Retroactivity and Contemporary Art 9781350009974, 9781350010000, 9781350009967

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One
1. Modernism in ruins
Part Two
2. Index (tracing)
3. The reality of ends
Part Three
4. When, even if
5. Still there, waiting (retracing)
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

i

Retroactivity and Contemporary Art

ii

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY The Curatorial Reparative Aesthetics, Susan Best Counter-Memorial Aesthetics, Veronica Tello Enduring Time, Lisa Baraitser

iii

Retroactivity and Contemporary Art craig staff

iv

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Craig Staff, 2018 Craig Staff has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0997-4 PB: 978-1-3501-3676-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0996-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-0999-8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

v

Contents Acknowledgements

Introduction

vii

1

PART ONE 1

Modernism in ruins

11

PART TWO Index (tracing) 33 3 The reality of ends 2

55

PART THREE When, even if 79 5 Still there, waiting (retracing) 4

Notes 119 Bibliography Index 185

172

99

vi

vii

Acknowledgements I first broached the possibility of writing this book with Liza Thompson, someone who I previously had had the good fortune of working with whilst she was at I.B.Tauris. At that point, which was towards the latter half of 2014, the book not only had a different title but my intentions for it were somewhat inchoate. With her guidance, I was not only able to begin formulating a coherent thematic approach, but I was also able to begin the task in earnest. I remain indebted to her editorial nous, clear-sightedness and general support. With regard to the book’s genesis from that point on, thanks must also go to Frankie Mace who has been able to steer the project to its successful conclusion. Fundamentally, Retroactivity and Contemporary Art remains indebted to the artists whose work is included. Their willingness to engage with and lend their support to my undertaking is very much appreciated. In this respect, I would like to extend a special thanks to Chloe Dewe Mathews, Hannah Leighton-Boyce and Rä di Martino. I  am also grateful to the various gallery and museum spaces that have provided assistance and, in certain cases, granted permissions for their works to be reproduced within this study. As the recipient of research funds from the University of Northampton, I would like to thank the Faculty of the Arts, Science and Technology for its support. Finally, a heartfelt thank you must go to my family, who are always there, in time.

viii

1

Introduction

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.1

F

ounded in 1779 by John Fothergill on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends, Ackworth School sits approximately four miles due south of Pontefract in West Yorkshire. In accordance with guidelines as set out by the British government, during the Second World War blackout curtains were hung in the building’s windows with the intention of forestalling the school becoming a potential target during Germany’s night-time air raids. Although the war, along with the government’s blackout regulations, ended in 1945, a number of the curtains at the school remained a fixture of the building’s East Wing for almost seventy years until somewhat serendipitously, they were discovered by the artist Hannah LeightonBoyce. Based there from 2008 to 2011 as part of an artist’s residency, Leighton-Boyce salvaged two of the curtains from a bin and used them as the basis for the work East Wing 1939–2011 (2012) (Figure I.1). In the first instance, the heavily faded curtains are reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Shadows (1978), a series of 102 silkscreened canvas panels that were based on photographs of shadows taken in the artist’s studio. In addition to their visual affinities, both harness, albeit in markedly different ways, the variegated effects of light. Bearing in mind the fact that they were, and arguably still are, a pair of curtains brings to Leighton-Boyce’s work a further set of connections

2

2

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

FIGURE I.1 Hannah Leighton-Boyce, East Wing 1939–2011, 2012. Found curtains with extended analogue exposure, diptych; each 229 × 130 cm.

with the annals of art history. On one level, East Wing 1939–2011 continues modernism’s fascination with the objet trouvé or found object. More specifically, they recall Pliny the Elder’s anecdote concerning the rival artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius and their attempts to outwit each other using, among other things, a painting of a linen curtain. In the excursus to his Natural History, an encyclopedia first published towards the latter half of the first century, the natural philosopher recounts the various exploits of artists that lived and worked in the ancient world. One of the most compelling was that of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, two rival painters who lived during the fifth century BCE: Parrhasius and Zeuxis entered into a competition. Zeuxis entered a picture of some grapes so true to nature that birds flew up to the wall of the stage. Parrhasius exhibited a linen curtain which was painted with such realism that Zeuxis, swelling with pride over the verdict of the birds, demanded that his rival remove the curtain and show the picture. When he realized his error, he yielded the victory, frankly admitting that whereas he has deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived Zeuxis himself, a painter.2 While such points of contextual affinity and overlap are an interesting aspect of East Wing 1939–2011, the work’s meanings, given

