fisher in her penetrating study of the heroes in Coleman’s art. Others include James Joyce and Strongbow, an Anglo-Irish conqueror. Of these it is arguably with Tunney that the viewer becomes most closely embroiled, to the point of temporarily relinquishing a sense of self. Mostly,

however, Coleman has discouraged this kind of identification. In order to direct attention to the social meaning of the ritualized gesture in place of what risks being vicariously perceived as motivations of “character,” Coleman henceforth has action imitate reality without reproducing it. That this work has a unique place in Coleman’s art depends in part on the nature of its specific content. Boxing has been the subject of study by a number of celebrated male writers from Ernest Hemingway to Norman Mailer, but it is Joyce Carol Oates’s encomium that is most relevant to Coleman’s treatment, not least for the way she characterizes the social role of the sport, the psychological charge it carries for its supporters and for the contenders themselves: “Boxers are there to establish an absolute experience,” she asserts;“they will know, as few of us can know of ourselves, what physical and psychic power they possess—of how much, or how little, they are capable.”21 Boxing is for her a ceremonial set to the authority of Time: When a boxer is “knocked out” it does not mean, as it’s commonly thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapacitated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time. (The referee’s dramatic count of ten constitutes a metaphysical parenthesis of a kind through which the fallen boxer must penetrate if he hopes to continue in Time.) There are in a sense two dimensions of Time abruptly operant: while the standing boxer is in time the fallen boxer is out of time. Counted out, he is counted “dead.”22 Just as the sport is governed by time so is it subject to codes concerning space. Oates defines the ring as “an altar of sorts, one of those legendary spaces where the laws of a nation are suspended . . . [where] a man may be killed at his opponent’s hands but he cannot be legally murdered.”23 Her conclusion that boxing inhabits a sacred space predating civilization derives from the fact that boxing’s image cannot be assimilated into what is desired of civilized man. Its display of direct, unmitigated, and seemingly natural aggression is almost too explicit to be tolerated: it is “enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. . . . As a public spectacle [it] is akin to pornography; in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced yet presumably intimately involved in an event that is not supposed to be happening as it is happening. . . . Violation of taboo against violence . . . is open, explicit, ritualized, and, as I’ve said, rou-

A Tempered Agnosia

131

132

Lynne Cooke

tine—which gives boxing its uncanny air.”24 Finally, but equally importantly, “in boxing, the individual is so very alone, or seems so. Like the saint he gives the impression of having arrived at his redemption by unflagging solitary effort.”25 This elemental condition is in turn reinforced by the additional fact that “the Opponent is always male, the Opponent is the rival for one’s own masculinity, most fully and combatively realized.”26 It is this conjunction of the atavistic and the prescribed informing what can be read as an elemental but eternal struggle for life itself, a struggle beset by doubt, anxiety, and pain, that Coleman draws on so effectively in giving his work its allegorical meaning. The choice of a widely known piece of footage of a famous episode— that is, of an already existing element—is unusual for Coleman from this moment onward in his career. Although during most of the eighties he employed vernacular and stereotypical genres—gothic horror, thriller, romantic melodrama, TV serial—with increasing frequency, synthesizing or otherwise hybridizing their standardized structures, he always fleshed them out with raw material of his own devising, his intention being to frame the notion of narrative by employing something like a collage system of narrativity, reconstructing it from diverse elements and radically different sorts of fragments. Notwithstanding these heteroclite materials and means, his approach, however, remained quite consistent. Narrative was always undercut, its conventions and forms continually frayed, unraveled, parodied, and undermined in ways that at once deconstructed it and made manifest his great gifts in the notable Irish tradition of storytelling. So Different . . . and Yet (1980) epitomizes Coleman’s skill in this respect in its compelling yet deliberately confusing conflation of two seemingly separate but interlinked tales. The installation features a video in which a vamp/odalisque reclines in a chaise longue in a setting reduced to a sea of enveloping blue space save for the background figure of a horned pianist, who plays an accompaniment to the unfolding saga. Speaking with patently false French accents, the two protagonists unleash a twisted, intricate narrative fusing seduction and intrigue, sexual rivalry and deceit, robbery and terrorism. Replete with all the trappings of a dime-store romance crossed with a thriller, the story at once enthralls and teases as its tangled threads knot into an unresolved (and unresolvable) denouement. The tale functions on several levels, ranging across the more overt issues of gendering, sexual stereotyping, and role playing to the level of allegory, for it addresses—albeit obliquely—the sociopolitical travails of Ireland by drawing together literary, historical, mythical, and psychoanalytical refer-

ences in what becomes an almost Joycean overload.27 Gesture, costumes, and even the performers themselves have become the agents of the narrative, for the adroitly meandering and compelling linguistic innuendoes not only propel the plot(s) but are the subject of the piece. Narrative traditionally meant the representation of “significant action,” the istoria, the aim of which was the edification of the mind rather than the pleasure of the eye; Coleman turns this around by teasing the mind in ways that at once entertain and hence give pleasure but simultaneously cause viewers to consider their own role in the drama of decipherment, and hence in attributing significance to the metanarrative over metaphysics. By his manneristic treatment of the habitual tropes of such routine stories, Coleman renders the viewer hyperconscious of the rhetoric and maneuvers integral to narrative. He exploits narrative’s capacity to generate significant objects and hence to generate and engender a significant problematic of receivership while he simultaneously forces narrative to uncover the machinations of its own formations. Seeing for Oneself is an apt title for the work made in 1987–88 in which this focus on narrative as istoria seems to have been brought to at least a temporary halt. In those of his works that involve an elaborate narrative, Coleman constantly brings fiction and artifice to the fore: while never treated as transparent, the medium is never itself the primary object of study. By contrast, in the works of the last few years the materiality of the medium together with its codes and conventions have taken precedent over narrative tropes in the examination of perception and of issues concerning identity and representation. Critiques of the traditional paradigms of visuality, of notions of representation, of conditions of receivership, and of the role of the spectator have gained increasing currency at a time when new technologies are relocating vision to a plane severed from that of a human observer. As Jonathan Crary warns: The radical development in little more than a decade of a vast array of computer graphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation that effectively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of the terms observer and representation. The formalization and diffusion of computer-generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual “spaces” radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography, and television. These latter three, at least

A Tempered Agnosia

133

134

Lynne Cooke

until the mid-1970s, were generally forms of analog media that still corresponded to the optical wavelengths of the spectrum and to a point of view, static or mobile, located in real space. . . . Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.28 Crary’s prophecy of a future in which “increasingly, visuality will be situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic terrain where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, circulated, and exchanged globally”29 needs to be set against the growing preoccupation over the past three decades with the theorizing of issues of representation, vision, and visuality by artists and writers inside as well as beyond the world of high culture. The basis for these debates was laid largely by Michel Foucault. In the postwar years Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty had regrounded theories of perception in the “lived-body.” Sartre argued that reciprocation is integral to the gaze, linking the gaze with questions of identity, authenticity, and engagement, while dismantling its position or standpoint at the center of the world. Merleau-Ponty stressed a meaningladen imbrication of the viewer and the viewed in the particularities of real time and space, and the crucial function of actual, empirical observation. Foucault turned instead to the modalities of seeing, its embodiment in language, in thought structures, in power, and in the formative paradigms of any discourse of a particular era. His analyses have been accompanied and expanded by theories which contend with the construction of the self, with identity, and with reception, by such thinkers as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Coleman’s work is clearly informed by these unfolding debates. His achievement depends, however, on the ways in which he is able to instantiate them in works that are neither didactic nor illustrative but replete with an elusive richness and a stringent eloquence of a kind that might be desired, but cannot be demanded, from a fellow countryman of James Joyce. Notes

1. James Coleman, quoted in Richard Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” The Crane Bag 6, no. 2 (1982), p. 128. 2. Anne Rorimer, James Coleman (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 1991), n.p.

3. Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), pp. 26–27. 4. “You know, I never did feel I did abandon painting,” Coleman averred in 1983. See Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” p. 127. 5. Titles are very telling for Coleman and always carefully chosen. Charon refers to the boatman who ferries the dead to Hades. In Lucian’s satire, Charon or the Inspectors, the boatman, accompanied by Hermes, comes to the earth for the day to observe the daily life of mankind. Lucian utilizes him as the vehicle for a satire on human values and aspirations, on inflated hopes, unfounded dreams, fears, and vanities. Much of what the Greek author derides or disdains falls within the compass of roles to which photography is bent, the beliefs and values it subtends, inflates, and conjures. 6. The title La Tache Aveugle refers to the way Georges Bataille used the phrase. Coleman’s reference to Denis Hollier’s discussion of this suggests the way in which his own piece can be read in terms of the structuring of identity, as the following intimates. After stating that for Bataille the mind has a blind spot like that of the eye, Hollier goes on to argue, In the area of “notions” this point is occupied by the notion de dépense, the notion of unthinking expenditure, the blind spot of rationalist, utilitarian economy, the whole where the edifice of thought is spent, swallowed up, ruined. . . . To have a sense [meaning], for Bataille, is to be constituted by that which negates one. Nothing is meaningful, nothing makes sense, until confronted by its negation. A thing’s sense is the rupture of its identity, that which exceeds it, that by means of which it exceeds and is not itself but that which is beyond it, or its absence. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 96–97. 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217–52. 8. Ibid., pp. 233–34. 9. Ibid., p. 234. 10. Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. xii. The link between narrative and healing connects to the larger analogy of medicine and film, which runs through Coleman’s oeuvre in various guises. In Seeing For Oneself, for example, this analogy centers on the alchemical/scientific experiments which Neville performs in his laboratory, and which generate the elixir, the pivot and emblem around which the whole turns. In guaiRE: An Allegory the obstetrician speaks of his desire to perform a postmortem on the body of the previous king, “Cutting the body into parts—hoping to see what . . . the spirit?” For Michael Newman, within the investigative structure common to Coleman’s works, the character is both obstetrician and murderer “because he assists at the birth of the modern subject as an assignment of position” (Newman, “Allegories of the Subject,” p. 48). This recalls, as pointed out by several critics, that for the Enlightenment the operating theater no less than the popular theater was a place where the body as spectacle was laid out for the public gaze. A sustained relationship with Foucault’s thought could be articulated here, for Foucault argued that clinical medicine “was probably the first attempt to order a science on the exercise and decisions of the gaze.” In The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), Foucault countered the notion of a stabilized reality, contending that there

A Tempered Agnosia

135

136

Lynne Cooke

are only projections of ourselves and our relations to others, projections which operate through the mediations of our social constructs, and he tried to determine the deep conceptual organization which gathered these seeings together into a form of “visibility,” a scopic regime, different from others. 11. This relationship with cinema which it foreshadows has been analyzed by Rosalind Krauss: The phenomenology of the stereoscope produces a situation that is not unlike that of looking at cinema. Both involve the isolation of the viewer with an image from which surrounding interference is masked out. In both, the image transports the viewer optically, while his body remains mobile. In both, the pleasure derives from the experience of the simulacrum: the appearance of reality from which any testing of the real-effect by actually, physically moving through the scene is denied. And in both, the real-effect of the simulacrum is heightened by temporal dilation. What has been called the apparatus of cinematic process had, then, a certain proto-history in the institution of stereography, just as stereography’s own proto-history is to be found in the similarly darkened and isolating but spectacularly illusionistic space of the diorama. And in the case of the stereograph, as would later be the case for film, the specific pleasures that seem to be released by that apparatus—the desires that it seems to gratify—led to the instantly wild popularity of the instrument. . . . The diffusion of stereography as a truly mass medium was made possible by mechanized printing techniques. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42 (Winter 1982), p. 31. 12. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 92. 13. John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 205. While White’s concept of observations of actual reality might now be questioned, the sense he gives of a subtle and astute balancing and harmonizing of different conventions and codes for reality remains valid. 14. Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (Summer 1988), pp. 5–6. As Crary points out (pp. 28–29), Even as sophisticated a student of vision as [Hermann von] Helmholtz could write, in the 1850s:“These stereoscopic photographs are so true to nature and so life-like in their portrayal of material things, that after viewing such a picture and recognizing in it some object like a house, for instance, we get the impression, when we actually do see the object, that we have already seen it before and are more or less familiar with it. In cases of this kind, the actual view of the thing does not add anything new or more accurate to the previous apperception we got from the picture, so far at least as mere form relations are concerned.” 15. Ibid., p. 30. 16. In 1990 Coleman completed a piece based even more directly on the model of the stereopticon. The image(s) reconstructed a photograph of a postcard which W. B. Yeats had taken of his study in his castle at Thoor Ballylee. Alongside the craze for photographic views which the stereopticon promoted, there was a rapid growth in the proliferation of postcards in the early twentieth century. Postcards confirm presence and absence simultaneously in that they involve the recipient, attesting to the sender’s former location at the site, and

through that make evident both the absence of the sender and the absence to which all photography bears witness. 17. Rosalind Krauss, “Antivision,” October 36 (Spring 1986), p. 147. 18. In his history of conceptual art, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh traces the ways in which the linguistic and perceptual spheres were mapped onto each other back to Sol LeWitt’s Structures of 1961–62, where the artist forced the inherent contradiction between the two spheres into the highest possible relief. And he instances Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making of 1961 as a seminal example of counteracting the visual with an auditory experience of equal if not higher importance. The minimalists were among the first to inscribe a phenomenological model of experience onto the traditional model of purely visual specularity. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1968: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 106–43. Certain video installations by Bruce Nauman, Peter Campus, and Dan Graham at the end of the sixties not only required the spectator’s presence to become activated, but as Douglas Crimp writes, “were fundamentally concerned with the registration of presence as a means towards establishing meaning.” Telling similarities, and differences, may be drawn between Coleman’s work and that of a number of American artists whose work Crimp analyzed as the product of a new sensibility emerging at the onset of the 1980s; these artists included Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman. See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 75–88; reprinted in Brian Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 177. 19. Jean Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” (1983), reprinted in this volume. 20. For a fuller account, see ibid., pp. 44–49; for a bizarre addendum to this story, see Trip Gabriel, “The Psychiatrist Who Pleaded Insanity,” New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1991, p. 36 and following. 21. Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Garden City: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987), p. 8. 22. Ibid., p. 15. 23. Ibid., p. 19. 24. Ibid., pp. 105–06. 25. Ibid., p. 110. 26. Ibid., p. 72. 27. Joyce was the subject of homage in a work entitled Ulysses Project that Coleman made in 1982 in response to a commission for an exhibition marking the centennial of the writer’s birth. 28. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 1–2. 29. Ibid., p. 2.

A Tempered Agnosia

137

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

Live Vocals Kaja Silverman

James Coleman’s Lapsus Exposure (1992–94) is an allegorical work, both in its formal articulation and its thematic concerns. In this respect, it resembles Background (1991–94), its immediate predecessor, which not only proceeds in an insistently allegorical fashion, but also constitutes a study of the affect specific to allegory: melancholy.1 Like the work it follows, Lapsus Exposure is also in implicit dialogue with an earlier allegory—this time Plato’s Parable of the Cave,2 rather than Dürer’s Melancholia 1. Like the urtext of Western philosophy, Coleman’s 1992 “projection” juxtaposes a domain of darkness with a domain of light. It situates its human characters within the first of these spaces, but holds open the possibility for them to enter the second, and even dramatizes one such foray. Coleman’s cave-dwellers spend their time straining to make out stimuli which derive from a reproductive apparatus, much as Plato’s do. Like the Parable of the Cave, Lapsus Exposure also constitutes an allegory about human perception. Finally, Coleman’s text—like its Platonic counterpart— points the way toward a kind of perceptual redemption. Here, however, the similarities end. The Parable of the Cave opposes truth to representation, and depicts as exemplary the movement from the latter to the former. Lapsus Exposure undoes this opposition, defining representation as our pathway to the real. Plato’s text also offers a metaphysical account of Being. Coleman’s, on the other hand, accepts as absolute the limits of the physical world. Everything earthly, Plato tells us in his famous allegory, constitutes a copy of a spiritual prototype or Idea.3 When we create what we generally

140

Kaja Silverman

call a “representation,” we make a copy of this copy.4 A copy constitutes a degraded imitation of an incorruptible original, and with each subsequent level of mimesis the degradation increases. For the most part, we mistake the simulacrum or—worse yet—the simulacrum of the simulacrum, for what it replaces. Like the prisoners in the allegorical cave, we are then sunk in the darkness of deception, shadow-gazing. Plato calls upon us to move backward from these representations of representations to the representations for which they stand, and from there to the forms from which the latter derive. If we do so, he tells us, the shadows on the walls of our metaphoric cave will give way to a radiant illumination, whose privileged celestial signifier is the sun. Lapsus Exposure also contains a cave of sorts, as well as a site of illumination. Coleman shot the work in a studio for the production of sounds and images, which was partitioned into a stagelike area and an area more closely approximating a backstage. He sets its story in a studio as well, and organizes its space in the same way. He also ups the binary ante by painting the walls of the backstage area black, and those of the stage area white. Coleman heightens the contrast between these two spaces further in the process of defining them. He locates a wardrobe rack and related tools of the audiovisual production trade in the space with black walls, along with a number of technicians and musicians. He also dresses these characters—some of whom are the members of a 1950s band, and some of whom belong to a group of 1990s post-punkers—in bright and variegated colors. In the white-walled space, on the other hand, which is for the most part without human inhabitants, he situates a light-reflecting screen and two high-voltage lamps on tripods. He also works with a very limited palette. This palette is primarily blue, black, and white. At times, Coleman restricts the color scheme even more drastically by filtering out the blue. But the author of Lapsus Exposure seems as determined to undo this spatial opposition as he is to establish it; indeed, he appears to delineate it only in order to erase it. There is little to satisfy the eye accustomed to traditional kinds of spectacle in the area set up for shooting images. Virtually nothing happens there, and the lamps and screen illuminate only themselves. The sequences which take place behind the scenes, on the other hand, are full of striking tableaux of characters engaged in the activities of looking and listening. Coleman also turns his camera on these tableaux much more often than on those involving the lamps and screen. Finally, the post-punk characters themselves make it difficult to distinguish between the two areas of the production studio.

