Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism 2015048238, 9781138777422, 9781315772653

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Beckett Effect: The Intermedial Archive
2 The Archival Testimonial: Mirosław Bałka's How It Is
3 The Relational Archive: Silvia Kolbowski and Eija-Liisa Ahtila
4 The Personal Archive: From Christian Boltanski to Lifelogging
5 The Archive and the Informational Sublime: Arnold Dreyblatt
Conclusion: The Ethical Archive
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism

This is a deeply compelling book. David Houston Jones takes us into the quick of archive fever, exploring a range of artworks which exist in or refer to real archives, and allow reflection on our compulsion to archive and the rethinking of memory that theories of the archive allow. In a turn to Pierre Nora this book moves particularly to consider artists’ interest in remnants, in material traces and the culture of remains. The illuminating series of chapters, beautifully titled – ‘Intermedial’, ‘Testimonial’, ‘Relational’, ‘­Personal’, ‘­Sublime’ – offers a taxonomy of archivalist practice. The interpretations yielded, of major artworks by Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Mirosław Bałka, Atom Egoyan and others, are gripping, deft, melancholy and disarming. In fine theoretical readings and measured discussions of the individual projects David Jones shows here, so brilliantly, how archive art engages major current questions of human memory and ethics. —Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge, UK

On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Mirosław Bałka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for ‘archival’ media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist. David Houston Jones is Associate Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, UK.

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Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism

David Houston Jones

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of David Houston Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jones, David Houston, 1972– author. Title: Installation art and the practices of archivalism / By David Houston Jones. Description: New York: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies; 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015048238 Subjects: LCSH: Installations (Art) | Memory (Philosophy) Classification: LCC N6494.I56 J66 2016 | DDC 709.04/074—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048238 ISBN: 978-1-138-77742-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77265-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To P

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi 1

1 The Beckett Effect: The Intermedial Archive

17

2 The Archival Testimonial: Mirosław Bałka’s How It Is

47

3 The Relational Archive: Silvia Kolbowski and Eija-Liisa Ahtila

79

4 The Personal Archive: From Christian Boltanski to Lifelogging

112

5 The Archive and the Informational Sublime: Arnold Dreyblatt

146

Conclusion: The Ethical Archive

174

Bibliography Index

179 193

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List of Figures

I.1 Arnold Dreyblatt, The Wunderblock, table, chair, TFT display, computer, 2000. Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 2000. Photograph: Tom Gundelwein. 9 1.1 Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett, 2002. Courtesy of The Artangel Collection. Photograph: Thierry Bal. 22 1.2 Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett, 2002. Courtesy of The Artangel Collection. Photograph: Thierry Bal. 26 1.3 Coletivo Irmãos Guimarães, Breath More. Photograph: Ismael Monticelli. 31 1.4 Coletivo Irmãos Guimarães, Breath Less. Photograph: Ismael Monticelli. 32 1.5 Interactive torches and mixed reality video in UNMAKEABLELOVE © Sarah Kenderdine & Jeffrey Shaw 2008/2015. 35 1.6 Interactive torches in UNMAKEABLELOVE © Sarah Kenderdine & Jeffrey Shaw 2008/2015. 40 2.1 Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, The Unilever Series, Tate Modern, London, 13 October 2009–5 April 2010 © Mirosław Bałka. Courtesy © Tate Images and White Cube. 47 2.2 Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, The Unilever Series, Tate Modern, London, 13 October 2009–5 April 2010 49 © Mirosław Bałka. Courtesy © Tate Images and White Cube. 3.1 Silvia Kolbowski, After Hiroshima mon amour, 2008. Video; twenty-two minutes. Installation view, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal. Photograph: Paul Litherland. 87 3.2 Silvia Kolbowski, After Hiroshima mon amour, 2008. Video; twenty-two minutes. Installation view, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal. Photograph: Paul Litherland. 90 3.3 Silvia Kolbowski, an inadequate history of conceptual art, 1998–99. Installation view, American Fine Arts, 1999. 99 Video still.

x  List of Figures 3.4 Silvia Kolbowski, an inadequate history of conceptual art, 1998–99. Installation view, American Fine Arts, 1999. Photograph: Takahiro Imamura. 103 4.1 Christian Boltanski, Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Young Man of Oxford, 1973/2014–15. Installation view, Modern Art Oxford. Courtesy of Modern Art Oxford. Photograph: Hannah Wilmshurst. © ADAGP, Paris and 115 DACS, London 2015. 4.2 Laurie Frick, Quantify-Me. Installation view, W&tWork (2012). Photograph: Leon Alesi. 131 4.3 Wafaa Bilal, 3rdi, year-long performance, 2010–11. Copyright Wafaa Bilal. Courtesy Driscoll Babcock 133 Galleries and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. 4.4 Wafaa Bilal, detail from 3rdi, year-long performance, 2010–11. Copyright Wafaa Bilal. Courtesy Driscoll Babcock Galleries and Mathaf: Arab Museum of 137 Modern Art. 5.1 Arnold Dreyblatt, Who’s Who in Central and East Europe, hypertext multimedia opera, Gasteig, Munich, 1991. Photograph: Dirk Bleicker. 148 5.2 Arnold Dreyblatt, The Great Archive, 1993. Wooden boxes, inscribed Plexiglas, illumination. Stadtgalerie 161 Saarbrücken, 1993; Photograph: Tom Gundelwein. 5.3 Arnold Dreyblatt, The Great Archive, 1993. Wooden boxes, inscribed Plexiglas, illumination. Stadtgalerie 163 Saarbrücken, 1993; Photograph: Tom Gundelwein.

Acknowledgments

The debts incurred in the writing of this book are numerous and various. First of all, my thanks to Barbara and Gareth Jones, who made so many things possible. It has been my pleasure and privilege, too, to work with a number of the artists mentioned in this book. My warmest thanks to Mirosław Bałka, Arnold Dreyblatt, Laurie Frick, F ­ ernando and Adriano Guimarães, Carmin Karasić, Sarah Kenderdine, Silvia Kolbowski and Nikos Navridis. Without them, this book could not have been written; every step in its development was marked by their generosity, patience and guidance. Images from Arnold Dreyblatt, Sarah Kenderdine, Silvia Kolbowski, Laurie Frick and Fernando and Adriano Guimarães are reproduced by kind permission of the artists. Images of Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett, courtesy of The Artangel Collection. Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, The Unilever Series, Tate Modern, © Mirosław Bałka, courtesy © Tate Images and White Cube. Christian Boltanski, Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Young Man of Oxford, 1973/2014–15, courtesy of Modern Art Oxford, photograph: Hannah Wilmshurst. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2015. Wafaa Bilal, 3rdi, year-long performance, 2010–11, copyright Wafaa Bilal, courtesy Driscoll Babcock Galleries and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Part of Chapter 3 was published as ‘The Inadequate Archive: After Hiroshima mon amour and Archival Remaking, from Duras and Resnais to Kolbowski and Raad’, French Cultural Studies, 24, no. 4 (November 2013), 417–29. An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 was published as ‘All the moments of our lives: Self-Archiving from Christian Boltanski to Lifelogging’ in Archives and Records: The Journal of the Archives and Records Association, 36, no. 1 (2015), 29–41, http://www.tandfonline.com. I am grateful for permission to reproduce elements of that material here. Thanks to all those who participated in the workshop Repositioning Memory: Between the Archive and the Rubbish Heap at the University of Exeter in 2011, in particular my co-organiser, Chloe Paver, and our keynote speakers, Ernst van Alphen and Paul Becker. Many of the conversations initiated that day were pursued during its successor, The Archive and the Institutional Body, at the University of Kent in 2013. Thanks to my co-organisers, Larry Duffy, Claire Lozier and Lucy O’Meara, and to the participants, in particular Sue Breakell, Yves Chevrefils-Desbiolles, Albert

xii Acknowledgments Dichy, Peter Fifield, John McKeane, Eric Marty and Shane Weller. I am very grateful to Yves Chevrefils-Desbiolles, too, for much precious dialogue during my earlier visit to L’Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine (IMEC). IMEC subsists here as an unseen lieu de mémoire; my thanks to the staff and researchers of all the archival and other institutions I haunted while researching this book, in particular Alex Borkowski at Artangel; Wafaa Bilal studio; Hannah van den Wijngaard at White Cube; Fleur Soper at The National Archives and Jon Weston at Modern Art Oxford. For research leave and support, I am grateful to the University of Exeter, and should like to thank colleagues at Exeter for much stimulating dialogue, in particular Sally Faulkner, Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, Fabrizio Nevola, Laura Salisbury, Helen Vassallo, Aron Vinegar and Adam Watt. My warm thanks to all the friends and colleagues who did so much to shape this book, in particular Kate Palmer Albers, Elizabeth Barry, Tom Cousineau, Everett C. Frost, Stan Gontarski, Richard Hobbs, James Knowlson, James Little, Cathy Lomax, Federica Lucivero, Sunil Manghani, Matt McFrederick, Anna McMullan, Trish McTighe, Mark Nixon, Mignon Nixon, Gavin Parkinson, David Pattie, John Pilling, Ruth Rosengarten, Katherine Shingler, Amarante Szidon, Derval Tubridy and David Tucker. It is with both sadness and gratitude that I remember the contributions of two friends, Julie Campbell and Mary Bryden, both of whom brought so much to the Beckett community and to me personally over the years. Their voices are much missed. Warmest thanks to Angela Moorjani and Emma Wilson, initially as readers for Routledge, and whose guidance, support and criticism were so vital later on. I should also like to thank Nancy Chen and Felisa N. Salvago-Keyes, my editors at Routledge and Assunta Petrone at codeMantra. Above all, my thanks to Pascale Aebischer, for more than I can say, and to Rhiannon and Glyn, for their part in the domestic preposterousness which underpinned the writing of this book.

Introduction

This book is concerned with the extraordinary currency of responses to the archive in installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive, including Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Arnold Dreyblatt and Walid Raad to others, such as Mirosław Bałka, S­ ilvia Kolbowski, Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Atom Egoyan, whose engagement with the archive is more oblique. All, in varying ways, respond to the ‘archive fever’ which has sometimes been taken to characterise contemporary cultural memory. The phrase comes from Jacques Derrida’s famous analysis, in Mal d’archive (1995), of the twin dynamics of erasure and repetition which shape our compulsion to archive and which, in archivalism, characterise the compulsive re-enactment of the traumatic past. A similar compulsion, meanwhile, has been felt in exhibitions such as Deep Storage (1997), whose organising theme was the ‘storerooms […] where art is collated, concealed and kept from view’, and the Interarchive project led by Hans-Peter Feldmann and Hans Ulrich Obrist (1997–99), which centred on the archive of over a thousand boxes of material amassed by Obrist in the course of his work as a curator in the 1990s.1 The account of archive fever given by Okwui Enwezor, who curated Archive Fever at the International Centre of Photography, New York, meanwhile, addresses the evolving role of photography in understandings of the archive. As Enwezor notes, because the camera is literally an ‘archiving machine’, the photograph is often taken to function as an ‘analogue of a substantiated real or putative fact’.2 At stake in many of the works shown at Archive Fever, by contemporary artists such as Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Craigie Horsfield and Zoe Leonard, is the tension between photography’s promise of truth-telling and the ‘vast, shapeless empire of images’ which has arisen from file sharing (p. 13). Between Memory and Archive at the Museu Coleção Berardo, ­Lisbon (2013–14), curated by Ruth Rosengarten, enlarges upon many of these concerns, identifying in the archive both bureaucratic taxonomic systemisation and a mnemonic drive, an ‘impulsion to gather and shore up fragments of historical evidence against a tide of forgetfulness’.3 In discussing the ‘archive as form’, meanwhile, Enwezor endorses Hal Foster’s foundational account, in ‘An Archival Impulse’ (2004), of an

2 Introduction artistic practice characterised by ‘idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects and events in modern art, philosophy and history’.4 A number of artists, including Stan Douglas and Tacita Dean, feature in both F ­ oster’s article and Enwezor’s exhibition, and Enwezor cites Foster’s analysis of Gerhard Richter’s seminal uses of photographic repertoires to institute ‘archival attributes’ between ‘public and private, between documentation and commentary, critique and analysis, power and subordination’ (p. 22). The ambition Foster sees in contemporary practice to ‘make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’ (p. 4), meanwhile, is ambivalently echoed in Enwezor’s discussion of the transformation of documents into monuments. Quoting Michel Foucault, Enwezor claims that, in their attention to diverse archival processes, contemporary artists ‘undertake to “memorize” the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal’.5 My own argument on archivalist practice is very much in the spirit of Foucault’s statement, in the Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), but diverges from Enwezor’s account in two key respects. Firstly, Foucault’s claim itself refers not to artistic practice but to history, whose own processes are at the centre of the transformation to which Enwezor refers. Secondly, although contemporary art indeed shows significant investment in the monument, as Enwezor argues, my understanding of the monument is modified by the notion of lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, elaborated by the French historian Pierre Nora. That notion has a debt to the archive which is insufficiently recognised in existing discussions and, equally, very substantial implications for my discussion of archivalist installation art. My analysis of Nora also allows archivalist practice to be related to the archival turn in the discipline of History, a concern which I address in Chapter 5. The documents which I discuss there, in their scope and ambiguous affiliation to the sublime, may, in a sense, be monuments too.6 One of the criticisms levelled at Enwezor’s Archive Fever is that the exhibition (like Enwezor’s text) is ‘not interested in the physical site of the archives’, which is dismissed in a display panel as a ‘musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts’.7 As Lisa Darms argues, ‘while this show was a successful reflection of the art world’s interpretations of the archive as theory, it is difficult for the archivist to recognize his or her own practices (and agency) within it’ (p. 253). In what follows, I seek to revisit the archive as a place of fascination and discovery, and to propose an alternative understanding of archivalism as a locus of artistic activities which connect ­meaningfully with the ‘real’ archive and the discourses that surround it. The need for such an understanding is emphasised in work like that of Sue ­Breakell which documents the evolving implication of the archive in art historical discourse since Foster’s account.8 Breakell, an archivist then working at Tate, played a leading role in the 2007 conference ‘The Archival Impulse: Artists and Archives’

Introduction  3 and the 2009 follow-up, ‘Archiving the Artist’, both held at Tate Britain. In the latter event’s appeal to the three constituencies identified in Breakell’s article, artists, archivists and researchers working in artists’ archives, the framework was created for a larger enquiry which gave rise to the 2013 book All This Stuff, edited by members of the UK Art Libraries Society (ARLIS) and in which the activity and agency of the archivist are notably reinscribed in critical discourse on art and the archive.9 My own account of archivalist art refers to installations which take place in the archive, which appear to appropriate personal archives and which incorporate archival techniques and practices. In some cases, as is argued in Ernst van Alphen’s Staging the Archive, these represent ‘transgressive performances of archival principles’; elsewhere, they display remarkable fidelity to the archives and processes with which they engage.10 Van Alphen’s account persuasively links the ‘memory crisis’ documented by Kracauer in the 1920s to contemporary questions of cultural memory (p. 250). Such questions, as we shall soon see, are indeed at the heart of contemporary artistic engagement with the archive and of the emerging critical field which is now forming around it. My own account, in the course of five chapters, identifies and analyses five types of archivalist practice which have been deployed to significant effect in recent installation art: intermedial, testimonial, relational, personal and monumentalist. Each demonstrates how different forms  of archival activity have been reimagined and, equally, assesses the impact of that reimagining upon a specific sphere of activity. Such reconfigurations often involve self-reflexive performances of media and genres associated with the archive. My understanding of such archivalist practices both recognises their significance as a product of historical debates (what van Alphen describes as ‘archival memory practices’ (p. 265)) and acknowledges their diversity and multiple orientations. The archive has fostered a rethinking of how we remember, how we testify and how we envisage the interlocking domains of the ethical, the personal and the sublime. Works by Mirosław Bałka, Silvia Kolbowski, Wafaa Bilal, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Arnold Dreyblatt and Christian Boltanski indicate transformative excursions into each of these domains. In each case, archival practices guide their enquiry, whether through the instrumentalisation of archival media or the appropriation of techniques derived from archival activity. This tendency and its multifarious products are understood under the broad heading of ‘archivalism’.

The Archive as Lieu de mémoire One of the most provocative visions of the role of the archive in shaping cultural history is that in Lieux de mémoire, the vast collaborative work led by Pierre Nora, published between 1981 and 1992 and partially translated as Realms of Memory (1996–98). Nora’s introduction to the project, translated into English in 1989, includes archives in the list of ‘most symbolic objects of our memory’, alongside libraries, museums, the Panthéon,

4 Introduction the Arc de Triomphe and the Dictionnaire Larousse.11 All, for Nora, are endowed with a symbolic significance which is the symptom of a particular standpoint to history and memory. These are memorial sites which testify in various ways to the attempt to preserve memory, and yet are pregnant with the failure of that attempt: ‘these lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it’ (p. 12). Our cultural moment, for Nora, is that of the imminent disappearance of an ‘immense and intimate fund of ­memory’, leaving behind only ‘a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history’ (p. 12): the drive to commemorate past events and to create monuments and archives arises from this sense of impending loss. The proliferation of archives is perhaps the example par excellence of the situation Nora describes: Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape r­ ecording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs—hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past. (p. 13) Nora’s comments strike an immediate chord with the work of Christian Boltanski which, as we shall see, displays a form of archival obsession specifically preoccupied with the ‘total preservation of the past’. Such activity, it is suggested, can only be pursued by entirely subordinating the present to the past, by replacing living with archiving. Boltanski’s archival installations are indeed ‘remnants’ of the kind identified by Nora and, in common with many of the artists I consider, show a particular interest in the materiality of the trace. Their frequently specular archival repertoires are housed in biscuit tins or museal vitrines, so that the personal information they promise to reveal (through plasticine models, perhaps, or the rhetorical promise to display the belongings of a young man from Oxford) is hedged by the encounter with recalcitrant materials. Despite their promise of familiarity, the tins are often inaccessible, sealed or built up into precarious towers which disable their functioning as archive boxes. Elsewhere, the implication of memory in archival technologies like those discussed by Nora is a recurrent concern, from the historically ambivalent use of tape recording in Samuel Beckett’s plays to the incorporation of archival film in the work of Mirosław Bałka. Nowhere is the culture of remains more evident than in Beckett’s work, in which a form of existence ‘no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded’ is forever present.12 If for Nora archiving exemplifies the obsessive return to memorial remnants, Beckett’s work is invested with the same spirit.

Introduction  5 Beckett’s work has inspired a range of recent installation-based work, much of which is analysed in detail for the first time in the first chapter of this book. That work highlights Beckett’s deep investment in the archival in three interrelated ways: in overt representation of the archive; in a preoccupation with ‘archival’ media; and in the conversation on deixis which the work initiates as it moves from ‘old’ to ‘new’ media. My analysis progresses from Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett, which both makes of Krapp’s Last Tape an archival object and meditates at length on film as an archival medium, to the installations of Nikos Navridis and the Guimarães brothers, all of which respond to the ambivalent possibility of ‘reinventing Beckett’ discussed by S.E. Gontarski. Finally, a range of new media installations appears to offer a resolution of the problems of indexicality which are central both to ­Beckett’s work and to recent discussion of the archive by replacing the speaking ‘I’ with virtual bodies. Beckett’s work, then, like the archive, has become a lieu de mémoire. This is a site transformed by its endless revisitation through time, and which in turn transforms the cultural foundations on which it is sited. The lieu de mémoire is both a memorial site and the location of an encounter with the problematics of cultural memory, and these twin aspects, too, constitute the pillars of archivalist installation. To be in the archive, to stand at the lieu de mémoire, is to be elsewhere. In invoking the archive, the artists I consider represent, occupy or allude to further sites of memory, from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp; to the Museum of Mankind, London, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, the site of the Rivet killing in Algeria, post-hurricane New ­Orleans, ­Sigmund Freud’s house in Masefield Gardens in Hampstead, London, wartime Iraq, post-war Beirut, the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, the ­Public Records Office in Kew (now The National Archives) and the M ­ ormon ­Genealogical Archives in Salt Lake City, Utah. The lieu de mémoire recalls Foucault’s idea of the heterotopia, a place which bears within it other times and places, and which Foucault links specifically to the modern ‘idea of accumulating everything, […] of creating a sort of universal archive’.13 The idea of the infinite or universal archive, for Foucault, in contrast to the construction of pre-nineteenth-century museums and libraries according to principles of individual choice, ‘belongs entirely to our modern outlook’ (p. 182). This is an idea which haunts contemporary thinking on archiving, especially in the new media archive, which constitutes its closest approximation. The implications of the infinite archive are various, from lifelogging and genealogy, which both attempt to turn it into a practical reality, to its artistic refractions, which offer both critique of the contemporary personal archive and glimpses of the sublime, to which I return below. The idea of the archive in Foucault, though, is also bound up with its function as a ‘register’ of the said or, more precisely, a ‘set of rules which at a given period and for a given society define […] the limits and forms of the sayable’.14

6 Introduction

Archival, Ethical, Testimonial If there is in fact no ‘universal archive’, it might nevertheless appear to make sense to think of ‘the archive’ as the sum total of material held in archives, and this approximates Diana Taylor’s rendering of the archive as ‘documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change’ (p. 19). The limited resistance to change which the contents of the archive in fact enjoy has significant implications for our understanding of them, as historians such as Carolyn Steedman and Arlette Farge have remarked, and as many of the installations I analyse demonstrate.15 Farge’s and Steedman’s work follows in the wake of that of Foucault, and of the renewed interest in ‘the archive’ which it signalled, and yet Foucault articulates a markedly different idea of the archive: By this term I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity; nor do I mean the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation. On the contrary, it is rather the reason why so many things, said by so many men, for so long, have not emerged in accordance with the same laws of thought, or the same set of circumstances, why they are not simply the signalisation, at the level of verbal performances, of what could be deployed in the order of the mind or in the order of things; but they appeared by virtue of a whole set of relations that are peculiar to the discursive level.16 Foucault’s understanding of the archive refers not to the totality of what is archived or said, but to the archive as a discursive principle or formation, that is, the set of relations which indicates the limits to what may be said. ­Foucault’s subtle conception has a long legacy, and later informs Giorgio Agamben’s 1999 essay on testimony Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive. As Agamben asks, ‘how are we to conceive of this dimension, if it corresponds neither to the archive in the strict sense – that is, the storehouse that catalogues the traces of what has been said, to consign them to future memory, nor to the Babelic library that gathers the dust of statements?’.17 For Agamben, the Foucauldian archive is situated between langue, the repertoire of ‘possibilities of speaking’ and, on the other hand, ‘the corpus that unites the set of what has been said’ (p. 144). The archive represents the ‘mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of its enunciation; it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech’ (p. 144). The notion of the unsaid or unsayable which is thus invisibly encoded in speech is the foundation for Agamben’s definition of testimony as the ‘system of relations between the inside and outside of langue, between the sayable and unsayable in every language’ (p. 145). A key distinction for Agamben concerns the status of the speaking subject which, in the archive, is ‘reduced to a simple function or an empty

Introduction  7 position’; in Agamben’s version of testimony, founded on a ‘relation to an impossibility of speech’ (p. 145), the subject’s position can be seen in terms of contingency, as the situation of a subject who cannot speak. In the work of Mirosław Bałka, the principal subject of Chapter 2, testimony is remediated by the archive. The installation work considered in Chapter 1 embeds the intermedial reinvention of Beckett in a dilemma of indexicality. Whereas Beckett’s work is rooted in treacherous deictics (the notoriously slippery ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’), installation art offers the possibility that these unstable positions will be resolved in the viewer’s own negotiation of an array of concrete locations. Bałka’s How It Is (2009), though, in fact represents an in-depth engagement with the complexities of Beckettian deictics: by adopting the title How It Is, the work both refers to Beckett’s prose work How It Is (1964) and to the inscrutable ‘it’ which lies at its heart, and complicates the viewer’s progress through the work’s physical site by creating a virtual, online How It Is. Here, the topoi of Bałka’s project notes are rendered as virtual locations, so that archival text and film are triggered by occupying a particular position in the virtual installation, although the imposing external form of How It Is is not presented. The site is both an archival remediation of the physical installation and an important instance of Bałka’s enquiry into the new media archive and the virtual lieu de mémoire, concerns which I revisit in Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 3, meanwhile, the ethical framing of the speaking ‘I’ engages the political. I turn here to the work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, in particular Where is Where? (2008), and to the related installation idiom of Silvia ­Kolbowski, both of which are notable for their distributed presentation of the event between times and places. Kolbowski and Ahtila, too, are inheritors of B ­ eckett’s distressed deictics, re-envisaging the constative dilemma of ‘how it is’ as a drama of chronological and geographical otherness. In both bodies of work, speakers’ attempts to narrate past trauma in the present are overwhelmed by the weight of history, and are submerged in their archival pre-texts. The reflections of Ahtila’s poet-narrator on the Algerian War infiltrate the past into the present, as the poet’s account is overrun by archival newsreel and documentary footage shot in Algeria. Kolbowski’s After ­Hiroshima mon amour (2008), meanwhile, is in part a remaking of R ­ esnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959), and in part a meditation on the structural belatedness and archivalist preoccupations of that film. Where Ahtila exploits multi-channel presentation, the montage of Kolbowski’s video juxtaposes Hiroshima with post-hurricane New Orleans and wartime Iraq in a self-conscious echo of Resnais’ juxtaposition of Hiroshima and Nevers, and the work’s sound and image tracks are self-consciously uncoupled. The distribution of speech between Kolbowski’s diverse protagonists suggests a form of collective political enunciation, a prospect which I link here to the work of Chantal Mouffe. Kolbowski and Ahtila create potential ‘contact spaces’ which may institute new relations within the political, unsettling hegemonies or, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, creating dissensus, momentary disruptions of the political order. Kolbowski’s destabilisation of sites of enunciation,

8 Introduction meanwhile, is bound up with a career-spanning critique of art historical discourses and institutions. The tendency is most marked in an inadequate history of conceptual art (1998–99), in which artists’ reminiscences about conceptual art are filmed, but only their hands are shown and voice is once again desynchronised from image. Kolbowski’s dramatic intervention in the archival legacy of conceptualism challenges the ventriloquism which has all too often characterised art historical discourses, and creates the possibility of a critical reinscription of women within them. At the same time, though, it continues to be underwritten by the agonistic character of the political realm. Jacques Rancière’s discussion of the relational potential of art, meanwhile, refers to the work of Boltanski which, in Aesthetics and its ­Discontents (2004), stands for two separate aesthetic categories: firstly, the archive or repertoire; and secondly the ‘encounter’. For Rancière, the two are closely connected: the category of the encounter appeals to passersby to engage concretely with the work, and shows a significant debt to theories of relational aesthetics. Of greater significance in Rancière’s account is the archive, which ‘forms an inventory of traces of history’, and is seen in Boltanski’s Les Abonnés du téléphone, which consists of a vast array of telephone directories from a variety of years and countries which can be taken down and consulted by visitors in the installation space.18 The work, which Boltanski himself describes as ‘une salle d’archives’, an archival reading room, constitutes a remarkable memorial site. While it testifies to the existence of a particular population at a given moment in history, its archival repertoire simultaneously solicits live interaction.19 The span of Boltanski’s career sees radical developments in the personal archive, the central concern of Chapter 4, from Vannevar Bush’s Memex project of the 1940s to the recent evolution of lifelogging, all of which partake, in varying ways, of the idea that it is possible to ‘save everything’.20 Wafaa Bilal’s 3rdi (2010–11) uses lifelogging technology to document a journey undertaken by the artist, consisting of a camera mounted on the back of Bilal’s head and programmed to take photographs at regular intervals. Bilal’s work, like that of Boltanski, entertains a productive, critical relationship with lifelogging and the related idea of the quantified self, questioning the understanding of the self in terms of its data while maintaining a significant personal investment in self-archiving. Rancière’s comment on the ‘traces of history’ preserved by the inventory has further implications for another archivalist body of work, that of the American artist Arnold Dreyblatt. In Chapter 5, I examine Dreyblatt’s mobilisation of the archive as a vector of the sublime, a recurrent preoccupation in Aesthetics and its Discontents. Dreyblatt’s practice is shaped by his chance discovery in the 1980s of the 1935 edition of Who’s Who in ­Central  & East Europe, an event which resonates with Arlette Farge’s analysis of the sublime moment of revelation in Le Goût de l’archive (1989). Who’s Who in Central & East Europe operates as an archival pretext or data set which is reconfigured and redeployed in works which interrogate the paradigms

Introduction  9 of performance (the Reading Projects, which extrapolate from interactive possibilities like those in Boltanski’s Les Abonnés du t­ éléphone) and of new media art (in installations such as The Great Archive and the Wunderblock, which appear to incorporate digital archives). In works like these, the sublime modality recurs in the enormous flows of data which are displayed, and which serve to disorientate the viewer. The inspiration for The Church and the Machine, meanwhile, is the Mormon genealogical project, which once more envisages the infinite archive as a practical possibility. Dreyblatt’s meditation upon it is informed by the ambition to create a register of all of the living, as in the thwarted ambition to ‘name all of earth’s inhabitants’ which underlies Boltanski’s Les Abonnés and indeed, in the Mormon project, of all of the dead.21 Dreyblatt’s reflection, though, is also technological in nature, and inspired by both the vision of a large, mechanical archival system in the Mormon Genealogical Archives site in Utah and the specific possibilities of the digital archive.