3

INTRODUCTION

3

in part due to the bleached-out patina of the curtains, more squarely stem from and are organized around the work’s palpable relationship to time. To this end, as well as being keyed in to a historical moment wherein Britain was seeking to resist Hitler’s aerial bombardment, on a material level the work functions, according to the artist, as an ‘analogue record of the passage of time’.3 Approached in this way, East Wing 1939–2011 can be taken as being more broadly emblematic of an impulse within contemporary art that is concerned with both time and the potential recovery of the past or a particular moment therein. This aspect of the work, namely, its retroactivity, entails utilizing, in some way, shape or form, that which has previously occurred, happened or existed. As a consequence, retroactivity requires us to consider and reflect upon how that which inhabits the past tense can become reimagined within the present tense and material effects of what is, in this case, the work of contemporary art.4 This fundamental question frames the study as a whole and as such, focuses upon those works that foreground some aspect of the past (or equally, what has passed), as a means to engender a particular set of meanings. Within the context of what follows, the analysis of retroactivity within contemporary art will encompass instances that are somehow organized around particular historical moments. So, for example, Raum/Room (1994) by Thomas Demand is based on the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1944. However, as the study will evince, history can never be unequivocal. Working outwards from this admission means that the representation of such moments is very rarely a straightforward process, nor are such representations wholly indubitable. In other words, and as Keith Jenkins has noted, history, as both a discipline and a methodology, is marked by epistemological fragility. Within Re-thinking History, first published in 1991, Jenkins identifies four basic reasons for history’s epistemological fragility. First, the totality of past events remain irrecoverable because their content is ‘virtually limitless’.5 As Jenkins notes, ‘One cannot recount more than a fraction of what has occurred and no historian’s account ever corresponds precisely with the past: the sheer bulk of the past precludes total history.’6 Second, due to the fact that the past consists of events or situations, no account as such can adequately re-cover this. In other words, ‘[T]here is no fundamentally correct ‘text’ of which other interpretations are just variations; variations are all there are.’7

4

4

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Third, history remains a personal construct, ‘a manifestation of the historian’s perspective as a “narrator” ’.8 Finally, epistemological fragility arises out of the fact that, in effect, history ‘always conflates, it changes, it exaggerates aspects of the past’ so much so that ‘[h] istories as known to us appear more comprehensible than we have any reason to believe the past was’.9 Clearly then, history, as a discipline, is characterized by a series of factors that colour the extent to which the past can be understood as such. And as Jenkins’s text demonstrates, dissonance and discontinuity, slippage between the event and its subsequent representation and the complicity of the authorial voice with respect to how the past is (re)constructed all contribute towards this fragility.10 With Jenkins’s assertion that ‘historians can only recover fragments’ in mind, the aim of the first chapter is not to further rehearse the recent resurgence of contemporary art’s interest in ruins per se, but rather to approach the task at hand by way of a basic admission, namely, that modernism is now perceived, for certain figures at least, as being in ruins.11 While on one level this acknowledges a more broadly held view that modernism has reached a state of decay, if not obsolescence, one might still legitimately ask where its residual effects might be located. To this end, and in light of Brian Dillon’s own reflections on the subject, the focus of the chapter will be ‘the latent and so far unfulfilled life embodied in its ruins’.12 With this contention in mind, the work of Gerard Byrne will be considered. On one level, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, Byrne’s multichannel installation of 2010, is oriented towards that which has become canonical, at least with regard to our understanding of late or so-called high modernism. Taking as its primary focus a set of both practices and discourses that pertained to Minimalism, the work in one sense revisits a point within modernism’s history wherein, according to the artist, there was ‘an awareness that art is increasingly grounded in temporality’.13 Byrne’s approach to the ostensibly ruinous nature of modernism’s intellectual and artistic histories works outwards from the following admission, namely, that it is not and never was a static, totalizing narrative or unified and for that matter monolithic whole. Rather, modernism’s historiography is written and indeed continues to be rewritten as a series of moments that are now, to a lesser or greater extent, unmoored from their site of origin.