Like Lapsus Exposure, punk works hard to deconstruct the opposition of art and life. It does so in part through its theatricalization of the quotidian, and in part through its enshrinement of ugliness as the supreme form of beauty. Together, these two gestures create a kind of “in your face” aesthetic, which leaps out of the everyday. The musicians and production crew in this work represent an amelioration of the second of punk’s principles; even the most conservative eye could not fail to respond positively to the saturated colors of their clothing and makeup, or the elegance of their stance. However, these characters are still faithful to the notion that life itself is inherently aesthetic. Coleman can consequently use them to demonstrate that one can solicit the camera without looking at it, pose without stepping out of the most quotidian of bodily postures, and paint without lifting a brush. The two spaces in Lapsus Exposure’s studio interpenetrate in a number of other ways as well. The band’s drum is red, a color that figures centrally in the backstage sequences. Nevertheless, it intrudes into some of the onstage sequences, as—near the end—do several backstage props. When the band assembles as if for a performance, they do so within the room lit by the studio lamps, and they are joined by a female sound technician, who, although framed by the white floor and walls, is dressed entirely in black. If this were the limit of Coleman’s rewriting of the Parable of the Cave, he could already be said to have played havoc with its categories. By situating both the domain of shadows and the domain of illumination in a production studio, and then blurring the distinction between them, he abolishes the notion that there are two “worlds,” rigorously separated from each other.5 But he does not stop here. The lamps and light reflector have been set up in the white room for a photographic or cinematic shoot. Coleman thus also links light to human image-making, rather than to the Good. To make certain that we do not miss this inversion of metaphysical priorities, he digitally works over some of the analog images of the studio lamps and screen, thereby associating illumination not just with representation, but also with the representation of a representation, i.e., with that which Plato places at the furthest possible remove from his metaphoric sun. But we have not yet reached the heart of Lapsus Exposure. Even more than a deconstruction of visual binaries, it is an allegory about voice. Coleman begins the work with a series of photographic images, linked by way of dissolves, of a studio lamp on a tall tripod facing a screen, onto which it shines its light. At various moments in this sequence, we also glimpse a second studio lamp on the other side of the screen, and a wall beyond.

Live Vocals

141

142

Kaja Silverman

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

However, we don’t know whether this wall also constitutes a screen, or whether the lamps are instruments of a photographic or a cinematic shoot. At first we are too baffled by these images to pay attention to anything else. It is consequently some time before we realize that a woman is speaking. What this woman says is as difficult to understand as the images at which we are looking. She does not so much assemble as disassemble her sentences, separating individual words from each other through long pauses, and never completing a thought. In Lapsus Exposure, the diachronic dimension of language almost entirely defeats the synchronic. Insofar as we are able to make sense of the woman’s laconic half-statements, moreover, our confusion increases, since she seems to be talking about sound, rather than the production of images. We never completely regain our bearing, but by the end of Lapsus Exposure we are in possession of a few “facts.” We know, first of all, that the studio in which it takes place has audio as well as visual facilities, and that the post-punk characters have assembled there for the purpose of recording a song. They are unable to do so, because the amplifier isn’t working and the singer’s voice cannot be heard. Someone points out that the vocal track has already been recorded; perhaps the musicians can coordinate the

sound of their instruments with the playback. But Seiko, one of the musicians, objects that he does not play to the accompaniment of “numbers.” The word numbers is a metaphor for a preexisting paradigm, much as it is in the expression “to paint by numbers.” With it, Seiko expresses his unwillingness to conform to what already exists. In order to make certain that no limits are placed upon how or what he plays, he wants the playback erased. The others demur, and the rest of the work is devoted to an exploration of what it would mean for the band to play to the accompaniment of an already-recorded voice. But this is only one dimension of the story. The prerecorded vocal track derives not from an earlier recording session with the same musicians, but—apparently—from one with another group, the 1950s band. It is not clear whether we are to regard this band as actually inhabiting a different historical moment than the post-punkers, or as being a retro group from the present moment, but either way they signify the “past.” Lapsus Exposure thus becomes an interrogation not merely of what it would mean to play along with a prerecorded voice, but also of what it would mean to align a voice from the 1950s with instrumentalization from the 1990s. After the musician demands that the recorded vocal track be erased, the female voice says “listen to the playback.” In so doing, she reminds us that the voice which functions as an unwanted model is itself a copy—and an electronic one at that. “Numbers” now becomes a signifier for “digitality,” as well as “rules.” Seiko refuses to accompany the recorded voice because it lacks the presence and originality he imputes to his own musicmaking, as well as because of an unwillingness to be bound by an already existing model. But although the word playback seems at first to refer only to the prerecorded vocal track, its semantic range keeps increasing. First, it becomes evident that if the 1990s musicians were to perform in tandem with the recorded voice, they would play “back” in time. And even if their own singer’s voice could be heard, they would be reprising former performances and adhering at least to some degree to a prearranged score. Although playing in the present moment, they would produce music that would also itself immediately pass over into the category of a recording. Before long, the term “playback” also seems to encompass the voice in some larger sense. Do not all utterances depend both for their form and their meaning upon previous utterances? And do we not necessarily draw when speaking upon a language system which precedes us and will ante-

Live Vocals

143

144

Kaja Silverman

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

date us, and which limits what we can say?6 Is not all discourse, then, the playing back of something that came before, a copy in a mise-en-abîme of copies? A number of elements in Lapsus Exposure seem to demand this final generalization. One character complains that to use a prerecorded vocal track would be to submit to a “pre-diction.” Another says that it would be a “re-call.” Like Coleman’s Background, this work also features an unusual kind of narrating voice: one which, although it is not synchronized with the images, nevertheless issues from within them. Again, this voice moves around a lot, speaking on behalf of a range of characters. This time, however, it is female and devoid of the characteristics which would permit us to link it more to one of the characters than to the others.7 Coleman also makes it difficult for us to know for whom this female voice is speaking at any given moment in time. It hovers above the human figures, like the speech balloon in a cartoon, producing a kind of generic discourse. Through it, Coleman suggests that the subject’s words are never entirely her own. When we speak, it is as though we lay momentary claim to something that does not belong to us.

Much of what the voice says points to the same conclusion. The first sounds it emits are “ah” and “ahemm,” which are more phatic than communicative; they foreground a feature of the voice that is in excess of signification. A moment later, though, the speaker makes clear that she has produced the “ah” and “ahemm” on behalf of the singer, who is testing the sound equipment. When the sound equipment proves recalcitrant, she also complains that she cannot hear herself speak. She now seems to be offering a general commentary on language. No one, after all, can really hear what she says; it is only from the place of the Other that our words become fully intelligible.8 We are also frequently at a loss to recognize ourselves in what we say. What speaks is not us, but rather language itself. However, Lapsus Exposure ultimately resists our attempts to subsume “discourse” entirely to “playback.” The concept of “liveness” also enjoys a surprising longevity. Coleman’s project is finally not to eliminate the distinction between “playback” and “liveness,” but rather to subject each term to a radical resemanticization. Over the course of the work, the first comes to designate all vocal production which slavishly conforms to a preexisting model, irrespective of whether it is unfolding in the present or derives from an audiotape or disc. Coleman reserves the adjective “live” for a very different kind of vocal production—one that transcends the oppositions between the past and the present, the original and the copy, and representation and the real. At the moment that the musicians discover that the amplifier is not working, the female speaker first says that there are “no live vocals,” then proposes that the playback tape be used instead, and finally—on Seiko’s behalf—asserts the incommensurability of the two. At this juncture, “live” signifies “happening in the ‘here and now,’” as is usually the case when one is speaking about sound. Later in Lapsus Exposure, though, it comes to mean something closer to “alive.” When this happens, it moves over adjectivally to the side of the recorded voice. It might seem impossible for a voice which is neither temporally nor spatially present to be alive. However, Coleman gives this last word a very unconventional meaning. Something is not alive, we learn late in Lapsus Exposure, by simple virtue of having been born. Nor is it necessarily dead because it has died. Rather, an a/live voice is one that has been resurrected through “song.” The word song emerges fairly early in this work, shortly before the speaker utters the word “pre-diction.” It comes in the form of

Live Vocals

145

146

Kaja Silverman

a negation—as the invocation of what does not yet exist. “No, not song,” says the female voice, apparently for Seiko. There is no song at this point in the work because the characters are still seeing the recorded voice as simultaneously unreal and a coercive model to which they must conform. Later, however, they begin to accompany it by humming the tune out loud. In the sequence where these harmonizing activities occur, the speaker utters the word “song” again, now in the guise of an affirmation: “Listen to the playback—do you recognize a melody? . . . In my head:voice, sounds, song . . .” “Song” refers in the first instance to the new musical composition which takes shape within Seiko’s head as a result of the mental alignment of his own voice with the one on the recorded tape. However, with it Coleman also clearly alludes to the transtemporal and transformal duets which figure so centrally within contemporary musical experimentation. The duets to which I refer can take an artisanal form like “scratching,” in which manual activity still has a part to play, and in which there is still a palpable “instrument.” Here a DJ isolates “beats” from the records in which they have been embedded by moving a needle back and forth across their vinyl surfaces, generating in the process new sounds and rhythms. At other times they take an entirely digital form. A musician feeds temporally distinct “samples” of preexisting sounds into a computer and creates a literal song out of them. There are also musicians—like Moby—who bring together digitized sounds with their own voice and/or instrumentation, enacting at the level of “actuality” what Seiko does in his head. As we look for the last time at the room with white walls and light reflectors, we hear the female speaker say:“A figure buried in numbers, waiting for a time to arrive when all that is said and imaged will be turned into beats and chords, so that the eye can hear, too—or take it and love it, when it is gone.” The word “figure” clearly has an allegorical significance, but of a rather special kind. It is a voice which anticipates a later one, but without determining what that voice will be, or the moment at which it will arrive. It assumes its allegorical status only retroactively, from the vantage point of the voice or voices which, by corresponding with it, constitute it as a figure. Like the figure described by Erich Auerbach in his important essay “Figura,” Coleman’s figure is also simultaneously real and metaphoric.9 It is better instantiated by Joshua in the Old Testament, who was a historical personage as well a “forerunner” of Christ, than by Wallace Stevens’s emperor

of ice cream,10 whose existence is purely fictive. Both in its dependence for its figural status upon a later voice, and in its bringing together of representation and the real, Coleman’s figure is the opposite of a Platonic form. But “figure” also signifies “image” in Lapsus Exposure, and we cannot arrive at a full understanding either of it or of the notion of “song” without taking this additional meaning into account. In an important sequence, two post-punk women stand beside each other looking at the photographs. “If cropped . . . hmm . . . and joined together . . . runs . . . runs . . . suddenly still.” This remark clearly reflects upon Coleman’s photographic practice, which halts physical movement, but then—through the alignment of series of slides—creates what might be called perceptual “runs.” But it also plays a part within Lapsus Exposure’s meditation on vocal harmony. In order for a discursive duet to occur, two voices must be joined together. Each must also be “trimmed” a bit. It might seem odd that Coleman would use such a visually oriented scene to theorize an auditory transaction, but this is not an isolated occurrence. From shortly after the utterance of the word song until the end of Lapsus Exposure, the female speaker makes as many references to seeing as she does to hearing or speaking. She invokes colors (“purple” and “green”), distinctions specific to the field of vision (“midground” and “background”), the binary “light” and “dark,” as well as uttering the words “Polaroids,”“images,” and “looking.” Coleman characterizes the kind of language that is capable of harmonizing the past with the present through visual metaphors because it requires words to behave like images. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud distinguishes between two kind of signifying processes—the “primary” and the “secondary.” Both of these processes operate at the behest of the pleasure principle, which is the driving force behind all of psychic life. For reasons which will become clear in a moment, however, the primary process is far more amenable to the demands of the pleasure principle than is the secondary process. Its “role” is to make pleasure possible by bringing about the repetition of experiences which have yielded that sensation in the past. At the beginning of life, the primary process achieves this goal in the simplest way imaginable: it reactivates previous perceptions in the form of a hallucination. It is in a position to do so because the memories at its disposal are indistinguishable from what they represent; they have the sensory values of perceptions. Hallucinations, however, are unsustainable; the pleasure they provide quickly

Live Vocals

147

148

Kaja Silverman

fades. Before long, the pleasure principle must “instruct” the primary process to start searching in the perceptual present for stimuli capable of reactualizing the past, rather than relying upon memory alone.11 After repression takes place, certain perceptual memories become taboo, and the subject can no longer openly pursue the pleasure they represent. By virtue of being forbidden, however, these memories assume a greater importance; the pleasure they promise takes priority over all others. The primary process now has a more difficult task to perform; it must bring about the repetition of the forbidden gratification, but in a form that does not arouse the ire of the psychic censor. It classically does so either by transferring onto “innocent” memories or perceptual stimuli the psychic value which properly attaches to the repressed memories, or by combining them with elements drawn from unrepressed memories or perceptual stimuli. Freud calls the first of these psychic processes “displacement,” and the second “condensation.” The only memories or perceptual stimuli which can be used for either purpose are those with associative links to the taboo memories. The primary process is consequently constantly “on the lookout” for similar and contiguous material. When it puts a present or previous perception in place of a repressed memory, it treats the substitutory term as if it were what it replaces, even if there is only a weak link between the two. The primary process does not recognize difference, cannot negate, and is indifferent to inconsistencies or logical contradictions. I used the word “lookout” a moment ago as a way of anticipating the next point I want to make. The primary process “speaks” a predominantly visual language; the memories and perceptual stimuli that we marshal in order to gain pleasure are generally imagistic in consistency. This makes the primary process more amenable than the secondary process to the demands of the pleasure principle.12 Freud accounts for the affinities between seeing and the pleasure principle in primarily strategic terms: mnemonic images are more capable of passing themselves off as the desired reality than are words. But the activity of seeing is not only the means to a libidinal end; it is itself, as I have argued elsewhere, the goal. So central is vision to the operations of the pleasure principle that it could be defined as the urge to see again what we have seen before.13 The secondary process has the upper hand at the level of consciousness and the preconscious. It attaches linguistic signifiers to our perceptual memories, thereby making “thought” possible. When worked over in this way, a memory undergoes a number of changes. It loses most of its sen-

sory intensity and becomes a concept or signified, i.e., a differential element within a larger system, which can be joined together discursively with many others without losing its integrity. A perceptual memory’s capacity for generating pleasure or pain is also radically diminished when a linguistic signifier is attached to it.14 Once we have verbally “processed” our perceptual memories, we are in a position to discriminate one from another, and to establish logical, temporal, spatial, and other relations between them. We no longer mistake them for things, nor are we overwhelmed by negative or positive feelings when we approach one of them. However, so long as we remain strictly within the sphere of the linguistic signifier, we inhabit a domain whose defining attribute is closure. With the word “closure,” I do not mean to invoke the Saussurean notion of language as a closed field of meaning—the idea that the word “mother” derives its significance from its opposition to the words “father” or “daughter,” rather than from its relation to an actual mother.15 I am concerned, rather, with what might be called “libidinal stagnation.” Language acts as a powerful curb on displacement; after it has been linked to a linguistic signifier, a memory hoards the small libidinal charge which it still retains. Once a visual recollection of one’s mother has been turned into a word, then, it ceases to function as a possible “donor” in relation to new perceptual stimuli or other memories. Things are at least potentially very different with the look. At its most exemplary, the latter represents a “meeting” of memory and an external stimulus, i.e., of representation and the real. It also provides the occasion for a transfer of libido from the former to the latter. When such a displacement occurs, there is what Nietzsche calls a “transvaluation” of “values”;16 what we see in the present shines with the luminousness of what we have seen in the past. This is not a borrowed light; we are not giving to one thing what “belongs” to another. Rather, what we have long dreamt of seeing undergoes a miraculous transformation; it is reborn in the shape of what stands before us. As a result of this transformation, what stands before us also becomes more real than it was before; it assumes its “essence” or “Being.” But the opposition between seeing and speaking is obviously not as absolute as I have made it out to be. Since language is based in some ultimate way upon visual perception, it can never exclude it completely. The primary and secondary processes also always work at least to some degree in tandem. As a result, looking can assume some of the properties of language. The memory or visual stimulus which it puts in place of another then be-