Archive Fever, Asynchronicity and the Wunderblock I now turn briefly to one of Dreyblatt’s best-known works, The Wunderblock (2000), which exemplifies some of the most important possibilities and strategies of contemporary archivalist installation.

Figure I.1 Arnold Dreyblatt, The Wunderblock, table, chair, TFT display, computer, 2000. Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 2000. Photograph: Tom Gundelwein.

10 Introduction The work consists of a fibreboard table and chair and a small, plastic-­ mounted LCD monitor set in the surface of the table. Text scrolls continuously across the monitor and is easily legible but palimpsestual: no sooner has one phrase unfurled across the screen than it fades and is overwritten by another. The text is taken from two sources, Sigmund Freud’s ‘Notiz über den Wunderblock’ (1925) and the Glossary for Archivists of the Society of American Archivists (1992). The work makes three interrelated pledges: that Freud’s reading of the Wunderblock will be explicitly aligned here with the work of archiving; that the work of archiving will be refracted through the practices of art; and that Dreyblatt’s own Wunderblock will engage with the discourses of cultural memory which preoccupy the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As we shall see, all three pledges are provocatively fulfilled, and link Dreyblatt’s remarkable artefact to a series of developments in the wider field of archivalist practice. Freud’s essay on the Wunderblock (or ‘mystic writing pad’, as it is often translated) takes the pad as an analogy for the functioning of perceptual consciousness. Freud infers ‘a remarkable agreement’ between the functioning of the pad and the ‘hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus, which, he argues, ‘can in fact provide both an ever-ready receptive surface and permanent traces of the notes that have been made upon it’.22 What is most interesting, for Freud, is the double sheet which lies on top of the wax in the original mystic writing pads, consisting of a sheet of cellulose and a sheet of paper. When the sheet is removed, the writing is erased, leaving the pad ready for further writing. At the same time, though, as Freud notes, ‘it is easy to discover that the permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights’ (p. 211). In this way the system of perceptual consciousness is compared to the celluloid and waxed paper cover, while the wax slab itself stands for the unconscious, and ‘the appearance and disappearance of the writing’ images ‘the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception’ (p. 211), with some of the perceived phenomena filtering through the ‘screen’ to settle in the memory. The intermittent appearance of writing, flickering into view before lapsing into invisibility, is rendered in striking fashion in Dreyblatt’s ­Wunderblock, where we begin to read about ‘memorabilia, memorable or noteworthy things’, only for the fragment to fade from our field of vision. ‘A single record or manuscript’ comes into view, only to give way to ‘to have lost sight of’. These are tantalising statements, and take on an almost epigrammatic intensity in their brief, ephemeral presentation. They seem to document our very perceptual processes, as the ‘single record’ becomes both sign and signifier and the loss which we know must come is explicitly articulated before it too fades from consciousness. In the Dreyblatt work, writing appears simultaneously from several points on the screen: not only are these ‘memory trace[s]’ fleeting, but they crowd in on our senses from all sides.23 Part of the work’s power derives from the seeming autonomy

Introduction  11 of the Wunderblock: no hand is seen writing on its surface, as would have been required in the original mystic writing pad. The Wunderblock suggests a ghostly elimination of human agency, as though archiving were no longer a human affair, perhaps recalling the evolution of a ‘monad’ which archives the memory of the human in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman (1988). Such a viewpoint extrapolates from the trajectories pursued by Freud in 1925, and from the paper on the archive which Jacques Derrida read in Freud’s house in London during a conference in 1994. That paper, subsequently published as Mal d’archive (1995), or Archive Fever in English, is one of the best-known theoretical accounts of the archive, and knowingly trades upon the location of its original delivery. In speaking in Freud’s house, Derrida is conscious of occupying a space like that of the arkheion: ‘initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded’.24 If arkhe means both to commence and to command, its authority is derived from this location, in which ‘official documents are filed’ (p. 2). In Archive Fever, Derrida considers both the archival or museum space which Freud’s house has become and an imaginary digital equivalent. Derrida speculates as to the impact which contemporary (1994) archival technologies would have had on Freudian psychoanalysis had they existed at the time, constructing a ‘retrospective science fiction’ scenario in which Freud had access to ‘MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences and above all E-mail’ (p. 16). Derrida’s scenario has two types of implications for my argument: firstly, in the historically situated snapshot of archival technology which we encounter here; and secondly, in the intertwining of technology, archiving and archived content: This archival earthquake would not have limited its effect to the secondary recording, to the printing and to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (pp. 16–17; original emphasis) The technological examples which Derrida provides are now highly dated, and fax machines and tape recorders in particular largely obsolete. It is tempting to wonder why Derrida’s science fiction is not more daring, extending the

12 Introduction range of technologies to include, say, compact discs and hard drive storage, both of which were established by the time of Derrida’s composition of the book, and which must have looked set to endure beyond tape-based media. At this point in the argument there is a complex transaction with Freud’s work as a memorial topos which is itself concerned with the constitution of memory and perception: Derrida criticises Freud for his limited treatment of the archive’s technological incarnations, describing the Wunderblock as a ‘child’s toy’ compared with the immense archival potential of cinema, the phonograph and the gramophone, and yet himself refers only to a limited range of 1994 archival technologies.25 Nicholas Gane and David Beer thus argue that ‘Derrida repeats Freud’s error in focusing on the primitive technology of the Mystic Pad’.26 Why, then, is Derrida’s engagement with archival technologies so limited? Although one answer might focus on the centrality of the physical ‘impression’ to Derrida’s argument (seen in the sub-title ‘a Freudian impression’), another concerns the subtle ‘relationship to the future’ which is mentioned here. Derrida could have preserved the contemporaneity of Archive Fever by a different choice of archival media, but the ageing media which are in fact selected create an effect of obsolescence which subtly reconfigures the argument. Derrida argues not only that ‘in the past, psychoanalysis would not have been what it was’ had email existed, but also that ‘in the future it will no longer be what Freud and so many psychoanalysts have anticipated’ (p. 17; original emphasis). Derrida’s book already occupies the future imagined in the second proposition, and yet leaves that future in the future tense, implicitly positioning itself in a past whose obsolete technologies the reader can recall, just as Derrida recalls Freud’s antiquated hand-written correspondence. The stance, seen in Derrida’s description of the archive as a ‘pledge [un gage], a token of the future’ (p. 18), equally recalls Mieke Bal’s use of the ‘preposterous’ to reposition what came first, chronologically speaking, as an after-effect (drawing upon Patricia Parker’s reading of the preposterous in 1992, the immediate pre-history of Derrida’s text).27 At the same time, it uncannily pre-figures the use of archival technologies in archivalist art such as Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which the dramatic action, concerned with the passage of archival technologies into the future, must inevitably be marked by obsolescence in the performance history the play will engender. Derrida’s work, like that of Beckett, anticipates its transformation into a lieu de mémoire, and encodes that transformation within itself. The coexistence of multiple time-frames and the juxtaposition of multiple places within the installation space, meanwhile, are defining characteristics of archivalist installation, and cement their association with the heterotopia in Foucault’s thought. In Foucault’s ‘Des Espaces autres’, heterotopias are often ‘connected with temporal discontinuities [découpages du temps]’, while ‘they open onto what might be called, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronias’.28 The drama of asynchronicity, or of heterochronia, is a recurring concern, and one which frames archivalism’s ethical discourse.

Introduction  13 Derrida’s ambivalence concerning technology, meanwhile, significantly recalls that of Freud. In Thomas Elsaesser’s analysis, the key question in Freud’s essay is ‘what sort of “answer” does it constitute’?29 The piece can be read as a serious suggestion for a ‘workable media technology’; as ‘a metaphor that alludes to a technical solution’ and, equally, as ‘a personal in-joke’ (p. 102). For Elsaesser, one possibility is that ‘Freud deliberately used such an improbable – and yet on second thoughts apt – example precisely in order not to have to declare himself on the technical media of transmission and storage that were developing during his lifetime’ (p. 102). Whether or not this constitutes a deliberate strategy of avoidance or repression, Elsaesser revealingly identifies ‘the peculiar status of media technologies as at once absent and present in Freud, which Derrida sees – in a manner borrowed from Freud – as itself a repression haunted by the possibility of its return’ (p. 106). The archive, the subject of Derrida’s book, is itself caught between the feverish imperative to record and the simultaneous urge to destroy: ‘the repetition compulsion remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive’, and the death drive ‘threatens every principality, every archontic primacy, every archival desire. It is what we will call, later on, le mal d’archive, “archive fever”’.30 If archiving is associated with repetition compulsion, Archive Fever feverishly revisits both Freud’s Wunderblock essay and Derrida’s own earlier analysis of it in Writing and Difference. The main engagement with the ­Wunderblock essay in Archive Fever is a quotation from the section of Writing and Difference in which Derrida states that the mystic writing pad is a child’s toy, ‘compared to other machines for storing archives’.31 Such a move is a repetition (of both Derrida and Freud) and a form of repression, as Derrida criticises Freud for the very failure to attend to archival technologies which he himself subsequently displays. In this, then, Derrida’s reading of Freud’s ­Wunderblock models the archival dynamic which both, in different ways, address, making a reference or repetition which bears within it a simultaneous erasure. Following Elsaesser, I now consider what kind of ‘answer’ is provided by the recent revisitation of the archive in installation art. Although the ludic strategies of Christian Boltanski’s works and the childhood objects which they frequently contain might suggest the category of the ‘in-joke’, the archive is, too, the springboard for searching enquiries into the nature of human memory and ethics. Two large, interrelated questions arising from Derrida’s account guide my analysis of archivalism in this book: that of the archive’s implication in its technological substrate; and that of the standpoint of the archive to human memory and agency. In the course of his discussion of Freud and the mystic writing pad, Derrida asks the bald question ‘do these new archival machines change anything?’ (p. 14). This is a question which shapes the history of the archive and, equally, continues to preoccupy artistic practice. In early archive studies, in particular in the work of Hilary Jenkinson, the work of ‘the good Archivist’ as a ‘selfless devotee of Truth’ is based on ‘the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge’.32 In the age of the Internet and of postmodernism,

14 Introduction however, such a vision has been unsettled, challenging the primacy of the archive as the physical location of records, and focusing instead on the vast, distributed process of archiving which takes place ‘in the infinite iteral space of the web’.33 Such a shift, for Jennie Hill and Victoria Lane, heralds the beginnings of a Derridean conception of the archive in archive studies itself, in which knowledge and archiving are intimately linked and ‘the archive’ comes to stand for ‘an evolving mediation of understanding’ (p. 9). Although such thinking is inspired by Derrida, Derrida’s own account of the archive remains curiously reluctant to consider the Internet as archive. Even ­Geneses (2003), which returns to some of the archival preoccupations of Archive Fever, is primarily concerned with libraries, books and paper, and the disturbances wrought in ‘archival and indexing’ spaces by works which are underpinned by ‘undecidable writing procedures’ are expressed via the conceit of a removable prière d’insérer.34 Dreyblatt’s Wunderblock, then, bears within it the memorial trace of Freud’s and Derrida’s inscriptions in the archival field, and juxtaposes them with the traces of the archival profession. In so doing, it refers implicitly to the technology of the mystic writing pad while reinventing it in a form which replaces the waxy surface of the original with the glossy, reflective expanse of the monitor. No longer dependent on the motion of the human hand across its surface, the Wunderblock now pursues its silent archiving in apparent autonomy, endlessly deploying and reconfiguring the archivists’ texts and those of Freud, and juxtaposing them without reference to the viewer’s presence. The functioning of The Wunderblock, in this reincarnation, though, in fact incurs an invisible debt to the archival and indexing spaces referred to by Derrida, in this case those of the database. While The Wunderblock is active, its text is produced not by a ‘live’ human user, but by software which draws upon two databases, one containing the Society of American Archivists Glossary and the other the text of Freud’s ‘Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad”’. The dialogue between the two is determined by the installation software’s random selections from each, and by the viewer’s piecing together of the on-screen fragments. Such a situation appears profoundly anti-narrative: the story I have told here of the tellings and retellings of the history of the archive is unpicked and retold each time that Dreyblatt’s Wunderblock resumes its sifting of statements and connections. In this, it recalls Lev Manovich’s famous account in The Language of New Media (2001), in which the database ‘represents the world as a list of items’, and tags those items in ways which facilitate their selection.35 In contrast to the cause-and-effect trajectory of narrative, the database refuses diachronic structure (p. 225). A double elision appears to lie at the heart of Dreyblatt’s Wunderblock: firstly, of the human agent, who is apparently absent; and secondly, of the database, the inscrutable avatar of the archive which lies at the work’s core, and yet cannot be seen by the observer. In fact, the disappearance of the human and the implication of the archive in a specific technological

Introduction  15 instantiation (here, the electronic database) may be less absolute than they appear. Although it sometimes appears in virtual form, and sometimes outside the gallery, archivalist installation generally displays a durable investment in the progression of an embodied viewer through the installation space. Its investment in archival technology, although central, is critical in nature, frequently exploiting the capacity of particular media to evoke effects of nostalgia, desire and loss. In many cases, the use of a particular archival technology informs a work’s thematics of memory in ways which create conundrums for the viewer and, like Derrida’s positioning of the present of the time of writing as always already past, such works self-consciously occupy obsolete forms, seeming to advertise their own belonging to the realm of history. In order to assess what such archivalist strategies can achieve, I turn now to Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), in which the past and present of the archive are locked into a particular dilemma.

Notes 1. Ingrid Schaffner, ‘Deep Storage’, in Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (eds.), Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art (Munich; New York: Prestel, 1998), pp. 11–21 (p. 11); Beatrice von Bismarck, Hans-Peter Feldmann et al. (eds.), ‘Preface’, Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Field of Art (Cologne: Walther König, 1999), pp. 417–18 (p. 417). 2. Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), pp. 12, 11. 3. Ruth Rosengarten, Between Memory and Document (Lisbon: Museu Coleção Berardo, Kindle ebook 2013). 4. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, 2004, 3–22 (p. 3) [accessed 5/3/14]. 5. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 7, quoted in Enwezor, Archive Fever, p. 23. 6. For an alternative account of the monument in the context of the archive, see Sophie Berrebi, The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2014), pp. 17–44. 7. Lisa Darms, ‘Review: Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art’, The American Archivist, 72 (2009), 253–57 (p. 255). 8. Sue Breakell, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive,’ Tate Papers, 9 (Spring 2008).  [accessed 9/8/15]. 9. Judy Vaknin, Karyn Stuckey and Victoria Lane (eds.), All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist (Faringdon: Libri, 2013). 10. Ernst Van Alphen, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (London: Reaktion, 2014), p. 16. 11. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, no. 26 (1989), 7–24 (p. 12) (http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2928520) [accessed 27/5/2015]. 12. Nora, ‘Between Memory’, p. 12. 13. Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, ed. by J.D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), ii, pp. 175–85 (p. 182).

16 Introduction 14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 59. 15. Steedman claims that Derrida’s account fails to take account of the experience of archival research and the modes of reading to which the archive gives rise. For her, the English translation of Mal d’archive elides the excitement of ‘fever’ with the occupational disease occasioned by the archive’s poisonous materials, notably dust. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 16. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 128–29. 17. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone, 2002), p. 143. 18. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 55. 19. Thomas Ferenczi, Devoir de mémoire, droit à l’oubli? (Paris: Editions Complexe, 2002), p. 267. 20. Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013). 21. Ferenczi, Devoir de mémoire, p. 267. 22. Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (London: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 209. 23. Freud, ‘A Note’, p. 207. 24. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 2. 25. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 14. 26. Nicholas Gane and David Beer, New Media: The Key Concepts (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2008), p. 76. 27. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Patricia Parker, ‘Preposterous Events’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (1992), 186–213 [accessed 2/6/2015]. 28. Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, p. 182. 29. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Freud as Media Theorist: Mystic Writing-Pads and the ­Matter of Memory’, Screen, 50 (2009), 100–13 (p. 101) [accessed 2/6/2015]. 30. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 12. 31. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), pp. 227–28, quoted in Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 14. 32. Jenkinson, ‘The English Archivist: A New Profession’ (1947), in Hilary ­Jenkinson, Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Chicago: Society of American ­Archivists, 2003), p. 231. 33. Victoria Lane and Jennie Hill, ‘Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Situating the Archive and Archivists’, in Jennie Hill (ed.), The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: a Reader (London: Facet, 2010), p. 16. 34. Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 15; translation modified. 35. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 225.

1 The Beckett Effect The Intermedial Archive

Beckett, the Archive and Installation Art Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape stages an extraordinary meditation on the archive, transporting the viewer into the private archive of Krapp, a sixty-nine-year-old man whose failing memories of his younger self are supplemented by a repertoire of audio recordings. Krapp’s faltering progress through those recordings, accompanied by interjections of his present, live voice, is the foundation of the spectacle we witness in the theatre, as Krapp ruminates on the ‘farewell to love’ which results from his decision to devote himself to literature.1 At thirty-nine, Krapp is already preoccupied by his recorded memories, and records himself reflecting on the experience of listening to an earlier recording, made at least ten years earlier. This early point in Krapp’s memories, at which he was ‘still living on and off with Bianca in Kedar Street’ (p. 218), constitutes a turning point. The relationship with Bianca is described as a ‘hopeless business’ (p. 218) by the thirty-nine-yearold Krapp, and his sixty-nine-year-old counterpart subsequently listens in ambiguous silence to Krapp thirty-nine’s apparently enthusiastic consignation of his ‘best years’ (p. 223) to the past. Much of the irony of the presentation of Krapp’s ambivalent recourse to recorded memory stems from the seeming ignominy of Krapp’s literary career which famously leads only to ‘seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas’ (p. 222). Beckett’s play presents two possibilities which resonate with archivalist problematics. The first concerns the way the idea of the archive is concretised: this is Beckett’s most tangible representation of the archive, and the creation of the personal archive or ‘den’ in which Krapp lives as a physical location in Krapp’s Last Tape was to inspire the interplay between Krapp’s study and other manifestations of the archive in the installation of Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett during the Enniskillen festival in 2012. The second possibility concerns the relations of Beckett’s works with archival technologies, whose presence marks the ongoing reinvention of Beckett in installation art. I suggest that the two possibilities are interlinked, and that the nature of the connection has compelling consequences both for Beckett studies and for representations of the archive in installation art, which in turn display an enduring preoccupation with Beckett.

18  The Beckett Effect In Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp’s attempts to negotiate the past, played out in the decaying confines of the archival space which he inhabits, consist mainly of listening to old recordings of himself on a reel-to-reel tape player. The counterpoint of memory and its technological support in the play is well known: the tape player, which in 1958 represented contemporary technology, allows Krapp to access the remote and irrecoverable domain of his youth, and to mourn his lost love. The paradox of the play, though, is that it depicts ‘a late evening in the future’, a setting with highly significant and far-reaching implications.2 This is the play’s opening stage direction and yet, like the description of Krapp as ‘wearish’ (p. 215), it apparently makes no real contribution to the business of staging. Instead, I suggest, it subtly modifies the role of archival technology in the play’s reception, by marking Krapp’s textual aspect with an enduring sign of irreconcilable anachronism. When Krapp’s Last Tape is considered as a text, the action is both embedded in an unspecified future and wedded to the technological signifiers of the past. For Nicholas Johnson, the play now represents a ‘fascinating crossroads with profound implications for how Beckett is to be treated in the future’.3 For Johnson, the encounter of future and past represents a practical dilemma in the theatre: writing in the context of the 2010 Gate Theatre production in Dublin, Johnson argues that this is the ‘last audience generation for which Krapp could even conceivably be in the present. He can always be read as an old man who held on to a piece of analogue machinery instead of getting a recording attachment for his iPod, but at what point does the technological anachronism get in the way of the play’s reception?’ (p. 217). I reformulate this position slightly in order to tease out a problematic which, I suggest, does not necessarily surface in staging but which pervades the play’s textual being. The vision of the future in Krapp’s Last Tape has no direct bearing on the action, which is concerned with the endless series of ‘P.M.s’ (p. 218), or memorial post-mortems, which populate Krapp’s present experiences. Nevertheless, the play’s ambivalent recourse to the future offers glimpses of a time after Krapp’s death, ‘when all my dust has settled’ (p. 217; original emphasis) and even, towards the end of the play, of a post-human era in which ‘the earth might be uninhabited’ (p. 221). In this, Krapp echoes Clov’s apocalyptic dream of order in Endgame, in ‘a world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust’ and the accompanying fear, in that play, of humanity surviving the apocalypse.4 The staging of the play is thus invisibly modified by the discourse of futurity which textually underwrites it: although the play can be staged exactly as written, the alignment of the tape player with ‘the future’ is inherently unsettling. The thread of the play concerned with a very remote, destructive future crucially interferes, too, with the historicisation of the play’s action, just as Krapp’s protestation ‘thanks to God that it’s over’ (p. 218) finally rings false. One of the central ironies is that Krapp ultimately bemoans the farewell to love, and looks back at his past in an implicit attitude of regret, but the play’s

The Beckett Effect  19 insidious futurity threatens to unravel the underpinning temporal logic of the scheme in which that very statement is made. Instead of setting the play in ‘a late evening in the nineteen eighties’, as he at one point considered, Beckett ultimately decided upon ‘in the future’, permanently complicating the play’s relationship to the present of its performance.5 The 1980s setting would have ensured that the reel-to-reel player itself looked more and more antiquated to later audiences while anchoring the action in a technological present defined by the compact disc as well as the not-yet-quite-obsolete reel-to-reel machine. Instead of this fixed end-point, though, Krapp either suggests a setting in which reel-to-reel technology is itself positioned in the future or, alternatively, gestures towards the endless succession of recording technologies which supersede it, ensuring that the play resists its own historicisation by occupying a future which always recedes before the spectator’s eyes. This, then, is a drama of the asynchronous which cannot be resolved in the theatre. Johnson contextualises the 2010 Gate Theatre production by reference to the productions of the play staged by Michael Colgan between 2000 and 2010. In particular, Johnson cites the danger of turning Beckett’s plays into the ‘museum pieces’ (p. 219) which the tape recorder used in the C ­ olgan productions, including the Beckett on Film version directed by Atom Egoyan and featuring John Hurt, has literally become. If Colgan’s productions court a ‘mode of repetition’ (p. 219) with potentially serious implications for Beckettian performance, however, that mode has also proved to be the source of unsuspected opportunities. The reuse of the tape recorder from the Beckett on Film version heralds a strategy of reuse in which Egoyan remakes Krapp’s Last Tape once more as the installation Steenbeckett in 2002. At the same time, the ironisation of repetition in Beckett’s work, and the implication of the archive in that irony, have been repeatedly revisited in both theatre and installation art. The insistent return to Beckett in contemporary visual culture takes place through and as a mode of repetition. Such a situation is loaded with irony in view of the groaning thematics of memory in Beckett’s work, suggesting that Beckett becomes a crucial shared memory precisely in the dramatisation of forgetting and loss. To remember Beckett, then, is to participate in shared amnesia; in Nora’s famous (Beckettian) phrase, ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’.6 For Nora, too, the archive is the privileged figure of this cultural aporia: ‘the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life itself – often a function of its own recording – a second memory, a prosthesis-memory’ (p. 14). The implication of Beckettian performance in the constitution of Beckett as lieu de mémoire paradoxically points the way to the ‘reinvention’ of Beckett which Stan Gontarski envisages in his centenary essay on Beckett’s theatre, and to a strand of intermedial practice which, since the late 1990s, has begun to implant Beckett’s theatre into new contexts and forms.7 Those forms, as we shall see, are durably marked by the figure of the archive,

20  The Beckett Effect and by the epistemological dilemmas which arise in the tense exchanges it initiates with Beckett’s work. Such dialogue, as Peggy Phelan suggests, arises from the broader contemporary theatrical context: as Phelan argues in 1997, the ‘strange temporal economy in which we live’ is already characterised as ‘post’, and contemporary performance studies must respond to this dilemma of belatedness. For Phelan, Beckett plays a key role in any such response: ‘what we carry in our “post” is a series of transpositions, transcriptions, transfigurations. Our current “post” signals the difficulty of the end ever arriving at its true ending, or of remaining singular, fixed, gone. And so, like Didi and Gogo, we go on’.8 I want now to consider the reinvention of Beckett as an archival strategy: one which combines intermedial reference with a deep investment in ‘archival’ forms and technologies. If recent reimaginings of Beckett have privileged one form, it is that of installation art. For all the diversity of recent installation work, Claire Bishop’s major account characterises the form as presupposing an ‘embodied viewer’ derived from the physical presence of the viewer within the art-work, two characteristics with enormous implications for Beckett: Rather than imagining the viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes that survey the work from a distance, installation art presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision. This insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art.9 Such a definition, principally intended to distinguish installation art from other types of art, sheds considerable light on the sensory problematics of Beckett’s work. Not I, for example, constitutes one of Beckett’s most striking sensory interventions, drawing the viewer’s gaze in towards the mouth, the sole illuminated object in the theatre, but it simultaneously highlights the disembodiment of that mouth. Arguably, Not I is a key milestone in the ‘radical complications of corporeal self-presence that characterize Beckett’s staging of the body’ and which herald Beckett’s interest in other forms, including television, in the 1970s.10 More recently, the possibility of embodied spectatorship has come to the fore in Beckett studies, despite, or in tandem with, the tortured phenomenology of the prose fiction, where all is ‘mal vu’, or ill seen.11 In what follows, I suggest that the disputed ground of embodiment in Beckett’s prose and theatre alike gives rise to the very dilemmas which have led to the recent ‘re-embodiment’ of Beckett’s work as installation. In particular, those dilemmas concern the deliberately ill-concealed epistemological problematics of the late works, and the concern with the ontology of the image which runs through Beckett’s literary production. Nikos Navridis and Adriano and Fernando Guimarães exemplify the important shifts in spectatorial dynamics which occur in performance and installation in the twenty-first century: Navridis’ Breath (2005–06)

The Beckett Effect  21 reimagines Beckett’s Breath (1969) in the gallery space and redefines that space through the use of hypersurfaces. The Lost Ones (1971), meanwhile, has inspired two mixed reality projects which respond to the problematic articulation of the fictive reality in Beckett’s original. Carmin Karasić’s The Lost Ones (1999) is the first installation work to exploit the problems of scale, epistemology and time which bedevil Beckett’s The Lost Ones, as participants negotiate a ‘real’ space which incorporates a virtual world occupied by a population of searchers. The immersive potential of the cylinder environment is dramatically heightened in Kenderdine and Shaw’s Unmakeable Love (2008–09) by means of large-scale immersive visualisation technology. In their concern with the problems inherent in the cylinder scenario, both projects anticipate Mirosław Bałka’s How It Is (2009–10), a work which creates highly problematic intermedial reference to Beckett by means of separate real and virtual environments. While continuing to exploit the capacity of new technologies to create unique dialogues with Beckett’s work, How It Is engages with the specific meanings of the archival in the field of trauma and testimony. First, though, I return to an earlier point in the trajectory traced out between Beckett’s theatre and contemporary installation. Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett (2002) enjoys a special place in that trajectory, embracing the possibilities of both the digital and the analogue archive, and mobilising analogue film in ways which periodically, and conditionally, suggest nostalgia. Egoyan’s work engages in unique ways with Beckett’s vision of the archive and, as we shall see, announces the strand of installation work whose preoccupation with the archive has been framed by Beckett. That work, like that of Egoyan and of Beckett, pursues an ambivalent reflection on the archive as a place of both commemoration and encounter.