5

INTRODUCTION

5

For Pierre Nora, writing in the article ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, the anxiety that the absence of any singular determination or ‘single explanatory principle’ of the past ‘turns everything into a trace, a possible indication, a hint of history that contaminates the innocence of all things’.14 With this in mind, it is to the indexical status of the trace that the second chapter will be oriented towards.15 While the initial point of consideration will be one of examining indexicality as ‘a preeminent model for photography’, the main focus of the second chapter will be that of considering how the index, conceived within this particular context as a trace, either seeks to negotiate with or in some cases fall beyond the ontology of the photographic image.16 While Rosalind Krauss had originally sought to account for the artwork’s strategic deployment of the indexical sign-type in two articles published in October in 1977, it was arguably in The Optical Unconscious, first published in 1994, that she attempted to consider the index with regard to the temporalities it puts into effect and, furthermore, is necessarily contingent upon. Analogous to the graffitist’s expressive mark, the index, according to Krauss, is construed as that by which ‘the operations of form are those of marking an event – by forming it in terms of its remains, or its precipitate – and so in marking it, of cutting the event off from temporality of its making’.17 Notwithstanding the fact that Krauss conceived her interpretive framework as being directly applicable to certain modernist artists including Cy Twombly, her pronouncements on indexicality remain apposite for her reading of time in relation to work of art. Rather than simply rehearse Krauss’s own reflections on the index and the broader set of questions raised by her argument, the chapter will be oriented towards how the indexical sign-type as trace reinscribes some aspect of what has passed or previously occurred into the present tense. With this basic admission in mind, the work of Sophie Ristelhueber and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin will be considered. For Nora, writing elsewhere in ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, while ‘memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again’.18 Although not necessarily concerned with what Nora in this context deems to be

6

6

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

the ‘sacred’, the third chapter will nevertheless seek to examine how particular works of contemporary art are organized around a memorializing impulse. Rather than reflect upon memorials per se, the focus for this chapter will nevertheless be works that, like memorials, can be seen to function as ‘special precincts’ wherein the ‘reality of ends’ becomes marked.19 The fourth chapter of the study takes as its starting point the proclivity for artists to adopt re-enactment as a key artistic strategy. According to Ruth Erickson, the reason for such a ‘historical turn’ is twofold. First, it enables the artist the opportunity to ‘rewrite history by offering a forum for other viewpoints traditionally kept outside the “grand narratives.” ’.20 Second, re-enactment provides the critical means whereby ‘the images and accounts that have composed these narratives can be deconstructed’.21 Working outwards from the premise that The Eternal Frame (1975), T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s parodic version of the Kennedy assassination, anticipated more recent works such as Performer. Audience. Fuck Off (2009) by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, re-enactment will be considered with respect to how the past can be reworked and thought anew. As will become evident, the applicability of Jenkins’s thesis to those artists who adopt various practices of re-enactment finds its conceptual equivalent within other works that this chapter will also consider. So, for example, by foregrounding ‘epistemological fragility’, a work such as 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) by Omer Fast attests to and actively works with Jenkins’s contention that the past has no objective reality outside of how, as a ‘variation’, it is represented or rewritten as such.22 Following Paul Ricouer, the aim of the final chapter will be to examine those works that attempt to retrace the ‘presence of an absent thing’.23 In the case of William Christenberry, as well as rephotographing a number of sites in Alabama where twenty-five years previously Walker Evans had sought to document the effects of the Great Depression, this retracing has also entailed photographing a building, again in Alabama, over a period of thirty-four years. In contrast, Chloe Dewe Mathews’s project Shot at Dawn (2013) entailed the artist photographing twenty-three separate sites in Europe where approximately one hundred years ago soldiers were executed for

7

INTRODUCTION

7

desertion. In the case of both, the basic approach, namely, to examine ‘place[s] where something happened’, will be the final chapter’s overarching focus.24 What follows then is a critical examination of retroactivity as the means by which contemporary art engages with and reimagines aspects of the past, or to borrow Jenkins’s apt description, ‘the radical otherness of the “before now” ’.25

8

9

PART ONE

10

11

1 Modernism in ruins

The ruin is a ruin precisely because it seems to have lost its function or meaning in the present, while retaining a suggestive, unstable semantic potential.1