Live Vocals

149

150

Kaja Silverman

come visible as a signifier, permitting us to apprehend the representational bases of our perceptions. But language can also assume some of the properties of looking. Affinity then overrides difference, “opening” words to each other, and making possible libidinal transfers between them. It is to an examination of this kind of language that Lapsus Exposure is devoted. Colemanian song, however, exceeds the psychoanalytic model I have just sketched in several important ways. First of all, Freud elaborates an intrapsychic account of signification; he explores the signifying relationships linking the subject’s present to her own past. The signifying transaction to which Lapsus Exposure is devoted, on the other hand, is intersubjective in nature; it shifts libido from one psyche to another. When the post-punk musicians hum, they provide the receptacle for someone else’s affect. Second, Freud attributes only a symptomatic value to the words that make up a short story, or the images that comprise a dream; they exist in order to be decoded.17 For Coleman, on the other hand, aesthetic form is all-important. Only through its agency can affect be transferred from one subject to another. The affect in question is also inflected in all kinds of ways by the kind of form through which it is transmitted. Cinema, for instance, imputes a different temporality to the “more-than-reality” that it makes possible than does still photography; it encourages us to love “what is,” rather than “what was.”18 Finally, intersubjective displacement as Coleman conceptualizes it requires not just one, but rather two forms. Because its production depends upon the physical presence of what it depicts, the still photograph attests with unusual force to the latter’s “havingbeen-ness.”19 It is consequently often seen as having a more intimate relation to the world than earlier forms of representation had.20 The digital image has no such requirement; it can spring forth ex nihilo from the computer, and even figure forth things that have never existed. For this reason, we tend to think of it as “simulacral”—as breaking photography’s contract with the real. This account of the analog image seems at first to be light years away from Plato’s account of representation. What functions in the earlier text as a debased copy here shifts over to the side of the “original”; rather than being defined as an imperfect replica of the Realm of Ideas, our world itself becomes the model upon which image-making is based. Indexicality also replaces mimesis as the agency of reproduction, securing for the copy an authenticity which is nowhere to be found in the Republic. However, reality is still assumed both to preexist representation and to make it pos-

sible. And although representation can be more or less faithful to reality, it nevertheless remains forever confined to the category of a “fiction.” In the final sequence of Lapsus Exposure, Coleman breaks as emphatically with the second account of representation as he does with the first. Like the opening sequence, this one takes place in the white-walled area. At first, the image is dominated by the screen and the two studio lamps. As time goes by, though, it becomes more and more cluttered with backstage objects, including ladders and the wardrobe rack. Coleman also sometimes splits space into zones of light and zones of darkness. Representation and the real thus do more than interpenetrate; they inhabit the same field of vision. As a result of the presence of the ladders and wardrobe, space is much more articulated than it was in the previous screen and lamp sequences, where there is little depth-of-field. Then the opposite happens. The analog images give way to ones that have been digitally manipulated, and space becomes emphatically two-dimensional. It is at this moment that Coleman has the female speaker articulate his definition of sound. Let us listen to this definition again, along with the sentence that follows: “A figure buried in numbers, waiting for a time to arrive when all that is said and imaged will be turned into beats and chords, so that the eye can hear, too—or take it and love it, when it is gone. Lens cover . . . has the secret.” The phrase “lens cover” constitutes an obvious reference to the digital image, which can be produced without ever taking the camera out of its case. By attributing the “secret” of figuration to it, though, Coleman claims digitization for a very different project than that embarked upon by George Lucas or Steven Spielberg—one closely related to what he earlier calls “live vocals.” He also invites us to think in entirely new ways about aesthetic realism. If an analog image succeeds in putting us in touch with the world, Coleman suggests, it is not because of its indexical or iconic relation to its model. It is, rather, because the scopic encounter which remains latent within it has been reactualized in us; because it has succeeded in transmitting to us the affect specific to another subject’s perceptual experience. Once again, moreover, this affect has a realizing effect upon the real; it allows what we see to Be. Since realism is in the final instance an affective rather than a formal affair, there are no restrictions on the kinds of texts which can serve under its banner. The fact that an image constitutes a copy of a copy does not make it any less “realistic” than one drawn by the “pencil of Nature.”21

Live Vocals

151

152

Kaja Silverman

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

What does make one work more responsive to the real than another is its amenability to the libidinal transfers by means of which the latter becomes “itself.” The degree to which a work is able to transmit affect from author to reader or viewer is initially determined, as we have seen, by the degree of its “primarization.” This libidinal transfer classically takes place within the parameters of a form, though, and every form eventually closes in upon itself. The affect which once coursed through its textual representatives then becomes inert, a kind of “standing pool.” It will remain sealed off both from us and from the world unless we succeed in putting the form in question into communication with another form—one which still has the power to move us.22 Photography retained this power for an unusually lengthy period. Its “time,” however, is drawing to a close.23 Already in Barthes’s Camera Lucida, a text from 1980, we can sense the diminishing capacity of the camera to convey affect from one psyche to another. Its author speaks proudly at one point in the book about his refusal to “inherit” anything from another eye, but he is clearly making a virtue out of necessity.24 The photographs at which he looks are in fact incapable of effecting this transmission.

Since for Barthes, as for Coleman, affect is finally “everything,” he does not accept this state of affairs. Instead, he searches within himself for visual representations capable of corresponding with the photographs at which he looks. Because Barthes alone is privy to the resulting “duets,” we do not know exactly how they “sound.” However, the author of Camera Lucida leaves us in no doubt about their enabling force. By harmonizing his memories with the photographs in his collection, he is able to get the libido which stagnates within them flowing once again. Coleman documents a much later moment in the “demise” of the photographic image than does Barthes. Not only is the technology of this form now virtually obsolete, but its transferential capacity is also almost completely exhausted. “Private solutions” like the one developed in Camera Lucida are no longer adequate to the affective crisis in which we find ourselves; we need aesthetic ones as well. In the final sequence of Lapsus Exposure, Coleman uses the computer to devise some. The images that result from the digitization of the analog images of the white room closely resemble the analog images. They, too, depict a room with lamps, ladders, a screen, and a number of other tools of the production trade. Because of their many similarities to the analog images, the digitized images are able to “stand in” libidinally for them, much as a dream image can for a repressed memory. This permits them to bridge the affective distance between us and the analog images, and so to recover what would otherwise be lost: the world as it shone in the sun of another person’s eyes. We find ourselves beginning to “care” about the white room. Unlike the analog images that precede them, however, the digitized images are two-dimensional, and their colors have a paintlike thickness; they insist in an almost modernist way upon their “flatness.” By using the computer to foreground their representational status, Coleman secondarizes them—he makes them “behave” a bit like words. In so doing, he might be said to “expose” the time lapse which separates a photograph from its referent. But this is not the end of the libidinal story. The digitized images relate to the analog images much as the analog images relate to what they depict. They both depend upon the latter for their physical existence, and refer insistently back to it. The analog and digitized images also communicate as much through the anteriority of their semiotic as they do through what they show. Through the formal modulation with which Coleman ends Lapsus Exposure, he therefore makes it possible for us to take and love

Live Vocals

153

154

Kaja Silverman

not only a particular moment in the past, and the unique convergence of world and eye which that moment made possible, but also photography itself, both as a medium and as a form of memorialization. Notes

1. See my “Melancholia 2,” in James Coleman (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002). “Melancholia 2” is a companion essay to the current text; it focuses on Coleman’s Background. Also published in this same catalog (for an exhibition at the Lenbachhaus Munich, 20 April to 21 July 2002) were two further essays, “Growing Still” (on the projection I N I T I A L S [1993–94]) and “Girl Love” (on the projection Photograph [1998–99]). 2. The Parable of the Cave appears in book 7 of the Republic, which is to be found in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 1132–55. 3. I draw here on book 6 of the Republic, p. 1128. 4. Plato makes this claim in book 10 of the Republic, pp. 1201–02. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche repeatedly refers to Platonism as a “two-world” theory in Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1978). 6. These are, of course, two of the founding assumptions of poststructuralist theory. Their ur-formulation can be found in Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). 7. This voice warrants an essay of its own. Like the voices in two later works, I N I T I A L S and Photograph, it exceeds not only categories like “voice-off ” and “voice-over,” but also the larger system through which cinema—the form which gives those categories meaning— enforces sexual difference. For a discussion of this system, see my The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 8. For an extended discussion of this claim, see my World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 51–74. 9. See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 10. I refer here to Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” 11. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), vol. 5, pp. 535–609. 12. I elaborate this argument in World Spectators, pp. 75–125. 13. Again I am referencing issues here which I develop at much greater length in World Spectators. 14. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 598–605, and Appendix C to “The Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 14, pp. 209–15. 15. For an elaboration of this principle of difference, see Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 115–17. 16. Nietzsche, Will to Power, p. 426. 17. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud attributes to dream images the status of a “rebus.” He accounts for fiction in a similar way in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (The Standard Edition, vol. 9, pp. 143–53): fiction provides a disguised version of the author’s fantasies.

18. Roland Barthes makes this temporal distinction between photography and cinema in “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 19. See, for instance, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 115. 20. For the most extreme version of this argument to date, see André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9–16. 21. This is the title of William Henry Fox Talbot’s early study of photography. 22. I take the notion of a “communication of forms” from Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, who have theorized it in a number of important books, including Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). See also Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 47–101. Bersani and Dutoit use this concept to theorize a nonpsychic form of relationality—one which is inherent within the universe prior to any action on our part. We spend most of our lives in utter forgetfulness of this “universal connectedness” (110n). The ego and what generally passes for “human relationships” are the two primary vehicles of our forgetfulness. Bersani and Dutoit’s account of the communication of forms has enabled mine in all kinds of ways. I also share their larger concern with the world and our relationship to it. My deployment of this concept nevertheless differs from theirs in several respects. I am using it, first of all, to conceptualize something profoundly psychoanalytic: libidinal transfer. I am also narrowly concerned here with aesthetic forms and their capacity to create affective bridges between one subject and another, and the psyche and the world. Finally, the communication of forms represents for me a way out of a specifically formal closure, albeit one with profound psychic and ontological ramifications. 23. For a very compelling—albeit different—account of the obsolescence of photography, as well as a rich meditation upon the notion of a “medium,” see Rosalind Krauss’s essay on Coleman’s Photograph, “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph” (1999), reprinted in this volume. 24. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 51.

Live Vocals

155

Seeing for Oneself, 1987–88 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” Rosalind Krauss

December 15, 1996—Arriving in Paris on Air France, we are slipped unceremoniously into the reception hall, like so many letters slid under the door. I find myself missing the ritual of entry at the first Roissy terminal, where, somewhat dazed, one would stand on the moving walkways snaking downward and then up again, a long, slow passage toward Customs punctuated by a series of hanging white globes from within which a changing sequence of projections winked their greetings from the City of Light: Cartier, Absolut, Galeries Lafayette, Chanel No.5. Later in the week, when I mentioned this to Coleman, he told me that the globes have recently been taken away, probably an acknowledgment that even for advertising, the slide tape is obsolete. But the slide tape, a form of promotion in the 1960s and ’70s, must have been born obsolete, already under pressure from film and video, with only its cheapness to recommend it. Which is another consideration to take into account in this matter of “inventing a medium.” Artists do not, of course, invent mediums. Carving, painting, drawing were all in full flower before there was any socially distinguishable group to call itself artists. But mediums then individualize their practice; they intensify the skills associated with them; and, importantly, they acquire histories. For centuries it was only within and against the tradition encoded by a medium that innovation could be measured, just as it was in relation to its reservoir of meanings that new ranges of feeling could be tested. Was it Duchamp and the readymade who did away with all that? Was it “you-push-the-button-we-do-the-rest” photography? Whatever the cause, the late twentieth century finds itself in the postmedium age. Surrounded

158

Rosalind Krauss

everywhere by media, which is to say by the technologically relayed image, the aesthetic option of the medium has been declared outmoded, cashiered, washed-up, finished. Painting is a possibility we can barely remember; sculpture is so far in the past that it seems indifferent whether we weld in steel or cast in bronze; drawing seems obviously best left to computers. The Jeremiahs of this situation were Michael Fried in the 1960s and Thierry de Duve in the 1980s. Fried saw the individual mediums imploding into a single continuum which he chose to call “theater,” his name not only for a technical mixing of mediums, but also for what he saw as an activation of the work’s audience by means of the forms of pandering we commonly call entertainment, but which he called “presence” (as in stage presence).1 De Duve contrasted the specificity that belongs to a medium with the generality that hovers over the collective term art.2 It was one of the ironies of critical discourse, he pointed out, that the term “specific”— as in Donald Judd’s nomenclature “Specific Objects”—should have been applied to the very operation that dissolved the individual mediums of painting on the one hand and sculpture on the other, by funneling them into the general condition of a hybrid object which, like the readymade, directly invokes the privilege of “art” without recourse to the intermediary of a medium. If it was minimalism that set this operation in motion, de Duve argued, it was conceptual art that fully theorized it. The linguistic definitions conceptualism was concerted to formulate were of art as a category that, mediumless, was generic: art as such. The “return to painting” that convulsed the 1980s was the shudder of reaction that greeted this situation, as though it were possible simply to recathect what had so slowly and laboriously been cast aside and take up the medium again. Taking it up not exactly where one had left off, since that would have been at the point where the support for the medium—the canvas—had been, in its monochromed nudity, or its objectlike shaping, or its bannerlike flaccidity, right on the verge of leaving the specific to turn into the generic; rather, taking it up at some point earlier in its modernist past, where painterly values were more apparent, and the painterly persona more present. The other response that was also gathering was less apparent, because more disparate and interstitial. It is probably only with about a decade’s hindsight that we can see it as anything like a coherent phenomenon, even with all its gaps and unevennesses. This was an attempt, or rather several quite individual and different ones, to “invent” a

medium: not to resuscitate a dying tradition, but, most improbably, to create a new one. Inventing a medium is like inventing a language, since it is the business of a medium to have not only something like a grammar, a syntax, and a rhetoric, but a way of deciding what counts as competence in its use. Not only does this parallel suggest the extreme difficulty involved in such an invention, but it also means that questions we might ask about such a language would apply a fortiori to a medium, just one of which might be: Would it be (logically) possible for someone to “speak” a language if he or she only ever uttered a single sentence in it? This question has a particular force if we think about certain ruptures within a known medium, which, however powerfully evocative, never have a sequel. A case in point would be Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), which as a film made entirely of stills (with one exception), seems to break with the cinematic medium, perhaps to found a new one. Is the fact that Marker never repeated this formula what makes us so clear about the fact that, however unprecedented, the work did not constitute a new medium for him? And does his refusal to acknowledge it thus as a “medium”—like a language he could develop and continue to speak— make us reevaluate the very condition of the still within the filmic unreeling

Chris Marker, still from La Jetée, 1962 Courtesy of Chris Marker.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

159

160

Rosalind Krauss

of La Jetée, suggesting that Marker’s recourse to motionless images was never intended as a rupture with cinematic grammar as we know it, but rather as a way, precisely, of filming the “final” image we would see at the moment of our own deaths, an image whose approach we can narrate cinematically but whose occurrence we can only produce as an explosively static “still”? La Jetée begins with this barely intelligible image of the hero’s collapse, seen on the outdoor concourse at Orly Airport. In what turns out to be an extended flashback, the rest of the film preserves and even intensifies the trauma of this final, convulsive, retinal impression, by being told through the form of memory images, each of them understood as grasped from the flow of time and slowed to a stop. In this sense La Jetée is not a break with cinema so much as it is a special case: a cinematic work in which the filmed still has been used to orchestrate that framing moment in every movie where “The End” hangs as an extended mark of motionless punctuation against a blackened screen. In contrast, Coleman’s slide tapes—the term he prefers for them is “projected images”—which he has been developing for over two decades (although with special intensity since the early 1980s), do constitute an example of “inventing a medium.” As I said before, he is not alone in the postconceptualist period in having embarked on such a task. It could be said that the entire cohort of video artists, in their determination to separate video from film by finding its specificity as a medium, has been involved in something of a similar project. But technologically speaking, video just is an independently available medium, and the problem of finding its specificity—while chronologically continuous with the period I am addressing—is not exactly the same as “inventing” the support itself. Rather, the artist who offers something of a parallel with Coleman in this matter would be Jeff Wall, who since the late 1970s has been formulating his work in relation to his “own” medium, the back-lit photographic transparency. Of course neither Coleman nor Wall invented their supports, any more than Bruce Nauman or Dan Graham or Bill Viola invented the portapak. In both cases, the medium—slide tape or illuminated photo panel—was taken from the commercial world of advertising or promotion and imported into an aesthetic context. The difference between their cases and that of video is that on the one hand video’s apparent connection to film gives it something like an aesthetic tradition from which to evolve, and on the other, this very condition makes it accessible simultaneously for exploration by a range of artists. Whereas the slide tape and the photo panel have no aesthetic lineage and each is so singular as a support that to adopt it as a

medium is immediately to put a kind of aesthetic patent on it. Each thus functions as the paradox of a “medium” that can only be practiced by one. December 20, 1996—Coleman is in Paris for the dismantling of his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, where both Living and Presumed Dead and I N I T I A L S were installed. We have lunch upstairs at the Café Beaubourg where from our window perch we can see the ugly billboard-like panel affixed to the Centre’s facade, on which all the exhibitions for 1996 have been listed, black letters on white. As these shows have closed, the title of each has been crossed off by a series of colored tapes that strike through each letter. “L’Informe,” the exhibition Yve-Alain Bois and I mounted last spring, which had included Coleman’s Box (ahhareturnabout), has long since met its colored death and is lost high up on the panel between a crossed-off “Cinéma Turc” and a canceled “Frederick Kiesler.” Now it is Coleman’s turn to see himself gaily sous rature, his submerged name riding just above the still monochrome “Luciano Fabro.” We talk briefly about the essay I am in the midst of drafting for his exhibition at the Vienna Secession, since I have questions for him before he leaves. As well, I have been telling him that I have decided not to go down the road of the Irish Question in writing about his work.3 It’s not just that I feel incompetent (which I do) to speak with any authority or subtlety about Irish history and culture or the Literary Revival, mounted by Synge and Yeats, to all of which there are obvious references in his work. It’s rather that the issue of the “medium” as I’ve begun to think it in relation to his art is not a matter restricted to one country or another, but is generalizable across the whole field of the avant-garde. It may indeed be that the attempt to return to a medium, not by regression but by invention, is, in its own search for specificity, not just a rejection of the generic forms of conceptual art but the manifestation of a certain distrust in the internationalist scope of conceptualism’s practice. But the idea that postconceptualism chimes directly with postcolonialism—an assumption made with increasing frequency now in the critical literature—is something I think one should be wary of. The blanket condemnation of the avant-garde’s belief in transnationalism as just another cover for the imperialist ambitions of international capital, and the idea that the only source for unalienated, authentic meaning is to be found in the specificity of national tradition, seem a dangerous embrace of the archaic to me.4 In turning its back on the long history of modernism, it shrugs off the very thing it supposedly wants to save: the idea of a tradition against which to test the meaningfulness of forms.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

161

162

Rosalind Krauss

Besides—I think—one of the sources for Coleman’s “medium” is the photo-novel, which for Coleman will always be pronounced fotoromanzo, since his crucial encounter with the object was in Milan, where he lived for ten years before his return to Ireland in the early 1980s. The photo-novel, which doesn’t have much of a presence in the States, is an international phenomenon throughout Europe, where one sees grown men and women engrossed in these comic-books-for-adults on the Metro or the Underground. The two major ingredients for Coleman’s medium—the slide tape and the fotoromanzo—have nothing particularly Irish about them. Indeed, they point directly to an internationalist commercialization of culture in advertising on the one hand and a degraded form of literacy on the other. To say “degraded” will unleash, I know, the antimodernist zeal of the postcolonial theorist who accuses the media-driven globalization of experience of spreading a homogenized cultural pap through which to alienate its recipients from their local traditions and to automate their behavior toward mass-market consumption. In this view the slide tape and the photonovel are commodified forms of support for the image which the work itself must attack and demystify. This is the position routinely taken toward Jeff Wall’s use of the illuminated advertising panel, for example. As de Duve has put it, “Whenever they talk about photography, the majority of Wall’s commentators discuss the transparency and its light box installation, to make the point that this has been borrowed from the society of the spectacle and in a reflexive and critical manner turned back against it.”5 But the question is, can one “invent a medium” without believing in the redemptive possibilities of the newly adopted support itself ? Can something function as a medium, if it is not a vehicle of expressiveness but only a target of attack? De Duve obviously doesn’t feel this way and, in his own advocacy of Wall’s seriousness, he argues for the rehabilitation of the commercialized panel by means of its recoding as a specifically modernist conveyor of value. Insofar as it recalls, de Duve says, “a new pact sought [by Cézanne] between the painting and its viewer, one founded upon the immersion of the painter’s eye—and his canvas—in the light bath emanating from the motif,” Wall’s illuminated panel blocks the automatic transparency of photography, realigning it with the opacity of the modernist surface.6 While this account of Wall seems extremely dubious to me, and indeed, the whole phenomenon of Wall’s work is something to which I will have to return, the need to make a positive claim for Wall’s support seems entirely logical once one wants to argue for his commitment to a medium.