Egoyan’s Steenbeckett: The Digital Archive and the Analogue Archive Steenbeckett occupied the former Museum of Mankind building in London’s Burlington Gardens from 15 February to 17 March 2002. It staged the archive on a number of levels, as viewers’ progress through the building’s narrow corridors and staircases revealed scattered archival materials: film spools, audio cassettes and film canisters. The work is preoccupied with the dilemma of memory and technology that is central to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, while rethinking the terms in which the dilemma is expressed. In Beckett’s play, the juxtaposition of the voices of the younger Krapps and the largely silent presence of the old Krapp, a solitary figure amidst the boxes and spools of the ‘den’ in which he lives, produces an overwhelming sensation of loss. Krapp’s lonely presence, barely more alive than the archival documents which surround him, receives no consolation from writing, and he obsessively returns to his memories of Bianca. Technology is unable to provide redemption, endlessly reiterating Krapp’s destitution, and with

22  The Beckett Effect

Figure 1.1 Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett, 2002. Courtesy of The Artangel Collection. Photograph: Thierry Bal.

it a growing sense of amnesia, as Krapp is unable to remember some of the recordings which he consults, and is bewildered by the word ‘viduity’ (p. 219), interrupting the recording to fetch a dictionary. The loss of love and the loss of memory are ultimately encoded in the play in technological form. That loss is stunningly amplified in Egoyan’s Steenbeckett, which extends the play’s preoccupation with memory and technology by incorporating Krapp’s Last Tape in two distinct technological instantiations. Egoyan’s film version of Beckett’s play is displayed twice within the installation, firstly as a crystal-clear digital projection; and secondly, in a separate room, as an analogue projection via the monitor of a Steenbeck film editing machine. The parallel digital and analogue projections highlight the progressive deterioration of film, as Egoyan himself notes: ‘as scratches and dust gather, the sound and image will deteriorate more and more, while the digital projection next door remains perfect’.12 The meditation on loss in Steenbeckett, then, is not simply concerned with the long-term status of film as an archival medium, but with the tangible deterioration which takes place in the short period of the work’s display: Over the course of the month, the digital projection was absolutely constant, but the 35-mm image went through a process of decay – through dust that had accumulated, through scratches, through people physically trying to maul the film. So a piece like ‘Steenbeckett’ is dealing with the relationship of analog technology – and its basis in physical

The Beckett Effect  23 principles of the graven image, whether it be on silver or through the displacement of oxide on magnetic tape – to certain corporeal aspects of decay.13 The loss which characterises Krapp’s Last Tape is repeated in the work’s presentation within Steenbeckett, as the imperfections of reel-to-reel playback and of Krapp’s memory are accompanied by the increasingly damaged film of the analogue projection, as though to act out the medium’s obsolescence and decay in real time. The situation sharply recalls the technological dilemma inscribed within Krapp’s Last Tape: the insidious futurity which skews the temporal framework of Beckett’s play itself now points to the work’s remaking as Steenbeckett, as an installation which arises entirely from the dilemma of technological obsolescence of the original. While the laborious process of fast-forwarding in real time makes it difficult to replace the tape recorder with a contemporary equivalent, the whole work can be remade by transferring the action to the installation space. ­Technological anachronism, then, lies at the origin of the work’s remaking in installation form and of the technological mediations which that remaking, in Steenbeckett, implies. In Steenbeckett, in a modification of the dynamics of Beckett’s play, material deterioration is associated with spectatorship rather than Krapp’s solipsistic contemplation of his own past. While in Krapp’s Last Tape the business of fast-forwarding dominates the play’s presentation of memory, in Steenbeckett the viewers who struggle to watch John Hurt’s performance via the tiny Steenbeck monitor are made complicit in the deterioration of the film stock. As we watch the analogue Krapp in the installation, we are acutely aware of the vast swathes of film present in the room in what amounts to a significant amplification of the materiality effects of the original play. Egoyan, furthermore, documents or imagines spectators who ‘maul’ the film, suggesting that this contemplation of the breakdown of the memorial apparatus instils in some the urge to violence. Steenbeckett nevertheless suggests that the decay of the analogue film is mitigated by the preservation of the digital copy, which subsists in near-perfect condition in the adjacent room. The archive, then, is at once a place of preservation and of loss, and the suggestion that the image can be preserved beyond the loss which the piece initially dramatises is an ambiguous one. Egoyan’s installation appears poised between the proposition that digital media can reverse the loss inherent within analogue and a nostalgia for conventional film. Rather than the preference for the digital which Steenbeckett might suggest, Egoyan equates film with ‘the notion of scarcity and of something having an added value by virtue of the fact that it raises issues of preservation, storage, deterioration and decay’.14 The very precariousness of film makes it precious, or so it seems. Egoyan suggests, too, that analogue editing was on the brink of obsolescence at the time that

24  The Beckett Effect Steenbeckett was planned, and that it had effectively ceased to be part of his working practices before 2002: I am not nostalgic about the ancient technologies of mechanical film splicers, bins of dusty celluloid, and the behemoth that was the editing machine – the mighty Steenbeck. I haven’t edited a film on a Steenbeck for almost 10 years. But when I was invited to direct a film version of Krapp’s Last Tape, I couldn’t resist the possible confluence of form, content and process.15 Such comments strongly suggest an elegiac commemoration of a lost medium, a final opportunity to celebrate film before it passes into the museum and the archive. Krapp’s Last Tape is often read in similar terms: even at the time of Beckett’s death the reel-to-reel machine was approaching obsolescence. Egoyan was to commemorate the reel-to-reel recorder in another installation, Hors d’usage, the same year as Steenbeckett: ‘it’s a call to the community to go into their basements and find obsolete reel-to-reel tape recorders. We’ve accumulated about 25 so far, mostly from the Sixties, and people will come in to recount the last time they recall these machines being used’.16 What is not made clear by such an account, though, is the relation of technology to historical context in Beckett’s play: the reel-to-reel machine, far from an obsolete device, was in fact cutting-edge technology at the time of the play’s publication, in 1958. What Egoyan is responding to, then, is not the moment of the play’s creation but its status, in 2002, within Beckett’s complex archival legacy. Krapp’s Last Tape has become a museum piece, and Egoyan’s Steenbeckett links the archival place which the play now occupies to contemporary (2002) debates on film and archival technology. Indeed, when Emma Wilson asks Egoyan for his assessment of 35mm film in relation to contemporary film-making and viewing, his response sheds considerable light on the notion of an archival medium: It’s supremely impractical. There’s no question about that. I do think there’s something unique about the grain structure when you see an image directly off a negative. It’s unworldly. It’s so pristine and so arresting. It’s lovely, but you can’t justify it. There are horrors—seeing a scratched print, bad reel changes, dirt, and confusions about the very order in which a reel is to be presented. There’s something endearing about that because it speaks to our own bodies and things that we can relate to in terms of things being scratched or damaged or confused. Digital gives clarity, but there’s something we are missing. 35mm is, sensually, the best experience of watching the projected image.17 Although Egoyan begins by arguing that 35mm film is ‘impractical’, the rest of his long response is concerned with his personal investment in the aesthetics of film, up to the affirmation ‘I think 35mm will continue to exist

The Beckett Effect  25 as an archival form’ (p. 31). Egoyan has often claimed to prefer digital as a working medium, and stresses his perplexity at the decision to show Krapp’s Last Tape in a 16mm print in a screening in Paris, objecting to the registration, the movement in the frame and the sound, and noticing dirt leading to the reel change mark.18 Once again, though, practical objections are accompanied by a wistful ‘it’s touching’ (p. 27); Egoyan’s rejection of film is forever accompanied by a nostalgic reinstatement of the medium for the sensual link between film and bodily experience. The idea of film as an ‘archival form’ represents both obsolescence and a more subtle, and more shadowy, understanding of the archive. The interaction between the body and the archive is the key operative structure of Krapp’s Last Tape: more important than the details of the recorded material are the sensual texture of the old and young voices and the stark intervention of the body as Krapp sweeps the tape recorder and ledger off the table in irritation. Recent criticism has read the play in the light of the ‘prosthetic voice’ which it suggests, as Krapp apprehends his own voice as other through the technological medium of the recorder.19 The words ‘sound as a bell’ offer the same content in their repeated articulations in different recordings, but their effect differs due to the changing character of Krapp’s body over time. Voice and body thus construct a problematic of presence which is reworked in a highly sensitive fashion in Egoyan. Egoyan’s comments on ‘certain corporeal aspects of decay’ cannot be confined to the body of the film stock, but refer to the human body, whether that of old Krapp within the space of the stage-archive, or that of the viewer. In the analogue projection of Krapp, the physical presence of the film is foregrounded: the projection consists of the last shot of the film, a twenty-minute sequence filmed in a single take. In order to complete the take, a special magazine had to be ordered which would accommodate the resulting 2000 feet of film; the enormous material presence of the film dwarfs the ‘film’ itself, that is, the sequence of images which the audience is supposed to be watching. For Egoyan, this presence is, once again, ‘touching’: ‘the proximity of this huge camera to John Hurt, the physicality of it all, was very touching. I felt there must be some way to commemorate that’.20 In the analogue projection, the vast loops of film and the Steenbeck machine occupy the foreground of the spectators’ vision and overwhelm the projected images on the distant Steenbeck monitor. In the digital projection, meanwhile, the ‘perfection’ of the image is ­proclaimed by the very large screen, while the audience is crowded into a small space very close to the screen. In both cases, although in contrasting ways, the body intrudes upon spectatorship, reminding us of the sensual link between bodily experience and the production of cinematic images, and underlining the fundamental difference between digital and analogue editing. Whereas digital editing takes place through the computer interface, analogue editing is itself a bodily process of the kind illustrated in Steenbeckett; Tom Rolf, an editor making the transition to digital, has spoken of missing ‘having the film in [his] hands, around [his] neck, in [his] mouth’.21 Beckett’s

26  The Beckett Effect

Figure 1.2 Atom Egoyan, Steenbeckett, 2002. Courtesy of The Artangel Collection. Photograph: Thierry Bal.

Krapp’s Last Tape anticipates the materiality of editing: central to the play is the idea of Krapp’s manipulation of the tape in order to find the passages which interest him. Locating those passages means fast-forwarding by guesswork and listening, and repeating the process until the passage is found, in a tense interaction of body and listening. On the stage, the process is a simulation: the actor normally gives only the illusion of manipulating the tape, and Patrick Magee’s interpretation, in which the tape was indeed manipulated to find the correct passage, was a high-risk exception.22 Krapp’s fast-forwarding is only a step away from the editing imagined in Steenbeckett, and the preoccupation with the materiality of tape, and its bodily manipulation, is shared by both works.

Egoyan, Film and the Archival The complex understanding of the cinematic image which Egoyan proposes in Steenbeckett has far-reaching implications for the idea of the ‘archival medium’. For Egoyan, film is ‘archival’, not only in its status as a medium of the past (a description he repeatedly advances, only to withdraw it), but also in its capacity to reflect upon the archive. This subtle strand of Egoyan’s work resonates with that of Beckett, and equally with the theories of the image of Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rancière. The view of the image, body and presence which emerges there allows us, in turn, to tease out the archival understanding of the image as it informs the recent work of Navridis, Karasić and Bałka. Reflecting on what he calls ‘digital

The Beckett Effect  27 archiving’, Egoyan stresses the prominent place of digital technology within his work: ‘digital technology has saved me time, and given me the comfort that my work will last, if not forever, then certainly for longer than it would have [in analogue form]’.23 His comments curiously echo Krapp’s key ­preoccupations: that of lost time, and the artistic vocation to which it is sacrificed; Egoyan’s standpoints to time and narrative and, equally, to the durability of art-works, may be rather more ambivalent than appears here. For David L. Pike, such a rhetorical stance is a ‘hyperbolic defiance of the explicit message of [Steenbeckett]’, and reflects a split in Egoyan’s work between ‘a practical and an emotional attitude toward technology’ (p. 107). For all Egoyan’s pronouncements on the practical superiority of digital and on the possibilities of digital archiving, his work retains a parallel suspicion of the digital, and a nostalgia for analogue technology. One of the most important embodiments of the split is that found in Speaking Parts (1989), a film whose production took place on the cusp of the obsolescence of analogue editing. The scenario concerns the contribution of Clara, a writer, to a film which draws on the earlier death of her brother, Clarence; Clara consoles herself both with Lance, a hotel worker who obtains a role in the film, and in the video mausoleum, a cold, monumental space harbouring an unseen video technology, in which she watches clips of Clarence. The scenes in the mausoleum suggest an embracing of digital technology as a vital memorial tool, as a means of enabling the work of mourning, and as a key medium for communication. Clara uses the mausoleum to revitalise her memories of Clarence, who appears initially in close-up and then walking away from the viewer’s gaze. As Emma Wilson argues, ‘this video image, with its rhythm of arrival and departure, satisfaction and withdrawal, seems a small imitation of the child’s game with the cotton reel discussed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as he rehearses his mother’s absence, bringing her close and then letting her loose’.24 What is striking here is the protagonist’s limited movement and the elimination of narrative from the video sequence: Clarence is made present as though controlled by the viewer (Clara), appearing on demand and parading before the viewer’s gaze before walking away again. The video mausoleum thus articulates a fantasy of mastery over the lost object, and appears to bring mourning under the control of the subject (Clara). Where the role of memorial technology becomes more complex, of course, is in the fraught relation of the images of Clarence to the real: as Wilson notes, ‘Clara’s compulsive viewing in the video mausoleum […] removes her from reality and interrelation with others’ (p. 40). Clara apparently renews her capacity to engage with others in her relationship with Lance, but that relationship proves to be mediated both by technology and by the spectre of Clarence. As Clara starts a video conference with the producer of the film she is in the process of making, we expect to see Lance’s audition, the occasion on which Clara gets to know him. Not only does the audition tell Clarence’s story (the film is a fictionalised version of Clara’s relationship

28  The Beckett Effect with Lance), but the film we are watching inexplicably cuts back to the mausoleum sequence once more. The digital mausoleum is the source of an extraordinary incursion into the real, and produces a situation in which real and imaginary can no longer be satisfactorily defined. For the viewer, that logic extends to Clara, too: in its progress across the white marble expanse of the mausoleum in black dress and high heels, her image is available to imaginative manipulation in just the same way as that of Clarence. For the viewer, she is no more or less ‘absent’ than Clarence, and both images serve as spaces for fantasmatic projection. The mausoleum of Speaking Parts has become, in Ron Burnett’s description, a ‘living archive’: it is both a physical location to be visited in the real and an imaginary repertoire actualised in reading or viewing.25 The idea of the digital image, for Egoyan, is bound up with this important conception of the archive, a virtual space in which real experience and the figments of the imagination merge. That space, equally, informs Steenbeckett, which reads increasingly as a reflection on this hybrid understanding of the ‘image’. Even the comments by Egoyan which featured on the Artangel publicity for the installation feed into a notion of the image which cannot be limited to questions of film editing and storage: We used to record on spools. We filmed on reels. Our memories fell out of cans, unspooled on the floor, got caught in projectors. They used to sound scratchy. They would dim with age. Now digital technology, bearing none of the signifiers of our natural mental process, is erasing the ‘graven image’ in the recording of experience and the function of memory. Steenbeckett is a monument to the thousand natural shocks that analogue was heir to.26 In apparent contradiction of his previous comments on digital technologies, Egoyan now gives in to nostalgia for analogue. Digital technology, here, serves to erase the signifiers of ‘our natural mental process’; as such, it is inferior to analogue as a means of preserving memory. The last line presents a highly ambiguous conclusion, suggesting either a natural order which is now lost, or that the passage from analogue to digital is simply the latest in a long line of ‘natural shocks’ or transitions. The ‘graven image’ to which Egoyan refers here resonates in two distinct contexts: firstly, cinematic testimony to atrocity; and secondly, the mystical idea of the resurrection of the image. Both contexts originate in the ­comment’s Biblical subtext, the ban on pictorial representation in the Second Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [­ is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under the earth’ (Exodus 20.4).27 Since the late twentieth century, the ban, or Bilderverbot, has come to stand for the claimed impossibility of representing the Holocaust.28 As the

The Beckett Effect  29 term suggests, the general claim of the impossibility of representation has a specifically visual dimension: cinematic and photographic representations provoke particular cultural anxieties. As Marianne Hirsch claims, visual representation of the Holocaust has tended to centre on a limited repertoire of ‘iconic’ images; she asks, ‘if these images, in their obsessive repetition, delimit our available archive of trauma, can they enable a responsible and ethical discourse in its aftermath?’.29 Egoyan is acutely sensitive to the implications of the debate for cinematic representation, while the work of Mirosław Bałka offers a still more acute response to the image ban, as we shall see in the next chapter. First, though, I turn to another kind of ­ethical discourse, that which arises in recent ­Beckett-­inflected installation art.

Digital Paratexts, Video and Ontology In the second half of this chapter I consider two further contexts which continue to interrogate the archive: installation work directly inspired by Beckett; and virtual worlds (often appearing within physical installations) which respond to Beckett’s universe. Work carried out in both contexts, I contend, is bound up with Beckett’s conception of the archival, and with the way that conception continues to shape contemporary understandings of the archive and of deixis. In discussing the first of those contexts, I use Gérard Genette’s theory of the ‘paratext’ to consider work which is not properly part of the Beckett canon and which remediates elements of Beckett’s work as installation art. Like Genette’s idea of the ‘zone between text and off-text’,30 or Lejeune’s notion of the ‘fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text’, that work modifies our understanding both of Beckett’s work and of the media within which it (often problematically) operates.31 The idea of the digital paratext, meanwhile, is acquiring specific meanings within new media theory, where understandings of ‘text’ have expanded to include code which is not normally made visible in the course of web navigation, but which is nonetheless part of the fabric of web pages. Text, in these new definitions, acquires a specifically archival aspect, linking the visible text on the viewer’s display to the database operations by which it is produced. In much recent Beckett-inspired installation work, the Beckettian ontology of the image is complicated by a changed standpoint to indexicality and by the progress of the viewer through the work in the present, conditions with rich ethical implications. As Stan Gontarski has suggested, installation art significantly modifies the performance history of Beckett’s work, and may help answer Gontarski’s own 2006 question on the future of Beckett’s theatre in performance. For Gontarski, Beckettian performance can be reinvented through the reimagining of Beckett’s work in hybrid artistic forms, in particular in the plastic arts. For Gontarski, ‘the continued development of

30  The Beckett Effect the hybrid art that I take to be Beckett’s late theatre, an art of icons, images and afterimages, ghosts of memories’, is ‘as closely related to sculpture as to what we have traditionally called theatre’ (p. 442). Conversely, such hybrid installations, which continue to operate under the Beckettian signs of the posthumous and the entropic, have much to say about contemporary installation art and the troubled ontology which is so crucial to our evolving understanding of the archive. Gontarski’s own multimedia production of Beckett’s thirty-five-second ‘play’ Breath constitutes one of the inaugural acts in this post-Beckettian tradition. The move from theatre to installation space is the founding condition for Gontarski’s installation, which arose from the invitation to participate in an event at Florida State University Gallery and Museum in 1992. The main focus of the event was the ‘electronic satellite reception of a piece of hypertext poetry, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)’.32 William Gibson’s hypertext, once broadcast simultaneously to nine sites around the world, would be destroyed by its own viruses, thus enacting a dramatically speeded-up version of the technological obsolescence that informs Krapp’s Last Tape and is later recrafted by Egoyan in Steenbeckett. Although a limited edition livre d’artiste was subsequently produced, the paper was treated with photosensitive chemicals so that the ink faded after a period of time. Such a wilfully ephemeral work poses a particular archival dilemma: it can only be referenced in the form of archival copies, given the disappearance of the original. Such copies were indeed made following the initial broadcast, both in the form of a bootleg video of the broadcast and online dissemination of the text of the poem.33 On the websites which house them, notably The Agrippa Files, Gibson’s text is dwarfed by its archival paraphernalia, including selections from the art book, an emulation of the poem in its self-destructive electronic form and ‘a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception’.34 This, then, is an archival artefact: Agrippa now owes its existence to archives. At the same time, the work contains an implicit commentary on the problem of archival technology: its obsolescence is accelerated but not different in kind from that of other books, whose paper is itself photosensitive, and its rapid electronic self-destruction mimics that of electronic formats which become unreadable over time. It is in this ‘fragile and ephemeral artistic environment’ in the Florida State University Gallery and Museum that Gontarski presented Breath, replacing the proscenium arch with ‘an oversized prop television, through the absent screen of which Breath would be performed “live,” if that’s the word’.35 Gontarski’s self-deprecating account emphasises the ‘clownish’ appearance of the simulated screen and the difficulty visitors may have had in distinguishing the piece from other art objects in the gallery display ‘(or from the gallery’s refuse outside the service entrance, for that matter)’ (p. 244), but this is to downplay the importance of the move from the theatre to the gallery, and the nascent dialogue initiated there with the digital archive.

The Beckett Effect  31 What is already striking in Beckett’s Breath is the work’s convergence with installation art, as the presence of the actor on the stage is replaced by the depiction of a static scene, punctuated by modulations in light and the ‘faint brief cry’ which occurs twice in the published text.36 Rather than a theatre audience, such a work cries out for the progress of the viewer through the installation space and for dialogue with the other works installed within that space. Breath, first performed as part of Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! in 1969, is an extremely brief work, even for Beckett, and in this anticipates the viewer’s brief attention to works in the gallery rather than the longer period traditionally spent in the theatre auditorium. As Gontarski argues, the recent installation work of Adriano and Fernando Guimarães extends the redeployment of Beckett-inspired performance as installation and  the concern with duration seen there. The Guimarães have incorporated Breath in a number of works, including We Were Not Long … Together (2002–03), and a series of works whose titles include the word ‘Respiração’. Here, the visible body is reinstated but in a radically reimagined context: in Respiração Mais, actors enter water-filled tanks fully dressed; the short duration of the piece is understood anew as the period between two breaths.

Figure 1.3 Coletivo Irmãos Guimarães, Breath More. Photograph: Ismael Monticelli.

Instead of the span of life (between two cries of ‘recorded vagitus’, one signalling birth and one heralding death), Breath stands for a threatening suspension of living processes, the interval between breaths (signalled by a bell) which threatens to end them.37 Indeed, in some versions of Breath+, a transparent box or tank contains a naked actor who gradually runs out of air while another actor, impassive and oblivious, gives an academic lecture on the cultural meanings of breathing.

32  The Beckett Effect

Figure 1.4 Coletivo Irmãos Guimarães, Breath Less. Photograph: Ismael Monticelli.

As Gontarski argues, ‘the human is reduced to the machinery of respiration, man or woman reduced to metabolic function’.38 Such work enormously extends the frame of reference of Beckett’s work, while continuing to create resonances with the Beckett performance tradition. In particular, the use of tanks in the Guimarães projects creates an inevitable echo of Damien Hirst’s shark installations, in which the tank contains embalming fluid. The precariousness of life, and the possibility of preserving its archival simulacrum, is set, in pieces like A Thousand Years, against the very real decay which requires that Hirst’s work is periodically remade. Hirst himself looms large in the performance history of Breath due to the version he directed for the Beckett on Film project in 2000. In contrast to the static stage image of ‘miscellaneous rubbish’ in the published text, Hirst’s film version creates an unmoving expanse viewed by a jerkily unstable camera-eye, challenging the static viewpoint of the theatre and of filmed performance. As such, the film is a rare example of intermedial reinvention within the Beckett on Film project, with which Gontarski associates the goal of ‘homage’ to Beckett. By contrast, the Guimarães’ multimedia works, taking place principally in South America, combine elements of Beckett works with a range of video, photographic and physical ephemera and, for

The Beckett Effect  33 Gontarski, come to represent ‘the very opposite of the Beckett on Film project taking shape at almost the exact same time in Europe’ (p. 445). In the eclectic array of ephemera within which Beckett’s work is just one element, the Guimarães brothers’ projects, for Gontarski, ‘create something like their own Beckett archive, Beckett in or as a cabinet of curiosities, a Beckett made up of cultural shards’ (p. 446). In Nikos Navridis’ Breath (2005), installed initially at the 2005 Venice Biennale and subsequently in Toronto, Banff and Istanbul, the backdrop of debris which is common to nearly all versions of Breath is self-consciously re-created through the medium of video. More immersive than Hirst’s or the Guimarães’ versions, Navridis’ Breath places the viewer at the centre of the installation, as he or she walks over the projected film of the debris. The video sequence appears to transform the floor of the installation environment into a conveyor belt, and its projection at varying speeds clearly disorientates the viewers, preoccupied as they are with navigating both the gallery space and the video. Like the Guimarães works, then, Navridis sets spectatorship free from the confines of the proscenium arch, and further questions the stability of Breath as an artefact. Breath, always already an embryonic installation, bears a powerful formulation of Beckett’s ever-present imagery of physical decay and fragmentation: the work associates birth and death with the refuse which is physically made present. Beckett’s text, we infer, is itself a ‘found object’ ready to be reclaimed from the rubbish heap.39 Like Gontarski’s Breath, the piece marks the transition of Beckett’s work into the arena of installation art; as Navridis argues, ‘the challenge that Beckett’s text [Breath] presented had been the relocation of a theatrical language into a visual arts condition’.40 Beyond the various mediations by which we know Breath, in this latest remaking the viewer negotiates the problematics of refuse and remaking in physically entering a space constituted by mediation. The space of spectatorship becomes a ‘hypersurface’ defined by both physical and virtual boundaries: its physical make-up is overlaid by the virtual, projected images, and these interfere with the viewer’s apprehension of space in the ‘real’. For Gabriella Giannachi, such a mode of viewing doubles the presence of the spectator: ‘the viewer may be part of both the realm of the image and the sphere of the real, and may modify one through the other’.41 It is in this liminal space that the refashioning of Beckett’s theatre now takes place.

Virtual Beckett The second strand of contemporary Beckett-related work which I consider here is explicitly concerned with the creation of virtual worlds. The presence of Beckett in digital media is now growing exponentially, from the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which promises to make available digital facsimiles and transcriptions of all the extant manuscripts of Beckett’s works, to a plethora of individual and institutional websites, YouTube videos and even a chat room performance of Waiting for Godot, ‘waitingforgodot.com’.42 As Sean McCarthy argues, there are signs of a performance community in

34  The Beckett Effect the online virtual world Second Life (SL), signalled, for example, by the Second Life production of Eh Joe directed by SaveMeOh, the avatar of a real-world Dutch theatre director, in 2007.43 McCarthy appeals, in analysing work of this kind, for the creation of ‘a large Beckett virtual space, an entire Beckett “island” partly modeled on the many education campuses that already work in SL’ (p. 113). Such a space, McCarthy argues, ‘would include a museum that contains a range of archival material such as interactive manuscripts, facsimiles of correspondence, photographs and playbills from famous productions, and streamed video of past performances and adaptations’ (p. 113). The Beckett ‘island’, then, would constitute an online performance and archival space with particular affordances. Such a space, though, already exists, in the large secondary Beckett archive constituted by the totality of existing online Beckett-related material, which now co-exists with, and subtly modifies, the ‘real-world’ Beckett archives. The Beckett archive cannot now be straightforwardly equated with the repositories which house physical and electronic documents (the Beckett archives at Reading, Dublin and Austin, for example) and the institutions which manage them. Just as the archive supplements the published body of work with the ‘grey canon’ of manuscripts, correspondence and other paratextual matter, so the archive is now itself accompanied by a grey or virtual archive. The digital entities which subsist there, meanwhile, are archival in a double sense: both as they engage with Beckett’s work and its archival preoccupations and, equally, in their own literally archival condition, as packets of data served up from databases. The most significant engagements with Beckettian virtuality to date are those of Carmin Karasić’s The Lost Ones (1999) and Kenderdine and Shaw’s Unmakeable Love (2008). Karasić’s work highlights the ontological problems of Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1971) by creating a virtual environment (or environments) inspired by that work. The piece was initially created for the Attleboro Museum of Art in 1999, and subsequently remade for the Brodigan Gallery, Groton School, also in Massachusetts. It consists of three interlinked instantiations of the world of The Lost Ones: an outer cylinder, in which viewers can physically move around; an inner cylinder, which contains two hundred small, human-like figures made of foam (or, later, clay); and the virtual space of a monitor within the inner cylinder, and positioned beneath a raised floor or surface in the inner cylinder. The virtual world which the piece contains is made visible in two ways: through the monitor, and in the form of projections on the inside wall of the outer cylinder. It thus reconsiders and extends the problematic of searching which is central to Beckett’s text, concerned as it is with a ‘population’ of ‘searchers’: ‘abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one’ (p. 55). The fullest realisation of The Lost Ones as a virtual environment, meanwhile, must be Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw’s Unmakeable Love, ‘a revisioning of Beckett’s initial investigation that focuses and makes

The Beckett Effect  35 interactively tangible a state of confrontation and interpolation between our selves and another society that is operating in a severe state of physical and psychological entropy’.44 Following its premiere during eArts/eLandscapes, at the Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology in September 2008, the piece was reinstalled at Un Volcan Numérique in Le Havre in June 2009. REACTOR, the technology on which the piece is based, creates a hexagonal viewing area five metres in diameter comprising six screens, and which looks onto a central inner space. Viewers are granted glimpses of a virtual world populated by computer-generated humanoid searchers: small areas of the inner arena are lit up by ‘virtual torches’ which the viewers direct towards it.

Figure 1.5 Interactive torches and mixed reality video in UNMAKEABLELOVE © Sarah Kenderdine & Jeffrey Shaw 2008/2015.

In this mixed reality environment, the viewers are free to move around the viewing area but cannot enter the inner realm inhabited by the searchers. Although the effect is highly immersive, including a simulated illumination of other viewers by means of the virtual torches, viewing is restricted by the limited number of torches and screens (six in each case) and the impossibility of moving between the inner and outer areas. The idea of creating a virtual counterpart to the textual world of The Lost Ones, a world which itself creates multiple problems of realisation, is intriguing. Each of the virtual environments is itself a form of archive,

36  The Beckett Effect a virtual, informational entity which encodes and endlessly redeploys the structures of Beckett’s text. At the same time, each is highly attentive to the place of indexicality in virtual worlds, a sphere in which the indexical takes on striking new meanings. Before returning to the details of Karasić’s engagement with The Lost Ones, I pause now to consider the way indexicality, which both dominates discussions of how we view photographs and subtends the functioning of the archive, can be understood in virtual worlds. In the virtual, indexicality is gradually unmoored from its established associations with photographic and cinematic realism. As Lev Manovich notes, although basic photographic realism was achieved relatively quickly in computer programming, such advances continue to beg the question of how virtual aesthetics are to be understood.45 For all that cinema may be ‘the art of the index’, the virtual environment cannot be defined so simply,46 and even a photographically realistic virtual world diverges sharply from Bazin’s understanding of the direct impression of phenomena on film. As Crandall and Levich argue, virtual reality (VR) simulations do not always have an obvious ‘real’ counterpart: a virtual snake, for example, may refer either to a ‘real’ snake or a real hallucination of a snake: ‘without further clarification, there is simply no way of knowing how the purveyors of VR intend us to construe the connection between what is on the screen and what is in the world. The notion of VR is compatible with the occurrence of anything, because anything can, under the right description, be a real thing of its kind’.47 Virtuality, then, creates a crucial ontological instability, and that instability casts redefines the kind of indexicality which Bazin derives from Peirce.