A

thing is a hole in a thing it is not (2010), Gerard Byrne’s multichannel film installation, consists of a series of films projected onto prefabricated, freestanding or rather free leaning boards. Positioned at various points within the gallery space, these boards are reminiscent of Minimalist objects due to both their modularity and their physical presence. Periodically during the artwork’s display these boards function as screens for the films to be projected onto. Moreover, the staged presence of these boards could arguably be seen as a deliberate ploy on the part of the artist, given the films’ content. Taking the artistic and intellectual histories of Minimalism as its central area of focus, each of the five films is organized around either specific works or the discourses that the movement engendered. So, in addition to a reconstruction of an interview with the artist Tony Smith in 1966 that centered upon a car ride in New Jersey, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not also restages a work by Robert Morris entitled Column (1962). As a way of further extending the work’s address to the critical legacy of Minimalism, the work also includes the restaging of an interview with Frank Stella, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd that originally took place in 1964. A fourth film shows a number of works associated with the period in question being installed and on display at the Van

12

12

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, one of the first European museums that showed the work of the Minimalists. Finally, the last of the installation’s five films concerns a letter the film-maker Hollis Frampton wrote about another artist associated with Minimalism, Carl Andre. In one respect, Byrne’s work is an example of contemporary art’s reappraisal of modernism and the artistic, philosophical and ideological contexts that worked to underpin it. To this end, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not echoes the works of other artists who, in a similar vein, and as Brian Dillon has noted, have been exercised by ‘a thoroughgoing or superficial archaeology of architectural and artistic modernism’.2 Moreover, and as the analogy suggests, such an archaeology entails a ‘discourse on ruins in a romantic mode’.3 Although not cited within Dillon’s article, the French writer and philosopher Denis Diderot provided what was arguably one of the first instances wherein the idea of the ruin was considered with respect to the visual arts. Nearing the completion of his Encyclopédie and at the behest of his friend Friederich Melchior Grimm, the art critic and philosopher Denis Diderot published his first ‘Salon’, ostensibly an exhibition review based on the work shown at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1759.4 Within his subsequent and notably more voluminous Salon of 1767, Diderot’s criticism encompassed the landscape paintings of the French artist Hubert Robert5 (Figure 1.1). Given the fact that Robert had acquired the moniker ‘Robert des Ruines’, it is perhaps of little surprise that one point of focus for his Salon of that year was the artist’s depiction of ruins and the meanings, for Diderot at least, they purported to engender. Accordingly: Our glance lingers over the debris of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a place, and we retreat into ourselves; we contemplate the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground; in that moment solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that is no more. Such is the first tenet of the poetics of ruins.6 On one level, Diderot’s impassioned and somewhat self-conscious responses to Robert’s paintings betray a predilection for the sublime

13

MODERNISM IN RUINS

13

that was, to a lesser or greater extent, in accordance with Edmund Burke’s own exposition on the subject.7 Moreover, implicit within Diderot’s pronouncements on the motif of the ruin was the fundamental role time played in their interpretation.8 Specifically, and as Sophie Thomas notes, Diderot’s commentary defines a poetics of ruin as a ‘paradoxical encounter between ancient ruins and the viewer who passes by what is past’.9 Cognizance of the past then, as Diderot’s commentary suggests, stems from the ruins’ ostensible subject matter and the meanings they appeared to proffer. As it was, Diderot’s predisposition to ruins was such that it functioned as the means wherein painters could legitimately connect with the ‘knowledge of history’, albeit a knowledge that foregrounded the theme of irrevocable loss.10 As he would write elsewhere in the Salon of 1767: ‘Make it so that the remaining

FIGURE 1.1 Hubert Robert (French, 1733–1808), Landscape with Ruins, 1772. Pen and brown ink and brush and brown and blue washes, over black chalk, 57.2 × 78.1 cm (22 1/2 × 30 3/4 in.), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