Thus, for Coleman, the vehicle cannot just be a vile substance to be derided. It has, instead, to be understood as a positive source, the way Beckett’s clowns with their hat-passing tricks and vaudeville pratfalls have to be taken seriously as a basis for a linguistic value mined from seriality and repetition . . . not that I want to travel up the road of Irishness in literature. December 22, 1996—We go to see two rare films by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Victoire de la vie, shot during the Spanish Civil War, and Le retour, made in 1945 about the mass of people and soldiers flooding in all directions across Europe in a dense wave of repatriation. The films are being introduced by the filmmaker Teri Wehn-Damisch, who, when she called to invite us, mentioned the remark Gisèle Freund would often make about the relation of still images to moving ones: “It’s always the still image and not the one in motion that stays etched in our minds, becoming ever after part of our collective memory.” I assumed she was quoting this as a general inference regarding the relative importance of Cartier-Bresson as photographer or filmmaker. But it was, indeed, far more specific. Le retour contains a scene in a DP camp in Dessau with American soldiers behind a desk examining the papers of long lines of people seeking visas to return to their respective homes. We snap to attention as we recognize the stolid-looking blond woman who is now standing before the desk, and we immediately scan the circle of bystanders for the furious visage of the woman we already know will denounce her with a slap that will count as an unmasking of the hated collaborator. This after all is the scene that yielded one of the most famous photographs of the war’s end: retribution with a human face. You don’t have to know Cartier-Bresson’s work to know this image; it has joined a kind of communal memory bank along with the burning Vietnamese girl running down the road and the little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto. But the scene is over in the movie before we can even figure out what it’s about. The slap has no resonance. Something’s off about the drama. I imagine that Cartier-Bresson, standing next to his cameraman, looking at the scene unfold, but through his own Leica, has framed the whole thing differently in some essential way, producing for us the choreography and the tonal balance that yields the image’s violence, its memorableness.7 When I look up the still the next day, I see that this difference is illusory; it’s the same angle, the same distance. The difference is only that, in being motionless, the image gives us the time to notice the motley of

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

163

164

Rosalind Krauss

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dessau, 1945 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

onlookers—the young man, still in the striped pajamas of his POW uniform and the strange jauntiness with which he holds a battle-stick; the partisan in a beret, directly behind the denunciating woman, grasping his belt in a way that makes his wedding band incongruously prominent; the woman just behind the seated officer’s head who is the only one to look not at the drama itself but at the camera capturing it. In the sensation this gives that these viewers are merely curious (rather than engaged), we suddenly seem to be looking at a mirror of ourselves looking at this event. And the effect of this mirroring is twofold. It isolates the two women within the paroxysm of denunciation—a gesture that carries its meaning, literally, on its sleeve;and it fissures the image from within, breaking it into details that have nothing to do with Cartier-Bresson’s famously eloquent “decisive moment,” and thus no relation to the image’s meaning: details such as the tangle of metallic zipper appearing and disappearing along the side of the denunciating woman’s dress. It is in discussing a detail such as this, one that has slipped out of the grasp of narrative and of communication, that Barthes had introduced the term “obtuse meaning” or, alternatively, “third meaning.”8 He is analyzing stills from a film by Eisenstein. After addressing everything in them that

contributes to the horizontal dimension of the story, of its various themes and their development, of the historical background against which the narrative plays itself out, he arrives at a set of details that strike him as “counternarrative,” details that set reversibility against the forward drive of diegesis, that produce the effect of dissemination against the interweaving of narrative form, that give off a sense of permutability against the focalization of the story. This counternarrative, which opens up a different sense of time, one not hurried along by the twenty-four-frame-a-second mechanics of verisimilitude, is where Barthes feels he must look for what he calls “the specifically filmic.” And to locate this, which he is certain will not lie in movement “but in an inarticulable third meaning,” he holds onto the still. This, he explains, is not the same as looking at a photograph or a painting, neither of which unfold their contents against what he calls the “diegetic horizon” of the rest of the story. Rather, the still, which is not a sample of the story, not a “specimen extracted from the substance of the film,” is the fragment of a second text which itself must be read vertically. This reading, open to the signifier’s permutational play, institutes what Barthes calls “that false order which permits the turning of the pure series, the aleatory combination . . . and the attainment of a structuration which slips away from the inside.”9 And it is this permutational play, he says, that must be theorized.10 Within cultural experience there are other phenomena that produce this sense of the signifier at luxuriant play against, but not in service to, the background of narrative. These can collectively be spoken as pictograms— “‘anecdotalized’ images, obtuse meaning placed in a diegetic space”— some examples of which, Barthes says, would be stained-glass windows, Carpaccio’s Legend of Saint Ursula, images d’Epinal, comic books, and photonovels. In a footnote where he speaks of his own taste for the fotoromanzo, he speculates that “these ‘arts,’ born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic-strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photonovels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning).”11 Is “a new signifier” the same as a new medium? And when Coleman isolated the fotoromanzo as a form, was he saying along with Barthes that “there may thus be a future—or a very ancient past—truth in these derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical forms of consumer subculture”?12

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

165

166

Rosalind Krauss

In any event the medium Coleman “invented” sprang fully into being with the 1987–88 Seeing for Oneself, although this work had been preceded by four others, through which the medium evolved: Slide Piece (1972–73), Clara and Dario (1975), La Tache Aveugle (1978–90), and Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85). But it is Seeing for Oneself that most overtly and adamantly marries the mechanics of the slide tape to the histrionics of what is unmistakably the photo-novel, thus not only erecting but reflexively acknowledging the “diegetic horizon” against which each still will be projected. December 23, 1996—Coming out of the subway, on my way to the library, I have the usual problem of there being no trash cans anywhere in Paris these days in which to throw the used Metro ticket. Or rather, they are everywhere, but all are welded shut as an antiterrorist measure. I find myself thinking about the curious piece of filmstrip Coleman had showed me in Dublin, which as a boy he had fished out of a trash can when leaving the movies. Since it is in 35 mm, the image is fairly easy to make out, although, because the three riders are very far away, it is hard to identify their uniforms. Frontiersmen? Canadian Mounties? Riding toward the camera beneath a thick canopy of evergreens, their advance is imperceptible in the few feet of film. Coleman had taken the strip home with him and had rigged his Brownie camera with a light in such a way as to be able to project the film onto the ceiling of his bedroom, winding the images through the apparatus faster and then slower. Hearing this story, I find it impossible not to think of the opening of Swann’s Way and the magic lantern images with which Marcel would try to amuse himself before dinner at Combray—slides through which the crimes of Golo and the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant would project themselves on doorknob or window curtains. Using this scene to set the stage for Marcel’s later glimpse of the Duchesse de Guermantes kneeling below the stained-glass windows of Combray church, Proust compares the effect of the slide projection to the colored glass: “In the manner of the masterbuilders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.”13 The parallel between the two scenes with the child fascinated by the story dancing over his bedroom walls—here Geneviève de Brabant, there Canadian Mounties—underscores the primitiveness of the narrative drive, storybook yielding to the dreaminess of the projected image.

Coleman’s earliest relation to “projected images,” however, was not by means of a story and thus a diegetic structure, but rather in terms of a perceptual problem. Slide Piece, which initiates the use of the slide tape, is contemporary with other works (the film-projection Playback of a Daydream and the wall paintings Series of Images [Goblet]) that focus on “what happens,” temporally speaking, when we see something—the same thing—differently. Wittgenstein’s philosophical interrogation of this kind of perceptual refocusing and thus of what it means to perceive different “aspects” of a visual datum—“And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect”—had taken the duck/rabbit, the psychologist’s standard-issue “ambiguous figure,” as his example.14 Coleman’s filmed projection of this same diagram in Playback of a Daydream had worked on the irony between the filmed image that continues, unchanging, through time, and the viewer’s own perceptual flipping that causes two “different” images to come and go, now a “duck,” now a “rabbit.” Wittgenstein had worried about the linguistic trap laid by the ambiguous figure, the one that leads us to say “Now I see it as a . . . ,” since seeing as implies that we have a mental image of something against which to test our perceptions, to ask ourselves whether we see this tangle of lines or that array of shapes as the thing in our minds, and thus to add interpretation to perception. Coleman might have started from this philosophical basis, or something like it, but he ends up with the fourfold permutation of two different forms of projection: the mechanical instrument’s steady stare versus the psychological “projection” as the array changes within the viewer’s perceptual experience; and two different temporal registers: the ongoing present of the unchanging film versus the “now!” of the perceptual flip, or renewal. In Slide Piece a similar investigation now employs a slide tape instead of a silent, projected loop of film. Here the slide of an achingly banal urban scene—a car and a van parked near four gas pumps with apartment buildings visible across the street, their ground floors housing various shops— holds steady while a voice of unctuous plausibility describes the array, only to “change” to exactly the same slide but now described, by the same voice, in different terms, and so on through many such “changes” of aspect. We could say here again that Wittgenstein had programmed Slide Piece, when in his interrogation of the problem of “aspects” he had written: I look at the landscape, my gaze ranges over it, I see all sorts of distinct and indistinct movement; this impresses itself sharply on me, that is

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

167

168

Rosalind Krauss

quite hazy. After all, how completely ragged what we see can appear! And now look at all that can be meant by “description of what is seen.”—But this just is what is called description of what is seen. There is no one genuine proper case of such description—the rest being just vague, something which awaits clarification, or which must just be swept aside as rubbish.15 But again, the full-scale enactment of the perceptual puzzle produces a different experience from the one Wittgenstein was interrogating. For what we are aware of, staring at the dowdy slide and listening to the ingratiating tones of the image’s cicerone, is the temporal dilation of the present in which we are trapped, caught in a narrative that is not only going nowhere, but obdurately, and through many changes, continuing to go nowhere. Michael Newman, one of Coleman’s early critics, has compared this effect to that of the nouveau roman;16 and, indeed, there is a quality of narrative perversity that takes over these painstaking descriptions, like the elaborate setting of a scene for a story that never takes place. What Slide Piece adds to the philosophico-perceptual problem, then, is the dawning of Barthes’s “diegetic horizon,” although here its dawning is felt through a willful suppression:the deadpan description precisely squeezing out, stymieing, repressing, the diegetic drive. By basing La Tache Aveugle (1978–90) on nine frames taken from a narrative film, Coleman goes on to acknowledge the diegetic dimension that seems to be built into the medium of the slide tape by the simple fact that sequence implies development. Even the selection of these frames seems to yield to the desire for narrative, since they come from the moment when the hero of The Invisible Man, trapped inside a barn, is about to lose his condition of invulnerability and to become visible to his pursuers.17 And yet the achingly slow dissolve—produced by the coordination between multiple slide projectors that henceforth will serve as the technical basis for Coleman’s medium—that seems to dilate the movement from one frame to the next into a paralyzing kind of infinity (the progression of the nine slides takes about eight hours) delivers this “change” as, indeed, a blind spot, and so, once more, a suppression of the very narrative expectations the work had seemed to provoke. La Tache Aveugle in this sense is obedient to the prohibitions against narrative so deeply ingrained in the whole history of modernism, and so recently reinforced by conceptual art’s thematizing of immobility via an aesthetics of tautology,18 but at the

same time, by embedding its very notion of the medium within the process of an unfolding, it covertly traffics with the diegetic. It is with Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85) that Coleman finally permits the diegetic horizon to stand forth, even making the visual field of the work appear as a constant renewal of this horizon, as each change of slide ever so slightly permutes the arrangement of the twenty characters ranged across its stage. And yet, since at any moment within their appearance these elaborately costumed characters appear to be arranged for a curtain call and thus posed to take their final bow, the visual field itself is as resolutely immobile as that of Slide Piece. Rather, the diegetic dimension is now given to the work by the soundtrack’s story, delivered in a rich Irish brogue, and recounting the adventures of the hero in a rolling mixture of narrative and dialogue. On the one hand, this strict separation of the two dimensions of the work—the visual/static from the audio/temporal—is reinforced by the production of visual effects that have nothing to do with the diegesis—effects such as dissolves that cause parts of the visual array to blur while other sections retain their uncanny brilliance and clarity—while on the other hand, the even wash of the narrative creates the enveloping resonance specific to acoustical space, even while producing a burgeoning sense of confusion.19 Indeed, on a structural level, Living and Presumed Dead could be said to involve a coordination between two dimensions of permutation: a visual one, as slide changes displace the characters in the lineup with a sly imperceptibility; and a narrato-temporal one, as the taped story disgorges its own set of permutations, from the very introduction of the characters who grow along the serial logic of the alphabet—Abbas, Borras, Capax—to the tale’s account of Capax’s multiple appearances and multiple deaths (as in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World), producing a logic of dissemination rather than of closure.20 The locus of coordination of these two permutational chains is to be found in the triple appearance of Capax in the line of twenty characters and in the whir and clicking of the three projectors as they set the apparatus of the projection forth within acoustical space. The drag against the grain of diegesis in Living and Presumed Dead is double, then. On the one hand there is the fixity of the single lineup, whose internal changes defy immediate detection; on the other there is what Barthes called the “verticality” of permutation unfolding within the horizontality of the story and opening it up to a subversion of narrative’s single-mindedness and drive.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

169

170

Rosalind Krauss

December 25, 1996—We go to Beaubourg in the afternoon, in the bright cold of Christmas Day. We are intending both to see and not to see “Face à l’histoire,” an exhibition of dizzying thematic excess, whose interest for us lies not in the paintings but in the long corridor of documentation, with posters, magazines, broadsides, articulating each of the wars, revolutions, or assassinations to which the exhibition is dedicated. I am arrested by the famously sardonic poster for the Internationale situationniste magazine (I.S., no. 11, October 1967) which takes the form of a comic strip. The top register shows an urban street scene unfurling behind the figure of a young woman in close-up gazing seductively at the reader over her shoulder. While the caption begins, “On the set of spectacle culture within which the gaze encounters nothing but objects and their prices . . . ,” the speech balloon for the girl interjects, “Nothing is missing from the comfort of boredom,” and the caption finishes “. . . the astute use of one’s choice begins with the refusal to pay”; after which, the next register cuts away to a close-up of two young people exchanging remarks on how many sweaters they’ve managed to steal. The contempt for the comic book that radiates off this sheet is almost palpable, as the medium is displayed as a perfect mirror for the society that produced it. Which is not at all the case for Seeing for Oneself, Coleman’s first fusion of the slide tape with a full-blown version of the photo-novel. For in Seeing for Oneself there is no lapse in the careful seriousness with which the histrionic intensity of the story is treated, in all its platitudinous inevitability. A variation on Sleeping Beauty, the story treats a young girl poisoned by her jealous, evil stepmother and “awakened” by the young doctor called in to perform an autopsy on the presumably dead body. The other dramatis personae of the piece include the girl’s wealthy father, lost in alchemical experiments and hypochondria; the stepmother’s lover, who first encourages the poisoning of the father and then, out of the same greed, begins to pursue the young heiress; and the young girl’s nurse. It is from the latter’s point of view that much of the first half of the story is told, although the narrator not only advances the plot in the third person—“meanwhile,” “a long time passed in silence”—but also “does” the voices of the characters in their various first persons. In the second half, after the girl has awakened not only to the criminality of her stepmother but to the love of the doctor—as well as to the strange master plan of her father—the narrator seems more to engage with her point of view, although continuing to pronounce the dialogue of the individual characters. This voice, produced by

Seeing for Oneself, 1987–88 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

the veteran radio actress Daphne Carroll, resonates in its pitch and pacing with the kind of narrative thrill that associates itself with storytelling, whether in the almost vanished tradition of radio or in the kind of children’s story hour that librarians valiantly continue to conduct. In the visual plane, it’s the staginess of the poses, their numbing sense of stasis beyond even the requirements of the slide tape medium, and the awkwardness of costumes that read more as disguises than as period garments (the father’s wig, the wrinkles in the stepmother’s dress, the heroine’s badly plucked eyebrows) that deliver the experience of the photo-novel: its combination of stock shots harshly etched in black and white and its sense of cheap production. And for Coleman’s audience, needless to say, this effect is immensely off-putting. But it is out of this very grammar of the photo-novel that something else begins to emerge. This is a concentration in scene after scene on a particular shot, which is also shared by comic books, which we could call the double face-out. It occurs when two of the characters are in an exchange to which one is having a strong reaction. In a film this would be handled by