Virtual Indexicality If indexicality continues to play a role in virtual worlds, it must be radically redefined. As Johnny Hartz Søraker argues, the terminology of virtuality continues to present grave problems for discussions of ontology. Although Søraker’s analysis aims to construct a comprehensive taxonomy of the terminology of virtuality, virtual reality and virtual worlds, I retain here the strand concerning indexicality. Indexicality, as I have so far defined it, concerns context-dependent phenomena: the photograph becomes an index by registering the imprint of objects, and by gesturing to their separate existence in the real. Similarly, in language, ‘I’, ‘you’ and so on create meaning both by naming participants in a speech event and by ‘pointing’ to referents which exist elsewhere. As Søraker argues, though, deictics like ‘here’ and ‘there’ ‘do not make literal sense unless the person who uses the words has a known location and orientation in a three-dimensional space’.48 The validity of Søraker’s distinction surely depends on the type of referentiality required by the definition of indexicality; in fact, ‘here’ and ‘there’ often function precisely by gesturing towards an elsewhere that cannot be instantly apprehended by the viewer or reader. The location cannot be identified, but the idea is understood. These ambiguous gestures continue to exist within

The Beckett Effect  37 virtual worlds: Bałka’s How It Is (2009) is a prime example, and will be discussed in Chapter 2. This point of contention aptly expresses the encounter of textual and virtual worlds, that is, virtual environments which must be accessed through technological means other than reading. The nature of the viewer’s interaction with the environment in virtuality means that the definition of the position he or she takes up within the environment takes on a critical importance. For this reason, Søraker argues, current definitions of virtuality must build on the location-specific understanding of indexicality: In this second use, indexicality is not only a property of words, but also a property of our relation to our surroundings. As an example, trying to orient oneself by use of a map is entirely pointless if one does not know one’s location on the map. Thus, stationary maps typically have a ‘you are here’ marker, which serves as an index from which you can orient yourself. In this sense of the word, ’indexicality’ means to have a discreet [sic], subjective (or ego-centric) position from which we act and orient ourselves in a three-dimensional world. (p. 18) Such a form of indexicality takes on considerable significance in relation to virtual worlds, where the navigation of the virtual environment tends to privilege spatial rather than linguistic indexicality. In virtual reality, as Søraker continues, indexicality requires an explicitly spatial relation to the viewer’s ‘real’ viewpoint: ‘for virtual reality, indexicality is necessary but not sufficient; it requires your indexical location, orientation and movements in the virtual environment to actually correspond to the indexical location, orientation and movement of your physical body – it requires what I will refer to as a genuine “first-person view”’ (p. 20). In a virtual world, the viewer may, for example, navigate using a computer mouse; the ‘index’ is present in the virtual world (frequently in the form of a cursor or point-of-view marker), but proves to entertain a complex relation to linguistic indexicality. Søraker’s argument makes location-specific indexicality the sine qua non of virtual worlds, and thereby implies that other forms of indexicality are impossible within them. I suggest, by contrast, that other forms of indexicality arise in The Lost Ones due to the work’s complex mapping of physical search onto ontological quest, and that archivalist installation is characterised by the encounter of spatial indexicality and deixis. Location-specific indexicality is problematised in the text both in the presentation of the female character with long hair and downcast eyes who is described as ‘the north’ and, equally, in the complex ontological situation which arises from it.49 The character serves as a point of orientation both within the narrator’s account and for the ‘last searcher’ to whom he refers at the end, threading ‘his way to that first among the vanquished so often taken for a guide’ (p. 79). ‘The north’ serves to designate a specific location within the cylinder, a spatial rather than linguistic marker. At the same time, though, ‘the north’ is important for what it says about the reader’s own place in The Lost Ones

38  The Beckett Effect and the ways in which the identification of linguistic and spatial reference points leads only to further dilemmas. This closing passage describes the end of the last searcher’s quest, apparently signalling the end of life in the ­cylinder: ‘he himself after a pause impossible to time finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends’ (p. 79). After the s­earchers’ frenetic attempts to find a ‘place’ in the preceding narrative, the ending suggests an end to movement and a state in which fixed locations can be deciphered. The complication, however, lies in the ontological quest which, for the reader and viewer, is only just beginning. Karasić amplifies the implicit suggestion that the reader of The Lost Ones ends up inhabiting a similar condition to that of the unnamed searchers, a possibility which has been amply explored in Beckett criticism.50 In Karasić’s piece, searching takes place not once, but three times: in the VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) world shown via the monitor and projections; in the physical presence of the human models; and in the situation of the viewer of the piece. The latter, as in reading the text, partly consists of observing the search which is taking place elsewhere, that is, in the virtual world. Unlike the reader of the text, the viewer of the installation is physically present within the cylinder, although only marginally so: despite the ‘presence’ which the viewer apparently achieves by entering the cylinder, he or she can only ever enter the outer cylinder. In this respect, the installation reproduces the text’s central epistemological problem, which is itself rooted in asynchronicity. As has frequently been observed, at least since P.J. Murphy’s 1990 reading, the origins of the narrator’s knowledge of the cylinder are unclear. The narrator’s account has pretensions to encyclopedic authority, and yet is presumably limited by his individual viewpoint. He refers to ‘time immemorial’ but, as Murphy observes, is ‘himself only a visitor, managing in the first fourteen sections to describe only one specific moment’ from which all his judgements are abstracted.51 It is unclear whether the narrator is physically present within the cylinder, is looking in from outside, or has knowledge of it in some other, presumably mediated, form. His involvement in the seemingly entropic ‘abode’ is not resolved at the end of the text, when he dispassionately concludes that ‘it is perhaps the end of their [the searchers’] abode’. On one level, the viewers of Karasić’s installation can orientate themselves easily: since the installation is immersive, and we physically enter the cylinder, we initially take up a viewpoint defined by our physical position within the outer cylinder. That viewpoint is subsequently complicated, however, by the ontological confusion of the encounter between the viewer and the population of searchers; by the simultaneous, parallel existence of the virtual world in cyberspace; and in the highly unstable epistemological architecture of the virtual world itself. These problems, in turn, point to the increasingly problematic treatment of deixis elsewhere in Beckett’s work, and to wider theoretical debates on virtual ontology which confront ethical questions. For all that viewers can orientate themselves within the physical confines of Karasić’s cylinder, that initial orientation is disturbed by the disjunction

The Beckett Effect  39 between viewers and the searchers, and equally by that between the physical presence of the searchers in the inner cylinder and their virtual presence within the projected VRML world. The striking physical differences between viewer and searcher create an apparently reassuring ontological separation between them: the searchers are only 4″ tall and coloured blue. They are modelled, moreover, on Giacometti’s disconcerting, elongated human figures, hardly a naturalistic reference point. The separation of viewer and searcher crumbles, though, when it is realised that each is engaged in precisely the same activity, that is, attempting to understand the cylinder world. This is at the heart of Susan Brienza’s classic account: ‘if the story presents a statement about man’s futile search for order and meaning in the world this is translated easily into a comment on the reader’s futile search for order and meaning in the piece itself. Thus the reader becomes one of the searchers trying to find a critical “way-out” of the cylinder’.52 Viewers are further disorientated in the parallel presentation of the searchers in the VRML world shown on the monitor and via the projected images. The apprehension of the searchers as physical forms is undercut by their virtual aspect, and viewers question the ‘reality’ of the version of The Lost Ones within which they are physically located. In Unmakeable Love, meanwhile, the separation between viewer and searcher is apparently underlined by the impossibility of physically entering the central area of the work. Although the contours of the searchers’ bodies are more naturalistic than in Karasic’s The Lost Ones, suggesting a greater likelihood of identification between viewer and searcher, any such likelihood recedes in view of the relentless objectification of the searchers’ bodies by the viewers’ gaze. Because the spectacle of the inner arena is apprehended via relatively fixed viewing positions and, above all, guided by the ‘light’ of the torches, viewers are acutely aware of their distance from the searchers. Rather than compromising immersive experience, the need to handle the torch in order to view the searchers may in fact enhance the central scenario of Unmakeable Love, that is, a ‘severe state of physical confinement, evoking perhaps a prison, an asylum, a detention camp’. Where the viewing dynamics of the piece become more complex is in the augmented reality effect created when viewers direct the torch not at the bodies of the searchers in the central arena but at other viewers who are themselves looking in from the opposite side. As the torches do not emit light but serve to highlight portions of the virtual environment, simulating pools of light within it, they should not illuminate the bodies of other viewers in the opposite viewing area. In fact, though, the viewers are themselves filmed by infra-red cameras while in the process of viewing the searchers. The ‘illumination’ of the other viewer is itself a simulation, and one which blurs the boundaries between the real and virtual environments: ‘the resulting ambiguity experienced between the actual and rendered reality of the viewers’ presences in this installation reinforce[s] the perceptual and psychological tensions between “self” and “other”’.53

40  The Beckett Effect

Figure 1.6 Interactive torches in UNMAKEABLELOVE © Sarah Kenderdine & Jeffrey Shaw 2008/2015.

Spatial indexicality is thus only half the story: the identification of the physical location which serves to orientate the viewer is no defence against the extraordinary epistemological disorientation wrought by The Lost Ones. That disorientation is already present within Beckett’s text, moreover, as the text undermines its own fictive reality by presenting internally inconsistent dimensions.54 The experience of reading The Lost Ones thus uncannily anticipates the disorientation which characterises Karasić’s scenario in ­particular: the further we delve into the construction of the cylinder, the more its tentative reality unravels. We are left contemplating the self-professed artificiality of the narrator’s creation, a situation which can lead only to further doubt as to the identity of the narrator. The narrator of The Lost Ones never becomes the object of the text’s descriptive agenda: no contextualising information is presented about him, and his identity can only be deduced from his all-­ consuming attempt to provide a highly detailed, apparently scientific account of the cylinder, ‘inside a cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony or a total surface of roughly twelve hundred square metres of which eight hundred mural’ (p. 59). Despite his pretensions to objectivity and exhaustive cataloguing, it transpires that the narrator is not infallible: descriptive passages are followed by the admission ‘that is not quite accurate’ (p. 58). The virtual rearticulations of The Lost Ones highlight the epistemological instability of the original and foreground the interrogation of indexicality

The Beckett Effect  41 in Beckettian narration. In The Lost Ones the narrator is dramatically marginalised within his own discourse, subsisting only in the form of the ‘wild surmise’ (p. 57) which he makes about the existence of a way out of the cylinder, or the rhetorical ‘so much for a first aperçu of the abode’ (p. 57). Such expressions suggest the possibility of a human viewpoint (their stylistic colour somewhat exceeds their value in imparting information), and yet that viewpoint cannot be located. The question of the narrator’s identity is never resolved, and at the end of the text his account returns to the objective mode, although its potential fallibility is again acknowledged: ‘so much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder’ (p. 79). In this, the text recalls the narratorial problematics which famously characterise the opening of The Unnamable: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’.55 Although the narration is saturated with deictics here, their referents are unavailable, and to read the text is (as in The Lost Ones) to enter into the search which the narrator’s ‘hypotheses’ announce (p. 287). Although the question of the speaker’s physical location is never satisfactorily resolved, we understand the terms of the Unnamable’s enquiry, that is, his attempts to understand the place from which his speech issues. The ‘where’ of his narration can only be understood in terms of this question, which refers not to a physical location but to a discursive problem. That problem is the referent, and can still be understood within the precepts of indexicality. The Lost Ones, then, enlarges upon the existing problematic of Beckettian narratorial desubjectification: while The Unnamable proceeds by dramatically failed deixis (endlessly repeating the ‘I’ which is never fully apprehended in the text), The Lost Ones is remarkable for its complete avoidance of the first person. In its removal of the first-person pronoun, the text opens the way to a new kind of simulation in which the reader’s immersion in the fictive reality is not characterised by the insistent interventions of the narrator’s voice or the iteration of his position. In this, The Lost Ones anticipates the ontological problems which arise in the virtual worlds we have considered. In Karasić’s and Kenderdine and Shaw’s cylinders, viewers’ progress through a set of physical locations produces not knowledge but disorientation, just as readers’ understandings of the cylinder gradually unravel. As a result of their negotiation of the cylinder world, reader and viewer enter into an undecidable ontology: the process of observing virtual phenomena seems to negate the understanding of those phenomena which observation proposes.

Ontology, Virtuality and Ethics The epistemological dilemmas of The Lost Ones have further ethical implications, which I now consider in the light of two recent debates, on micro and macro states and their ontological and ethical consequences. The first strand, referred to as ‘digital ontology’, concerns the belief that reality can ultimately be broken down into discrete, indivisible units of data, and that the physical universe can be understood in terms of the computation of these

42  The Beckett Effect units. The most famous statement arising from the theory is Konrad Zuse’s claim that ‘the universe is being deterministically computed on some sort of giant but discrete computer’.56 The idea is fundamentally compatible with the vision of The Lost Ones, whose troublingly open-ended epistemology implies mechanical omniscience of the kind that Zuse, writing at around the time that Beckett completed The Lost Ones, suggests. The Lost Ones offers a dispassionate account of the declining civilisation of the cylinder world, and Beckett’s narrator privileges the construction of informational taxonomies over affective engagement. Rather than focusing on the ‘searchers’ as individuals, they are referred to as ‘bodies’ (p. 55). The human population, then, is reduced to an array of ‘data’ and ‘evidences’ (p. 69) to be computed in the course of the narration, and there is no sense of a qualitative distinction between human and other phenomena in the text. Light in the cylinder is considered at length (‘how it throbs with constant unchanging beat and fast but not so fast that the pulse is no longer felt’ (p.  68)), and its variations appear to be the narrator’s main concern, rather than the blindness which they ultimately cause (p. 69). If the human is reduced to the status of data here, the text uncannily anticipates one of the central operations of virtuality. In the transformation of The Lost Ones into a virtual environment, the searchers must literally be turned into data packets in order to feature in the virtual world: the human figures are photographed with a digital camera and the resulting data encoded in the VRML simulation. Karasić’s subsequent, unfinished work on The Lost Ones takes the process a stage further: at the Better than Reality workshop at the V2 Lab in Rotterdam in 2008, Karasić created a ‘pointcloud’ representing the bodies of participants in digital form using a 3D laser scanner.57 Motion capture, equally, is the basis of the creation of the searchers in Unmakeable Love, each composed of a ‘12,000 triangle polygonal model’, with additional animations subsequently added by hand. Once again, the dynamics of virtuality replicate those of the source text, as the literal conversion of human forms into data re-enacts one of the central processes of Beckett’s text. A key question to arise from operations like these is that of the ontological and ethical status of these digital forms; the second type of debate which I consider concerns digital phenomena at the opposite end of the scale to the macro-level considered in theories of digital ontology. Here, Luciano ­Floridi’s work on digital ontology involves an ethical understanding of ‘digital entities’, while that of Rafael Capurro proposes ethical readings of contemporary conceptions of information by relating those conceptions to their grounding in Heideggerian understandings of Being.58 For Capurro, digital ontology is ‘today’s pervading understanding of Being’;59 we are trapped in the condition of virtuality, that is, of apprehending reality predominantly through the prism of the virtual. Our understanding of knowledge, according to Capurro, is thus borne of ‘the pervading view according to which today we believe that we understand things in their being as far as we are able to digitalize them’ (p. 179). Rather than the threat to indexicality

The Beckett Effect  43 sometimes associated with digital media,60 (periodically in Egoyan’s cinema, and elsewhere in relation to digital photography), the digital and the virtual have instead become the privileged means of accessing reality. For Capurro, such a situation leads to ‘the interpretation of all beings as digital ones’ (p. 178), so that Berkeley’s esse is percipi must be reformulated as ‘“to be is to be digital” or “their esse is computari”’ (p. 178). The understanding of information ethics in Capurro’s and Floridi’s work has significant implications for my discussion of archival processes. In his call for an ‘ethics of the infosphere’ (p. 182), Capurro draws heavily on Floridi’s work, in particular Floridi’s claim of agency for all ‘digital entities’. For Floridi, the intrinsic value of such entities is sufficient to warrant their consideration in ethical terms: ‘the minimal condition of possibility of an entity’s least intrinsic value is to be identified with its ontological status as an information object. All entities, even when interpreted as only clusters of information, still have a minimal moral worth qua information objects and so may deserve to be respected’.61 In a sense, this is the opposite of the situation depicted in The Lost Ones, in which human agents are treated as informational entities and excluded from ethical relations; for Floridi, by contrast, the most minute informational operations are endowed with agency and deemed worthy of ethical attention. This extraordinary ethics informs the argument of subsequent chapters, in which the archive is more explicitly considered in relation to traumatic experience. In the work of Bałka, Kolbowski and Boltanski, the archive is implicitly or explicitly related to the subject’s experience of trauma and to the prospect of creating a record of that experience. Here, archival ethics are a pressing concern: the archive may empower the subject in its promise to record experience, and yet the subject’s voice subsists within the archive only in the form of the archival record. The standpoint of the archive to speaking subjects is an ambiguous one, and produces the parallel concern, in contemporary art, with both live voices and archival structures. That concern, which we have encountered repeatedly in the present chapter, is reflected in Bałka’s interest in video testimony and archival film, as well as a recurrent preoccupation with the virtual and with archival time. Those preoccupations, as we shall now see, continue to be framed by Beckett’s treacherous deictics, most notably the repeated promise of the questionable ‘I’ to disclose how it is.

Notes 1. Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1990), p. 222. 2. Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 215. 3. Nicholas Johnson, ‘Analogue Krapp in a Digital Culture’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 20, no. 2 (2011), 213–20 (p. 217). 4. Beckett, Endgame, in Complete Dramatic Works, p. 120. 5. In UoR MS1659, the setting ‘a late evening in the nineteen eighties’ is altered by Beckett to read ‘a late evening in the future’. MS 1659, 1r; see Mary

44  The Beckett Effect Bryden, Julian Garforth and Peter Mills (eds.), Beckett at Reading: Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at the University of Reading (Reading: Whiteknights Press/Beckett International Foundation, 1998), p. 59. 6. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p. 1. 7. S.E. Gontarski, ‘Reinventing Beckett’, Modern Drama, 49, no. 4 (Winter 2006), 428–51. 8. Peggy Phelan, ‘Introduction: The Ends of Performance’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (eds.), The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 9. 9. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005), p. 6 (original emphasis). 10. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., ‘“Still Living Flesh”: Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body’, Theatre Journal, 45, no. 4 (1993), 443–60 (p. 450). 1. See in particular Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s 1 Drama (London: Routledge, 2010). 12. Egoyan, quoted in ‘Cine Art’, Time Out 15 February 2002, quoted in David L Pike, ‘The Passing of Celluloid, the Endurance of the Image: Egoyan, Steenbeckett, and Krapp’s Last Tape’, in Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan, ed. by Jennifer Burwell and Monique Tschofen (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), pp. 101–24 (p. 103). 13. Egoyan and Keil, ‘Searching for the Sacred in the CINematic Image’, in idea&s: the arts & science review (University of Toronto) 4, no. 2 (Autumn 2007), 22–27 (p. 24). 14. ‘Searching for the Sacred in the CINematic Image’ (p. 25). 15. Egoyan, ‘Memories Are Made of Hiss’, The Guardian, 7 February 2002, [accessed 1/11/15]. 16. Jonathan Romney, ‘Cutting Edge Tales for Reel Life’, Independent on ­Sunday 17 February 2002. [accessed 15/11/10]. 17. Emma Wilson, ‘Desire and Technology: An Interview with Atom Egoyan’, Film Quarterly, 64, no. 1 (2010), 29–37 (p. 31). 18. Egoyan, ‘Searching for the Sacred’, p. 27. 1 9. See Yoshiki Tajiri, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), in particular chapter 5. 20. Jonathan Romney, ‘Cutting Edge Tales for Reel Life’, Independent on Sunday, 17 February 2002. 21. Rex Weiner, ‘The Cutting Edge Finds Converts’, Variety (26), 27 June, 1994. On digital and analogue editing, see also Don Fairservice, Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice: Looking at the Invisible (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 22. While the ‘presentness’ of Magee’s body is emphasised here, making real as opposed to simulated interventions in the tape recording, Magee’s recorded voice was the inspiration for the play. See, for example, Ruby Cohn, ‘A Krapp Chronology’, Modern Drama, 49, no. 4 (Winter 2006), 514–24 (p. 514). 23. Egoyan, quoted in Pike, ‘The Passing of Celluloid’, p. 107. 4. Emma Wilson, Atom Egoyan (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2 2009), p. 39. 25. Ron Burnett, ‘Speaking of Parts’, in Atom Egoyan, Speaking Parts (Toronto: Coach House, 1993), pp. 9–22 (p. 18).

The Beckett Effect  45 26. Publicity leaflet, ‘Steenbeckett: Atom Egoyan’; unnumbered folio, Artangel archive, London. 27. The Holy Bible, King James Version (New York: Oxford Edition: 1769); King James Bible Online, 2008. [accessed 11/8/15]. 28. In this context, see Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallflower, 2008). 29. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, in Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, pp. 215–46 (p. 218). For a recent response to the problem, see Angi Buettner, Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe: The Cultural Politics of Seeing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 30. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2. 31. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 45, quoted in Genette, Paratexts, p. 2. 32. Gontarski, ‘Reinventing Beckett’, p. 442. 33. Although the text was circulated on the Internet, it is unclear whether the text originated from the bootleg video or from the disk housing the self-destructing electronic version. See Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, ‘Text Messaging: the Transformissions of “Agrippa”’, in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 213–48. 34. The Agrippa Files [accessed 11/8/15]. 35. Gontarski, ‘Reinventing Beckett’, p. 442. 36. Beckett, Breath, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 371. 37. Beckett, Breath, in Complete Dramatic Works, p. 371. 38. S.E. Gontarski, ‘Redirecting Beckett’, in Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin (eds.), The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett (Bari and Rome: Editori Laterza, 2009), pp. 327–41 (pp. 335–36). 39. Gontarski, ‘Redirecting Beckett’, p. 333. 40. Nikos Navridis, DVD documentation, Selected Works, 1996–2005 DVD (2005). 41. Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 95. 42. On the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, see [accessed 4/8/15]. 43. Sean McCarthy, ‘Giving Sam a Second Life: Beckett’s Plays in the Age of Convergent Media’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 51, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 102–17 (pp. 108–11). 44. Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw, ‘Unmakeable Love’. [accessed 10/06/15]. 45. Manovich, ‘Assembling Reality: Myths of Computer Graphics’, [accessed 10/06/15]. 46. Manovich, ‘What Is Digital Cinema’, (1995) [accessed 10/06/15]. 47. Richard Crandall and Marvin Levich, A Network Orange (New York: Copernicus, 1998), pp. 92–93. 48. Søraker, ‘Virtual Entities, Environments, World and Reality: Suggested Definitions and Taxonomy’, in Charles M. Ess and May Thorseth (eds.), Trust and Virtual

46  The Beckett Effect Worlds: Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford, Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 44–72 (p. 18). See also Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller (eds.), Digital Anthropology (London: A&C Black, 2013). 4 9. Beckett, The Lost Ones, in Six Residua (London: John Calder, 1999), p. 76. 50. See Susan Brienza, ‘The Lost Ones: The Reader as Searcher’, Journal of Modern Literature, special issue, Samuel Beckett, 6, no. 1 (February 1977), 148–68. 5 1. P.J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 103. 5 2. Susan Brienza, ‘The Lost Ones: The Reader as Searcher’, p. 148. 53. Kenderdine and Shaw, [accessed 10/06/15]. 4. See my Samuel Beckett and Testimony (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5 pp. 143–47. 5 5. Beckett, The Unnamable, in The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Picador, 1979), p. 287. 56. Konrad Zuse, Calculating Space (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Project MAC, 1970 [1969]), quoted in Floridi, The Philosophy of Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 319. 57. Karasić, ‘The Lost Ones Pointcloud’, unpublished archival text, fol.1. 58. Luciano Floridi, ‘Against Digital Ontology’, Synthese (2009) no. 168, 151–78. See also Luciano Floridi, The Ethics of Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 59. Capurro, ‘Towards an Ontological Foundation of Information Ethics’, Ethics and Information Technology no. 8 (2006), 175–86 (p. 175). 60. See Corey Dzenko, ‘Analog to Digital: The Indexical Function of Photographic Images,’ Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, special issue, Media Literacy, 37, no. 2, (September/October 2009), 19–23. 61. Floridi, ‘On the Intrinsic Value of Information Objects and the Infosphere’, Ethics and Information Technology no. 4 (2002), 287–304 (p. 287).

2 The Archival Testimonial Mirosław Bałka’s How It Is

How It Is may be Mirosław Bałka’s best-known installation; it is also the piece in which the complex relationship of his work to that of Beckett reaches its culmination. Installed in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern between 13 October 2009 and 5 April 2010, How It Is is a work of monumental scale: its main structure occupies a space of 3900 cubic metres (30 × 10  × 13 m). From the outset, the work endows spectatorship with seemingly intractable problems: the monumental construction threatens to overwhelm the viewer’s capacity to see, or equally to reduce the piece to a spectacle small enough to be photographed.

Figure 2.1 Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, The Unilever Series, Tate Modern, London, 13 October 2009–5 April 2010 © Mirosław Bałka. Courtesy © Tate Images and White Cube.

48  The Archival Testimonial I want now to link the promise of disclosure which is at the heart of How It Is to the problem of deixis considered in the previous chapter. As we have seen, the dilemmas of Beckett’s unstable ‘I’ are provisionally resolved in mixed reality installations by Karasić and Kenderdine and Shaw in which the subject is no longer a speaking subject but a virtual body. The multiple speakers of Beckett’s prose represent its most treacherous deictic of all; in the installation works I have considered, the speaking ‘I’ is apparently removed. Deixis, however, comes to the fore once more in contemporary discussions of virtuality, in which location-specific indexicality is a crucial building block in understandings of spectatorship, and in recent debates on the relationship of the white cube and what I shall refer to as the black box. The black box of Bałka’s How It Is implicitly recalls both the darkened video projection space within the gallery and the black box flight recorder. In this, it responds to the attempt to rethink our relationship to cultural memory through the image archive in Alfredo Jaar’s work, and the related engagement with photojournalism in the work of the photographer Luc Delahaye. Both artists’ strategies show a continuing investment in deixis which is apparently in tension with that in new media installation. In placing the deictic ‘it’ at the centre of its title, Bałka’s How It Is pursues two archival strategies. The first suggests that the piece somehow refers to Samuel Beckett, in particular to Beckett’s prose work How It Is (1964) and to the inscrutable ‘it’ which lies at the heart of that text. The second concerns a process of deictic projection which links Bałka’s installation to the thematics of trauma, commemoration and mourning. How It Is signals a wider memorial preoccupation in Bałka’s work, in which archival materials are accorded a privileged position and particular attention is given to the sites of concentration camps as lieux de mémoire. The latter case is the crux of ­Bałka’s conception of the archive, as the present moment of enunciation is pitted against the archival moment of recorded, past speech, the very dilemma addressed by reference to Krapp’s Last Tape in the previous chapter.

Bałka’s How It Is and Beckett’s How It Is How It Is consists of a very large steel box, positioned at the bottom of the turbine hall ramp and only partly visible from the entrance to the turbine hall. When visitors have walked the length of the hall they can approach the open side of the box, which forms a second, smaller ramp. Because of its position, with the open side away from the main lighting of the hall, the interior of the box is extremely dark. Visitors can enter the box via the ramp, and to do so is, at first, to enter into a space of near-total darkness which can only be explored by touch. The complex dynamics of the piece arise from the dilemma of knowledge and sensation which arises in this space, and which is crucially modified when the viewer’s sight adjusts to the interior conditions. The thrust of the piece is precisely this epistemological dilemma: to attempt to know the interior is to enter into a black

The Archival Testimonial  49

Figure 2.2 Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, The Unilever Series, Tate Modern, London, 13 October 2009–5 April 2010 © Mirosław Bałka. Courtesy © Tate Images and White Cube.

space in which sight is briefly incapable of orientating the search. The only means of relieving the sensory deprivation which the work enforces is to turn back towards the entrance, whereupon a dim light is perceived and forms (principally those of other searchers) can be distinguished. The work promises to disclose ‘how it is’, but this constative function is instantly, and durably, threatened.1 Bałka’s How It Is implicitly suggests that its own shadowy contents, the ‘it’ which it so obscurely indicates, will be discovered by reference to Beckett, specifically by reference to Beckett’s How It Is (1964). As we shall see, the explicit signposting function of the title veils further intermedial relations while casting doubt upon the viability of the process of deixis itself. In this it is symptomatic of the peculiarly powerful standpoint to memorial discourses in Bałka’s work, and Bałka’s unique investment in the archive. Bałka’s How It Is and Beckett’s How It Is evoke a fundamentally similar situation: B ­ eckett’s protagonist is crawling in darkness and struggles to orientate himself within the poorly differentiated environment he senses around him: ‘on my face in the mud and the dark I see me it’s a halt nothing more I’m journeying it’s a rest nothing more’.2 The principal difference between the two scenarios lies in the materiality of the searcher’s environment: in contrast to the steel and fabric-covered surfaces of Bałka’s How It Is, Beckett’s landscape consists entirely of mud. Despite the divergence which it apparently signals between the two fictive worlds, though, the mud may in fact indicate a common concern with waste materials and with mediated voices.