14

14

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

fragments do not convey a commonplace idea; enlarge the ruin, and with it our idea of the vanished nation.’11 However, while Diderot’s commentary sought to interpret Robert’s paintings through the means by which they instantiated the past, Daniel Brewer contends that for Diderot the ruin also had the capacity to function as a harbinger for what might yet still come to pass. Accordingly, the temporal dimension of ruins is not an ‘analeptic return to a long-gone past but a proleptic anticipation, an imaginary expansion and dispersion of the present self into an imagined future’.12 We see such a belief in an imagined future, if not the historical progress that this might entail in Diderot’s Salon wherein he writes that ‘[i]n all times and everywhere the bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent and the excellent is followed by the bizarre “[and the] mannered” ’.13 Interestingly, as Paul Mattick Jr. notes: Diderot’s remarks are directed specifically against the rococo style of the period of the Régence, in response to which he is arguing for the return to the grand goût embodied in the Antique. The striking similarity, to Diderot’s critique, of Clement Greenberg’s diagnosis of the cultural decline of capitalism is a remarkable testimony to the stability of the practice of art as a feature of ‘modern’ society . . . In his scheme, of course, the role of the grand gout is played by ‘avant-garde culture’.14 By ‘avant-garde culture’, Mattick Jr. is referring to ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Greenberg’s text that was first published in 1939. Seeking to determine how aesthetic experience takes place under a prevailing set of historical or social conditions, the formalist art critic credited the emergence of an avant-garde as having arisen due to the ‘appearance of a new kind of criticism, an historical criticism’.15 In this respect, what this novel kind of criticism worked to reveal was that the ‘present bourgeois social order was . . . simply the latest term in a succession of social orders’.16 Moreover, ‘[n]ew perspectives of this kind, becoming part of the intellectual conscience of the fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century, soon were absorbed by artists and poets, even if inconsistently for the most part’.17 As Greenberg then goes on to note, it is for this reason that ‘the true and most important function of the avant-garde was . . . to find a path

15

MODERNISM IN RUINS

15

along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence’.18 Evidently then, in one sense, Greenberg’s criticism is premised upon and was at this stage, at least, largely organized around the identification of mechanisms by which an advanced, avant-garde culture (as opposed to one that was determinedly rear-guard) could be sustained. However, implicit within ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ is the idea that to speak of historical agency is also to acknowledge the inexorably progressive nature by which culture logically develops and unfolds.19 On one level, Greenberg’s teleology is symptomatic of an impulse that more broadly marked the project of modernism. Seemingly governed by the drive to commit itself to a future moment it was oriented towards, this was to be determined, if not guaranteed along a chronology that was monolinear. As Elena Filipovic notes: ‘Modernity is riddled with such myths [of a progressive and productive future]. After all, doesn’t the modern age precisely see itself as a series of revolutions (pictorial, technological, political, social . . .) that surpasses the past in a progressive march towards the future? Isn’t modernism’s incessant drive for the ‘new’ dependent upon the linearity of chronology?’20 In an article written in 1972 and published in Artforum, Rosalind Krauss noted that modernist criticism was ‘innocent’.21 However, rather than this observation signaling an attempt to come to the defence of modernist criticism and the charges that had been leveled against it, her admission diagnoses the root cause of precisely why modernist criticism, or at least a particular account therein, was problematic: Modernist criticism is innocent. And its innocence obtains on three counts: it refuses to see the temporality which it never tires of invoking – ‘the entire history of painting since Manet’ – as that perspectival armature on which it structures the art in question (and on which that art has increasingly tended to structure itself); it thinks of that story as ‘objective’ – beyond the dictates of sensibility, beyond ideology; and it is unself-critically prescriptive.22 As this passage suggests, the very fact that modernist criticism was ‘innocent’ meant that the historiography that it had been