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

171

172

Rosalind Krauss

the strategy of cross-cutting, with the camera looking away from one of the interlocutors to get a reaction shot of the other’s face. But since, in a book of stills, cross-cutting would endlessly dilate the progress of the story, the “reaction shot” is conflated with the image of its instigation and both characters appear together, the instigator somewhat in the background looking at the reactor, who tends to fill the foreground, but, back turned to the other, is also facing forward out of the frame. The advantage of this conflation for the efficiency of both the photo-novel and the comic strip is that both shot and reaction shot are now projected within a single frame. Consequently, in passages of greatest emotional intensity, one confronts the mannered unlikeliness of the “double face-out,” in which one of the two protagonists is not looking at the other. But if the double face-out strains dramatic credulity, for Coleman it has distinct structural advantages. For one thing, it manifestly subverts “suture.” In film, the binding of the viewer into the weft of the narrative space is itself a function of cross-cutting, since it is when the camera no longer looks head-on at an object but turns away to look at something else, that we as viewers leave our externalized positions outside the image to identify with the turning camera, thereby being visually and psychologically woven—or sutured—into the fabric of the film.21 And in this refusal of suture, Coleman confronts and underscores the disembodied planarity of the visual half of his medium, the fact that being film-based, it has no other recourse than to unroll the density of life onto a flat plane. In just this sense, the double face-out’s own flatness takes on a compensatory gravity as it becomes the emblem of this reflexive acknowledgment of the impossibility of the visual field to deliver its promise of either lifelikeness or authenticity.22 It is not only the frequency with which Coleman uses the double faceout, both in Seeing for Oneself and even more relentlessly in I N I T I A L S (1993–94), that secures it as both the resource Coleman is mining from the photo-novel and a major grammatical component of his new “medium.” It is also the way this resource is doubled at the level of the soundtrack in I N I T I A L S that gives it added gravity, since in the latter work the narrator repeats a question several times that serves as the poetic description of just this convention:“Why do you gaze, one on the other . . . and then turn away . . . and then turn away?” The lines are taken from Yeats, from his 1917 dance drama called The Dreaming of the Bones.23 The work was itself based on the No¯ play Nishikigi, which Yeats admired, and like its model presents souls of the dead who are

unable to depart this earth because of an unabsolved crime. In Yeats the souls are the lovers Dermot and Dervorgilla, whose passion summoned the Norman conqueror to defeat Dervorgilla’s husband, thus initiating Ireland’s eight centuries of servitude to England. Set in 1916 in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, Yeats’s drama is about a young patriot who is aided by the ghosts in his escape over the Galway hills only, when they ask his pardon, to refuse them, leaving them dancing in their ring of unrequited despair. January 2, 1997—We go to the Comédie Française to see Marivaux’s Les fausses confidences.24 It’s a play of unsavory if comic subterfuge, in which the heroine is manipulated into falling for the hero because she is “let in” on the secret that he’s in love with her. But the sense of an emotional drama— let alone an erotic truth—floating just one inch above the most conventionalized artificiality takes up in the plot what Marivaux acknowledges in the players, in which the stock figures from the commedia dell’arte are never very far from the surface of this eighteenth-century farce. In the strange disjunction between the knowingness of the way desire breeds desire and the avoidance of verisimilitude at every other level, Marivaux is content to make a theater fissured by internal contradictions. This is as far away as possible from Yeats’s desire for a dramatic space of seamless unity between language, movement, atmosphere, music, color—a desire he embraced from Wagner’s drive toward the theatrical implosion of the Gesamtkunstwerk and which he later funneled through his conception of the No¯ play.25 Coleman may honor The Dreaming of the Bones in the vocal dimension of I N I T I A L S. But in the visual dimension, by acting on the Marivauxlike position of a shattered unity, he once more reinforces the unbridgeable gap between the two dimensions of his “medium.” Indeed, I N I T I A L S splits the visual field between the voluptuous beauty of its color, its achingly sharp delivery of perceptual information, the elegance of the framing of each image, the physical beauty of the actors—all of this brilliantly developed in its prologue of a pile-up of metallic hospital beds—and the kind of hopeless staginess already experienced in Seeing for Oneself (and developed further in the interim in Background [1991–94] and Lapsus Exposure [1992–94]). The drive never to loose the grip of the photo-novel’s banality on the characters—no matter how elegant their presence—is part of the direction Coleman provides his actors. The storyboards for each scene in I N I T I A L S (set in a derelict former tuberculosis hospital outside of

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

173

174

I N I T I A L S, 1993–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

Rosalind Krauss

Dublin) are a collage of recipe gamuts from TV hospital serials like Saint Elsewhere and nurse romance novels (from Mills and Boon, the “Harlequin Romances” of Ireland). Thus behind a scene of one of the characters (the man in eighteenth-century dress, identified on the storyboards as Dandy and generally in the role of the “patient”) being made up by another (strangely enough not the actress who functions as either “technician” or “nurse”) is the following extract: His eyes darkened and met hers so deliberately that she lowered her gaze as she said “Nevertheless there are periods of stability even in the most turbulent relationships. Some people manage to achieve harmony for a lifetime.” A touch of bitterness sharpened his voice. “They’re singularly fortunate.” Then, as though he had no intention of continuing the conversation, he added, “Now I must get back to work; thank you for putting me in the picture and for handling the case so well.” And for the same scene, somewhat lower on the storyboard:“Dandy (heart racing waiting gathering strength to resist the shaft of agony): ‘I swear . . . you look (a smile) I feel (happy?)’”

I N I T I A L S, 1993–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

175

176

Rosalind Krauss

If its visual field is fissured, the audiotrack of I N I T I A L S also refuses the unified poetic dimension envisaged by Yeats, even while quoting his lines for over half of the script. The most obvious technique for this refusal is the spelling out of many of the words in the short text, a vocal sequence of interruptions that imitates the medium’s own disjunctiveness as it awkwardly passes from slide to slide. This dispersal of unity is further dramatized by the piping voice of the child who delivers the text, frequently interspersed with the hyperventilated breathing of childish concentration. The control of fissuring within each dimension and the rigorous separation of the visual/static from the audio/temporal, which is the fissured condition of the “medium” itself, allow Coleman to produce a reflexive acknowledgment of how his medium is constructed—the double face-out’s insistence on flatness; the articulation of the temporality of the slide tape’s static seriality in lines like “Unfolding in a time, now; to having been present in a past, now.” In the pre-“postmedium” days of modernism, such an acknowledgment would have carried the assumption that laying the conditions of the medium bare produces a kind of transparent self-evidence— the unassailable truth on which unity (material, ontological) and autonomy are based—and that such self-evidence as a function of the viewer’s powers of analysis is reflexive, reempowering the viewer’s own autonomy. But insofar as Coleman’s “medium” is, in its very nature, shattered from within, so that, as in Marivaux’s plays, we always come to any of its givens only to discover that it lies at an unmanageably skewed angle to the others, this transparency is denied. Coleman’s own word for this is “anamorphosis.” January 6, 1997—For the last time before I leave, I go to Beaubourg, to consult material for this essay in the “doc”—the Documentation du Musée, or curators’ library. On my way in I have to pass the mezzanine gallery from the glass front of which the huge back-lit transparency of Jeff Wall’s contribution to “Face à l’histoire” signals outward, in all its luminous seduction. Called Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Mogor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) (1991–92), it uses digitalized photography to put together a macabre image of aggressive realism, which its admirers compare to works by Baron Gros or Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.26 But to me it looks like nothing so much as a work by the famously academic, pompier realist Ernest Meissonier, his Memory of Civil War (The Barricades) (1849), for example. I am astonished all over again by the position taken by his supporters when they argue that Wall simply returns to the moment when painting

was internally riven by modernism—whether that moment be the Salon des Refusés or some earlier one, represented, say, by Courbet—when the drive for a reflexive visual unity which proscribes narrative abruptly split itself off from history painting.27 This is the point after which the portrayal of modernity (the painting of modern life) comes into unbreachable conflict with the aesthetic ambitions of modernism. Going back to this moment, yet traveling over this same road now as a photographer, Wall’s restagings of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère or Courbet’s Source of the Loue (or even more bizarrely, Poussin’s Landscape with Diogenes) are seen as gaining access to a narrative (and figurative) tradition that modernism simply, perversely, interrupted. And his supporters argue not only that Wall has reforged a kind of historical continuity, but that he has reconstituted the kind of pictorial unity of the Old Master tableau, a unity in which composition is able to weld a variety of elements seamlessly together. Thus does Wall gaily vault over the unhappy choice modernism gave itself of either gaining access to pictorial unity at the cost of narrative, three-dimensional space (unity therefore lodged in the material conditions of the surface) or admitting that such unity was irrevocably incompatible with the texture of real experience by means of the strategies of figurative disunity vested in collage and photomontage. One of the things that strikes me in all of this is the confusion on the subject of the medium. Although Wall is described as having a “signature format,” 28 this is not analyzed or even named as a distinct medium. Partially this is because Wall, though working self-evidently as a photographer, is depicted as rehabilitating the medium of painting. De Duve, the only critic to take Wall’s classification as photographer seriously, produces another deflection in this case by focusing on the subcategory of genre as a way of effortlessly moving back and forth between photography and painting, as though photography itself had not developed (over the same historical period as that of modernism) its own, specific genres, all of them inflected by the condition of documentary: news photo, portrait, fashion or advertising shot. But the nonspecificity of the medium in the eyes of his critics is echoed in Wall’s own assumption that the unassailable now of the photograph can be dilated endlessly by the chatter of narrative, which not only suffuses Wall’s images insofar as they produce themselves as “history paintings” but is repeatedly thematized by the works themselves: the soldiers telephoning in Dead Troops Talk, the conversation of the two women in Diatribe, the concluding handshake in The Agreement, and so on. I find my-

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

177

178

Rosalind Krauss

self wondering what Coleman, unreachable in the west of Ireland, might think of this, since although Wall may have “invented a medium” he has, by producing “talking pictures,” failed to engage that medium’s specificity. It is this failure, I think, that consigns his reworkings of Old Master art to nothing more ambitious than pastiche.29 Charon (MIT Project) (1989) is Coleman’s most severely reflexive work, not only staging the conditions of his own medium but producing the allegory of the photographer/author’s paradoxical condition of a simultaneous alienation and absorption within that medium. “Charon,” the first of the fourteen “tales” into which the work is divided, shows the image of a crashed truck, while the narrator tells the story of the photographer of the image. Never changing point of view but growing smokier and smokier through a series of dissolves, the image stakes its banality on the fact that it is staged to duplicate a crash picture from one of the fotoromanzi in Coleman’s stock. This kind of banality is sought after in other segments, through the snapshot-type baby picture of “Baby,” or the recognizable mug shot of “I.D.,” or, in an exercise in “appropriation,” the glossily frozen interior-decor photography of “Showrooms,” and the “soft drops” (mailorder backdrops employed by commercial photographers) used in both “Oudeis” and “Silent Dress.” But the story told in “Charon” is of the photographer’s sense of uncanny identification with the accident, since he stages it to duplicate one he was actually in. This uncanny sense of a threat continually returning then proceeds through many of the other “tales,” such as that of “Baby” which is about the photographer—kidnapped as an infant and obsessed ever since by strangers in an effort to reencounter his abductor—who now, taking pictures of his own baby, “notices” that the child seems continually to be scrutinizing his face. The mythical Charon, ferryman of the dead over the River Styx to Hades, demanded payment, and for this reason the Greeks placed coins on the eyes of their deceased. It is most frequently through the eyes that Coleman elaborates the photographic uncanniness allegorized in this work. At the level of the narratives this occurs, for instance, through the request of a model impersonating a photographer to be blindfolded (“Oudeis”) or through the fantasy that a grotesque image seen in a mirror has entered the photographer’s being through the blind spot of his vision (“Frankenstein”). But at the level of the static image this is repeatedly staged through references to the traumatic moment of the pose, when the subject, at-

Charon (MIT Project), 1989 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

tacked by the glare of the strobe lights, or even just by the rigidifying process of standing still, feels him- or herself pass from a living being to a dead image: becoming one with, as Barthes had put it, “the mortiferous layer of the pose.” Thus in “Baby,” the red glare of the lights in the wide-open baby’s eyes, a glare that is strangely immobile through the various dissolves that slightly change the point of view on the subject, creates this experience of the blow of the shutter/strobe, an experience that is immediately intensified in “I.D.” It is, of course, precisely this click of the shutter that Coleman’s “medium” reproduces over and over, as the slide tape relentlessly cycles dead images of the living through the apparatus of the projector, in a kind of technical repetition compulsion. But if Coleman’s medium is perfectly fashioned to “stage” photography’s testimony in the present to a vanished past—“Unfolding in a time, now;to having been present in a past, now”— and thus its commitment to death, that same medium, insofar as it is based as well on projection, is also fitted to stage fantasy. And so the final tale of Charon is “Showrooms,” in which the photographer, setting up, shooting, and dismantling interior decors for “Dream Homes,” takes unused elements for the pictures and places them in the

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

179

180

Rosalind Krauss

Charon (MIT Project), 1989 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

“spare” room. This room, furnished for us piece by piece by the narrator as he describes the elements in the glossy photo we are now looking at, which, the same but different, have been removed, exists as an imaginary projection of our own. But also of the photographer’s, who, after a long day’s work, “withdraws to the spare room to rest. Here, the photographer can feel free to move about the room, unobserved, or perhaps rearrange the furniture. Stretching out on one of the sofas to relax, the photographer imagines the next day’s pictures of Dream Homes.” This imaginative projection, permuted off the static image against the “diegetic horizon” of a narration that is never allowed to reach its destination, involves that “permutational play” of a signifier which, both real and imaginary, appears and disappears on the order of Barthes’s third term. But it also appears and disappears to the rhythm of the apparatus of Coleman’s medium. A medium which he has “invented,” and which, in continually investigating its terms, he continually reinvents, both as a disruption of modernism’s certainties and as a continuation of its hopes. Notes

1. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 ( June 1967), pp. 12–23.

2. Thierry de Duve, “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas” [1986], in Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 3. That Coleman’s work is to be discussed through the matrix of Irish cultural and historical references and placed in the service of Irish cultural identity has been the assumption of many of Coleman’s exegetes: for example, Jean Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” (1983; reprinted in this volume); Anne Rorimer, “James Coleman 1970–1985” (1985; reprinted in this volume); Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1985); and Luke Gibbons, “Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE,” (1993; reprinted in this volume). 4. A similar point is made in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s “Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle” (1995; reprinted in this volume), a searching presentation of Coleman’s work in relation to modernism’s obliteration of historical memory and the questions raised by any attempt to reconstruct such memory within the domain of specific cultural traditions. To this end he quotes the Irish literary scholar Seamus Deane: “The recruitment of postcolonial literature to post-Modernity dooms the politics of postcolonial societies to pre-Modernity” (p. 100 in this volume). 5. Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, and Boris Groys, Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 28. 6. Ibid., p. 50. 7. See Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Paris and New York: Verve and Simon and Schuster, 1952), plate 34. 8. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 9. Ibid., p. 64. 10. Barthes writes, “If the specifically filmic lies not in movement, but in an inarticulable third meaning that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume since they lack the diegetic horizon, then the ‘movement’ regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, ‘life’, copy, but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding and a theory of the still becomes necessary” (ibid., p. 67). 11. Ibid., p. 66. Taking up Julia Kristeva’s term signifiance, Barthes is using it to signal the play of the signifier as it eludes meaning (the signified) and registers instead the rhythms and the materiality of the body’s opening onto pleasure. 12. Ibid. 13. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House, 1928), p. 7. 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 194. 15. Ibid., p. 200. 16. Newman, “Allegories of the Subject,” p. 27. 17. The Invisible Man, based on an 1897 novella by H. G. Wells, was made into a film by James Whale in 1933. 18. In “Memory Lessons and History Tableaux,” Buchloh analyzes Coleman’s development within and rejection of conceptual art in relation to just this violation of conceptualism’s taboo on the rhetorical dimensions of language.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

181

182

Rosalind Krauss

19. Raymond Bellour has written a particularly elegant analysis of this work; see “Les morts vivants (Living and Presumed Dead)” (1996; translated in this volume as “The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead )”). 20. Coleman has stated that in inventing the story for Living and Presumed Dead he thought about Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and his analysis of how an extremely reduced number of narrative “functions” is elaborated into an ever-burgeoning cast of characters in everchanging permutations of basic plots. See Michael Newman’s development of this aspect of the work, “Allegories of the Subject,” pp. 36–37. Stressing the liminal nature of Coleman’s medium, in a manner that follows the theoretical tenor of his L’Entre-Images (Paris: La Différence, 1990)—which would imply a mixed medium or possibly a “postmedium” view of the matter—Bellour nonetheless opens his text on Living and Presumed Dead with a comment highly suggestive of the direction toward which the present essay is leading, namely the “invention” of a new medium:“Between the living and the dead. Between life and death. Between film and photography, theater and painting: between all the forms of representation linked to these extremes of motion and stasis, there lies a perverse and precise art, one dedicated to a future still partly unknown, and of which James Coleman is the inhabitant” (“The Living Dead,” p. 57 in this volume). 21. The classic text on point-of-view editing and suture is Jean-Pierre Oudart’s “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18 (Winter 1977–78). 22. This schematic flatness onto which life is impressed is thematized in the script’s references to the fact that the château in which the plot is set has been based on a diagram itself patterned on the diagram of a human skeleton, to a “formula” which produces not the father’s death but his disappearance, to the daughter’s own substitution of photographic plates for her absent body in her own coffin, etc. 23. Coleman has edited Yeats’s actual lines, which read:“Why do you gaze, and with so passionate eyes,/ One on the other; and then turn away,/ Covering your eyes, and weave it in a dance?” 24. Even the most casual reader of this text will have noticed that my time in France, though accompanied—at its entry into Paris, at the movies, at the theater, at exhibitions—was not spent in the company of Coleman, whom I saw once for lunch and who left immediately afterward for Dublin. Since my use of “we” seems, nonetheless, to cause confusion on this matter for some, it might seem perverse of me to have retained it and not have removed whatever lingering ambiguity there might be (?) by bending the truth and writing “I.” But as the reader might gather, I had a rather joyous time in Paris, even including the composition of this essay, and I prefer to document that mood by marking the plurality of its cause. 25. Yeats spoke of the No¯ drama as “a playing upon a single metaphor, as deliberate as the echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese painting,” and he quotes Fenollosa on the No¯: “The beauty and power of No¯ lie in the concentration. All elements—costume, motion, verse, and music—unite to produce a single clarified impression. Each drama embodies some primary human relation or emotion.” See Richard Taylor, The Drama of W. B. Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese No¯ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 26. See, for example, Thomas Crow, “Profane Illuminations: Social History and the Art of Jeff Wall,” Artforum (February 1993), p. 68. 27. This position is taken not only by Crow (ibid.) and de Duve ( Jeff Wall) but by Wall himself, as well as by his interlocutors T. J. Clark, Serge Guilbaut, and Anne Wagner in their interview published in Jeff Wall. It must be said that, in the latter interview, Clark expresses some concern over Wall’s technique. For insofar as Wall tightly manipulates the relation between his images and their art-historical sources, the viewer of this work becomes a subject

rigidly controlled by Wall (as the single subject/author). Thus, even though Wall may be thematizing that subject in his works as fragmented, it still appears to Clark as the monadic subject (no matter how dispersed) of capital’s basis in private property (ibid., pp. 114–15). 28. Crow, “Profane Illuminations,” p. 65. 29. The role of pastiche within postmodernism has long been an issue of particular theoretical concern, not only of mine but of many critics, starting with Fredric Jameson and his 1984 essay “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” characterizing postmodernist art as inherently infected by pastiche (see Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], pp. 1–54). Ever since my first encounter with Wall’s Picture for Women (1979), a restaging of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, I have been interested in accounting structurally for this condition in his work. It should go without saying (but I will say it anyway) that my views on Wall, which are offered here in an effort to clarify the notion of “inventing a medium,” have never been discussed with Coleman and, as far as I know, do not reflect his own.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?”