50  The Archival Testimonial The voice of the other is a recurring concern in Beckett’s text, in which the voice appears to originate both outside the searcher’s body and within it: ‘voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me’ (p. 7). The hubbub of voices bubbles up through the mud to the narrator, who then attempts to repeat what is said: ‘I say it as I hear it’ (p. 7). The situation, then, is both material (in the narrator’s navigation of the mud) and narratorial (in his attempts to give voice to the voices he hears). The voices of others equally loom large in Bałka’s installation: given added prominence by the loss of visual cues, they are one of the few prompts to supplement touch. There are in fact two types of voice in How It Is (2009): the voices which surround us as we explore the box and the voices which can be heard in mediated, intertextual form. Standing beneath the box, as its construction on stilts allows, the murmur of voices of those inside can be heard indistinctly, like the muffled ‘murmur in the mud’ (p. 7) of Beckett’s text. Both works are concerned with the problem of knowledge which the apparently intractable environment poses, and the voice is one of the unstable phenomena to populate that environment. If Bałka’s Tate installation replaces Beckett’s mud with smooth surfaces, and with the solidity of steel, it is unusual in Bałka’s work. Bałka tends to accord ‘waste’ and found objects prime importance, as in the cycle of pieces made of soap, such as 480 × 10 × 10 (2000). The most immediate problem of voice in Bałka’s How It Is, though, is that of the intertextual, intermedial voice of Beckett within it. Bałka’s installation promises to respond to Beckett’s How It Is, and that promise is articulated first of all by the work’s title. The work’s constative promise (the undertaking to tell ‘how it is’) is coupled to an intertextual promise. The business of presenting the current state of affairs within the box will take place by referring to Beckett’s How It Is, another work which promises to define things as they are. The intertextual pledge is pursued in visual terms: Paolo Herkenhoff’s catalogue essay cements the association between Bałka and Beckett in terms of ‘impenetrable darkness’. Herkenhoff’s essay includes a reproduction of the cover of the 1964 Grove Press edition of Beckett’s How It Is, and the Roy Kuhlman design which appears there is closely imitated in the cover of the 2009 exhibition catalogue which accompanies Bałka’s ­i nstallation. 3 If the image is the key medium of the intertextual relation, it enjoys a peculiar status in the source text. Although, like Bałka’s spectator, Beckett’s narrator is unable to make out ‘real’ images, the darkness which surrounds him is the occasion for a relentless stream of mental images: ‘another image so soon again a woman looks up looks at me the images come’ (p. 11). Like Bałka’s spectator, ‘life in the light’ (p. 9) is the memory against which present experience endlessly plays. To invoke Beckett’s How It Is by means of the image is to enter into a paradox of knowledge and vision: Beckett’s work promises to supply meaning to How It Is and yet replicates the loss of visual knowledge which characterises Bałka’s How It Is. Beckett’s voice may ultimately subside into the hubbub, just one of the quoted voices by means of which the spectator of How It Is attempts to make sense.

The Archival Testimonial  51 Although Beckett’s work occupies a key position here, it is in fact only one of the multiple sources which inform the project, and which Bałka schematises in playful form in the ‘list of references’ which he supplies. The reproduction of this one-page list in the How It Is exhibition catalogue (p. 47) might suggest a straightforward formal ontology, relating the installation to its foundational ideas, but the reality is more complex. For all that Plato, Doré, Courbet, Malevicz and Blake represent important intertexts, the ambiguous formal status of the list opens up further questions. The words ‘How it is’ stand at the top of the page, but are they to be taken as a simple title (perhaps an abbreviation for ‘Sources for How It Is’), or as a signifier of the Beckettian intertext? The one-page text already shows a dense ontological layering, juxtaposing these potential points of reference with calculations concerning the installation’s construction. Rather than the casual working notes which the sheet suggests, though, I want to argue that it is a further strategic intervention in the work’s intermedial dynamics. Calculations of dimensions and intertextual sources belong to very different orders of discourse, and raise the central question of the formal limits of the art-work. Is How It Is to be understood as the physical object which occupies the turbine hall, or rather as the web of sources which the one-page document details? And even if we confine its delineation to the physical form of How It Is, does this end at the end of the ramp, or is it rather to be understood as the entire space of the turbine hall, up to and including the entrance ramp? The document receives a further instantiation: in contrast to its static, printed form in the exhibition catalogue, its headings are redeployed as hyperlinks in the virtual environment housed on the Tate website.4 This is a vital element in the architecture of How It Is, complicating the presence of the installation with a further paratext, and extending the problematics of sight and knowledge which characterise it. The virtual environment reproduces many of the terms listed in the ‘list of references’ but structures those terms very differently. Instead of standing in rough columns on the printed page, they are distributed in separate locations within the environment, and can only be accessed by the viewer’s virtual movement through it. Controlling the point of view using the mouse or cursor keys, the viewer progresses from one ‘reference’ to another; aligning the point of view with the reference often leads to further ‘references’, whether sounds, animation effects or short videos. When a video clip is triggered, it plays on a virtual screen within the environment, so that the point of view must be sufficiently close to the virtual object both to trigger the video in the first place and, subsequently, to enable satisfactory viewing. While the virtual How It Is is superficially similar to the initial experience of entering the box, and may momentarily be taken as a simulation of it, it in fact differs in several crucial ways. Unlike the box interior, it is not ‘dark’, but studded with white and grey blotches. Although navigation of the environment resembles that of the ‘real’ box, in that the limited perspective and danger of collisions inhibit movement, there is sufficient light for movement to take

52  The Archival Testimonial place. Instead of the plunge into darkness which characterises the ‘real’ box, viewing is disorientated in the overwhelming light encountered when the virtual ‘exit’ is located. The virtual environment thus stages a dialogue with its real counterpart, creating a ‘memory’ of the real space which only arises in the virtual work’s manipulation of the viewer. Both versions threaten the constative enterprise: the attempt to say just ‘how it is’ in the box is imperilled by light conditions, by the real and imagined presence of others and, in the virtual world, by the vagaries of fly-through navigation and the instability of the artefacts which the ‘references’ trigger. Most of all, though, How It Is is remarkable for its own multiple instantiations and the way they complicate the business of knowing. Neither of the instantiations of How It Is is sufficient: we have to place both in dialogue in order to grasp the work’s complex structure. To contend with multiple versions of a work is also to consider multiple times of viewing, and this aspect of the work modifies the constative structure, contextualising the descriptive act in the present with a strategy of iteration. To view How It Is at all is to view it at least twice, once in the real and once in the virtual environment which extends and reformulates many of its concerns. Such an irony is in fact written into the central reference to Beckett, which doubles the ‘moment’ of Bałka’s How It Is (2009) with that of Beckett’s (1964). Or rather, Beckett’s How It Is (1964) is an attempt to describe a present which itself depends on an earlier telling, that of ­Beckett’s Comment c’est (1961), from which it is translated. That text, in turn, is a reiteration and amplification of the earlier L’Image (1956). I turn now to the role of these twin strategies elsewhere in Bałka’s work, where the declarative present is continually brought to bear upon the archival past. That encounter is one of the most important elements of Bałka’s installation work and serves to highlight another of the key modalities of the archival: that of trauma.

The Times of the Archive: Nothere Bałka’s Primitive (2008) is concerned with a uniquely charged enunciative moment, in which former death camp guard Franz Suchomel speaks of his experiences at Treblinka. Bałka’s short film is an extract from Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah (1985), which consists exclusively of the testimonies of those involved: perpetrators, survivors and bystanders. In formal terms, Bałka’s video installation is both a response to Lanzmann and a highly idiosyncratic juxtaposition of present speech and archival material. In contrast to Shoah, which lasts for more than nine hours, Primitive consists of a three-second loop of film in which only two words are spoken, ‘Primitive, yes’. Such a structure responds to what many critics have seen as ‘Lanzmann’s refusal to include archival representations of the Holocaust in his film and his justification of this procedure on the grounds that the Shoah is uniquely resistant to representation’.5

The Archival Testimonial  53 Lanzmann’s approach is analysed by Michael d’Arcy as an ‘ethics of blindness’ which may paradoxically renew an ethical commitment it appears to liquidate.6 Lanzmann goes against the flow of most representations of the Holocaust, which involve an implicit or explicit debt to the vast archival collections relating to the camps, and excludes archival documentation from Shoah. What is most striking, though, is the manner in which Lanzmann justifies the approach. Instead of arguing for the power of testimony spoken in the present, Lanzmann argues against archival materials, and that argument does not concern the effects of the use of archival matter but rather its very existence: There were therefore no archival materials [il n’y avait donc pas d’archives]. And even if there were, I don’t really like montages of archival images [les montages d’archives]. I don’t like voice-over commentary on photos or images that seems to express a kind of institutional knowledge: one can say anything, the voice-over imposes a knowledge that does not arise directly. One doesn’t have the right to explain to the spectator what he is supposed to understand.7 Lanzmann raises two distinct problems here: the first is both ethical and aesthetic in nature, and relates to the problems inherent in montage. As Lanzmann argues, montage (like voice-over) provides means of attaching institutional messages to images. The objection does not account for the other problem which Lanzmann alludes to, however, that is, the claim that no archival materials exist concerning the camps during their operation. The claim is, literally speaking, incorrect. Even excluding the large body of written documentation, and narrowing the definition of archival materials to the filmic or photographic sense in which the term is often used by Lanzmann, documentation exists of a mass shooting in Lithuania (which Lanzmann himself mentions), and of Auschwitz. These examples do not relate directly to the camps with which Shoah is principally concerned (Treblinka, Sobibor and Chełmno), but they raise a crucial objection to the claim that no archival film of the camps exists. Lanzmann’s troubled relationship with the archive has several important implications for Bałka’s work: in its concern with present enunciation, in the specific focus on Treblinka and in its comments on the phenomenology of viewing. Those comments, in turn, feed into a larger debate on Holocaust representation and the ‘pellicule maudite’ which looms large within them. In circumscribing the moment of enunciation so brutally in Primitive, Bałka is responding to the foregrounding of that moment in Lanzmann’s work, and enquiring into the implications of Lanzmann’s apparent rejection of the archive. In the version of Primitive shown as part of Nothere at the White Cube gallery in 2009, the video monitor is positioned at the entrance of the installation, so that Suchomel regulates the entrance both as camp guard and as an ambiguously welcoming presence within the

54  The Archival Testimonial exhibition space. The viewer’s presence within the installation is progressively saturated by the piece’s historical loading: the cage-like structure of 250 × 700 × 455, Ø 41 × 41/Zoo/T (2007) is a reworking of the zoo made by the camp commander at Treblinka. As in the inscrutable mode of reference of How It Is, the invocation of history is implicit, and only becomes apparent as the result of multiple viewings. The articulated content of the work (the metal frame and the work’s numerical title) do not disclose the nature of the historical reference, and suggest the impotence of the present moment relative to it. In an apparent contradiction of Lanzmann, the present of viewing or speaking is thus subordinated to the archival past, which is required to make sense of the work yet remains resolutely beyond its reach. The most striking component of Nothere, perhaps, is the basement installation in which viewers negotiate a wooden walkway with walls 190 cm high. As in How It Is, progress through the installation amounts to a quest for meaning, as the viewer pursues an imaginary exhibition in the centre of the room. No such exhibition exists, however, and the walkway, which leads around the edges of the space, is modelled on the Schlauch at Treblinka, the tunnel connecting the gas chambers to the area where prisoners were made to undress, and a liminal space, ‘not here’, which precludes reference to an elsewhere, ‘no there’.8 This marginal location reflects Bałka’s preoccupation both with the functioning of the camps and with their extreme epistemological fragility in the present. Although many of the established historical details of the camps are derived from photographic evidence taken after their liberation, other elements can only be established by testimony: the function and, frequently, the names of locations within the camp were defined during the camp’s period of operation and can only be accurately described by those present at the time. In Yitzhak Arad’s account, for example, the nature of the Schlauch is established by reference to the testimony of SS Oberscharführer Kurt Bolender, while an alternative version is provided in the encounter between Lanzmann and Franz Suchomel, the interview which provides the basis of Bałka’s Primitive.9 Suchomel corroborates the naming of the area as the ‘funnel’ or tube (‘Schlauch’) and as ‘Ascension’ or ‘The Last Road’. He indicates the width of the Schlauch, the high walls, and adds that the sides were camouflaged to prevent prisoners seeing what went on inside, all features which subtly inform Bałka’s Nothere piece.10 Ambivalent witnesses such as Bolender and Suchomel are important both to Lanzmann’s project and that of Bałka. For Lanzmann, the imperative to testimony involves capturing the speech of perpetrators as well as survivors, not only for the factual information which their speech provides but also for the wider discoveries which it facilitates. Having promised Suchomel anonymity, Lanzmann secretly films him, making possible the scene in which Suchomel sings a song which Jewish prisoners were forced to sing at Treblinka:

The Archival Testimonial  55 Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous, at the world, the squads march to work. All that matters now is Treblinka. It is our destiny.11 The manner in which Suchomel attempts to justify his recitation of the song, ‘you want history – I’m giving you history’ (p. 105), suggests a return to the territory of the archive. Almost as though he is aware of the extraordinarily unethical discursive position which he has assumed, Suchomel tries to replace the viewpoint of the witness with that of the archive. Instead of the perpetrator speaking, and ventriloquising the Jews in whose murder he is complicit, this discourse, claims Suchomel, belongs to the archive’s register of past utterances. As Suchomel observes, this is a song which ‘no Jew knows today’: it therefore cannot be sung by a Jewish speaker, and the perpetrator’s voice is the only one which will provide access to its memorial trace. In Felman and Laub’s analysis, the song is both a vital archival document and a deeply problematic act of witnessing: As a literal residue of the real, the song is history to the extent that it inscribes within itself, precisely, this historical discrepancy, this incommensurability between the voice of its sadistic author and the voice of its tormented singers. What is historically ‘unique’ about the song is the fact that it is a Nazi-authored Jewish song that ‘no Jew knows today’. ‘You want history – I’m giving you history’. In the very outrage of its singing doubly, at two different moments (in the camp and in the film, by the victims and by Suchomel) in a voice that is not, and cannot become, its own, the song is, so to speak, the opposite of a signed testimony, an anti-testimony that consists, once more, in the absence and in the very forging of its Jewish signature.12 The song cannot be dismissed in archival terms: it does indeed contribute to the archival documentation of the camps and, like Bolender’s comments, provides information which could not be found elsewhere. At the same time, in the manner of its execution, Suchomel’s discourse constitutes an ethically aberrant intervention in the present, an ‘anti-testimony’ which can only do further violence to the victims of Treblinka. Such discourse creates a dilemma for projects like those of Lanzmann or, equally, Bałka: how can the filmmaker or practitioner’s discourse assimilate or make sense of discursive acts like those of Suchomel in the present? Lanzmann’s response is to give full reign to Suchomel’s ethical abdications, and to allow him to indict himself further through the second rendition of the song to which he urges him (‘sing it again […] But loud!’ (p. 105)). The implication at this point in Shoah is that testimony has the capacity to repeat

56  The Archival Testimonial atrocity indefinitely in the present, constituting a negative speech act of the kind Felman and Laub describe, ‘a speech act that can neither own its meaning nor possess itself as testimony’ (p. 276). Such a situation is addressed in the looped speech of Primitive and in the inscrutable architecture of spaces like the Nothere walkway, in which the abomination of Suchomel’s present enunciation is pitted against the underlying archival knowledge which it simultaneously signifies. For all that Suchomel may go on repeating ‘primitive, yes’, the accompanying structures point to the wider phenomenon of archival knowledge, the realm to which the factual details of the Schlauch belong. That realm, the piece suggests, dwarfs Suchomel’s discourse, and indicates a space to which it can never accede. In order to consider the final, photographic, component, of Nothere, I turn now to a specific debate on the status of the archival image, a debate in which Lanzmann’s and Bałka’s work is deeply implicated.

La Pellicule maudite and Holocaust Film Lanzmann’s claim ‘il n’y avait donc pas d’archives’ has deep repercussions for our understanding of post-Holocaust visual culture. Even when the archive is taken to refer narrowly to film or photographs taken during the period of operation of the camps, Lanzmann’s statement is extraordinarily difficult to justify. As we delve further into the consequences of Lanzmann’s pronouncements, they begin to look less like rational discursive positions and more like speech acts designed to make waves beyond their immediate context. Jean-Luc Godard enters this troubled territory in order to reflect on the existence of the very Holocaust materials questioned by Lanzmann, although with very different conclusions; as a result, Lanzmann and Godard are enlisted on opposite sides of a bitter debate on image fetishism and Holocaust denial with far-reaching consequences. Bałka’s work represents a critical artistic context in which the fallout from the debate is felt. Reflecting further on the existence of Holocaust film, Lanzmann extends the question to the hypothetical situation of the discovery of film of the functioning of the gas chambers: Had I found a surviving film […] shot by an SS officer which showed how three million Jews, men, women and children, died together, asphyxiated in a gas chamber in crematorium II in Auschwitz, if I had found that, not only would I not have shown it, but I would have destroyed it. I cannot say why. It goes without saying.13 One may sympathise with Lanzmann’s concern with the limits of knowledge on the Holocaust and, as is presumably the case here, anxiety at the unethical uses to which archival materials may be put. To adopt such a comprehensively antagonistic position to archival knowledge, however,

The Archival Testimonial  57 places Lanzmann in the unlikely position of destroying the very materials which would silence Holocaust deniers. Because of the incendiary position which it occupies in debates like these, the hypothetical film of the gas chambers in operation has become known as the pellicule maudite (accursed reel). The reel is also at the centre of Godard’s thinking on Holocaust representation, and surfaces in a comment Godard made in the 1990s: ‘I think that if I worked with a good investigative journalist on this, I would find images of the gas chambers after about twenty years’.14 No such film is known to exist; the extraordinary positions which its hypothetical existence has generated, though, show the cultural fault line which film of the death camps’ operation signifies. Bałka’s work addresses this fault line by filming the sites of concentration camps in the present. The resulting works straddle present and past and, equally, film and photography. The distinction between film and photographic evidence is a critical one here: the former remains hypothetical, although explosively present in recent cultural debates. Photographic evidence of the camps dating from their period of operation does exist, meanwhile, albeit in a form which is marginal both in its extent and in the phenomenology of viewing which it suggests. Lanzmann’s objections to the archival materials whose existence he nevertheless acknowledges focus on the ways in which images signify: ‘a group of Jews quickly getting off the truck and going into an anti-tank trench, where they are shot with machine guns. It’s nothing […] I call these images without imagination’.15 Perhaps Lanzmann is appealing here to the need to foster a particular kind of imaginative work in the viewer: the images’ documentary function cannot take place, after all, without such imaginative work. Lanzmann’s view appears to receive support from Georges Didi-Huberman, whose study of Holocaust photographs, Images malgré tout, opens with the declaration ‘pour savoir il faut s’imaginer’ (‘to know, one must imagine’).16 Didi-Huberman, however, argues that contemporary photographic evidence of the camps’ operation does indeed exist and that its subject matter is not unrepresentable, as Lanzmann would have it: ‘let us not invoke the unimaginable’ (p. 3). If for Lanzmann the archive can only provide ‘images without imagination’, Didi-Huberman appeals to this very imaginative capacity: the archival image is the starting point for an imaginative process which will somehow result in knowledge of the functioning of the death camps. In Images in Spite of All, such a process is analysed in relation to the four surviving photographs of Auschwitz during its operation taken clandestinely. Bałka’s work worries at the status of former camps as memorial sites by imaginatively re-presenting them in the present in photographic and cinematic form. Treblinka, in particular, is approached by means of a strategy of veiled, indeterminate allusion which implicitly responds to Didi-Huberman’s phenomenology of viewing and to the assumptions about truth-telling which characterise the pellicule maudite debate.

58  The Archival Testimonial

From Winterreise to Jetzt: Simulating the Archival Moment The works which make up Topography (2009–10) not only invoke the death camps but are strikingly reminiscent of Didi-Huberman’s phenomenology of viewing. Although Bałka has not commented on the possibility of such a connection, the ‘list of references’ for How It Is does provide vital corroboration of his awareness of the Holocaust archive debate. Near the middle of the page of references, the words ‘4 images from A’ appear in tiny, spidery handwriting, and are linked with an arrow to a set of initials, partly illegible (p. 47). Paulo Herkenhoff identifies an explicit reference to Didi-­Huberman here, on the basis of a private communication from Bałka: ‘“I was in ­Auschwitz in 1992, but did not understand too much”, recalled Bałka. In his list of references the acronym “DH” appears, standing for (Georges) Didi-Huberman, “whose Images malgré tout I read at that time”’.17 The clandestine Auschwitz images are thus an implicit presence within Bałka’s work, and it seems extremely likely that Didi-Huberman’s argument on the phenomenology of viewing has informed pieces like Carrousel (2004), later exhibited as part of Topography. Carrousel consists of a series of films of Majdanek which are projected simultaneously onto the walls of the exhibition space. Each is a loop, timed so as to create a delay between the various films: instead of a synchronised beginning, the different loops stop and start independently, creating a relationship of difference or interference between them. The film was taken by Bałka using a hand-held camera; the motion effect was achieved by spinning around in a circle while filming. As Suzanne Cotter argues, ‘the continual movement of the image and the loss of spatial referents that guarantee our orientation vertically in the world are nausea inducing’.18 For James E. Young, viewing Carrousel is to enter into the ‘sickening swirl’ of a ‘memorial vortex’, a space concerned entirely with Holocaust memory.19 Although Majdanek is one of the best preserved camps, Bałka’s images blur the barracks beyond recognition. As in Primitive, the piece makes an appeal to the archival: it can only be understood by supplementing the spectatorial experience with archival knowledge. Once this is done, the dynamics of Carrousel start to make sense: the seasick panning of the images and the disjunctive relationship between the films suggest a mode of viewing like that which Didi-Huberman advocates in Images in Spite of All. For Didi-Huberman, the decipherable content of the clandestine ­Auschwitz photographs subsists alongside the blank zones of the images: ‘this mass where nothing is visible gives in reality a visual mark that is just as valuable as all the rest of the exposed surface’. This blank patch, he argues, ‘gives us the situation itself, the space of possibility, the condition of possibility of the photographs themselves’.20 Bałka’s piece enters into just such a space, but with one important difference: the mode of viewing is not photographic but cinematic. The ‘blind’ photographs of the camps which do in fact exist are supplemented here by film, and to the uninformed spectator, Carrousel might resemble film

The Archival Testimonial  59 of the Majdanek camp taken during its operation. Bałka, of course, makes no such claim; it is simply that the work replicates the conditions of such a film, whose existence remains entirely hypothetical. Ironically enough, these effects are achieved through the way the present moment maps onto the past. The archival past is very much at stake: the central subject matter of the images is Majdanek, that is, the death camp which previously existed at the location in which Bałka films. What we now know as ‘Majdanek’ is a memorial site in which the buildings of the camp have been deliberately preserved so that they continue to signify the operation of mass murder which they once harboured. Bałka uses the moment of enunciation to amplify the Majdanek site as a cultural sign, but does so by emphasising the present rather than concealing it. The present of expression is stressed in the extravagant movement which accompanies the act of filming, and that movement paradoxically creates conditions of viewing which make the present moment recede into the past. Bałka’s concern with the present of viewing is intimately connected with problematic deictics which recall those of Beckett. Although many of Bałka’s titles contain extremely oblique allusions to the camps, they initially appear inscrutable, as in ‘walkway’ pieces such as 196 × 230 × 147 (2007). Like the walkway in Nothere, the work directs the viewer to trace a particular physical route through the installation, indicated here by the high walls of vertical wooden panels, and that route stands both for the attempt to deduce meaning and a more troubling form of historical reference. In 190 × 90 × 73, equally, the viewer negotiates a narrow passage marked by the gallery wall on one side and a high plywood partition on the other. The work’s title, pointing only to its physical dimensions, is as slippery as Beckett’s ‘I’, reinstating reference in the very movement by which it is insistently evacuated. That reference is, for Adrian Searle, to ‘a version of the Himmelstrasse, the “road to heaven” along which the naked new arrivals were whipped towards the gas chambers, between fences camouflaged with pine branches, so that no one could see what lay beyond’.21 Reference is recovered through context and materials: the wood in these works recalls the pine branches to which Searle refers, and the brick passageway of 750 × 340 × 255/some in some out is reminiscent of a brick crematorium. Here, the opacity of the title is mitigated by the qualification ‘some in some out’, starkly contrasting the many who entered the gas chambers with the very few who came and went (chiefly the Sonderkommando, the detachment of prisoners responsible for disposing of the bodies and effects of those gassed). In earlier works, too, Bałka attaches the insistence of reference to treacherous deictics: in The Crossroad in A (1993) the memorial site, ­Auschwitz, is both reduced to a single letter (A) and rendered obscure through the addition of large areas of correction fluid to photographs of it. In defacing photographs of Auschwitz and partially obscuring identifiable reference points such as barrack blocks, Bałka threatens the referential function of the image, but never quite reaches the point at which reference is

60  The Archival Testimonial destroyed. Still more radically in B (2006), later shown as part of Fragment (2011) at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, the site is reduced to a single letter viewed in inverted form. Auschwitz is once more just recognisable: the unusually large lower loop of the letter B (seen back-to-front as well as upside down) graphically recalls that of the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign placed above the entrance to the camp. The fraught phenomenology of viewing in the present once again dominates the memorial site, which is further obscured by drifting snowflakes swirling around the sign. Similar strategies are pursued in Bambi (Winterreise) (2003), in which deer are seen grazing on snowy ground. That ground turns out to be the site of the Auschwitz camp: what the film is at pains to emphasise is the incommensurability of present and past as they are written into the memorial site. The present can only address the past with extreme difficulty, and to do so is to produce highly incongruous images which on first glance do nothing to enhance our understanding of past events. On one level, the deer are irrelevant to, and oblivious to, the meanings locked into the memorial site. On another level, the sentimental treatment of cruelty and love in the Disney film Bambi seems absolutely irreconcilable with a location at the heart of the Holocaust. In fact, though, the work’s title fosters a more productive relationship between present and past moments, and between the dual elements in the film’s subject matter. In referring to the Disney film, Bałka signals a shared chronological reference: Bambi was released in 1942, coinciding with the beginnings of Auschwitz’s operation as a death camp. The Disney Bambi refers implicitly to its source text, Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (1923), whose Austrian Jewish author, Felix Salten, had to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Innocuous as Bambi may be, its sequel, Bambis Kinder, eine Familie im Walde (1939) hints at the tightening grasp of the Nazi regime on German and Austrian Jews. By 1939 Salten was unable to publish anything but harmless children’s stories about animals, casting new light on the chocolate-box sentimentality of Bambi, and the second novel was first published in English translation in America. As Dagmar Lorenz argues, the ‘natural catastrophe’ depicted in the first Bambi gives way to a ‘political catastrophe’.22 In a further proliferation of its intertextual ‘moments’, Bałka’s Bambi also invokes Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (1828), in which the speaker meditates on his alienation from humanity and his longing for death. The work’s preoccupation with the journey recalls that in Bałka’s installations, which consistently require the viewer to negotiate real and/or virtual terrain in search of meaning. At the opening of the installation of Winterreise at the Starmach gallery in Kraków in 2003, songs from Schubert’s cycle were played, and Eleonora Jedlińska refers to comments made then by Bałka on the intention to juxtapose Schubert’s Winterreise with the ‘extreme situation’ of the camps.23 In ‘Der Wegweiser’ (‘The Signpost’), the motif of the signpost which points to a path ‘from which no one has returned’ foreshadows

The Archival Testimonial  61 the preoccupation with the journey to death taken by concentration camp prisoners.24 The obliqueness of reference in Bałka, meanwhile, is reinforced in the blankness of the signpost: although it suggests the path of no return from the wanderer’s perspective, the signpost’s own message is not disclosed to the listener. Finally, the reference to Schubert (and to Wilhelm Müller, whose poems lie at the origin of the cycle) reinforces the intermedial correspondences between Bałka’s work and that of Samuel Beckett. Those correspondences are born of a preoccupation with the fraught progress of the viewer or reader through the work in the present, a progress which is marked by highly ambivalent signposts to the traumatic past.