16

16

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

constructed upon was not. But, it should be noted, it was a historiography that sought to dissemble itself as such. And the means by which it did this was through the rationalization of its chronology such that historical progress was necessitated by and borne out through the inevitability of artistic innovation. Krauss, writing elsewhere in the same text, would analogize such historical progress as a series of rooms en filade. Within each room the individual artist explored, to the limits of his experience and his formal intelligence, the separate constituents of his medium. The effect of his pictorial act was to open simultaneously the door to the next space and close our access to the one behind him. The shape and dimensions of the new space were discovered by the next pictorial act; the only thing about that unstable position that was clearly determined beforehand was its point of entrance.23 Such an historiographical approach is evident within Cubism and Abstract Art, an exhibition Alfred H.  Barr, Jr. curated in the spring of 1936 that sought to focus upon salient modernist movements. In Barr’s diagram that was reproduced on the exhibition catalogue’s dust jacket, there is an attempt to map the historical progress of artistic modernism from approximately 1890 (Figure 1.2). Within the pictorial schema, a series of arrows stretching both vertically and diagonally gradually extend outwards towards what are, by 1955 and for Barr, Jr. at least, the two principal impulses of artistic modernism, namely, ‘Non-Geometrical Abstract Art’ and ‘Geometrical Abstract Art’.24 As a means to further shore up his conviction that modern art was constituted by a series of successive, logical and ineluctably unfolding stages, Barr, Jr. sought recourse to examples that were analogous to the sense of movement and natural progression that his version of history was constructed around. Within the context of the catalogue essay that accompanied Cubism and Abstract Art, it is Barr, Jr.’s conviction that the wellspring from which the two main ‘currents’ of abstract art emerge from is Impressionism.25 Moreover, in addition to marshaling terms such as ‘widening stream’ and ‘delta’, Barr, Jr. suggests that the second of the two categories, namely, the one which is ‘intuitional and emotional rather than intellectual’ flows through the ‘fauvisme of Matisse to

17

MODERNISM IN RUINS

17

FIGURE 1.2 Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (1902–81): Dust jacket with chart and annotations by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., of the exhibition catalogue ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 1936. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 3.C.4. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Acc. n.: MA594© 2017. Digital image courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. the Abstract Expressionism of the pre-War paintings of Kandinsky’.26 Clearly, the emphasis is on a series of interconnected tributaries wherein history is perceived as being monolinear, if not teleological. Filipovic’s so-called series of revolutions is also evident within the American historian Sheldon Cheney’s foreword to his ‘The Story of Modern Art’, first published in 1941. Although by his own admission the first of his four precepts was tantamount to ‘generalisations about modern art’, it was the art critic’s conviction that from approximately 1860 there had been ‘a retreat from “serious” subject matter, as a withdrawal from preoccupation with objective nature; and positively as a likeness of aim on the part of the artists, expressed in an ever more rigorous purification of the means of their art, and in a grasp toward expression of inner feeling and formal beauty’.27 In addition to a particular construal of history, a second understanding through which we might attempt to establish modernism’s relationship to time is with regard to how the work of art became understood as being in accordance with a particular temporality or more specifically, tense. To this end, there was a tendentious attempt on the part of modernist criticism, or, at the very least, instances

18

18

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

therein to confer onto the object’s status a specific temporal register by which, it was no doubt envisaged, it could be critically positioned and understood as such. Broadly speaking, what this was imagined to entail was the eschewal of the past and indeed, in this particular instance, the future tense to the extent wherein the object could exist within the unalloyed repleteness of the present moment.28 By the 1950s, abstraction characterized much of what fell under the auspices of artistic modernism. Although Abstract Expressionism had become the pre-eminent post-war movement in America, a subsequent generation of artists had sought to move beyond what they perceived was its grandiloquence and its markedly subjectivized approach to artistic production. We can perhaps take the work that was included in the exhibition Three American Painters as being representative of the means by which artists were seeking to strategically move beyond their artistic forebears. Curated by the art critic Michael Fried in 1965, Three American Painters was staged at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum and showcased the work of Jules Olitski, Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland.29 In order to establish a determination of modernist painting that was cognizant of but not necessarily wholly beholden to the sort of aesthetic shifts in pictorial structure that were evident within the so-called all-over canvases of Jackson Pollock, Fried, writing in the accompanying catalogue essay, sought to marshal what were for him the terms by which the significance of the three artists’ respective practices could be established. Although Fried had introduced into his critical lexicon ‘deductive structure’ as early as 1964, it is arguably within the context of Three American Painters that the term acquires notable significance.30 In one respect, deductive structure both acknowledged and worked centrifugally outwards from what was already intrinsic to the work of art in question. In other words, and as Fried notes at one point within the catalogue essay that accompanied the exhibition, deductive structure was concerned with the fundamental relationship between ‘the image to the framing edge’.31 In addition to which, Fried was equally keen to disarticulate modernist painting, or at least the account as it was given within the context of Three American Painters, from other avant-gardist approaches and positions. To this end, he deems Dada and modernist painting to be antithetical to one another.32 According