183

Photograph, 1998–99 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph Rosalind Krauss

1. James Coleman’s technical apparatus has very few parameters. There are the slides in their carrousel trays. There are the projectors equipped with their zoom lenses. There is the recorded soundtrack. There is the timer that synchronizes the slide changes with the track. There is the screen. That’s it. One can play with these parameters more or less. The static image may fill the wall-sized screen edge to edge or it may be centered within it. When there is more than one projector such that several individual beams are focused on the same spot, these might move in or out of synch with one another. The zoom lenses might pull the image, or parts of it, out of focus or they might implement the effect of a dissolve, either between two different images or between an image and black (thus imitating the filmic device of a fade-in or -out). The track might be a third-person narrative or, saying “I,” it might evoke the quality of inner monologue, or through successive “I”s, that of dialogue, but only by implication since the mouths of the projected actors never move. The collective title Coleman uses for the works that employ this apparatus is “projected images.” And in each such work, a facet of what could be called its content (or its field of representation) is doubled over so that, mirrorlike, it reflects a certain aspect of the apparatus itself. In I N I T I A L S (1993–94) this is the very fact of the slide changes, their punctuality, the click that occurs as the carrousel advances a notch and each slide falls into place. Imitating this material given, the soundtrack thematizes this noise as a regression from the signified to the signifier, from word to phoneme:

186

Rosalind Krauss

Photograph, 1998–99 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

“A,” calls the child’s voice. Pause. “R,” it raps out with the same emphatic sharpness (pronouncing this with a West Irish accent, “or”). Then, “D.” With the same slow, processional pace, the letters continue to come, each distinct: “D R [or] Y.” Then “B O N E S.” Then “DRY BONES.” In another age (not so long ago) this reflexive operation would have been called “specificity.” By consolidating the content of the work of art around the specific givens of its technical support, the artist would withdraw the work’s connections from the space around it—from anything that could be called its hors-texte or its context—to focus them, analytically, on the constitutive characteristics of the work itself. The rewards of this reduction would be the enormous gain in the self-evidence of a given work’s unity or, to use the appropriate modernist term, its autonomy. Photography is, however, the serpent that entered this Eden. For the photograph is not only unable to cut its ties with the external world of which it is inevitably a trace, it is unable to center the moment of one’s experience of it in an absolute present, since the record it smuggles into the “now” of that exchange is ineluctably of something past. The specificity of the “projected image” is always partially suspended, then, by the resistance of that one component of the support that can never be wholly summoned into the physical presence of the viewer: the

photographic referent, which is the ground of the slides themselves. Everything that signals that the slide projection occurs in the spectator’s present, everything that consolidates both the work’s unity and that of its viewing subject, is opened out from the rear, as it were. A dispersal occurs, an abeyance; to which we will return. Although Coleman’s newest work, Photograph (1998–99), signals this abeyance with its title, other aspects of the piece are concerted to map the terrain of the work’s specificity. These are now made to focus on the nature of the slide tray as support, which is to say on the carrousel’s circularity: not simply on the fact that it finishes only to start again, the fact of its repetition;but on the circle’s closure, its exclusiveness, its refusal to let anything extraneous in, or out. Most immediately, this experience of the circle is produced by the soundtrack and, as we pick out coupled line endings—smile/while; hue/true; light/might—by the fact that this textual accompaniment is constructed as rhymed verse. This, plus the manifestly Romantic nature of that verse— its simultaneous attention to subjective states (“in the springs of affection, deep as bright”) and conditions of nature (“all green with life again”)— produce in the viewer/listener of this work an experience of the totalization toward which lyric poetry aspires, a symbolic circularity in which self and other, beginning and end, origin and destiny, are presented as manifestations of a unified design, each mirroring and repeating the other in an impossibly dilated present.1 Indeed, by allowing the mind to skip backward over the verse as it unfolds, the structure of rhyme, producing a sense of the synchronous against the grain of diachrony, asserts the poetic form’s claim to circularity. This is a claim that Coleman’s soundtrack underscores not only by literally doubling up a group of lines from the opening—“There felt a moment’s silence round/ a breathless pause/ the hush of hearts that beat”—to repeat them at the work’s end, but by evoking circularity through the text’s individual figures:“over and about, around,” for example, or “circled with joy,” or “girth me round.” The encirclement thus named is, furthermore, made visually present to the spectator as he or she encounters the schoolgirl who seems to be the work’s central character in an extremely arresting image in which she is surrounded by a fellowship of dancers but is nonetheless coiled around on herself. Having mentioned the freedom of clouds racing through the sky, the soundtrack now says of—or perhaps on the part of—this visually trapped figure: “but I, I had yet to fly to a secret spot.” Somewhat later, the viewer finds her again circled, but now by

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

187

188

Rosalind Krauss

schoolyard walls on which a thick, whitewashed band is inscribed with graffiti which she is trying to clean off (“Would’st thou through following through these lines/ lay bare an innermost scroll”). And then there is the work’s final image, in which the dancers can be seen massing themselves so as to form—as the visual climax of the piece—a circle. 2. It is not a new impulse within Coleman’s work to acknowledge the circularity built into his apparatus through the form of the slide carrousel. Indeed, Clara and Dario (1975), one of the first of the “projected images” (preceded only by the earlier Slide Piece [1972–73]), not only initiates the dramatic situation that so many subsequent works will exploit—the strange abbreviation of the filmic shot-reverse-shot syntax that unfolds the presumed “dialogue” between these two heads in a repeated pose that I have elsewhere called the double face-out (on which more later)2 —but structures the piece around the circularity of the trays, as the two carrousels (that of Clara and that of Dario) begin in synch, only for the Clara tray to reverse itself halfway through and propel its cycle backward. Similarly the alternating soundtracks give the impression of sliding past one another, the enunciations timed with the Dario field continuing to cycle forward, while those associated with the Clara field move backward in reverse order. A key work in Coleman’s oeuvre, Clara and Dario also puts in place a feature that would characterize many of the subsequent slide tapes:namely that the soundtrack is a congeries of citations, in this case lifted from newspaper stories and fotoromanzo dialogue, these readymade verbal strings made nonetheless to coalesce with the image of the projected face(s) in a strong evocation of subjectivity. For Clara and Dario sets up a subjective field in which the two are “remembering” their adolescence and a scene where either their romance, or that of others, began. To hear in this “memory” the echo of that forming the center of Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (the younger Krapp remembering himself lying in a boat with his head burrowed in the breasts of the mistress from whom he is separating:“We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side”) is of course to feel the importance of Beckett for Coleman. This proximity is apparent not only in Beckett’s interest in low forms, such as music hall routines, which Coleman translates into his own concern for romantic pulp fiction. It is also there in the exploitation of forms of recording, such as audiotapes, so that the past moment testified to by the tape can enter the immediacy of the staged present with a dazzling tem-

Clara and Dario, 1975 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration. Installation at Studio Marconi, Milan, 1975.

poral ambivalence. And insofar as these audio interventions are often the character’s memories, the fact of recording underscores a relation to memory as a simultaneous experience of self-identity and self-alienation: the older Krapp listening to his youthful recording has to look in the dictionary for the meanings of words used by his younger self (“viduity”);the older Krapp, sneering in unison with the younger one sneering at the aspirations expressed in a tape made when he was even younger, is, however, utterly unconcerned with his earlier self ’s triumphant announcement of spiritual breakthrough—“The vision at last”—but is mesmerized by the tape’s record of that relationship broken and tossed away:“but under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down . . .” Does the old Krapp actually remember this? Or is he struck by it, comforted by it? Placated as if by a fairy tale: “We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem!” Is it the hope contained in Romantic lyric and encoded in bedtime stories that urges him to play this one part of the tape over and over—the thought of a harmony between nature and self, the possibility of producing a circle, of inhabiting a larger, divine plan?

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

189

190

Rosalind Krauss

This question of whether and to what extent our memories are actually our “own,” of how, that is, we as psychological subjects coincide with them, has been a longstanding concern of Coleman’s. At the same time that he was completing Photograph, he contributed a work devised in 1984 to a group exhibition of photographic and film-related work that included artists such as Chantal Akerman and Jeff Wall.3 Coleman’s piece, however, was neither photograph nor slide nor film. Figuring nowhere in the exhibition except in the show’s checklist, it follows the alphabetic appearance of his name and consists of a story about a man who often tells his friends about his hallucinations, one of which is a detailed account of watching a cardsharp at a country fair. Upon finding, however, a photograph of the very scene, the man is faced with the dilemma of whether this was a memory or a fantasy and, even more perplexing, whether in describing this scene in the future he will be referring to the memory of a memory of a hallucination or the memory of a hallucination of a memory.4 But between the two prongs of this dilemma—hallucination or memory?—there rides a third element, namely the photograph. And this, precisely as an independent third term, could be the basis for a range of subjective projections, from the material one “hallucinates” to the experience one “remembers.” 3. That subjectivity is a kind of collage, a concatenation of readymade material and the endless mental traffic between layers of this material, and that “authentic” experience is, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, always mediated, is a concern that threads its way through all of Coleman’s work. In Photograph this is registered on one level by the soundtrack’s poem, which though unlocatable (is it Robert Browning? is it Longfellow? is it Elizabeth Barrett Browning?) rings with the tones of verse learned in high school, so that it is both terribly familiar—part of everyone’s identikit, indeed part of the interior monologue that accompanies children’s play as they enact fantasy parts in both the first person (“I stood beloved”) and the third (“She turned, she knew”)—and depressingly uninhabitable from our vantage as adults. This citational effect impresses itself on much of the work’s visual texture as well. This is because the social fabric into which its youthful characters are woven is not only the physical building of the school—its classrooms, its auditorium, its exterior facade—but consists as well of the activity in which that school’s community is engrossed, which in this case is the preparation and rehearsal for the kind of intramural dance contests that take place in Ireland, and result in an annual carnival-like pageant in Dublin.

Far from summoning up ideas of classical ballet, however, this involves a type of dancing which is much closer to MTV, with moves based on the Spice Girls or Madonna and costumes that unleash a whole gamut of fantasy roles into which these adolescents are projecting themselves. Ranging from the martial—Wonder Woman, drum majorettes, Star Trek—to the erotic—cancan, flamenco—to the athletic, the roles both allow for the trying out of a variety of identities and form a fixed repertory, itself the product of a commercialized global culture. In the latter sense, the costumes, with the readymade parts they flag, function like a vise within which the adolescents are gripped; the outfits are something like the precipitates of a Lacanian Symbolic, an inventory that forms a circle that hems the children in—the circle also understood as the Law. Indeed, in developing the piece, Coleman himself was focused on the story of The Chalk Circle, the thirteenth-century Chinese drama that forms the basis for Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, both of these plays driving toward the moment when a child’s fate is suspended within the circle of the law, literalized by a ring chalked onto a courtroom floor. The “truth” this law assumes itself capable of producing is, then, both a function of the circle and the circle’s self-justification so that, in its self-perpetuation, the circle is absolute. And yet in both plays the child is ultimately liberated from the circle into the arms of its true parent (in the one because she is its biological mother and in the other because she is the one who really cares for it), a liberation which is also coded into the development of Photograph. Struck by the declaration of one of the members of this high school troupe that dancing was a way of breaking free of the strictures of their shabby suburban life (the district on the outskirts of Dublin called Cabra), Coleman was haunted by the performers’ conviction that they could “dance their way out of Cabra.” The circle as the liberation from the circle is, then, the paradox the work takes up as childhood is unfolded as a process of freeing oneself from the dyadic hold of the mirror—“traversed by the coils of memory’s chain, of magic mirrors that waft images, silent as a dream”— in order to be able to join the circle of a social whole—“and, through a life e’er twined with other lives, cast aside a lime-encrusted spell.” Indeed, in the narrative buried deep within the generation of the work, the central character is seen as breaking out of one circle—the graffiticovered band of whitewash (otherwise known as chalk or quicklime)—in order freely to join another—the round of dancers. Yet, though this narrative is encoded in the soundtrack of the piece (“cast aside a lime-encrusted spell, and, in an echo of a crowded hall, sounds of how all things shall speak

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

191

192

Rosalind Krauss

and quicken”), its message is muffled at every turn by the consciously formulaic quality of the elements of the work—the recipe-like verse, the kitsch clothing—implying that the circle cannot be broken, that there is no outside of the Law. 4. The two, superimposed circles of Photograph—that of the social order in which the protagonists are caught and that of the slide carrousel through which they are projected—could be thought of as relating to each other as content to form, or as signified to signifier: the first a function of all those associations to the construction of subjectivity and identity within the circularity of the Symbolic order, the problematic that has largely been taken to be the import of Coleman’s work;5 the second a mechanical system that the work signals as the ground of its “specificity.” In that one circle could be thought to be allegorizing the other, it is the assumption of contemporary criticism that if the carrousel has any interest, if it is to be noticed at all, this is because it stands for or redoubles the thematic center of the work, which is focused on issues of identity and its formation.6 That the allegory might go the other way is, within the present conditions of discourse, almost unthinkable. Many strands have braided together to contrive the situation within which this notion of specificity to a medium should now be “unthinkable.” The first is the historical fact of photography itself, which entered the field of art only to deconstruct its unity, with photography’s own dispersal—its existence as multiple, its dependence on the textual field of the caption, its erosion of the “aura” of the aesthetic original—now infecting the fields of the other mediums, like painting or sculpture. From Walter Benjamin’s “to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility,” to Jean Baudrillard’s theorization of photography as the model for “sign exchange value,” photography has thus emerged as a theoretical object that allows one to unthink the presumed unity or autonomy of the aesthetic fields. So whether it was as the prime example of Roland Barthes’s mythology or of Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, by the 1960s at least photography had left behind its identity as a historical or an aesthetic object, to become a theoretical object instead. The perfect instance of a multiple-without-an-original, the photograph— in its structural status as copy—marked the site of so many ontological cave-ins. The burgeoning of the copy not only facilitated the quotation of the original but splintered the supposed unity of the original “itself ” into

nothing but a series of quotations. And, as the second strand of this braid, in the place of what was formerly an author, the operator of these quotations—in being redefined as pasticheur —was repositioned on the other side of the copybook to join, schizophrenically, the mass of its readers. Barthes, in particular, was further interested in the structural irony that would allow photography, this wrecker of unitary being, to perform the semiological sleight-of-hand whereby in the seamlessness of its physical surface the photograph seemed to summon forth the great guarantor of unity—raw nature, in all its presumed wholeness and continuity—to cover the tracks of photography’s own citational operations. Its participation in the structure of the trace, the index, and the stencil made photography thus the theoretical object through which to explore the reinvention of nature as “myth,” the cultural production of it as a mask behind which the operations of history and of politics could be kept out of sight.7 In Baudrillard’s hands this mask became the model of a final disappearance through which the object-conditions of a material world of production would be replaced by the simulacral network of their reproductions, so many images peeled off the surfaces of things to enter the circuit of commodities in their own right. If in an earlier version of commodity culture the mobility of exchange value relentlessly replaces the embeddedness of use value, in its latest manifestation, then, both of these yield to the phantasmagoria of Spectacle in which the commodity has become image only, thus instituting the imperious reign of pure sign exchange.8 But photography’s emergence as a theoretical object had already occurred at the hands of Walter Benjamin in the years that elapsed between his “A Small History of Photography” in 1931 and his more famous text of 1936, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”9 In 1931 Benjamin is still interested in the history of photography, which is to say in photography as a medium with its own traditions and its own fate. He believes the genius of the medium to be the rendering of the human subject woven into the network of its social relations. Stamped on the photographic portraits made during the first decade of the medium’s existence was the aura both of a human nature settling into its own specificity due to the length of the pose and of a social nexus exposed in terms of the intimacy of its relationships due to the amateur status of these early practitioners (Hill, Cameron, Hugo) making portrait pictures for their circle of friends. Even in the early stages of photography’s commodification, after the spread of the commercialized carte de visite, the celebration of