Beckett’s Winterreise Beckett’s last play, What Where (1983), owes a particular debt to Schubert’s Winterreise and offers important insights into the problematic process of memorial deixis. The play consists of a series of exchanges between five characters, four of whom are depicted on stage, on the subject of an interrogation which has previously taken place off stage. In each fragmentary scene, a report is made on the earlier interrogation and its failure to elicit the required information, that is, the ‘what and where’ which pertain to some unspoken past event. In an echo of Beckett’s How It Is, this moment is repeated ad infinitum in the play, as the torturer is himself interrogated and himself becomes a victim. Following Bom’s report on the failure of the interrogation he has carried out (‘Nothing’), Bam concludes that the report is a ‘lie’: ‘He said it to you. [Pause]. Confess he said it to you. [Pause]. You’ll be given the works until you confess’.25 What Where is remarkable for the failure which it indicates in the present of enunciation: despite the serial violence the scenario suggests, the information is never recovered; the present never provides access to the memorial past. The play is both a cycle of victims and torturers, as Bom, Bim, Bem and Bam exchange roles, and of seasons, beginning with spring and ending, as in Winterreise, in winter. Beckett’s lifelong interest in Schubert has been documented by Mark Nixon and Dirk van Hulle, and reaches its culmination in the television play Nacht und Träume, in which a sung fragment from Schubert’s Lied of that name is the only speech.26 As regards What Where, James Knowlson identifies the ‘cycle of the seasons’ in Winterreise as providing Beckett with ‘the formal structure of his play’.27 Beckett’s investment in Winterreise suggests a version of deixis embedded in technological mediation and unresolved mourning. The ‘last five’ referred to in the play consists of Bom, Bim, Bem and Bam plus the disembodied voice of V, present only ‘in the shape of a small megaphone at head level’ (p. 469). In Paul Lawley’s reading, ‘the imperative of revisitation’ which Winterreise represents for Beckett is ‘facilitated by the electronic medium of reproduction’.28 That medium turns out to be the ‘electrophone’ by means of which Beckett listened to Schubert, an unorthodox usage in English which may

62  The Archival Testimonial reflect a self-consciousness about technological obsolescence like that seen earlier in Krapp’s Last Tape. This ghostly revisitation, I suggest, is in fact only imperfectly achieved, and implicates the mediated present of listening and viewing (‘I switch on’ (p. 470)) in an unfinished past: We are the last five. In the present as were we still. It is spring. Time passes. (p. 470) The speaker’s memories are mediated, in What Where, by the ‘megaphone’ or, in the Beckett on Film version, which is set in a high-tech environment reminiscent of a library or archive, by the recorded voice. Beckett’s ‘were we still’, moreover, suspends the scenario between a fantasised present in which the five would still be alive and a past which defines their living as survival of an undisclosed prior event. The ambivalent formulation marks the play’s ending, too, as Bam, having exhausted the series of surrogate interrogators, finds himself alone: I am alone. In the present as were I still. It is winter. Without journey. Time passes. That is all. Make sense who may. I switch off. (p. 476) The passage links the Beckettian paradox of the speaker whose own existence is hypothesised within his account (‘as were I still’) to the thematics of Winterreise. Schubert’s (and Müller’s) Winterreise is a winter journey of remembrance and loss, as the speaker laments his lost love. In what is almost a work of mourning for the speaker himself, he encounters the signs of aging and death (his hair is temporarily turned white by falling snow in an image which must have shaped the staging of the ‘same long grey hair’ of each character in What Where (p. 476)) but their function as signs is disappointingly unrealised in the present. He is left to lament ‘how far away the grave still is!’ (‘The Grey Head’).29 In ‘Der Wegweiser’, the process of mourning is progressively, and increasingly explicitly, invaded by the problem of deixis. The poet encounters signposts both real and symbolic: while the former ‘stand on the roads, signposts pointing to the towns’, the latter takes the form of a spectral ‘signpost standing immovably before my eyes’ (p. 273). Immediately thereafter, the poet’s exclusion from the world of the living is chillingly concretised in the realisation that ‘I must travel a road/From which no one ever returned’ (p. 273). This is the very road which Bałka

The Archival Testimonial  63 depicts in his walkway pieces, echoing the ‘last road’ of the camps, and mapping to it the viewer’s progress through the installation. It is this road, too, which runs through Beckett and Bałka in Michael Archer’s analysis. In his catalogue essay for 17 × 23.5 × 1.6, Archer twice refers to Beckett’s most famous deictics of all, from The Unnamable. For Archer, Beckett’s deictics are bound up with two instances of embodied spectatorship in Bałka: the experience of the ramp or walkway, to which Archer appends Beckett’s ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’30; and that of viewing the sites of the camps in the rotating gaze of Bałka’s 170 × 126 × 10/T.Turn. Here, for Archer, ‘the camera’s spin, as an index of the hand that holds it, poses those three questions with which Samuel Beckett begins The Unnamable: “Where now? Who now? When now?”’ (p. 11). 170 × 126 × 10/T.Turn pursues the indeterminacy of reference seen in B and Crossroad at A, deliberately compromising reference to the memorial past through an exacerbation of the phenomenology of viewing in the present as the hand’s uncertain trajectory through the air generates blurred footage of the memorial site. The strategy is indeed analogous to the fraught narration of The Unnamable, in which ‘I have no voice and must speak’, ‘of that I must speak, with this voice that is not mine’ (p. 281). The narrator’s discursive position is submerged in his own anguished, reflexive enquiry into his accession to discourse. This, then, is the fertile but troubled ground upon which Bałka’s important memory work takes place, work which produces a unique form of memorial deixis under the sign of Beckett, Schubert and Müller. That work exerts a particular influence, too, upon recent installation work which has sought to re-evaluate the status of archival materials (text documents and photographs) as an interface between journalistic and art historical discourses and practices. At stake here is the status of the black box within the white cube, that is, the creation of blacked-out enclosures like that of How It Is as privileged spaces for viewing and exploration within the larger installation space. One key example is the work of Alfredo Jaar: Jaar’s The Sound of Silence (2006), like Bałka’s How It Is, makes the archive box into the dominant installation form, as viewers enter a black box in order to witness the story of Kevin Carter and the starving child in Sudan in 1993. Archival paraphernalia, too, are prominent in Real Pictures (1995), in which documentary photographs are placed in black linen storage boxes. Pieces from Real Pictures are later exhibited as The Way It Is, thematising Jaar’s work, following Beckett and Bałka, under the sign of the testimonial moment and of the unstable deictic ‘it’. At the same time, though, the journey of Winterreise, with its problematics of deictic memory, is far from over. The deixis of mourning, in which the speaker may be commemorating his or her own death, continues to mark contemporary practice, and continues to take place under the sign of technological mediation. Indeed, the debates on the image between ­Godard, Lanzmann and Rancière themselves entail a lament on the passing of analogue technology which may signal a bleak voyage on the part of

64  The Archival Testimonial the photographic image itself. Before returning to the problematics of the black box, I examine one such winter journey which pays homage to that of Schubert: that of Luc Delahaye’s Winterreise (2000).

Delahaye’s Winterreise Luc Delahaye’s book charts an extraordinary photographic journey: across post-Soviet Russia, but also to the margins of photojournalism and, eventually, to the spaces of the art gallery. At the time of composition of W ­ interreise, Delahaye was known as a photojournalist, and it is in this form that the ­Winterreise project is apparently situated. The journey underpinning the project took place between November 1998 and March 1999, and took in a number of Russian cities including Moscow, Dzerzhinsky, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok. At first glance, the book is an exercise in gritty realism, graphically depicting the poverty and harsh living conditions of working class men and women. Apparently spontaneous scenes shot by Delahaye include groups of men drinking vodka and a striptease subtitled ‘Olga dances for $2’; Delahaye does not shrink from showing a drunk lying in the snow or a ‘homeless man found dead in a basement’.31 Delahaye’s text is remarkable for its lack of signposting: the images are prefaced only by three elliptical paragraphs on the book’s apparent subject, ‘the people who have always known suffering, condemned to life underground and who, in the euphoria of humiliation, see themselves with clarity’. The short text also refers to ‘the territory, a grotesque empire, a dull and almost empty space’. The logic implicitly attached to the project here is that the images which immediately follow describe the journey through this almost empty space and amount to an account of the people depicted there. At the same time, though, the text’s function as a signpost is left unfulfilled: each paragraph begins ‘given that […]’, suggesting a concluding clause which never comes, or a qualification which exists only in visual form. The sense of radically suspended deixis spreads to the first image in the book, an untitled two-page landscape photograph of a rubbish dump featuring a man holding a sack and crows rising from the ground in the distance. The second image does receive a caption, ‘Homeless man found dead in a basement’, but that caption is singularly unable to account for the expressive potential of the image. As in Delahaye’s most famous image, Taliban (2001), the photograph’s aesthetics threaten to overwhelm its documentary function, as the dead man’s pose, eyes upturned, and the brown blanket which partly covers him, evoke a saintly figure reminiscent of ­Christian iconographical traditions. In Taliban, described by Jan M ­ ieszkowski as Delahaye’s ‘most overt experiment in rendering death beautiful’,32 the dead figure has a similar iconographical charge, resulting, according to Lucy Soutter, from its occupation of a ‘relatively small space in the centre of a panoramic autumn-hued composition, his [the soldier’s] draped limbs recalling a pietà’.33

The Archival Testimonial  65 In this, I suggest, Delahaye’s work progressively subverts many of the assumptions surrounding photojournalism. As Soutter argues, Delahaye’s decision to ‘turn his back on a prize-studded career as a war photographer’ and ‘announce he was becoming an artist’ has dominated accounts of his work (p. 44). The decision, though, is implicated in Delahaye’s interference in the coding and reception of the image, his subtle redirection of the gaze and the reconfiguration of photographic economies which his work suggests. As Jean-François Chevrier states, in work created since the late 1990s, Delahaye ‘seeks subjects of a sort that would ordinarily belong to his earlier practice as a photojournalist’ while using ‘personalised, large-format frequently panoramic cameras in order to include vastly more of the scene before him’.34 Chevrier’s analysis of Delahaye’s large-format ‘tableau’ works, in particular the History series, beginning in 2001, associates them with the large canvases of traditional history painting, an association which Mark Durden specifically extends to the work of Delacroix, David and Géricault.35 Delahaye’s own standpoint to the ‘History’ label is highly ambivalent: he refers to the ‘unfortunate idea of calling a book History, which created a fruitless misunderstanding’, and yet reflects at length in the same interview on the idea of ‘history’ as the basis for images which are ‘the constructed face of an “experienced” fact’.36 The tableau works can produce immense disorientation in viewing, and it is with this effect, and the redirection of the viewer’s attention, that Chevrier is concerned: ‘the viewer tends to feel, at least momentarily, that the details he or she comes to invest with significance are discovered by him or her rather than delivered personally by the photographer’ (p. 186). The impression of agency on the part of the viewer is a consequence of the initial disorientation and, for Chevrier, of the work’s lack of signposting: ‘the viewer is given only the most minimal indications of where to look’ (p. 184). The tendency comes to a head in works such as U.S. Bombing on Taliban Positions (2001), in which we see a smoke trail and attempt to zero-in on its point of origin, only to spot a number of much smaller trails in the extreme right background. The eye shuttles back and forth between these traces in order to localise an ‘it’ which is found only in the photograph’s vast, unreadable expanses. In Winterreise, meanwhile, the scarcity of text captions and the inscrutable passage from one image to the next result in similar effects, although this time through serial disorientation rather than the impacted complexity of individual images. The final part of the book presents a series of underlit images of woodland shot at dusk, possibly from a moving train. Not only is the journey unsignposted, but a few of these images are self-consciously manipulated, including one in which a large horizontal band from a relatively bright photograph is superimposed upon a relatively dull-toned print of the same image. The detail draws attention to the composite nature of the photograph, forcing the viewer to scrutinise the documentary basis of the book and the nature of its journey.

66  The Archival Testimonial Three further aspects of Delahaye’s work inform my argument here: explicit recourse to the archive; the memorial sites of Rwanda; and the move to situate the photographic project in the gallery rather than in the spaces of photojournalism. Some of the images of Winterreise appeal to identifiable archival sources, and the clearest examples are the peopleless interior shots seen around halfway through the book. The images of dilapidated kitchen or bathroom fittings, with dirty sinks, rusting pipes and distressed plastered walls are sharply reminiscent of Walker Evans’s documentary photography of the interiors of the great Depression.37 The two-page image of ‘Children’s files in a police station’, too, displays a heightened concern with the archive, filling the frame with a close-up of police files and their accompanying photographs. Such concerns, as we shall see, receive a distinctive response in the work of Alfredo Jaar, an artist whose work focuses in some detail on memorial treatments of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Rwanda, too, is a privileged location in Delahaye’s own trajectory. Rwanda marks one of the last acts in Delahaye’s work as a ‘conventional’ photojournalist, and he was reportedly one of only two Western photographers to remain active in Rwanda after the evacuations of April 1994. Patrick Robert and Luc Delahaye are thought to have provided the only documentary footage of the mass grave discovered in Nyanza on April 21, 1994, and their work constitutes a rare exception to the ‘black hole’ in media coverage between April and the return of some Western journalists in early May.38 Despite or because of this exceptional situation, Delahaye later reacts against the strictures of photojournalism, and, according to Roger Luckhurst, ‘conceives of the gallery space as another kind of counter-point to the newspaper’.39 In Bill Sullivan’s account, Delahaye explicitly links the motivation for the large-format History tableaux to exhibition space: ‘one of the reasons for the photographs’ large size is to make them incompatible with the economy of the press’.40 Reproductions of the huge History images in books can be viewed only awkwardly, and are clearly unworkable in the restrictive formats of newspapers and magazines: loosening their bonds with journalistic text, the works appeal to an alternative genre or form, that of the History. Luckhurst compares Delahaye’s History series to Jaar’s Rwandan installations, linking Delahaye’s transgressive move to the suspicion of journalistic information and presentation in Jaar. Both projects reject journalism in favour of the gallery, a space which brings to bear its own troubled institutional history: This recontextualisation to the gallery might until very recently have been seen as a worrying form of aestheticisation of war, if the gallery is still regarded as the ‘white cube’ that decoupled art from history. Brian O’Doherty influentially argued that ‘the ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with that [sic] fact that it is “art”. The work is isolated from everything […] Their ungrubby surfaces are

The Archival Testimonial  67 untouched by time and its vicissitudes’. Yet the gallery might now be understood relationally to other institutions and against media consolidations and the control of the image since the 1980s. As Jacques Rancière (2004) would say, the distribution of the visible has changed and so, therefore, have the politics of aesthetics.41 Such a modified understanding of the white cube is highly productive in the context of Delahaye’s work, and is central to my analysis of the relational function of archivalist installation in the following chapter. The choice of ‘History’ as a generic category, meanwhile, constitutes a knowing response to the hierarchy of genres in painting and a deliberately provocative intervention at the interface between journalism and art, inscribing photojournalism’s entry in the art museum with the unmatched prestige of history painting. Delahaye’s incursion into the white cube is highly self-aware, and receives a vital corollary in Jaar’s work, which displays an analogous standpoint to the production of the visual event in the news media. Before turning to Alfredo Jaar, I consider a specific example of a display form which elaborates a critique of the white cube: that of the black box, and its extraordinary reconfiguration in Bałka and Jaar.

From the White Cube to the Black Box Bałka’s How It Is offers one of the starkest, and most monumental, stagings of the black box in recent installation art, creating a space in which darkness is palpably disorientating. Bałka draws on the well-established tradition of creating blacked-out spaces within the gallery, yet disrupts many of the expectations surrounding such spaces and their uses. Instead of the familiar, relatively small dark room accessed via a black-out curtain, a space which is frequently illuminated by a video screen, Bałka creates a large space whose black-out is its own drama and subject, as the visitor struggles to negotiate its dimensions. How It Is is formally reminiscent of the video projection space (typically a dark enclosure separate from the rest of the gallery), but experientially unlike it (no film is shown, and there is no black-out curtain and no seats to accommodate viewing). How It Is implicitly refers in formal terms to the spaces of video installation, and engages with our expectations concerning the dark room within the white cube. Video is nowhere present within the physical Tate installation but is an integral part of the work’s virtual counterpart, as I argued earlier. How It Is, then, inscribes within itself an appeal to its virtual, web-based aspect, forming a critique of the exhibition space while monumentally present within it. For Paolo Herkenhoff, Bałka produces a form of ‘institutional critique’ by ‘introducing his black box inside the white cube of the museum’.42 Bałka’s How It Is is vestigially present at the crossroads which debates on the place of film and video in the gallery space have recently reached. In the paradoxical gesture to video which its silent architecture makes in

68  The Archival Testimonial the Tate turbine hall, How It Is connects with growing critical awareness of the ever-increasing presence of film within installation work, and of the unresolved question of the position and status of film works within the gallery. My intention here is not to resolve questions such as these, but to shed light on the implication of Bałka’s work in their recent articulations, and to highlight the gestures which art history and film criticism themselves make towards testimonial deictics. Two foundational but seemingly rather discontented accounts of cinema spectatorship prove to inform recent work on film in the white cube: Robert Smithson’s ‘A Cinematic Atopia’ (1971) and Roland Barthes’s ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’ (1975). Although ostensibly concerned with cinema, both texts surface in Claire Bishop’s Installation Art (2005) and that text’s wide-ranging account of installation spectatorship. Bishop refers to Barthes’s account of leaving the cinema in a sleepy, slightly dazed state, his body soft and slightly limp. Barthes compares the experience to emerging from ‘hypnosis’: ‘bref, c’est évident, il sort d’une hypnose’.43 As Bishop notes, the comparison is not wholly negative: ‘Barthes is willing to be fascinated and seduced. This is because he does not consider cinema to be solely the film itself, but the whole “cinema-situation”: the dark hall, the “inoccupation of bodies” within it’.44 For Barthes, the dark space of the cinema is the site of a diffuse eroticism arising from the loose, casual and anonymous disponibilité of spectators’ bodies. At the same time, though, Barthes’s reflections stem from his tendency to view the spectators and their surroundings rather than the film: ‘Whenever I hear the word cinema, I can’t help thinking hall rather than film’; after all, the piece is all about leaving the cinema (p. 346). For Bishop, ‘this enthralment with the “surroundings” of cinema is the impulse behind so much contemporary video installation: its dual fascination with both the image on screen and the conditions of its presentation’ (p. 95). In Bałka, that fascination is a more specific gesture: in ushering the physical spectator into the virtual remaking of How It Is, and vice versa, the work repeats the distracted passage of Barthes’s gaze from film to auditorium, from this ‘opaque cube’ to the screen and, finally, to the projection beam, the ‘dancing cone that pierces the darkness like a laser beam’ (p. 347). Smithson’s reflections, meanwhile, dramatise a similar ‘immobilisation of the body’ and subordination of the agency of the spectator to the swarming celluloid mass of the cinematic repertoire.45 While the resulting ‘vast reservoir of pure perception’ (p. 53) results in extreme passivity on the part of the viewer, that passivity is accompanied, as Bishop notes, by Smithson’s fascination with entropy and the creative power of the death drive. That paradoxical creativity feeds into the troubled interrelationship which I am concerned with here between the black box and the gallery space and, equally, their recent reconfigurations. Since the publication of Bishop’s book, further accounts have noted the enigmatic generic status of video installation. As a result, for Alison Butler, it has become ‘a hybrid form, situated between the institutions of cinema and the art gallery and anticipating new media practices’.46 Butler’s 2010

The Archival Testimonial  69 article is one of a number of responses to Bishop which seek to address this situation. That of Erika Balsom, meanwhile, argues that ‘an attention to the specificity of exhibition situation is necessary if we are to come to terms with expansions and mutations of moving images today. For the movie theatre is no longer the default site of cinematic spectatorship; far from it’.47 If film is moving, like Barthes’s spectator, out of the movie theatre, the gallery, for Balsom, offers the prospect of a rebirth of cinema, or at least a form of posthumous preservation: ‘the white cube serves as a tomb that might house an embalmed cinema, newly minted as a precious and highly cathected object’ (p. 26). For Balsom, this returns film studies to the question posed by Francesco Casetti: ‘not only the Bazinian “What is cinema?” but also the radically anti-essentialist “Where is cinema?”’.48 What is striking here is the prominence of deixis in the attempt to situate and accommodate film and installation, a tendency which receives its fullest treatment to date in Butler’s work. Recent installation work, for Butler, is marked by a ‘deictic turn’, a notion which has significant implications for Bałka, Jaar and Ahtila. Installation deixis, for Butler, is bound up with the medium of video installation and the locations which it comes to occupy. In particular, Butler draws upon the association in Mary Ann Doane’s work of ‘the index in the deictic sense with the accusatory finger, pointing into offscreen space to indicate some past or future event’.49 Deixis is concerned here with the relation of the frame (in particular the screen, or virtual window) to the memorial trace: ‘the frame directs the spectator to look here, now, while the trace reconfirms that something exists to be looked at’ (p. 310). To look here and now, in the gallery space, is clearly to participate in the screening as event, and to bring a particular attention to bear upon the site of the screening. Building on the work of Andrew Uroskie, Butler highlights the productive uncertainty surrounding the institutional grounding of video installation, arguing that ‘the prominent thematization of location and dislocation in gallery film is the inevitable consequence of its uncertain position between the institutions and traditions of the cinema and the gallery’ (p. 310). Uroskie goes on to develop the problematisation of location and dislocation in the context of the field of ‘expanded cinema’ in his Between the Black Box and the White Cube (2014).50 Erika Balsom’s 2013 Exhibiting Cinema, meanwhile, gives an ambivalent account of the showing of film in the gallery, suggesting both the possibility of ‘a new cinematic dispositif through its [the gallery’s] particular discursive and institutional framing and the various practices associated with it’ and of ‘a dilution based on principles of excerption, format shifting, and distracted spectatorship that speaks to concerns very other than providing shelter’.51 If the fortunes of expanded cinema remain uncertain, recent installation work has traded upon its heightened concern with deixis in highly provocative ways. The distracted spectatorship feared by Balsom is at the heart of Barthes’s ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’, and equally of Smithson’s account, in which the undifferentiated continuum of film results in ‘dozing

70  The Archival Testimonial consciousness’ and a ‘tepid abstraction’ (p. 53). Rather than the grumpy and pessimistic standpoint to cinema they appear to express, Barthes’s and Smithson’s comments point to the invisible play of affects at work in the cinema, and which Smithson draws upon in his imagining of the cinema site as installation in the sketch Towards the Development of a Cinema Cavern (1971) and in ‘A Cinematic Atopia’ (1971).52 In this, Smithson arguably inaugurates a series of works which have taken the fabric of the cinema as the basis for installations, including Dan Graham’s Cinema (1981) and Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s The Paradise Institute (2001).53 Egoyan’s Steenbeckett (2002) belongs to the same tendency, although the space of the cinema is accompanied there by that of the editing suite, the film museum and, most prominently, the archive. Smithson and Barthes both articulate spectatorial experiences outside the cinema, and Smithson in particular points to installation forms created outside of any institutional context. Bałka, meanwhile, couples the concern with deixis in How It Is to a transferral of attention from the gallery space to the work’s virtual aspect. The black box, here, is not limited to its engagement with film and with the movie theatre, but also functions as a memorial device or repertoire. It is this aspect of the black box that Balsom’s concern with the troubled dynamics of excerption does not address: its common meaning, derived from aviation, as a largely autonomous recording device which can later be relied upon to produce a memorial trace. If How It Is is literally a black box, our multiple understandings of the black box subtend our experience of How It Is: with the glimpses of memorial sites such as Treblinka which its virtual instantiation offers, the work suggests an encounter with the inhuman intelligence of a memory machine. Such an encounter, I argue, also underwrites the next installation I shall consider: Alfredo Jaar’s The Sound of Silence.

Alfredo Jaar: From Real Pictures to The Way It Is Jaar’s The Sound of Silence (2006), like Bałka’s How It Is, both literally and symbolically positions the black box at the centre of the installation. The viewer crosses the installation space and enters the box which, as Nicole Schweizer argues, is imbued with the spectral presence of film and archival photographs: Constructed like a small movie theatre, and at the same time like a camera obscura, the work’s outer structure opens up to visitors on one side and on the other presents a façade that is lit up by a dazzling array of white neon lights. On the inside, in white letters on a black background, a text scrolls slowly and rhythmically, telling the story of Kevin Carter (1960–1994), a South African photojournalist who became famous for his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, taken while reporting in Sudan in 1993, of a famine-stricken little girl crawling along the ground as a vulture looks on.54

The Archival Testimonial  71 If the box is at first characterised by the blank monumentality of How It Is, The Sound of Silence is still more concretely shaped by the form of the movie theatre than is the case in Bałka. The movie theatre is concretely present in Jaar’s piece: when viewers penetrate the form of the box they find themselves within a functional projection space in which a film is indeed shown. Jaar’s film addresses one of the fundamental problems of deixis revealed in the debates I have discussed throughout this chapter: that of pronominal deixis and its frequent elision in installation art. While Bałka’s work draws upon the unique capacity of post-Beckettian deictics to indicate traumatic times and places through the creation of the black box and an oblique engagement with the movie theatre, Jaar’s work signals a return to the text and the promise of textual deixis. The first of these textual signifiers is the name ‘Kevin’, displayed in a slightly shaky projection and in a self-consciously ‘analogue’ white font against a black background. It is soon replaced by the full name ‘Kevin Carter’ and then by a series of short text segments which tell Carter’s story: ‘Kevin Carter was born in South Africa in 1960’. From these deceptively simple techniques a series of oppositions is born: between text and image; between light and darkness; and between Carter’s story and that of the starving little girl he later observes and photographs in Sudan. At the centre of the piece is the photograph Carter took of the girl, hunched painfully in the foreground while a vulture sits a few metres away. As Jaar’s dispassionate text says, Carter’s photograph was published in the New York Times (and subsequently in numerous other newspapers) and Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Jaar’s text describes the public reaction to the image and the comparison of the photographer to ‘another vulture on the scene’ in an editorial in the St. Petersburg [Florida] Times.55 The play of oppositions points to the glaring absence at the heart of the work: that of the little girl’s story, and of her voice. Carter’s story, meanwhile, its narrative arc leading to his suicide in August 1994, receives a detailed treatment in The Bang-Bang Club (2000). Indeed, Marinovich and Silva’s account draws heavily on Carter’s diaries, so that even here Carter’s voice is intermittently present.56 By contrast, the fate of the little girl is unknown and her voice entirely absent. When she is made visually present within the installation, in the form of Carter’s photograph, the silence to which she is consigned is starkly amplified. Carter’s photograph is thrown into sharp relief as apparently the only image within the film; in fact, though, the film is preceded by a leader consisting of vertical lines showing different shades of grey and features one other image, a flash of coloured horizontal lines, immediately before Carter’s photograph is shown. These seemingly marginal images serve to highlight another key opposition: that between text and image, and the latter, glimpsed for less than half a second, both simulates the act of taking the photograph, mimicking the action of the camera flash, and brutally foregrounds the image of the malnourished child. Jaar’s treatment of text and image recalls photojournalism in formal terms: the monospaced font used throughout suggests

72  The Archival Testimonial typewriter copy or news facsimiles, lending the text narrative a sense of both matter-of-factness and factuality. The echoes of the discourses and practices of photojournalism felt here, and indeed more widely in Jaar’s work, have led to its association with ‘New Social Documentary’, and with photographers and artists such as Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler.57 Indeed, Georges Didi-Huberman makes connections such as these in his catalogue essay on Jaar ‘Emotion does not Say “I”’, implicitly suggesting that the ‘use of the document’ in photography is bound up with the problem of the speaking subject.58 It is the loss or absence of the girl’s subject position that leads to Jaar’s highly innovative presentation of her story in The Sound of Silence and to the final statements of the film, which concern the archival belonging of Carter’s photograph. The ‘silence’ of the work concerns the absence of discursive agency on the part of the girl, a loss which is strikingly reinscribed in the work’s form. Following the sequences in which Carter’s photograph is shown and his subsequent suicide described, the film concludes with a further text-only sequence. The name ‘Kevin’ appears twice, and is then followed by the statement ‘Kevin Carter is survived by his daughter Megan’. The implicit identification of the girl in the photograph with Carter’s daughter is followed by a series of statements on the photograph’s position within image archives: This photograph is owned by the megan patricia carter trust The rights of this photograph are managed by corbis Corbis is owned by bill gates Corbis is the largest photograph agency in the world Corbis controls close to 100 million photographs The reference number of this photograph is corbis 0000295711–001 No one knows that happened to the child The end Jaar’s work traces the passage from testimony to the archive: faced with the disappearance of the ‘I’ of the girl in the photograph, her trace persists only as an anonymous numbered record in an image repository. The final sequences of The Sound of Silence maintain the work’s dispassionate, factual tone while levelling a politicised, responsible gaze at the corporate instrumentalisation of photographic archives. According to Didi-Huberman, recourse to the archive is beginning to permeate photojournalism in new ways: now that photography is ‘bereft of one of its major social functions, which for a long time was to feed “world events” to us through the illustrated press’, the photograph is ‘forced into a profound transformation of its own vocation as a document’.59 While for Didi-Huberman heightened attention to the documentary function and archival aspect of photographs is already seen in Bataille’s journal Documents, Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Richter’s Atlas, he singles out Luc Delahaye’s work as emblematic of the recent transformations of photojournalism:

The Archival Testimonial  73 This is well demonstrated by the choices of a photographer like Luc Delahaye, for example: after a life as a press photographer in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East at war, he has moved his ‘documents’ toward the ‘world of imagination’, as he puts it, while at the same time offering his new photographic ‘fictions’ only as obstinately reaching out towards ‘reality’; but he now speaks making references to Goya and Rossellini, setting out to ‘create an image that is a world in itself, with its own coherence, its autonomy, and sovereignty: an image that thinks’.60 Delahaye’s Winterreise, then, is born of the problematic negotiation of memorial sites seen in Bałka and Beckett, but is also part of the reconfiguration of the photographic seen in Didi-Huberman’s argument and borne out in Melissa Miles’s analysis of Conceptual Documentary. If Conceptual Documentary originates from the very problematisation of the place of the photograph in journalistic discourses which produces New Social Documentary, for Miles ‘Conceptual Documentary can be understood as a symptom of the larger “archival impulse” that pervades contemporary culture’.61 Drawing upon Hal Foster’s landmark essay, Miles identifies practices of collecting, repetition and classification as characterising Conceptual Documentary. Elsewhere, Lucy Soutter sees in Delahaye’s composite images of scenes of conflict an attempt to ‘bring their viewers into an awareness of the circumstances surrounding the making of documentary images’, adding Delahaye’s work to Miles’s list of Conceptual Documentarist photographers.62 A similar point is made in the presentation of Delahaye’s photographs as part of the Photography: New D ­ ocumentary Forms exhibition at Tate Modern in 2012. The attempt to nurture a particular form of engagement on the part of viewers is fundamental to Foster’s account of the creation of archives and the elaboration of archival practices: ‘these artists often aim to fashion distracted viewers into engaged discussants (here there is nothing passive about the word “archival”)’.63 This claim, of the relational potential of the archive, is considered in detail in the following chapter. The archival tendency is still more marked in Jaar’s Real Pictures (1995), which consists of 100 archival linen storage boxes installed in rows and spot-lit on the floor of the gallery. Each tombstone-like box is embossed with a text describing the image it holds. One such example is that of Caritas, a woman who survived the 1994 Rwandan massacres: Caritas Namazuru, 88 years old, fled her home in Kabilira, Rwanda and walked 306 kilometers to reach the Katale refugee camp in Zaire (now Congo). Her white hair disappears against the pale sky. Because of the early morning temperatures, she is covered in a blue shawl. Her gaze is resigned and carries the weight of her survival.64

74  The Archival Testimonial Jaar frustrates the viewer’s expectation of photographic reference, and instead provides textual description of the unverifiable image promised by the archive boxes. If, in Georges Didi-Huberman’s optimistic reading, the boxes signify not inaccessibility but suspense, ‘awaiting a possible, future legibility’ (p. 61), other accounts have focused on the archive as a site providing unsuspected access to traumatic memory: for Olivier Chow, ‘in Real Pictures, the traumatic memory is both acknowledged and mourned, laid bare within the non-place of the Rwandan archive’.65 In Griselda Pollock’s reading, Jaar’s use of text is key to the elaboration of a discourse of post-traumatic memory: Just as the testimonial literature that emerged following the Holocaust makes us realise that ‘it’ happened one by one – with each person a world was destroyed – so Alfredo Jaar’s focus on invisible images that mark his encounter with a named survivor-witness rejects the dangerous fascism inherent in mere enumeration and the annihilatory massification inherent in the media/photography and cinema.66 The text by which individuals are evoked by name is sharply opposed to the anonymous continuum of the image archive, associated with the reduction of individuals to numbers in genocide. The recourse to strategies of concealment, meanwhile, equally responds to the revolution in technologies of the image which had taken place by the 1990s, and on which Pollock comments, allowing real-time transmission of video footage instead of the ‘indexical production of images by single-lens reflex cameras’ in the era of the Holocaust (p. 6). The ‘it’ continues to loom large here. If the questionable prospect of the expression of trauma is aligned with this temperamental deictic in Pollock’s analysis, it recurs too in Jaar’s 2012 show The Way It Is. In a striking echo of the formulations of Beckett and Bałka, traumatic memory is once more articulated under the sign of the constative in an event which offers a restrospective of Jaar’s work. Alfredo Jaar – The Way It Is: An Aesthetics of Resistance in fact took place across three sites in Berlin: the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK); the Berlinische Galerie; and the Alte Nationalgalerie. The ‘it’ in question refers both to past events and to Jaar’s post-hoc representation of them, presenting Jaar’s early ‘Chilean’ works at the NGBK, while the ­Berlinische Galerie showed works on Berlin and Africa as well as works in which light plays a prominent role and works whose origins lie in press coverage. The two works shown at the Alte Nationalgalerie, meanwhile, are 1+1+1, an installation produced for Documenta 8 (1987); and Persona (1987). This is a highly self-conscious retrospective presentation of a body of work fundamentally concerned with the mediated nature of the ‘it’: Jaar responds to the journalistic imperative to tell where and when ‘it’ happened by engaging with the mediation of the event through the image archive, from Real Pictures to The Sound of Silence and From Time to Time (2006).