19

MODERNISM IN RUINS

19

to Fried, wherein ‘the former aspires to obliterate all distinctions between works of art and other kinds of objects or occurrences in the world, the latter has sought to isolate, assert, and work with what is essential to the art of painting at a given moment’.33 This issue or tension between an account of painting that is regulated by and wholly contingent upon its own intrinsic elements or occurrences and a broader, and arguably more discursive understanding of art was one that would also mark ‘Art and Objecthood’, a more tendentiously positioned and polemical text that Fried would write two years later. Suffice to say that the determinedly hostile critique Fried directed towards Minimalism is now an established historical moment within the broader chronology of late or so-called high modernism. However, notwithstanding the perceived differences between Minimalism and modernist painting that were articulated with such interpretive force, it would perhaps be useful to broadly establish what were some of the salient aspects that characterized Fried’s argument, if not its main points of contention. Originally published in Artforum in June 1967, ‘Art and Objecthood’ sees the 28-year-old critic attempt to distance, if not wholly differentiate, his account of modernism from the account of modernism, if indeed it was such, that Minimalism sought to delineate. Proffering an account of the former that was medium specific, Minimalism remained problematic for Fried due to the proclivity of the objects to transgress received disciplinary boundaries – ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’, for example, and in so doing repudiate the predetermined ‘design’ implicit within modernism’s teleology.34 In a text published in Arts Yearbook a year after his first one-person exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York, the artist Donald Judd prefaced his text ‘Specific Objects’ by asserting that ‘[h]alf or more of the best work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture’.35 Instead, and for Judd at least who, by this point, had become Minimalism’s unofficial spokesperson, it was towards the production of ‘three-dimensional work’ that artists must now direct their critical attention towards.36 It was within such an artistic milieu that artists associated with Minimalism and who shared Judd’s own reluctance to approach the work of art within a historically received set of terms published a

20

20

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

series of artists’ statements that collectively worked to position their respective practices outside of ‘the insufficiencies of painting and sculpture’.37 Moreover, such exegeses invariably centered upon an account of, if not attempt to delimit or shore up the ontological status of what it was they were making.38 So, for example, with reference to Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes of light which were labelled ‘icons’, the artist used the term ‘as descriptive, not of a strictly religious object, but of one that is based on a hierarchical relationship of electric light over, under, against and with a square-fronted structure full of paint “light” ’.39 Within the context of ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part  3:  Notes and Non Sequiturs’, the artist Robert Morris ranges over a number of related terms with regard to the specific objects that fell within the purview of Minimalism and the various inflections each carried. As Morris notes, ‘While most advanced three-dimensional work shares certain premises, distinctions can be made between works. Certain ambitions and intentions vary and can be named.’40 To this end, ‘objects’ are ‘[g]enerally small in scale, definitively object-like, potentially handleable, often intimate’.41 In contrast, ‘sculpture’, or at least the determination that Morris had in mind at the time the text was written, differs from previous sculpture (and from objects) in that its focus is ‘not singularly inward and exclusive of the context of its spatial setting. It is less introverted in respect to its surroundings’.42 In addition to the formulation of various descriptors and proper names, ranging from the more historically loaded ‘icon’ to the more mundane and seemingly neutral ‘object’, in their written statements artists worked to acknowledge the particularities of the artwork’s viewing conditions. In this sense, and as Morris observed, the object took ‘its place as a term among others which included “light”, “space” and “body” ’.43 By foregrounding the contingencies of real as opposed to illusionistic space, the experiential basis of the Minimalist artwork became played out through the shifting, and purportedly embodied engagement of its audience. And it was precisely because the Minimalist object betrayed a proclivity to ‘project and hypostatize objecthood’ that Fried sought to establish a counterposition for ‘art’ that was somehow exclusive of or ran counter to this understanding.44 As a means to further distance the work of modernist painting from its Minimalist counterparts, and seen through the interpretive