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

193

194

Rosalind Krauss

photography’s inherent technical possibilities meant that precision lenses would marry the confidence of a rising bourgeois class to the technological prowess of a new medium. The decadence that was soon to engulf this medium was thus due not just to its having yielded to the commodity but to that commodity’s having been swallowed by kitsch, the fraudulent mask of art.10 It is “artiness” that erodes both the aura of this humanity and its possessor’s authority, as the gum-bichromate print and the accompanying penumbral lighting betray a social class under siege. Atget’s response to this “artiness” was to pull the plug on the portrait altogether and to produce the urban setting voided of human presence, thereby substituting, for the turn-of-the-century portrait’s unconscious mise-en-scène of class murder, an eerily emptied “scene of the crime.” The point of Benjamin’s “Small History” is, then, to welcome a contemporary return to the authenticity of photography’s relation to the human subject.11 This he sees occurring either in Soviet cinema’s curiously intimate rendering of the anonymous subjects of a social collective or in August Sander’s submission of the individual portrait to the archival pressures of serialization.12 If he also deplores the photographer’s benighted struggle to acquire aesthetic credentials “before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning,”13 this does not assume the radically deconstructive position Benjamin would take five years later, in which photography not only claims the specificity of its own (technologically inflected) medium but, in denying the values of the aesthetic itself, will cashier the very idea of the independent medium, including that of photography. And so another strand of this braid is the fact that in becoming a theoretical object, photography loses its own specificity as a medium. Thus in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin charts a historical path from the shock effects courted by futurism and dada collage, to the shocks delivered by the unconscious optics revealed by photography, to the shock specific to the montage procedures of film editing, a path that is now indifferent to the givens of a particular medium. It is as a theoretical object that photography assumes the revelatory power to set forth the reasons for a wholesale transformation of art that will include itself in that same transformation. “A Small History of Photography” had pictured the decay of the aura as a tendency within photography’s own history; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” will now see the photographic— which is to say mechanical reproduction in all its modern, technological

guises—as both source and symptom of a full-scale demise of this aura across all of culture, so that art itself, as celebrator of the unique and the authentic, will empty out completely. Its transformation will be absolute: “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility,” Benjamin states.14 The change that the theoretical object makes clear to Benjamin has two faces. One is in the field of the object where, through the structure of reproduction, serialized units are rendered equivalent—much as in the operations of statistics—with the result that things are now made more available, in the sense of being both more proximate and more understandable, to the masses. But the other is in the field of the subject, for whom a new type of perception operates, “a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.”15 This extraction Benjamin also describes as prying objects from their shells. In an unpublished variant of one of the sections of his essay, Benjamin comments on the recent appearance of a theory of art focused precisely on this perceptual act of prying objects from their contexts, which in and of itself can now be reinvested with aesthetic force. Referring to the position Marcel Duchamp elaborates in the Green Box, Benjamin summarizes it as follows: “Once an object is looked at by us as a work of art, it absolutely ceases its objective function. This is why contemporary man would prefer to feel the specific effect of the work of art in the experience of objects disengaged from their functional contexts [crossed out: torn from this context or thrown away] . . . rather than with works nominated to play this role.”16 Thus acknowledging the intersection between his own theoretical position and that of Duchamp, Benjamin’s “work of art designed for reproducibility” is seen to have already been projected as the readymade;and the perceptual act that extracts “the sense of the universal equality of things” even from a unique object is understood as that of the photographer framing pieces of the world through the camera’s lens whether he or she takes the picture or not. That this act alone is aesthetic means that an entire world of artistic technique and tradition drops away, including not only the skill required to make the older forms of “works nominated to play this role”—painting, say, or sculpture—but also the technical skills of exposure, developing, and printing requisite to photography itself. The condition mapped by Benjamin would only be exacerbated in the history of postwar art—another strand in our braid—that absorbed the lessons of the readymade, which, in short-circuiting the stage of production

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

195

196

Rosalind Krauss

altogether, so that an object could now achieve its art status merely by being chosen, manages to skip over the specificity of the various forms of making—the mediums—to jump directly to the level of art-in-general. It was conceptual art that unequivocally theorized this relationship between a generalized condition of art and the Duchampian intervention, interpreting the import of the readymade as a transformation of art-as-object into art-as-enunciative statement, as in Robert Rauschenberg’s “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.” Thus interjecting the textual into the field of the visual, conceptual art could repeatedly assert the nonspecificity of the aesthetic.17 Whatever the politics of this assertion—whether it was meant to rescue art from the commodification that increasingly adhered to no matter what material object, or whether it was understood as opacifying the seemingly endlessly absorptive and seductive screen of late twentiethcentury spectacle culture—the assertion itself is now thought to inoculate all the work made in its name, which is to say the global fashion for installation art, against the forms of late capitalist consumption and entertainment; it wears its self-righteousness, so to speak, on its sleeve. If then conceptual art articulated this nonspecifity most overtly ( Joseph Kosuth:“Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. . . . That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art.”)18 and if one branch of its practice restricted the exploration of “the nature of art [in general]” to language—thus avoiding the visual because it would be too specific—most of conceptual art had recourse to photography. There were, perhaps, two reasons for this. The first is that the art which conceptual art was interrogating remained visual, rather than, say, literary or musical; and photography was a way of adhering to the realm of visuality. But, second, its beauty was precisely that its way of remaining within this realm was itself nonspecific. Photography was understood (and Benjamin once again was the first to pronounce it so) as deeply inimical to the idea of autonomy or specificity because of its own structural dependence upon a caption. Thus as heterogeneous from the outset—an always potential mixture of image and text—photography became the major tool for conducting an inquiry on the nature of art that never descends into specificity. Indeed, Jeff Wall writes of the importance of photoconceptualism that “many of Conceptual art’s essential achievements are either created in the form of photographs or are otherwise mediated by them.”19

It is this inherently hybrid structure of photography that is recognized in one of the major gambits of photoconceptual practice when Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966) or Robert Smithson’s “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967) assumes the guise of photojournalism, marrying written text to documentary-photographic illustration. This would become the model for many other types of photoconceptual work—from the self-imposed shooting assignments of Douglas Huebler or Bernd and Hilla Becher to the landscape reportages of Richard Long or the documentary pieces of Allan Sekula—as it would also be generative of a variety of narrative photoessays, from those by Victor Burgin or Martha Rosler to younger artists like Sophie Calle. Its historical origins, as Wall points out, are to be found in the avant-garde’s original embrace of photojournalism in the 1920s and ’30s as a way not only of opening fire on the idea of aesthetic autonomy so carefully preserved by “art photography” but of mobilizing the unexpected formal resources in the look of “non-art” contained in the haphazard spontaneity of the documentary photograph. Indeed photography’s mimetic capacity opens it effortlessly onto the general avant-garde practice of mimicry, of assuming the guise of whole ranges of non- or anti-art experience in order to critique the unexamined pretensions of high art. From Seurat’s emulation of art nouveau posters to pop art’s travesty of cheap advertising, a range of modernist practice has mined the possibilities of turning imitation to its own use. And as the whole cohort of appropriation artists demonstrated in the 1980s, nothing is so inherently equipped for this strategy of impersonation as the “mirror with a memory” that is photography. If photoconceptualism chose, as its second strategic dimension, the mimicry not of photojournalism alone but of brutishly amateur photography, this was because, Wall further argues, the look of the utterly dumb, hapless picture, the image divested of any social or formal significance— indeed, stripped of any significance at all—and thus the photograph in which there is “nothing to look at,” comes as close as photography can to the reflexive condition of a photograph about nothing but its maker’s own persistence in continuing to produce something that, in its resistance to instrumentalization, its purposive purposelessness, must be called art. A reflection thus on the concept of art itself, which as Duchamp had once put it can be seen as nothing more than the impossibilité du fer—his pun on the impossibility of making 20 —Ruscha’s pointless gas stations or Los An-

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

197

198

Rosalind Krauss

geles apartment buildings or Huebler’s utterly artless duration pieces exploit the amateur’s zero point of style to move photography to the center of conceptual art. Photography’s apotheosis as a medium—its commercial, academic, and museological success, the explosion in the market for photography “itself,” the turn of art professionals to the specifically photographic object—came ironically just at the moment of its capacity to eclipse the very notion of a medium and to emerge as a theoretical because heterogeneous object. And this emergence parallels a last tress in our story, also a theoretical one, composed of the dispossession of the centered subject of the Enlightenment at the hands of all those poststructuralist discourses that developed from the 1960s on to argue against the prerogatives of authorship or against the assumptions of universalist or essentialist values. The reciprocity between this dispersed subject and the scattered field of its objects, their mirrored acknowledgment of lack as their very ground and thus of the possibility of autonomy forever eclipsed, was theorized by the most powerful voices of the last three decades. And this, again, threw up a seemingly unbreachable taboo against the thought of specificity. If the grip of this argument has somewhat loosened in recent years, however, it is because of the way the purported radicality of the poststructuralist position has been compromised by the effect of what has been called the Cultural Revolution, the term given for the ultimate cunning with which advanced capitalism exploits radical practice, whether theoretical or artistic, by allowing it to prospect within the cultural Imaginary and thereby to open up new spaces within a subject now programmed to participate in—and thereby be colonized by—the next stage of capital.21 In no matter how minor a way, the two services the avant-garde has rendered the Cultural Revolution involve spectacle on the one hand and globalization on the other. Accordingly, most of the installation practices that are the logical heirs of conceptualism and are by now the universal language of multidisciplinarity have been incapable of resisting their own absorption into the transformative system of spectacle in which everything, now distanced as imaginary display, is repackaged as entertainment. And similarly, the very reconfiguring of all material objects into the condition of the image has turned the physical into the virtual, thereby not only making the experience of the work of art more and more porous to cybernetic transcoding, but programming the (decentered) subject of that experience as a form of dispersal along an endlessly proliferating information network.

It is at this historical juncture that the taboo against specificity comes to seem less and less radical and a desire to rethink the idea of the medium as a form of resistance to late capitalism’s utter generalization of the aesthetic—so that anything from shopping to watching wars on television takes on an aestheticized glow—seems less and less impossible. And whether some or all of this has gone into the thinking of those artists who are now imagining their way back into medium specificity, it is nonetheless the case that some of the strongest work in the last decade has come from the hands of practitioners determined to invoke the concept of the medium, not by returning to the compromised forms of the traditional mediums but by “inventing” new ones. James Coleman is one of these artists. For almost twenty years he has been pursuing a single medium, based on the lowly commercial slide tape as its technical support but wrought into a complexly dense aesthetic form that he now calls “projected images.” He is by no means the first artist to project slides inside the space of a gallery. Conceptual artists, from Marcel Broodthaers to Robert Barry, all exploited slide projections, as did filmmakers such as Michael Snow. But if the term invention needs to be applied to Coleman, it is because of the way in his hands a technical possibility began to be densely layered into something one could call a recursive structure such that some of the elements within that layering could be seen to produce the rules that generate the structure itself. This is a structure certain aspects of which need to be characterized as circular. 5. One of the rules that Coleman took as axiomatic for his “medium” is that his images are static and thus bereft of narrative. Like the silence modernist painting sought to make more and more absolute within the pure spatiality of its frame, these are to be images that banish speech. They are to be the antithesis of history painting; they are not talking pictures. Projected one by one, each image is held stable on the screen for many seconds, before fading to black and then yielding to another.22 That they will, however, yield to another, that they are in sequence, that the carrousel is round, and that the sequence itself will imply some kind of story, is another rule of this medium, one that is in seeming contradiction with the first, which had decreed stasis. The convention that Coleman both mines from this “contradiction” and uses to acknowledge it is what I alluded to earlier as the double face-out. A form of narrative improbability, it involves two characters locked in what seems to be dramatic confrontation or intense exchange who, how-

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

199

200

Rosalind Krauss

ever, do not look at one another but both face outward, toward the viewer. In this sense they have stepped outside the diegetic horizon, the forward drive of the story—like actors at the end of a play making their bows to the audience, another trope Coleman often exploits—and yet they are still invoking that story. It is this very ambivalence that Barthes explored as he sought the logic of the movie still, which, counterintuitively, he saw as containing the principle of the filmic. Arguing that “the ‘movement’ regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, ‘life,’ copy, but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding,” Barthes releases what he calls an “inarticulable third meaning” from the photographic still’s privilege of being both static and anecdotalized.23 This is a meaning “that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume,” he argues, “since they lack the diegetic horizon,” but by being both harbored within the story and secured from it, it is a meaning released from the burdens of the Symbolic and is instead at luxuriant play against the background of signification: “a luxury, an expenditure with no exchange.”24 Counternarrative, the third or obtuse meaning, is instead “disseminated, reversible, set to its own temporality.” The double face-out as the counternarrative device, the permutational element playing, vertically, against the horizontal thrust of the slide sequence, is not unique to Coleman’s medium. It is in fact adapted from those kinds of anecdotalized images—comic books and photo-novels—that use it as a stylized contraction of the cinematic grammar of shot-reverse-shot necessary to film two characters in a face-to-face exchange, but which, unable to string out the series of individual shots needed to present each interlocutor as separately situated, for reasons of space, collapse the two “reaction shots” in a single frame. That such sources are resonant for his own analysis of the “third meaning” is indeed acknowledged by Barthes: There are other “arts” which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis—namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these “arts,” born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comicstrip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-novels: “their stupidity touches me” (which could be a certain definition of obtuse meaning). There may thus be a future— or a very ancient past—truth in these derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical forms of consumer subculture.25

Photograph, 1998–99 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

201

202

Rosalind Krauss

It can be said, then, that Coleman did not “invent” the double face-out anymore than he “invented” the slide tape; rather, I am claiming, his invention is the medium within which such a thing emerges as a necessary convention, illuminating the logic of the support at the same time that it exfoliates a whole field of possible meanings. Which is to say that the slide tape only becomes a medium once it has been able to generate a set of conventions that will be recursive within it. Is it necessary to interject here that the idea of a recursive structure, which operates on the idea that a medium is always composite—technical support plus conventions—is not incompatible with the idea of “specificity”? Which is to say that the literalization of “medium-specificity” to mean nothing more than a physical characteristic to which the medium is thought to have been reduced (such as “flatness”) is a strange aberration in the history of criticism, which though it has had very real fallout (Donald Judd’s idea of “specific objects,” Joseph Kosuth’s arguments for conceptual art) is not philosophically serious.26 In their desire for specificity, various modernist mediums might have jettisoned conventions deemed inessential or superfluous, but this does not mean they rid themselves of all conventions. Thus even the two “constitutive conventions or norms—flatness and the delimitation of flatness,” to which Clement Greenberg saw painting so stripped down that any length of canvas could be experienced as a picture, still left room for the second norm to be understood as the grounds for what he would call “the optical third dimension,” a convention generative of a whole run of pictorial production to which Greenberg gave the name “color field.” And in that case color, layered onto the plane of canvas, even though stained into it, became the means of producing the specificity of this optical field. 6. Like I N I T I A L S, Photograph opens with a prelude, the material for which, in a departure from the earlier work, then recurs twice more as interludes between sections of the piece. Visually distinct from the texture and pace of the rest of the work, this appears as an amorphous blur, a luminous, dissolving cloudiness that for a long time is experienced as being in black and white. The continuity with which the images shift, in their near abstractness, brings the experience of these passages up against the threshold of film; and except for the audibility of the slide changes and the whirring of the zoom lenses—the palpable presence, that is, of the apparatus—one would imagine oneself confronted with cinema.

As the framing device for a work called Photograph, this is a peculiar choice indeed;and in order to be able to read it we need to do a little backtracking, both into the evolution of Coleman’s work in general and into the development of this piece in particular. The idea of a regression back to black and white as an experience of denaturing, of moving through the living present of the photographic support back into its archaic past, had been explored by Coleman in a work called Untitled: Philippe VACHER (1990). A peculiar hybrid of his “medium,” the work is on 35 mm film, although with each consecutive frame of the original action multiplied some 300 times, each segment of the action is held on the screen for about thirteen seconds, reproducing in a certain sense the effect of a slide tape.27 The action itself is that of a doctor who slumps onto a medical cart containing bottles and equipment which his collapse scatters in the same agonizing slow motion that characterizes his gesture. Made to repeat again and again over the course of about seventeen minutes, the circularity of this fall-only-to-rise-once-more is contradicted by a different movement which is relentless, progressive, and one-way only. This is the very gradual substitution of an A negative, shot in color, by a B negative which is in black and white. And, as color is drained from the image in imperceptible degrees, so are the intermediary tonalities registered in the layer of color stripped away, with the resultant field a strangely mortiferous scatter of shape and grain. This is thus a movement that seems to be going back into the indecipherability of very early photographic experiments (one thinks of the nearly unintelligible images made by Niépce in the 1820s) in which what one seems to encounter in the print is nothing but a field of chemicals, the silver-salt crystals themselves. If Untitled: Philippe VACHER operates from the past of Coleman’s work as a support for the interest in the black-and-white near-unintelligibility that frames Photograph, the “first cut” of the images selected for the new work had originally placed a peculiar slide at the start of this succession of brilliantly colored images. A shot of the outside of the school building, taken from what seems like an interior courtyard, the image is of a strangely faceless blockhouse, its windows boarded up, its walls streaked and filthy. These, made of a menacingly rough stucco, are resolutely gray, as is the gravel in the small patch of desolate yard. In fact, within the play of gray geometries that make up this image, the only clue to the fact that it is not in black and white is the tiny line of hapless weeds that scatter a faint green

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

203

204

Rosalind Krauss

Photograph, 1998–99 Location (outtake).