The Archival Testimonial  75 To encounter The Way It Is in the 2012 present is, equally, to negotiate the traces of The Way It Was (1991), a work staged in a disused flat in Berlin under the aegis of the Heimat exhibition, organised by Galerie Wewerka & Weiss. If the unstable ‘it’ of the title refers simultaneously to three distinct memorial sites in Berlin, it also refers obsessively to the memory of earlier works which are themselves concerned with the articulation of memorial deixis. Jaar juxtaposes the incompletion of the work of memory with the insistence of the ‘it’, and our unremitting need to phrase it in the present, and in this his work brings together two key archivalist concerns: deixis and engagement. The black box has, as I have argued, brought about a reconfiguration of the white cube in recent years, leading to what Jacques Rancière has called ‘a redistribution in the system of correspondences of the arts’.67 If the reconfiguration of artistic spaces and practices leads us from photojournalism to Conceptual Documentary, it also ushers in a strand of installation work concerned with the engaged mode of viewing suggested by practitioners like Delahaye and theorists such as Foster. In the work I consider in the following chapter, artists such as Silvia Kolbowski and Eija-Liisa Ahtila continue to revisit intractable pasts and places, and ask, in renewed form, a question which has been at the heart of my argument so far: Where Is Where?

Notes 1. For a very different reading of the experience of entering How It Is, in which the press of people expresses the ‘warmth of human togetherness’, see Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 68–69. 2. Beckett, How It Is (London: Calder, 1996), p. 10. 3. Herkenhoff, ‘The Illuminating Darkness of How It Is’, in Helen Sainsbury (ed.), Mirosław Bałka: How It Is (London: Tate, 2010), pp. 50–102 (p. 97). 4. ‘Explore How It Is’. [accessed 9/6/15]. 5. Michael D’Arcy, ‘Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Intentionality of the Image’, in David Bathrick, Brad Prager and Michael David Richardson, Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), pp. 138–61 (p. 138). 6. See d’Arcy, ‘Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Intentionality of the Image’, pp. 138–42; see also Robert Brinkley and Steven Youra, ‘Tracing Shoah’, PMLA, 111 (1996), 108–27. 7. Lanzmann, ‘Le Lieu et la parole’, in Michel Deguy (ed.), Au sujet de Shoah (Paris: Belin, 1990), pp. 293–305 (p. 297); translation mine. 8. For a reading of Bałka’s How It Is which identifies the resonances of that work’s ramp with the ramp at the entrance to the Warsaw ghetto and with concentration camp transports, see Gillian B. Pierce, The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), p. 113. 9. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 76.

76  The Archival Testimonial 10. Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 111. 11. Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust, p. 105. 12. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 275–76. 13. Lanzmann, ‘Holocauste, la représentation impossible’, Le Monde (Supplément Arts–Spectacles), 3 March 1994: i, vii. 14. Jean-Luc Godard, ‘La Légende du siècle’ (interview with F. Bonnaud and A.  ­Viviant), Les Inrockuptibles, 21 October 1998, 20–28 (p. 28); translation mine. See also Miriam Heywood, ‘Holocaust and Image: Debates Surrounding Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98)’, Studies in French Cinema, 9, no. 3 (2009), 273–83 (pp. 276–79). 15. Lanzmann, ‘Le Lieu et la parole’, pp. 296–97. 16. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2003), p. 11. 17. Herkenhoff, ‘The Illuminating Darkness of How It Is’, p. 89. 18. Suzanne Cotter, ‘Internal Time/External Time’, in Cotter (ed.), Topography: Mirosław Bałka (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2009), pp. 185–90 (p. 187). 19. Young, ‘Mirosław Bałka’s Graves in the Sky’, in Cotter (ed.), Topography, pp. 177–84 (p. 178). 20. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, transl. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 35. 21. Adrian Searle, ‘Mirosław Balka on the Ghosts of Treblinka’, The Guardian, 15  September 2009 [accessed 11/8/15]. 22. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler (Rochester: Camden House, 2003), pp. 117–18. 23. Eleonora Jedlińska, ‘Memory Regained – Art after the Holocaust. Some Examples from Poland’, in ‘Zerstörer des Schweigens’: Formen künstlerischer Erinnerung an die nationalsozialistische Rassen- und Vernichtungspolitik in Osteuropa, ed. by Frank Grüner, Urs Heftrich, and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe (Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2006), pp. 443–56 (p. 449). 24. Schubert, ‘Der Wegweiser’, quoted in Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Franz Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 273. 25. Beckett, What Where, in Complete Dramatic Works, p. 473. 26. Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 216–18. 27. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 685. 28. Paul Lawley, ‘“The Grim Journey”: Beckett Listens to Schubert’, Samuel ­Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2001): 255–66 (p. 255). In this context, see also Chris ­Ackerley, ‘Inorganic form: Samuel Beckett's nature,’ AUMLA, no. 104 (­November 2005), 79–101 and Catherine Laws, Headaches Among the ­Overtones: Music in Beckett/Beckett in Music (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), p. 163. 29. Schubert, ‘The Grey Head’, quoted in Youens, Retracing a Winter Journey, p. 235. 30. Archer, ‘Heaven’, in Mirosław Bałka, 17 × 23,5 × 1,6 (London: Jay Jopling/ White Cube, 2008), p. 15. 31. Luc Delahaye, Winterreise (London: Phaidon, 2000), no page number. 32. Jan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 129.

The Archival Testimonial  77 33. Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography? (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 44. 34. Jean-François Chevrier, ‘The “tableau form”: Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Luc Delahaye’, in Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 143–89 (p. 183). ­ eoffrey 35. Mark Durden, ‘Documentary Pictorial: Luc Delahaye’s Taliban, 2001’, in G Batchen and others, eds., Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: ­Reaktion Books, 2012), pp. 241–48 (p. 243). 36. Luc Delahaye, Luc Delahaye: 2006–2010 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), no page number. 37. Delahaye’s L’Autre, featuring photographs taken in the Paris métro also recalls Evans’s subway photographs. See Luc Delahaye, L’Autre (London: Phaidon, 1999). 38. Nathan Réra, ‘Rwanda: Images of the Disaster from the Time of News Coverage to the Time of Memory’, Arts & Societies, Letter of Seminar no. 61 (January 2014). [accessed 9/6/15]. 39. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 170. 40. Delahaye, quoted in Bill Sullivan, ‘The Real Thing: Photographer Luc Delahaye’, Artnet. [accessed 7/3/14]. 41. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 14–15, quoted in Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, pp. 170–71. 42. Herkenhoff, ‘The Illuminating Darkness of How It Is’, in Mirosław Bałka, How It Is, p. 67. 43. Roland Barthes, ‘En sortant du cinéma’, in Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 383–87 (p. 383). The spectator’s condition is merely given as ‘dazed’ in the English translation: Roland Barthes, ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’, in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 345–49 (p. 345). Subsequent references are to this translation. 44. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005), p. 95. 45. Robert Smithson, ‘A Cinematic Atopia’, Artforum, 10 (1971), 53–55 (p. 53). 46. Alison Butler, ‘A Deictic Turn: Space and Location in Contemporary Gallery Film and Video Installation’, Screen, 51 (2010), 305–23 (p. 323) . 47. Erika Balsom, ‘Screening Rooms: The Movie Theatre In/and the Gallery’, Public: Art/Culture/Ideas, 40 (2009), 24–39 (p. 26). 48. See Francesco Casetti, ‘Filmic Experience’, Screen, 50 (2009), 56–66 , quoted in Balsom, ‘Screening Rooms’, 25. 49. Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, Differerences, 18, no. 1 (2007), 128–52 (p. 140), quoted in Butler, ‘A Deictic Turn’, 310. 50. Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 51. Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), pp. 40, 41. 52. See also Smithson’s earlier comments in ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, Artforum, 4, no. 10 (June 1966), 26–31.

78  The Archival Testimonial 53. See Balsom, ‘Screening Rooms’, p. 29. On The Paradise Institute, see Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, pp. 2–4. 54. Nicole Schweizer, ‘The Politics of Images: An Introduction’, in Alfredo Jaar and Nicole Schweizer (eds.), Alfredo Jaar: La Politique des images (Zürich; New York: JRP-Ringier, 2007), pp. 7–16 (p. 14). 55. Reena Shah Stamets, ‘Were His Priorities Out of Focus?’, St. Petersburg Times, April 14, 1994, 1A, quoted in Sherry Ricchiardi, ‘Confronting the Horror,’ American Journalism Review, January–February 1999, 35–39 [accessed 5/3/14]. 56. Greg Marinovich and João Silva, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (London: Arrow, 2001 [2000]). 57. In this connection, see Rosler’s comments on the use of ‘text, irony, absurdity’ and ‘mixed forms’ in art. Rosler, quoted in Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King, 2006), p. 471. 58. Didi-Huberman, ‘Emotion Does Not Say “I”: Ten Fragments on Aesthetic Freedom,’ in Schweizer (ed.), Jaar: La politique des images, pp. 57–70 (p. 67). 59. Didi-Huberman, ‘Emotion does not Say “I”’, p. 66; original emphasis. 60. Luc Delahaye and Philippe Dagen, ‘Luc Delahaye: décision d’un instant: interview’, Art press, 2004, 27–33 (31), quoted in Didi-Huberman, ‘Emotion does not Say “I”’, p. 66. 61. Melissa Miles, ‘The Drive to Archive: Conceptual Documentary Photobook Design’, Photographies, 3, no. 1 (2010), 49–68 (50). 62. Soutter, p. 66. Miles’s list includes Frank Breuer, Paul Shambroom, Matthew Sleeth, Hans van der Meer, Raphaël Dallaporta and Mathieu Pernot. Miles, ‘The Drive to Archive’, 49. 63. Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, Fall 2004, no. 110 (2004), 3–22 (p. 6) [accessed 5/3/14]. 64. Jaar, Real Pictures, quoted in Antoon Braembussche, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: On Trauma and Visual Art’, in Antoon Braembussche, Heinz Kimmerle and Nicole Note (eds.), Intercultural Aesthetics: A Worldview Perspective (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2009), pp. 119–36 (p. 124). 65. Olivier Chow, ‘Alfredo Jaar and the Post-Traumatic Gaze’, Tate Papers, 9 (2008) [accessed 6/3/14]. 66. Griselda Pollock, ‘Editor's Introduction’, in Pollock (ed.), Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art in Post-Traumatic Cultures (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp. 1–23 (p. 5). 67. Jacques Rancière, ‘Le cinéma dans la “fin” de l’art’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 552 (December 2000), 50–51 (p. 51).

3 The Relational Archive Silvia Kolbowski and Eija-Liisa Ahtila

In Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s 2008 installation Where is Where?, a contemporary Finnish poet reflects on past events, principally the Algerian War, and her capacity to write about them in the present. The poet’s dilemma is bound up with a problematic of place and memory: to attempt to represent the past event is also to expropriate it from its original context (in colonial Algeria) to the poet’s home space in Finland. Ultimately, the ‘where’ of the title comprises both of these diegetic locations and, equally, that of the 2008 exhibition for which the work was commissioned, at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris. In this chapter I consider the articulation, in works like Where is Where?, of a problematic of memory and space by means of the immersive potential of archivalist installation art. Installation work has the capacity for an intensely lived ‘present’, as we have seen, and yet in Ahtila’s work, like that of Silvia Kolbowski, that present entertains a paradoxical relation with an intransigent and indeterminate past. Kolbowski and Ahtila expore the past by means of a politically coded dialogue: initially that of protagonists who belong to the same fictive or historical scenarios but also, subsequently, forms of dialogue imagined between historical periods and across continents. Such dialogue allows Kolbowski and Ahtila to scrutinise our standpoint to historical events and discourses and, in dialogue with spectators, to institute new forms of relation in the present. Those forms, I argue, have important implications for recent discourses of relationality in art, and allow us to evaluate the political valency of archivalist art as it engages with the traumatic past. In particular, Ahtila and Kolbowski create discourses of dissensus, which disturb ‘common-sense’ understandings of identity and the political, and activate those discourses through disjunctively staged dialogue; through archival materials (newsreel footage and archival photographs); and through ‘archival’ practices such as the oral history. These discourses will be evaluated in the light of existing accounts by two theorists who are explicitly concerned with the potential of art to engage with the political: Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe. For Mouffe, ‘critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’.1 For Rancière, meanwhile, ‘art is starting to appear as a space of refuge for dissensual practice, a place of refuge where the relations

80  The Relational Archive between sense and sense continue to be questioned and re-worked’.2 Common to both is an innovative model of political aesthetics in which, despite the historical character of the avant-garde, art is able to shape the political: in Mouffe’s recent work, critical art ‘is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony’ (pp. 4–5). While the work of Ahtila and Kolbowski presents a variety of forms of dissensus, in particular through avowedly impossible dialogue and contestatory histories that institute new forms of dialogue in the present, Rancière’s theory of the reconfiguration of the sensible has specific implications for the multi-channel installation work through which such discourses are articulated. The reconfigurations which take place there are bound up, too, with the shifting status of the speaking ‘I’, whose standpoint to the past, to cultural history and to art history is relentlessly scrutinised. Ahtila and Kolbowski significantly reconfigure the speaking subject, both in response to artistic traditions concerned with the legacy of conflict and, as we shall see, in dialogue with artistic tendencies such as conceptualism in which the understanding of the art-object its intricately bound up with its archival legacy.

Where Is Where? Dialogue and Dissensus One of the most remarkable sequences of Where is Where? is the dialogue in the later part of the video between two Algerian boys named Ismael and Adel, two unnamed interrogators and a doctor. Ismael and Adel have killed a European boy with whom they were friends and respond to the interrogators’ questions with very little emotion and no trace of remorse. The opening question, ‘why did you kill your friend?’ elicits the retort ‘Have you ever seen a European in prison? Has a single European ever been arrested for the murder of an Algerian?.’3 The interview closes with a final, ambiguous statement by Adel: ‘Anyhow, I killed him. – Now you do what you have to do’ (p. 115). This inscrutable call to action announces the final sequence of the video: a series of documentary images of dead bodies. The images receive a brief interpretative gloss in Ahtila’s published script: ‘nothing moves, nobody is there, no one to look at’ (p. 115), suggesting a final dissolution of both dialogue and viewing relations. The interview scenes literally give voice to the silenced: the Algerian boys are written out of history both as Algerians (subject to the French colonial regime) and as children, and they explicitly respond to their simultaneous constitution as objects of violence and marginalisation in discourse. When the interrogator states ‘But you’re a child and what is happening involves adults’ (p. 114), Adel replies ‘But they kill children too’ (p. 114). The sequence is one of the most striking examples in Where is Where? of the problematic transition of the past between languages, between media (from text to live speech to film), and from archival source to installation. The scene is a reimagining of a psychiatric interview transcribed in

The Relational Archive  81 the course of Chapter 5, ‘Guerre coloniale et troubles mentaux’, of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961).4 The principal interrogation scene in Where is Where?, scene 40, presents a relatively faithful use of the text of Fanon’s interview in theatrical form, combining acted dialogue with an imagining of the interrogation room ‘with a table, chairs, a light in the ceiling, a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the table’ (p. 113). Nevertheless, the two boys are unnamed in Fanon’s text, and the figures of the interrogators are an invention on Ahtila’s part. Before the interrogation room scene we see Ahtila’s fantasised version of the killing itself, entitled ‘sandpit/killing’ in the script, and characterised by its brevity and haphazard nature: ‘even though it is shown from several angles, there is a feeling that nothing as big as someone’s death could actually have happened at that moment’ (p. 112). Before the killing scene come three related scenes: a ‘workroom’ sequence setting the scene for the interrogation; a scene in which the poet sings a hymn to camera; and a scene entitled ‘stage/journey to the scene of the murder’. A  key preoccupation in Ahtila’s work is the moment at which the event takes place, and the troubled apprehension of that event in the present. The staggered presentation of the killing, which is foreshadowed, announced and then fleetingly shown before the interrogation resumes, subordinates event to analysis, suggesting a past which never ceases to trouble the present. Conversely, the condemnation of the present to an endless preoccupation with the traumatic past is announced by the poet at the very beginning of the video as ‘an unforeseen moment in time, one that destroys, one with everlasting consequences’ (p. 94). Against realist convention, the poet is present in the interrogation scenes and the ‘workroom’ scene sees Ismael, Adel and the interrogators meditate on the prison cell and on time. Stepping outside of the time-frame of the interrogation, Adel muses, ‘Here and elsewhere they always ask Why? and Who am I really?’ (p. 111; original emphasis). The reflexive foregrounding of the interrogatives ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘where’ is powerfully underlined by direct address in the interrogation scene: ‘the boys talk in turn directly to the camera. While one is being interrogated, the other is silent’ (p. 113). It is in this context, too, that the exhortation ‘now, you do what you have to do’ assumes such significance. The phrase is both laden with rhetorical force and almost entirely empty of content, mimicking the implication of deixis in context. The phrase points to a future which is never disclosed: we do not find out what the interrogators or the authorities will ‘do’ following the interrogation. The ambivalent expression is at the heart of Mieke Bal’s important reading of Where is Where? in Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Art Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila (2013). In Bal’s account, the killing episode in Where is Where? is an example of the ‘contact spaces’ created in video installations, ‘condensed forms or, in other words, emblems of the political force of figuration’.5 For Bal, the exhortation to ‘do what you have to do’ is an important part of the intermedial fabric of the installation, and is analysed at length in Thinking in Film for what it says about the mode of address, alongside the close-ups

82  The Relational Archive which accompany it. As Bal argues, ‘the addressee in Fanon’s work is the psychiatrist whose questions the boy is answering’ (p. 28). For Bal, in doubling this address with that of the viewer of the installation, Ahtila’s work creates a ‘contact space’, a concept derived from the notion of ‘political space’ in Wendy Brown’s political philosophy.6 The exhortation to action is complicated by its multilingual presentation and, equally, by its ambiguous place in Les Damnés de la terre itself. The phrase, which appears in English in the script as ‘you do what you have to do’, is spoken in Finnish on the video soundtrack and corresponds to the phrase ‘faites ce que vous voulez’ in Fanon’s original text.7 As Bal notes, the political implications of the choice of language of expression bear further scrutiny: The quoted original is Martiniquan (a département of the French republic, at the time under French colonial rule) if we go by the provenance of the quoted author, Frantz Fanon. But it is also in French, the language of the quoted text, Les Damnés de la terre. This is also the language of the power structure: the boy Adel is being examined on behalf of the French State. (p. 29) The ambiguity of address is still greater than Bal suggests: although the interrogators in Ahtila’s scenario are representatives of the French state, the interlocutor in the transcribed interview in Les Damnés de la terre is Fanon himself. When he states ‘nous avons de longs entretiens avec eux [les petits inculpés]’ (p. 194) (‘I have long conversations with [the young suspects]’), Fanon uses the French rhetorical ‘nous’ form to designate his official professional activity, in this case as chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria. Such official language expresses an ambivalent affiliation to state power: although Fanon was in theory, as a state-employed psychiatrist, carrying out the policies of the French state in colonial Algeria, he sympathised with the Algerian revolution, had already published the radical political text Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) and subsequently became a public spokesman for the Front de Libération Nationale while in Tunisia in 1957. It is here that the voices of installation and text begin to multiply: the narrator of Fanon’s text is both civil servant and political activist, and it is these twin voices or personalities that give rise to Les Damnés de la terre and to the encounter between colonial war and mental illness which Ahtila belatedly draws upon. For Razanajao, Postel and Allen, ‘the twin aspects of his [Fanon’s] activity cannot be separated: promoting the revolution and promoting his conception of real psychiatry are features of the same commitment’.8 Nevertheless, their juxtaposition in Les Damnés de la terre leads both to the inclusion of psychiatric case studies in a work of political philosophy and, still more surprisingly, to the radical exclusion of the case study concerning the murder of the European boy from Fanon’s theory of violence. Despite positing colonisation and the Algerian war of independence as the causes of the epidemic of psychological problems he analyses

The Relational Archive  83 in chapter 5 of Les Damnés de la terre, Fanon does not, as David Macey notes, seize the opportunity to reiterate his theory of violence as a positive and therapeutic force.9 Fanon’s entry into this shifting intermedial network of voices and texts is marked as much by an unexpected reserve as it is by self-assertion. In Les Damnés, the psychiatric case study is supposed to produce expert testimony that will make possible a legal judgement on the boys’ responsibility for the crime, and yet its presentation is characterised by an inscrutability and open-endedness that ultimately affirm the impossibility of consensus. As Fanon’s notes at the beginning of the section dealing with the case of the two boys make clear, the context is that of ‘une expertise médico-légale’, an official psychiatric examination or, as the Farrington translation puts it, ‘expert medical advice in a legal matter’.10 The boy’s statement ‘faites ce que vous voulez’, which provides the last words of Ahtila’s script, pre-empts and disables any legal judgement, while in Fanon’s text the interviewer’s subsequent question, ‘alors?’, followed by the wilfully inconsequential ‘voilà’ (p. 196), suggests that any future legal or diagnostic discourse will, rather than arriving at consensual judgement, perpetuate the inconsequentiality of the interview. The discourse of consensus is rendered inoperative by the colonial violence to which the boys are already subject, suggesting a politics which must instead operate under the sign of dissensus. It is here that Fanon’s rich source-text highlights the concern in Where is Where? with the moment of enunciation and of viewing. Just as the internal structure of Les Damnés de la terre is born of the simultaneous articulation of politics and psychiatry, simultaneity proves to underlie Where is Where? and its call to action. The installation, as we have seen, pursues a disorientating temporal logic in which the present is consumed by the past and the past, conversely, refuses its pastness. As Bal argues, ‘Ahtila’s Algerian War/ Revolution emphatically becomes an event in the present in that it mobilises historical consciousness and responsibility’ (p. 23). For Bal, the traumatic history Ahtila presents can be understood in terms of the extremely influential ‘retrospective logic I have termed “pre-posterous” (1999)’ (p. 23). The suggestion is persuasive, and perhaps merits more detailed consideration than it in fact receives in Thinking in Film. Ahtila’s Where is Where?, like Kolbowski’s After Hiroshima mon amour, has a strong claim to function according to Bal’s ‘reversal, which puts what came chronologically first (‘pre-’) as an aftereffect behind (‘post’) its later recycling, […] a preposterous history’.11 The figure has specific implications for art historical discourses, which are engaged in my later discussion of Kolbowski’s work, but also aptly expresses the intertwining of past and present in Ahtila. Ahtila’s complex understanding of the event resonates particularly forcefully in the context of the Algerian War, and her work’s attention to the multi-faceted nature of the event and the multiplicity of moments of its apprehension reconfigures both installation forms and understandings of history. Where is Where? proposes new ways of viewing the Algerian War,

84  The Relational Archive an event which was written out of history for decades through its euphemistic demotion to a series of events (‘les événements d’Algérie’); recognition that it constituted a full-blown war and struggle for independence came only in the 1990s.12 Ahtila’s Algerian War is mediated through its self-conscious staging (the interrogation scenes take place on a theatre stage), through the invented characters of the interrogators and the doctor and, equally, through the figure of the poet, who represents the (2008) present but shares the stage with characters from the 1950s. To view the installation is to view these dual temporal situations simultaneously, as the 1950s murder is overlaid with the poet’s daily life. The logic of the installation is preposterous, then, but it also adds to the preposterous a logic of fraught simultaneity. Not only is the murder subordinated to the post hoc interrogation, but its apprehension is complicated by the work’s multi-channel architecture. Of the six screens, four face each other and can thus be viewed in quick succession. The multi-channel form means that viewing the preposterous moment of the 1950s murder requires the viewer to negotiate not one but four simultaneous representations of it (screens five and six are close to the entrance and exit and cannot be viewed at the same time as screens one to four). At times, as in the sequence following Death’s arrival at the door of the poet’s house, all screens depict the same place, in this case Algiers. At others, meanwhile, as in the aftermath of the attack on the Algerian village, they diverge, showing documentary images of Algerians carrying corpses; two girls walking into the Poet’s room to recover a dead body; and a toy dog. It is through this dialogue between the screens that we apprehend the crucial pre-text to the murder of the European boy: that of the Rivet killing in 1956, in which French forces killed around forty inhabitants of a village near Algiers. In what Bal describes as ‘a mix of documentary footage and blatantly fictional enactment’ (p. 36), Ahtila’s film shows soldiers walking towards the village at night and then, across three screens successively, an Algerian woman walking into the Poet’s living room. Although she does not speak to the Poet, the scene is punctuated by the sound of a dog barking in response to the soldiers’ arrival, and we subsequently see the Algerian woman run to warn the villagers. The momentary illusion of the screens as a coextensive space during the woman’s passage between them ultimately underlines the remoteness of the Algerian setting from the Poet’s situation in present-day Finland. At the same time, a sound bridge is created between the two scenarios by the dog’s bark, which prompts both the woman and the Poet to look up. The look is once more deictic in function, and serves to direct the viewer’s attention in a similar way to the injunction to act, ‘faites ce que vous voulez’, gesturing towards an unspecified future relation. The apprehension of a single place, then, takes place through multiple viewing moments, and a single moment in history is articulated across several screens. If such a movement is preposterous, it finds an uncanny precursor in the work of Fanon’s contemporary Jean Genet. Genet’s anger at the Algerian

The Relational Archive  85 War takes specifically intermedial form in the play Les Paravents, published in 1961, the same year as Les Damnés de la terre, and whose stage directions demand that objects and landscapes relating to the on-stage action are depicted on three-metre-high screens. The anti-colonial vision and brutal depictions of the French military which Genet sets out in the play are bound up with a formal critique which, through the device of the screen, both gestures towards film and deliberately exploits the limits of theatrical representation. In an amplification of the intense political loading of spectatorship seen in the earlier Les Nègres (1958), the elaborately anti-naturalistic device of the screens, suggesting that understanding the event requires a multiplicity of perspectives, is bound up with an acerbic critique of colonialism. The moment at which the dead burst through the screens confirms, in Marion May Campbell’s account, the ‘non-cooption of [Genet’s] hero and heroine into any regime’, whether representational or political.13 The Rivet killing is revisited in Where is Where? in the interrogation scene when, asked to explain his reasons for killing his friend, Adel responds ‘have you heard of the Rivet case?’ (p. 114). The doctor responds: ‘a village called Rivet near Algiers became famous in 1956, when French gendarmes attacked the village one night, dragged forty men out of their beds and murdered them’ (p. 114). The statement is largely faithful to Fanon’s text, except in terms of viewpoint: Ahtila’s dramatic speech does not originate in the exchanges between the two interlocutors in the interview in Les Damnés de la terre, but is instead found in a footnote (p. 196). Where is Where?, then, amplifies and personifies elements of Fanon’s text while inscribing the dubious accessibility of the past into the fabric of the video installation. As Nicholas Mirzoeff notes, the newsreel footage Ahtila uses here is consigned to screens one and six: because these screens are outside the main room of the installation, ‘it was therefore impossible to see the entire “film”’. Although, for Mirzoeff, the strategy is rooted in a ‘challenge to the concept of film in the digital-video era’, I suggest rather that this is part of the archivalist agenda of Where is Where?, in which the passage between contemporary and archival media is part of the exploration of the traumatic past.14 Mirzoeff’s observation does reflect Ahtila’s self-conscious use of archival footage which, as Bal acknowledges, includes contemporary newsreel and extracts from documentary film by René Vautier shot in Algeria. The archival image attains particular prominence in the sequences surrounding the interrogation: the murder is immediately followed by film of the war, described in the script as ‘archive shots from the days of the Algerian independence struggle’ (p. 112). As though to emphasise the contingency of our attempts to apprehend the past in the present, the final shots of the film consist of ‘still pictures of dead people, documentary material’ (p. 115), as viewing is swallowed up once more by the archival repertoire. Mirzoeff, finally, comments on the extraordinary afterlife of Fanon’s description of the Rivet killings: that which it takes on in John Edgar Wideman’s novel Fanon (2008). Wideman’s scenario includes, in mise en

86  The Relational Archive abyme, the writing of a book about Fanon by a character called Thomas, as Mirzoeff describes: Wideman proposes a re-creation of the same scene from The Wretched of the Earth as that visualised by Ahtila: the killing of the French child. Only in this case it is to be set in counterpoint with Homewood, Pittsburgh, an underprivileged African American neighbourhood. (pp. 262–63) Wideman’s project is rooted in the real encounter between Fanon and Wideman’s mother which took place in 1961 while she was working as a nurse in Bethesda and Fanon was being treated for leukaemia there. When, in the fictional Fanon project, Thomas, the author, pitches the scenario to Jean-Luc Godard, Godard crushingly responds that ‘images are slaves, prisoners. Images kidnapped, copyrighted, archived, cloned. Property’.15 If  this fictional Godard seems to foreclose the possibility of a cinematic afterlife for Fanon, and to associate the archival image with the bourgeois world of property, his voice furthers the active concern in Ahtila with the image as an unreliable bearer of historical and political messages. The impossible dialogue between Thomas and Godard, like that between Wideman and Ahtila, or that between Genet, Fanon and Ahtila, continues to pose the question with which I have been concerned throughout my discussion of Where is Where?: that of its political address. Bal considers Ahtila’s work to be politically engaged in its creation of ‘contact spaces’, and yet the notion of such spaces suggests an understanding of the public realm informed by consensus. The distinctively North American voice which Wideman brings to the conversation helps us apply such an understanding critically to a body of work which brings to bear a unique archivalist politics upon a variety of memorial sites and discourses: that of Silvia Kolbowski. Kolbowski’s work recalls that of Ahtila in its transversal engagement with the memory of Hiroshima and of the Iraq war. Nevertheless, it breaks new ground both in its scrutiny of the archive and in its radical treatment of enunciation. If, for Ahtila, the problem of saying ‘I’ in the present centres on the figure of the Poet, in Kolbowski enunciation is at once democratised, delocalised and rendered anonymous. In tracing out a serial failure of identification on the part of the speaking subject, Kolbowski achieves an unsettling of the speaker’s link to the author functions of art historical, as well as historical, discourses, and does much to disturb consensus.