accent along the building’s base. It was this “black-and-white” image that was eventually removed from the work and replaced by the far less locatable blur of the “prelude.” And that blur itself is also a transmutation of something with which Coleman was working in the early stages of the piece. Standing next to the tripod on which his slide camera was placed, Coleman would occasionally experiment with shooting with a digital camera. This camera—from an early generation of these instruments and thus relatively slow—would sometimes produce a strange kind of blurring in which a given shot would contain a halation that was like the retention of the immediate past of the image held over within it like a strange cybernetic “memory.” Aware that this effect was the function of a technological phase now already rendered obsolete because of the drive of digital equipment toward higher and higher resolution, Coleman was greatly interested in these blurred images with their incredibly voluptuous color. Incapable of being integrated into the close-grained visual texture of the rest of the slides, however, these images also dropped from the work only eventually to be transcoded into the socalled prelude’s blur. Precipitated into the “prelude” then, in the form of a strange temporal dilation, is a meditation on the life cycles of technologies: the hopes

with which they are born and the ignominious fates to which they are consigned at the moment of their obsolescence, moments which come with increasing speed as the pace of technology grows exponentially. The cinematic technology which had supplanted the photographic image is now itself threatened with obsolescence by a digital encoding which is every day updating and thus outmoding its earlier incarnations. With a “blur” that can, then, refer simultaneously to the early practice of photography in its monochromatic phase—Julia Margaret Cameron’s vaporous portrait of Thomas Carlyle, for instance—and to that medium’s own overthrow at the hands of a new technical resource whose own beginnings have by now been swallowed up by its further advance, Coleman suspends Photography within a reflection on obsolescence. It is a reflection Walter Benjamin had long ago broached in his own consideration of photography as he wondered whether photography had, like other technologies before it, released a fleeting image of the utopian promise it might contain at the moment when it was still an amateur pastime, the moment, that is, before it became commercialized and hardened into a commodity. Further, it was Benjamin’s thought that at the moment when a technology is suddenly eclipsed by its own obsolescence, its armoring breaks down and it releases the memory of this promise. And here, he thought, through the outmoded’s creation of a chink in the armor, one could glimpse an outside to the totality of technologized space.28 Coleman’s own “medium” has been developed within this interstitial space, the very slide tape that forms its technical support a victim of all those newer devices like the video or computer presentation that have placed it, as a viable commercial vehicle, on life support. But with this same logic articulated by Benjamin in his thoughts on the outmoded—inasmuch as it may be photography’s very passage from mass use to obsolescence that allows its use in the “reinvention” of a medium—the slide tape’s demise within the world of high-powered advertising allows one to imagine an outside of spectacle culture itself, which is to say an earlier form in which spectacle released and supported imaginative life, supporting amateur presentations of the tableaux vivants signaled by Coleman’s staged, static actors, or fueling the magic lantern show to which the very idea of his “projected images” consistently refers. The argument has been made that for Benjamin, too, the magic lantern show was endowed with a complex power. For not only could it be said to be the very embodiment of phantasmagoria as ideological projection, but it could also be thought to produce the inverse image of

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

205

206

Rosalind Krauss

ideology: phantasmagoria as constructive rather than merely reflective; the magic lantern as the medium of the child’s permutational powers at play against the diegetic horizon, as in the opening pages of Proust’s novel Swann’s Way where we witness the young Marcel’s enchantment with the projections of the magic lantern slides on his bedroom walls as a realization of the way that childhood’s endless capacities for narrative invention can be married to the dreaminess of the luminous image.29 Indeed the magic lantern functions in Benjamin’s thought as one of those outmoded optical devices, like the stereopticon slide (Benjamin’s model for the dialectical image), which can brush the phantasmagorical against its own grain, to produce the outside to the totality of technologized space that Benjamin sought. It is this resource of the magic lantern show, lodged within the commercial slide tape as a kind of genetic marker, that is central to Coleman’s project. It tells of an imaginative capacity stored within this technical support and made suddenly retrievable at the moment when the armoring of technology breaks down under the force of its obsolescence. To “reinvent” the slide tape as a medium is to release this cognitive capacity, thereby discovering the redemptive possibilities within the technological support itself. Benjamin’s “A Small History of Photography” had already described certain photographic practices of his own day performing a retrieval of the “amateur” condition of photography’s first decade, although he was not using amateur in the sense given it by a postwar avant-garde to mean incompetent. Rather it conveyed what Benjamin thought of as the ideal of a relation to art that was nonprofessional in the sense of nonspecialized. Benjamin had spelled out such an ideal in a text he wrote one year after “The Work of Art” essay, his “Second Paris Letter: On Painting and Photography,” undertaken for the Moscow edition of Das Wort but refused for publication. There he connects the amateur status of early photography to the pre-impressionist situation in which both the theory and practice of art arose from the continuous discursive field maintained by the academies. Claiming that Courbet was the last painter to operate within this continuity, Benjamin pictures impressionism as the first of the modernist movements to have courted a studio-based esoterica with the result that the artists’ professional jargon both gave rise to and depended upon the critics’ specialized discourse.30 Once again, then, this first decade of photography’s history operates as a kind of promise folded within its medium of the possibilities of an openness and invention before the rigidification of the image as commodity.

In 1935 Benjamin had articulated his idea of the onset of obsolescence as a possible if momentary revelation of the utopian dreams encoded within the various forms of technology at the points of their inception. If he had steadily claimed a political future for photography, that was not how he described its birth in the two essays straddling “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (in 1931 and late 1936). There we get a glimpse of photography’s both hooking into the cognitive powers of childhood and opening up the promise of becoming a medium. At the moment, now, of its obsolescence, photography can remind us of this promise: not as a revival of itself or indeed of any of the former mediums of art, but of what Benjamin had earlier spoken of as the necessary plurality of the arts (represented by the plurality of the Muses), a plural condition that stands apart from any philosophically unified idea of Art. This is another way of stating the need for the idea of the medium as such to reclaim the specific from the deadening embrace of the general.31 All of this is in the haze that dilates Photograph’s beginning and makes its reappearance as if to mark the separation between the work’s three successive acts. The classical quality of this form of articulation reinforces the sense in which the piece gathers itself together around the terms of its circularity and its closure. But as was noted at the outset, the circularity of the carrousel is doublevalenced. It can be construed as the assertion of completeness, unity, autonomy: the exclusiveness of the circle. But it also comes to closure only to start again in an endless production of repetition which is like the multiplicity of photography itself. This is the abeyance in which photography holds the self-sufficiency of modernism. This is the gap that Photograph wants to open within the grip of all those circles that the Law maintains. Notes

1. Paul de Man speaks of this totalizing drive of the Romantic lyric and its use of the symbol: In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to coincide with the substance, since the substance and its representation do not differ in their being but only in their extension: they are part and whole of the same set of categories. Their relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind and in which the intervention of time is merely a matter of contingency, whereas, in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 207.

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

207

208

Rosalind Krauss

2. See my “. . . And Then Turn Away?” (1997), reprinted in this volume, pp. 171–72. 3. See the catalog So Faraway So Close (Brussels: Espace Méridien, 1999). Coleman characterizes his contribution as a “stretched title work.” 4. The text reads in its entirety: There was this open-shirted man who was subject to frequent hallucinations. His friends were always eager to hear him describe his visions which he would do with astonishing attention to detail. One such account was about the day he believed himself present at a Gymkhana near Doonbeg. There, he became involved in gambling with his powers of observation on the Three Card Trick. Always he would provide spellbinding characterizations of the small group gathered around a man who wore a checked cap—the performer. However, some years after the experience the man in the open shirt discovered an old photograph which was identical in every detail to the scene of the Doonbeg hallucination. The photograph could not show everything of course but its exposure forced the man to take to his bed to contemplate his dilemma: was the card-trick an hallucinatory vision, or was it a memory of his actual presence and experience at Doonbeg. Worse, how was he going to describe the experience in future. One thing was sure, he believed himself to be hallucinating at the time of the experience. 5. See for example, Jean Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” (1983;reprinted in this volume), and “Concerning James Coleman’s Recent Work,” in James Coleman: Projected Images, 1972–1994 (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1995); and Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985). 6. See Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this volume), for a reading that is attentive to issues of specificity with regard to Coleman’s use of his different forms—photography, film, etc. But in the end she, too, addresses these media as operating in Coleman’s hands to articulate the construction of the subject and of subjectivity. The essay on Coleman that departs from the general poststructuralist model to track the artist’s relation to specific forms within the history of modernism, particularly the issues that pertain to theater, is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s “Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle” (1995; reprinted in this volume). 7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Barthes’s theorizations of photography include “The Photographic Message,” “Rhetoric of the Image,” and “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 15–31, 32–51, 52–68; and Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 8. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (Saint Louis: Telos Press, 1981). 9. “A Small History of Photography” was published in Literarische Welt in the September and October issues of 1931. See Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in “One Way Street” and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (New York: New Left Books, 1979). Benjamin wrote a first draft of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the fall of 1935 (completing it in December). He began to revise it in January 1936 for publication in the French edition of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (trans. Pierre Klossowski, under the title “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa repro-

duction mécanisée,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 [1936], pp. 40–68). Because the French version imposed various cuts in his text, Benjamin reworked the essay again in German, this ultimate version to be published only in 1955. See Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Schriften, ed. Theodor Adorno and Gretel Adorno, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 366–405. I have used the translation by Harry Zohn, under the title “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969). 10. Benjamin speaks of the decadence and the “sharp decline of taste” that overwhelms photography by the 1880s (Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” p. 246). 11. Benjamin, writing after the 1929 crash, comments: “It would not be surprising if the photographic methods which today, for the first time, are harking back to the preindustrial heyday of photography had an underground connection with the crisis of capitalist industry” (ibid., pp. 241–42). 12. On the relation between Benjamin’s analysis of Sander and the debates about photography engaged in by the Soviet avant-garde, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture,” in Melissa E. Feldman, ed., Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1994). 13. Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” p. 241. 14. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 224. 15. Ibid., p. 223. 16. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomènes et variantes de la version définitive,” trans. Françoise Eggers, in Benjamin, Écrits français, ed. Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 179–80. 17. The theorization of the move from the specific to the generic that dominates artistic practice of the 1960s, although ultimately deriving from Duchamp, has occupied Thierry de Duve in essays such as “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” in Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 244–310; and “Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism,” October 70 (Fall 1994), pp. 61–97. 18. Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International 178 (October 1969), reprinted as “Art after Philosophy, I and II,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973), pp. 70–101. 19. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), p. 253. 20. Denis de Rougemont, “Marcel Duchamp, mine de rien,” interview with Marcel Duchamp (1945), Preuves 204 (February 1968), p. 45; quoted in Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 166. 21. Fredric Jameson defines the concept of “cultural revolution” in The Political Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 95–98; he analyzes its operations within the cultural field of the late twentieth century in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 22. This is true of the four most recent of Coleman’s works: Background (1991–94), Lapsus Exposure (1992–94), I N I T I A L S (1993–94), and Photograph (1998–99). Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85) generates the effect of one single tableau vivant, held for twenty-five

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

209

210

Rosalind Krauss

minutes, the changes within this lineup of actors as if for a curtain call masked by the slow dissolves between nearly identical images and the pulling of parts of the image in and out of focus. 23. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” pp. 66–67. 24. Ibid., p. 62. 25. Ibid., p. 66. 26. For a development of this issue, see my essay “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, eds., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999); and my “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 27. Not only is the slide tape composed of a sequence of static frames, but these are themselves shot in a 35 mm format. 28. The relevant texts are Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography”; and Benjamin, “Lettre parisienne (no. 2): Peinture et photographie,” in Benjamin, Sur l’art et la photographie, ed. Christophe Jouanlanne (Paris: Carré, 1997), p. 79. 29. See Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 229 and following. 30. See Benjamin, “Lettre parisienne (no. 2),” p. 79. 31. Walter Benjamin, “The Theory of Criticism,” in Selected Writings: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 218. The relationship (and opposition) between “the plurality of the Muses,” with each Muse the genius of a specific medium—visual art, music, dance, and so on—and the general, philosophical concept of Art is explored by Jean-Luc Nancy in “Why Are There Several Muses and Not Just One?,” in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–39.

Index of Names

Acconci, Vito, 20, 92 Adorno, Theodor W., 84, 85 Akerman, Chantal, 190 A-Koan, 10, 11, 50–51 Atget, Eugène, 194 Auerbach, Erich, 79, 146 Background, 63, 64, 65, 139, 144, 173 Baden-Powell, George, 76 Barry, Robert, 93, 199 Barthes, Roland, 27, 31, 32, 93, 105, 152– 153, 164–165, 168, 169, 179, 180, 192, 193, 200 Bataille, Georges, 135n6 Baudelaire, Charles, 83 Baudrillard, Jean, 192, 193 Baxandall, Michael, 113 Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 197 Beckett, Samuel, 163, 188–189 Benjamin, Walter, 76, 79, 119, 120–121, 192, 193–195, 196, 205–207 Bersani, Leo, 155n22 Beuys, Joseph, 20 Blanchot, Maurice, 95–96 Box (ahhareturnabout), 9–10, 13, 25–27, 29, 41–42, 52, 96–99, 102, 118, 130, 161 Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 30, 32–33, 85, 191 Brody, Howard, 121 Broodthaers, Marcel, 94, 199 Burgin, Victor, 197 Butler-Cullingford, Elizabeth, 75–76

Cage, John, 95 Calle, Sophie, 197 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 205 Carlos, Isabel, 49 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 163–164 Celan, Paul, 84 Charon (MIT Project), 68, 77, 114–116, 178–180 Clara and Dario, 8–9, 13, 25, 29, 31, 48, 52, 166, 188, 189 “Contemporanea,” 6 Cooke, Lynne, 77 Courbet, Gustave, 177, 206 Crary, Jonathan, 125, 126, 133–134, 136n14 Deane, Seamus, 99–100 Deleuze, Gilles, 68 De Man, Paul, 86, 207n1 Derrida, Jacques, 134 Doyle, Roger, 29, 49, 51, 82, 103 Du Camp, Maxime, 83–84 Duchamp, Marcel, 19–20, 94, 95, 157, 195, 196, 197 Dunning, Brian, 61 Duras, Marguerite, 63 Dürer, Albrecht, 139 Dutoit, Ulysse, 155n22 Duve, Thierry de, 158, 162, 177 Eakins, Thomas, 122 Eisenstein, Sergei, 164

212

Fisher, Jean, 13, 96, 98, 130 Flash Piece, 1–2, 23, 31, 86, 87, 88, 98 Flavin, Dan, 88, 101 Fly, 127 Foucault, Michel, 61, 77, 95, 125, 134, 135n10 Fouère, Olwen, 29, 51, 72, 75, 78, 82, 103 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 60, 75, 147–150 Freund, Gisèle, 163 Fried, Michael, 90–91, 94, 158 Galway Arts Festival, 11 Godard, Jean-Luc, 119, 120 Godzich, Wlad, 86 Graham, Dan, 72, 77, 78, 87, 88, 92, 97, 160, 197 Greenberg, Clement, 202 guaiRE: An Allegory, 72, 74–80, 135n10 Habermas, Jürgen, 89 Holbein, Hans, 124 Hollier, Denis, 107 Huebler, Douglas, 197, 198 Huston, John, 62–63 Ignotum per Ignotius, 14–15, 44, 49–50, 51– 52, 53 Images, 6–7 I Matti, 22–23, 25 I N I T I A L S, 63, 161, 172, 173–176, 185–186, 202 Installation Made for Location, 6 Internationale situationniste, 170 Isaak, Jo Anna, 77 Joyce, James, 42, 62, 75, 77, 130, 134 Judd, Donald, 158, 202 Klein, Yves, 101 Kojak and Zamora, 44–49, 130 Kosuth, Joseph, 196, 202 Krauss, Rosalind, 97, 127, 136n11 Lacan, Jacques, 21, 23, 60, 66, 124, 134 Lapsus Exposure, 63, 138–147, 150–154, 173 La Tache Aveugle, 68, 114, 116–117, 166, 168 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 68 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 61

Index

Line of Faith, 114, 122–124 Living and Presumed Dead, 14, 15–16, 37– 40, 46, 48, 52, 53, 56, 59–69, 102, 104– 106, 161, 166, 169 Long, Richard, 197 Manet, Edouard, 83, 107, 108n11 Marey, Eugène, 118 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 173, 176 Marker, Chris, 64, 118, 159–160 McHale, James, 29, 82 Meissonier, Ernest, 176 Memory Piece, 2–3, 89 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 127, 134 Metz, Christian, 23 Morris, Robert, 95, 137n18 Muldoon, Paul, 77 Muybridge, Eadweard, 118 Nauman, Bruce, 87, 92, 97, 160 Newman, Michael, 87–88, 113, 168 Niépce, Nicéphore, 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 149 Nordau, Max, 90 Now & Then, 13, 29–30, 48, 52, 82, 95, 102 Oates, Joyce Carol, 131–132 Orf ão, Rui, 49 Pater, Walter, 90 Photograph, 184, 186, 187–188, 190–192, 201, 202–207 “Places with a Past,” 122 Plato, 139–140, 147, 150, 190 Playback of a Daydream, 6–7, 98, 129, 167 Ploughman’s Party, The, 10, 11–12, 100– 102, 103 Projections, xii, 2 Propp, Vladimir, 28, 60, 61 Proust, Marcel, 166, 206 Pump, 4, 127, 128 Purcell, Noel, 60, 105 Rainer, Yvonne, 84, 95 Rauschenberg, Robert, 196 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, 122 Rorimer, Anne, 89, 113 Rosler, Martha, 197

Rotterdam Arts Foundation, 6 Roussel, Raymond, 61 Ruscha, Ed, 197 Russell, Christabel, 76, 79

Williams, Raymond, 108n1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 167–168 Yeats, William Butler, 62, 73, 136n16, 161, 172–173, 176

Sander, August, 194 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 134 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 149 Seagull, 5–6 Seeing for Oneself, 63, 133, 135n10, 156, 166, 170–172, 173 Sekula, Allan, 197 Series of Images, 57, 58, 167 Seurat, Georges, 197 Shakespeare, William, 62 Slide Piece, 4–5, 16, 23–24, 31, 91–92, 93, 129, 166, 167–168, 169, 188 Smith, David, 101 Smithson, Robert, 197 Snow, Michael, 84, 199 So Different . . . and Yet, 12–13, 18, 28–29, 30, 48, 95, 102–104, 132–133 Stereo, 3–4, 129 Stevens, Wallace, 146 Streuli, Beat, 65 Strongbow, 10–11, 36, 42, 44, 46, 52 Studio Marconi, 1 Suzi, 37, 38 Synge, J. M., 27, 62, 161, 169 Uccello, Paolo, 124 Ulster Museum, 6 Ulysses Project, 42, 43 Untitled: Philippe VACHER, 112, 114, 117–122, 203 Velázquez, Diego, 77 Viola, Bill, 160 Vygotsky, L. S., 27 Wall, Jeff, 160, 162, 176–178, 190, 196, 197 Warhol, Andy, 98 Warner, Marina, 75 Weekes, Anne Owens, 76 Wehn-Damisch, Teri, 163 Weiner, Lawrence, 93 Wells, H. G., 116 Whale, James, 68, 116, 168(n17) Willemen, Paul, 27

Index

213