After Hiroshima mon amour as Contact Space Silvia Kolbowski’s video project After Hiroshima mon amour (2005–08) renegotiates the place of war and trauma in discourses of cultural memory. In remaking Alain Resnais’ 1959 film in the shadow of the Iraq war, and acknowledging the impossibility of assigning an end either to that conflict or to Hiroshima, Kolbowski stages the intractability of the traumatic past and,

The Relational Archive  87 in doing so, creates novel forms of engagement which implicate viewers, in the present, in archivalist practices. Hiroshima mon amour, Kolbowski’s cinematic pre-text, famously depicts a love affair between two unnamed protagonists, ‘She’ (Emmanuelle Riva) and ‘He’ (Eiji Okada). In his staging of the chance encounter which takes place between them while She is filming a commemorative film ‘about Peace’ in Hiroshima in 1957, Resnais juxtaposes past trauma with desire in the present. In Kolbowski, as in Ahtila, the apprehension of the past takes place in an installation situation which draws attention to the mediation of the past and the belatedness of its presentation: to view Hiroshima is also to view other later sites of traumatic experience, principally Iraq and New Orleans.

Figure 3.1 Silvia Kolbowski, After Hiroshima mon amour, 2008. Video; twenty-two minutes. Installation view, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal. Photograph: Paul Litherland.

For Kolbowski, ‘by using an earlier film as a palimpsest onto which layers are added, the contemporary focus on Iraq and New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, rests on an earlier traumatic incursion and site of criminal neglect’.16 The dialogue between those sites is achieved not through multi-channel juxtapositions like those in Ahtila, but instead through a strategy of substitution pursued around markers of ethnicity, through exploitation of video sound and through reflexive critique of the work’s generic status. Kolbowski’s work provides an intriguing response to Bal’s notion of contact spaces: although in presenting locations remote from one another in time and place it appears to foreclose the possibility of ‘contact’, After Hiroshima mon amour in fact

88  The Relational Archive complicates and extends Bal’s understanding of relationality, in particular what she refers to as the ‘political force of figuration’ (p. 6). Before exploring the specifics of Kolbowski’s work, in which the work of figuration is bound up with the capacity of characters to ‘figure’ gender and ethnicity and, in doing so, to interrogate memorial discourses, I return briefly to the notion of the contact space and its relational potential. Bal’s account of contact spaces explicitly signals its debt to Wendy Brown’s notion of political space: Thinking beyond ordinary boundaries and going into other, new, unheard-of spaces is of vital importance to sustain the conditions of a functioning political domain. According to political philosopher Wendy Brown, these conditions are the formation of judgements, the performance of democratic acts and the availability of what she calls ‘political spaces’ (1995). These are spaces where people (the demos of democracy) can be together, learn new things that break with everyday routine, recognise and acknowledge the unreflective habits of others and then talk on an equal footing, which includes the possibility to disagree. (p. 7) Paradoxically, in Brown’s account in States of Injury (1995), women’s voices are most likely to be heard through ‘political conversation oriented toward diversity and the common, toward world rather than self’.17 For Brown, this conversation entails the conversion of ‘a situated (subject) position into a public idiom’ (p. 51). The feminist critique of identity politics in Brown provides a key context in which to read Ahtila and Kolbowski, and the passage from a politics of identity to a ‘politics of diversity’ in Brown foreshadows the uncoupling of the signs of ethnicity and gender in After Hiroshima mon amour from their origins in the work’s source scenario. Just as, for Brown, the politicisation of the ‘I’ is ‘partly at odds with the requisites for developing political conversation among a complex and diverse “we”’ (p. 51), the multiple speakers of Kolbowski’s work indicate the possibility of a form of collective political enunciation. Such a form of speech informs Chantal Mouffe’s recent work, which seeks to apply the idea of the agonistic nature of politics in the domain of art, and to evaluate the possibilities for political speech in the artistic domain. Mouffe, too, allows for the ‘deconstruction of the “who-ness” and the proliferation of identities’ emanating from recent feminist accounts of agonistic politics,18 while cautioning that such notions must be accompanied by the creation of institutions and forms of power that will allow democracy to be radicalised (pp. 14–15). A key element of Mouffe’s work is the recognition that ‘antagonism is ineradicable and that every order is an hegemonic order’ (p. 14). In this, and in the conviction that ‘artistic practices can contribute to unsettling the dominant hegemony’ (p. 91), Mouffe is close to Jacques Rancière, and to the notion of dissensus in Rancière’s work. For both, the potential of art to disturb hegemonic discourses lies not in overt political content or in ‘participatory’ encounters, but in what Mouffe calls ‘critical art’. Both,

The Relational Archive  89 too, reject Hannah Arendt’s vision of public space as producing consensus, a vision which cannot acknowledge ‘the hegemonic nature of every form of consensus and the ineradicability of antagonism, the moment of what Lyotard refers to as “the differend”’ (p. 11). For Rancière, dissensus stands both for the moment at which hegemonic discourse is challenged, when an excluded group demands a reconfiguration of a common understanding and, equally, for the way this type of reconfiguration can be written into the form of art-works. As Rancière puts it in Aesthetics and its Discontents, dissensus is ‘the way in which the practices and forms of visibility of art themselves intervene in the distribution of the sensible and its reconfiguration’.19 Kolbowski’s work leads both to the disruption of hegemonic discourse and an intermedial reconfiguration of the sensible. At the heart of Kolbowski’s complex remaking of Hiroshima mon amour is the replacement of He and She with multiple characters. Instead of negotiating the film’s juxtapositions through the familiar, iconic presence of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, in After Hiroshima mon amour we encounter a seemingly endless succession of male and female actors, as the roles of She and He cross and re-cross boundaries of gender and ethnicity in the course of the video. The strategy is pursued in the quotation of Marguerite Duras’ scenario in the subtitles of After Hiroshima mon amour, suggesting explanatory mediation of the French text but in fact complicating the recognition of gender, ethnicity and place. A key example occurs when Duras’ ‘synopsis’ is quoted in the first three minutes of the video, setting the images the day before the female character returns to France and introducing her encounter with the male character: ‘this anonymous woman meets a Japanese man (an engineer or architect)’.20 Faithful as it is to Duras’ text, the claim contradicts Kolbowski’s video montage, which shows an olive-skinned man who does not look Japanese at this point. His posture and gestures, lounging on a hotel room bed and smiling, recall those of Okada in Hiroshima mon amour, so that we are drawn into identifying him with the male character even as his ethnicity suggests the opposite. He is almost immediately replaced by a smiling white couple, lying in bed in another hotel room, at which point the subtitles read ‘how they met will not be revealed in the picture’. This very brief sequence, entirely silent apart from minimal background noise, then cuts to a repeated scene in which an unidentified female character draws a red cross on what appears to be a white flag. As Rosalyn Deutsche argues in her insightful study Hiroshima after Iraq, this is ‘a scene that suggests questions about humanitarian law and aid’ and, for Deutsche, identifies Kolbowski’s project as a reflection on ethics and, in its juxtaposition of ­Hiroshima and Iraq, ‘the American way of war’.21 As Deutsche says, ‘the video is framed by footage, appropriated from its source film, on which the artist has performed certain mediating operations, and which she has edited together with footage of war-torn Iraq and post-Katrina New Orleans’ (p. 10). Those mediating operations, I suggest, are of three kinds: the manipulation of spectatorial relations through video sound, a self-conscious appeal to archival material and an exploitation of the work’s generic status as installation.

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Synchresis and Sound Relations in After Hiroshima mon amour The near-elimination of sound in the hotel room sequence is highly disconcerting, flouting the conventions of cinema sound. The disruption of viewing and listening relations which ensues has particular relational potential, suggesting a reconfiguration of the auditory which makes an implicit demand on the listener. In A L’Ecoute, Jean-Luc Nancy theorises such a demand as a call to listen, ‘an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety’.22 In the cinema, complete silence is rare, and tends to induce extreme discomfort in the viewer; Kolbowski’s creation of a ‘silence-over’, in Jalal Toufic’s phrase, inhibits viewing, and is not relieved until the beginning of the longer scene involving the black woman and white man, around five minutes into the video.23 Kolbowski’s work exploits two further techniques focusing on sound which pursue this demand and which refer to strategies already present in Hiroshima mon amour: acoustic quotation and acousmatic sound. Not only does Hiroshima mon amour quote the soundtrack of Nuit et brouillard, but the opening sequences of After Hiroshima mon amour quote the soundtrack of Hiroshima mon amour in modified, digital form.24 Resnais’ opening sequences are themselves quoted in After Hiroshima mon amour, in which original images of the lovers’ bodies accompany the soundtrack, albeit overlaid with Kolbowski’s title sequence in addition to that of Hiroshima mon amour itself and with one frame in four subtracted.

Figure 3.2 Silvia Kolbowski, After Hiroshima mon amour, 2008. Video; twenty-two minutes. Installation view, Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal. Photograph: Paul Litherland.

The Relational Archive  91 The troubling beauty of the ash-sprinkled bodies is subsequently cut with first-person documentary footage of American soldiers entering a building during the Iraq war. Duras’ ‘I saw everything. Everything’ now accompanies a confrontation between soldiers and civilians, and jerky low-definition hand-held video footage replaces Resnais’ lovingly crafted black-and-white cinematography. The claim to have seen ‘everything’ is complicated by the ongoing presence of trauma in the (2005) present, when to have seen everything is to have seen New Orleans and Iraq as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For all that the quotation of sound in After Hiroshima mon amour suggests continuity, it in fact reinscribes the video in the highly ambivalent repetition dynamics of its predecessor, and puts the conventions of cinema sound under intolerable strain. Large swathes of the video are silent, or accompanied only by background noise: the dialogues between the two protagonists which occupy such a prominent position in the original film are largely mute, leaving the viewer grasping for the monosyllabic sentences and crystal-clear enunciation of Resnais’ film (‘You destroy me. You’re so good for me’).25 While it is tempting to try to reconcile the two voices in the sequence with the characters of She and He, the voices remain disembodied, preventing the desired identification. Kolbowski’s deliberately elliptical editing uses silence, and periodic incursions of sound, to dislocate many of the operative relations of Hiroshima mon amour. Most strikingly, sound and image are placed out of sync for almost the entire duration of the video, drastically amplifying the original’s threat to the acoustic order. As a result, the collision of the erotic and the deathly is subject to a further collision: instead of providing respite from the traumatic sub-text, the love scenes are now immersed in it. The respite in Hiroshima mon amour is itself strictly relative, and underwritten by trauma (for instance in the match-cut between Okada’s hand as he lies sleeping in bed and the hand of the Hiroshima survivor). In the remake, however, that relation is brutally undercut. In Kolbowski, the reassuring wholeness of Okada’s and Riva’s bodies in the present, and the viable relation between their bodies and voices, is undermined. Instead of the clearly intelligible dialogue between She and He which, at least in part two, suggests naturalistic characterisation, in Kolbowski the characters embrace in a strange limbo; their lips move silently, as if in a vacuum. The sounds heard by the viewer are principally derived from ‘background’ noise, albeit from a background whose foreground is never resolved. He and She, then, are deprived of much of the jouissance which animates the original love scenes: their function now resembles that of the ­acousmêtre, in Michel Chion’s sense of an ‘acousmatic character’ which is ‘neither inside nor outside the image. It is not inside, because the image of the voice’s source – the body, the mouth – is not included. Nor is it outside, since it is not clearly positioned offscreen in an imaginary “wing”’.26 In contrast to Chion’s description, the mouth from which the sound issues is

92  The Relational Archive visually present, but its acoustic referent has disappeared. Kolbowski’s technique indicates a more radical disorientation than that observed by Chion in the procedures by which speech is relativised in cinematographic sound.27 Kolbowski works against Chion’s notion of synchresis, ‘the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time’ (p. 63). As Chion notes, ‘synchresis can even work out of thin air – that is, with images and sounds that strictly speaking have nothing to do with each other’ (p. 63). Important as it is, Chion’s account pays rather less attention to the obverse relationship: while ‘loose synch gives a less naturalistic, more readily poetic effect, and a very tight synch stretches the audiovisual canvas more’ (p. 65), Kolbowski loosens synchronisation to such an extent that images and sounds are no longer perceived as related at all. In part, the technique reflects the changed relation of sound and image in video as opposed to film, a relation which Kolbowski ruthlessly exploits. Chion acknowledges the change, arguing that ‘in film frame and sound are strongly inter-related, particularly through the factor of offscreen space’ (p. 165). His conclusion is provocative: ‘there may well be a precise relation at the core of video art between the vagueness of the frame and the indeterminate status given to sound’ (pp. 164–65). The predominant sound dynamic in After Hiroshima mon amour is one of loss of reference, as the viewer attempts to relate images to sounds and, inevitably, fails. The technique is an integral part of Kolbowski’s technique of repetition made unfamiliar, and contrasts sharply with Chion’s claim that ‘generally speaking, video art does not devote much thought to the place of sound’ (p. 165). The anti-synchresis of After Hiroshima mon amour does recall Chion’s comment on the ‘indeterminate status’ of sound in one respect: sound and image are choreographed so as to render their relation indeterminate, rather than simply antagonistic, and sound and image very occasionally coincide. In one of the scenes depicting He and She in bed (in this sequence the roles are played by a black woman and a white man), we are suddenly and inexplicably able to hear the off-screen sound which interrupts their (silent) dialogue, a loud cough. The video pursues the ontological problems of Hiroshima mon amour, rendering the truth-status of events as indeterminate as in Resnais’ original, but the occasional flashes of diegetic sound hold out the prospect of making sense of the narrative at a level beyond contingency. Synchronisation of sound and image returns briefly at the very end of After Hiroshima mon amour, in the scene following the woman’s return to her hotel room at dawn. In its brief restoration of the relation between sound and body, this remade final scene is still more disorientating than the desynchronised sequences, and lends tremendous emphasis to the closing dialogue between He and She: ‘I’ll forget you! I’m forgetting you already! Look at me!’ (p. 83). The scene ends with a lurid red dissolve as the soundtrack revisits the opening music of Hiroshima mon amour, a version

The Relational Archive  93 of which accompanies a red-saturated manipulation of the early sequences in the original depicting the ash-covered bodies. Kolbowski’s video does not replicate the distant gaze with which She ascribes to He the fixity of a place (‘he looks at her, she at him as she would look at the city’ (p. 83)), and it omits the final lines in which She is explicitly identified with Nevers and He with Hiroshima (‘Hi-ro-shi-ma. That’s your name’ (p. 83)). It does, however, point to a further network of identifications and substitutions concerning both text-image relations and ethnicity. If the closing scenes of After Hiroshima mon amour restore visualised sound and therefore point towards a more conventional cinematic acoustic order, another disjunction is made apparent in visual terms: the man playing He is not the same as in the earlier scene in which the cough disrupts the work’s acoustic fabric. In that scene, the woman’s head rests upon the chest of a white man with a goatee; here, by contrast, he is olive-skinned. She nevertheless recognises him, driving a further wedge between the relations operative in the diegesis and those which obtain in the viewer’s understanding of it. The reconfiguration of sound and image relations in the video enforces a thorough scrutiny of our viewing assumptions. That scrutiny informs the radical critique of hegemonic discourses in After Hiroshima mon amour, whether those discourses concern gender, ethnicity, or their mediation through discourses of foreign intervention (Iraq) or domestic neglect (New Orleans). When sound relations promise renewed intelligibility, that intelligibility is juxtaposed with public memorials in a way that suggests further critique of the problematic intelligibility of commemorative discourses. The viewer’s disorientation is tempered by the return of sound later in the hotel room scene, when the almost complete silence is relieved by the return of background noise (the sound of insects like crickets). Although the lovers’ dialogue cannot be heard, the acoustic dimension is at least shown to be operative once more. The continuum of sound is suddenly interrupted by the loud, off-screen cough, at which point the protagonists look up, as though to locate the source of the sound. The moment suggests the overlapping of previously separate diegetic spheres (as though remote ‘background’ noise is now part of the present) or a return to synchronised sound. The subtitles reinforce the relation of the personal narrative to discourses of commemoration: ‘however little the spectator has been shown of the Hiroshima Monument, these miserable remains of a Monument of Emptiness, the spectator should come away purged of practically all prejudice and ready to accept anything that may be told about the two protagonists. And at this point, the film comes back to their own story’. Duras’ rather overloaded phrase links an absent visual signifier (the Hiroshima Monument), which has not appeared in Kolbowski’s video, to the possibility of a new form of spectatorial relation: the purging of prejudice which Duras describes suggests deep suspicion of official modes of commemorative spectatorship, a tendency which has been strongly emphasised in recent criticism on Hiroshima mon amour. For Kyo Maclear,

94  The Relational Archive ‘Resnais’s attempt to capture the elusive relationship between vision and knowledge in Hiroshima mon amour is a way of indicating the hubris of the all-knowing eye’, an argument which has further implications for my argument.28 Despite the promise of reference to the ‘present’, the words ‘at this point’ in fact trigger footage of Iraq. Instead of the advertised return to the intimacy of the lovers’ embrace, we view a washed-out Iraqi highway from the vantage point of an American military vehicle. ‘Their embrace, so banal, so commonplace’, we read, ‘takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to imagine it’. Far from reducing the impact of the video, the wholesale transposition of signifiers of place which occurs in After Hiroshima mon amour represents a telling, and curiously faithful, engagement with Hiroshima mon amour itself. Just as She and He are divested of their individual identities (‘in each other’s eyes, they are no one’ (p. 13)) and substituted for the places associated with their past histories (Nevers, Hiroshima), Hiroshima is now exchanged for Iraq and, following Hiroshima mon amour, personal history and historical memory are locked in a relation of undecidability. The traffic briefly eases; as the vehicle clears a crossroads, a single word appears in the subtitle area: ‘Hiroshima’. Instead of functional signification, language amplifies the disorientation wrought by sound; the image of Iraq is accompanied by a quite remote signifier of place. Kolbowski’s subtitles quote Duras’ desire to ‘have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves’ (p. 9). Alluding to the plethora of documentaries in existence by the time of Resnais’ commission, Kolbowski and Duras suggest a move away from documentary conventions. Immersion in the ‘banal’ love story or, equally, the transposition of the narrative into an entirely different geographical location, suggests an abdication of documentary ethics. In fact, however, the return to the couple in bed which follows these sequences heralds a reconstitution of the documentary form and a promise of ethical renewal. In an apparent return to a matching relation between subtitles and images, the subtitles claim ‘their personal story always dominates. If this condition were not respected, this film would be just one more made-to-order picture, of no more interest than any fictionalised documentary’ (p. 10). For Kolbowski, the intrusion of the personal story is a condition of formal innovation, and of avoiding the documentary ‘to order’: ‘if it is respected, we’ll end up with a sort of false documentary, that will probe the lesson of Hiroshima more deeply than any other made-to-order documentary’ (p. 10). It is through the incursion of the love story into the documentary that the possibility of documentary is paradoxically reinstated; spectatorial disorientation is pursued in the unfaithful caption, which adds the word ‘other’ to Duras’ statement on the made-to-order documentary. Kolbowski implies that After Hiroshima mon amour is indeed a made-to-order documentary, skewing the sense of the original and adding another fictional premise to the array of disingenuous statements that the viewer must negotiate. The subtitle is accompanied

The Relational Archive  95 by a striking photo-negative rendering of the actors’ bodies, reducing them to unsignifying forms locked in an inscrutable embrace: our recognition of He and She is compromised by the substitution of bodies which takes place throughout After Hiroshima mon amour, and even when the ‘original’ protagonists of Kolbowski’s project return, they are no more straightforwardly self-identical than the anonymous bodies in the opening sequences of Resnais’ film.

Archival Reconstruction In Hiroshima mon amour, sound contradicts the image’s claim to truth-­ telling in a way that signposts the work’s deep implication in the archive and, equally, the preoccupation with the archival in Kolbowski’s later video installation. In the early part of Resnais’ film, in which voiceover accompanies sequences shot in the hospital at Hiroshima, the intervention of the male protagonist’s voice informs us that we are viewing reconstructions, not documentary footage. When the woman’s voice claims ‘I saw everything. Everything’, the male voice replies ‘you saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing’. The line is spoken by ‘a man’s voice, flat and calm, as if reciting’, or as the French original puts it, in a ‘voix de lecture récitative’. This measured, almost incantatory tone troubles the relation of text to image and of voice to text, suggesting that He is reading from a script.29 The images we view are reconstructions of the past, instead of directly depicting the traumatic events of Hiroshima, and the voice which conveys this knowledge is itself mediated by a pre-existing text. Kolbowski’s exploitation of the archival problematics of Hiroshima mon amour complements the installation’s reconfiguration of sound and image relations, trading upon the promise of documentary knowledge and linking that promise to the problematics of remaking. The female protagonist’s experience of Hiroshima in Resnais’ film is peculiarly dependent on the idea of historical fact: the hospital sequence is closely followed by shots of the archival materials she views at the museum, including newsreel footage, statistics (200,000 dead) and photographs. The sequence bears an epistemological promise which is apparently corroborated when the archival materials are shown to the spectator, echoing the claim ‘I saw the newsreels’ (p. 18). The film’s standpoint to the archive, however, is very much more complex, and opens up epistemological fault lines which are later exploited to great effect in After Hiroshima mon amour. The female protagonist’s insistent account of the archive is infused with the desperate passion which shapes her affair with the Japanese man, and with the same sense of delusion, ‘the knowledge of Hiroshima being stated a priori by an exemplary delusion of mind’ (p. 9). The claim to historical knowledge and its subsequent denial are the simultaneously deathly and erotic faces of that passion. As Nina Varsava has argued, ‘in her commanding and precise regurgitation of the museum’s contents, Riva’s character dramatizes the archival drive, what Derrida terms “mal d’archive”’.30

96  The Relational Archive The quest for knowledge of the traumatic event, then, is bound up with the twin dynamics of recording and deletion seen in Derrida’s theory of the archive, as the feverish imperative to record brings with it a countervailing repression or erasure. For Varsava, ‘the film composes “a contradictory turning to the archive and yet a contesting of its authority”’ like that seen by Linda Hutcheon in postmodern fiction.31 That contradictory turn, I suggest, becomes both more sweeping and more interrogative in Kolbowski’s project, which extrapolates from the claim, in Duras’ script, to produce ‘a false documentary’ (p. 10). The spectre of the false documentary affords further insight into the archival anxiety which afflicts the female character, along with the archival ‘reconstitutions’ which are its symptoms. One of the immediate causes of that anxiety is the comprehensive nature of the destruction of Hiroshima, as a result of which many of the artefacts held in the museum are in fact reconstructions: Four times at the museum in Hiroshima. I saw the people walking around. The people walk around, lost in thought, among the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else [faute d’autre chose], among the photographs, the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, the explanations, for want of something else. (p. 17) The archival objects which She consults are themselves reconstructions, opening up important questions about the forms of historical knowledge which are possible after Hiroshima. She is in Hiroshima in order to make a film which is itself a remaking of the traumatic event; her attempts to understand the event lead her to the remade artefacts which populate the archive. As Olivier Ammour-Mayeur notes, the equally uncertain ontological foundation of the love story and of the ‘reconstitutions’ is indicated in their designation as contingent, ‘faute d’autre chose’.32 The process of la reconstitution – that is, remaking – spreads from a contingent archival strategy to an aesthetic procedure with far-reaching ethical consequences. It is this procedure which will ultimately produce Kolbowski’s remake, After Hiroshima mon amour. For Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Hiroshima mon amour is both ‘unmakable and never remade’.33 The latter claim is invalidated only in 2005 by Kolbowski’s radical project of remaking, a project which itself draws upon the embryonic ethics of reconstruction seen in Duras’ and Resnais’ film. The project occupies the intermedial hinterland created by Hiroshima mon amour: following the remaking of Hiroshima as ‘a film about Peace’ (p. 34) and as Hiroshima mon amour itself, Kolbowski remakes the film as a video installation and photographic exhibition preoccupied with contemporary (2005–08) conflicts. At the conclusion of her essay, Ropars-Wuilleumier explicitly links the problematics of remaking to the documentary form, noting that, despite the danger of doing so, ‘Hiroshima mon amour does not remake Nuit et brouillard’. Instead, ‘Hiroshima marks the moment when,

The Relational Archive  97 in the aesthetic world, that consciousness of an irreducible gap between facts and their formulation emerged’ (p. 183). Resnais’ film interrogates the procedures by which documentary artefacts produce historical discourses of memory or, in Nina Varsava’s analysis, espouses ‘an ethics of representation that resists the violence of positivist accounts of history’ (p. 111). Noting the prominent role of the archival in the film, Varsava argues that ‘the film incites criticism of the injustice that archival discourses enact on the particularities of trauma, and raises questions about the ethics as well as the truth-value of conventional commemorative tropes’ (p. 111). Those questions, I suggest, are posed still more insistently, and create a larger discursive framework, in Kolbowski’s remaking. In her account of the ‘antipositivist, deconstructivist sensibilities’ of ­Hiroshima mon amour, Varsava refers to Kyo Maclear’s work, in which the film is explicitly taken as a model of deconstructionist ethics.34 Rejecting the oft-repeated charges of nihilism and the claim that historical reference is fictive, Maclear repositions deconstructive procedures as attentive to the gaps in historical knowledge occasioned by trauma (pp. 234–35). For Maclear, the ‘archival history’ which the female protagonist attempts to construct is undermined by the film’s restlessly shifting viewpoints, adding a multiplicity of perspectives to the unity suggested by the figure of the archive (p. 237). Like the sensory reconfiguration undertaken through ethnic substitution and video sound, those perspectives create disturbances in the hegemonic. In Kolbowski, such effects are significantly amplified: the ten actors who alternately occupy the roles of He and She in After Hiroshima mon amour enact the ‘multiple and diverse “we”’ imagined by Wendy Brown. The proliferation of viewpoints, too, guides the ongoing remaking of After Hiroshima mon amour as installation, from LA>