21

MODERNISM IN RUINS

21

framework of objecthood, Fried accords each with an ostensibly separate temporal register. Because Minimalism sought ‘not to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such’, the impulse for the Minimalist object to ‘theatricalize’ what was deemed to be a durational relationship with the viewer was brought into play.45 That is, while they remained obdurate in their materiality, the conditions of possibility nevertheless remained for the objects, as presences, to be construed as both affective and mutable rather than, that is, as being necessarily static and fully bounded. As a result, the experiential basis of the work of Minimalism existed in time; moreover, and as Fried notes towards the end of the text, ‘the presentment of endlessness . . . is central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentment of endlessness, or indefinite duration’.46 In contrast, according to Fried at least, because modernist painting somehow managed to suspend its own objecthood through what was deemed to be the ‘medium of shape’, the theatricalizing impulse that marked the Minimalist or literalist work was also arrested.47 What this ushered in were the conditions of possibility wherein ‘at every moment the work itself [could be] wholly manifest’.48 In effect, as opposed to the durational, embodied basis of Minimalism that was played out over time and was dependent upon the viewer to take effect, modernist painting was atemporal and necessarily conditioned by the ‘instantaneousness’ through which it became wholly manifest and through which its effects could visually be received.49 To this end, and as Yves-Alain Bois has observed: The exclusion that proceeds from this [the disembodied vision of modernist painting] (though it was stated even before the postulate of pure vision, going back to the distinction Gotthold Lessing made in his Laocoön between the arts of time and those of space) bears on the temporality with the visual and on the body of the perceiving subject:  pictures reveal themselves in an instant and are addressed only to the eye of the viewer.50 In one respect, the debates that become played out during this period in artistic modernism’s history and the foregrounding of the artwork’s temporality are the central area of focus for A thing is a hole

22

22

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

in a thing it is not. As we have already seen, to describe the work is, in the first instance, to range over a series of vignettes that all in their respective ways are keyed into and symptomatic of the critical reception and subsequent understanding of late modernism as it became given within the context of advanced American art.51 The provenance of the work’s title and what is, in one sense, the first in a subsequent chain of references, adaptations and iterations is a statement the artist Carl Andre made in 1968. During a roundtable discussion with Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner and in response to the former’s emphasis upon the importance of the void and the potency of nothing, Andre, somewhat aphoristically, declared that ‘a thing is a hole in a thing it is not’.52 From that point, the Land Artist Robert Smithson adopted Andre’s ‘motto’ and used it as the title of an article that was published almost immediately after the discussions between Andre et al. took place. To this end, ‘A Thing Is a Hole in a Thing It Is Not’ entails Smithson’s attempts to account for various new approaches to artistic production by way of their respective engagements with notions of site.53 Arguably, the title’s basis within a particular set of imbricated contextual references is more broadly indicative of the work as a whole, comprising as it does a somewhat dispersed filmed re-enactments which include a dramatic reconstruction based on a transcript of an interview with the artist Tony Smith.54 Originally published in Artforum in December of 1966, Smith’s text recounts a (much earlier) car ride at night with three Cooper Union students along what was then an unfinished stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike between Meadowlands and New Brunswick.55 Due to the enveloping darkness, coupled with the fact that the road was unfinished, what Smith and his fellow travellers encounter and which is subsequently recounted by the artist remains, for the most part abstract, inchoate elements, divested of all but their essential characteristics: ‘It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights.’56 The narrator within the film recounts his experiences in such a way that it doesn’t seek to militate against the cinematic elements

23

MODERNISM IN RUINS

23

suggested by what becomes in this instance no longer a transcript of an interview but a monologue spoken by who we take to be the film’s central protagonist (Figure 1.3). On one level, and no doubt at least in part due to the fact that it is a reconstruction, the scene adapts the material to the extent wherein it unmoors itself from its historical point of origin. On one level, the epiphanic nature of what Smith describes is rooted in the realization of traditional art’s obsolescence.57 Moreover, the paucity of explicit detail, the sequential, unfolding nature of their encounter, an encounter that sought to underscore the recipient’s experience of that particular stretch of highway as much as the various incidents of the road itself all, in their separate ways, worked to analogize and become coincident with the discursive, embodied and necessarily felt aspects that characterized the viewing conditions of the Minimalist object.58 A further ‘moment’ of which A thing is a hole in a thing it is not is structured around is Robert Morris’s performance-cum-sculpture Column (1962). Staged at the Living Theatre in New York on 5 February 1962, on one level Morris’s Column was indicative of Minimalism’s ambition of wanting to reevaluate the terms upon which sculpture, as a material enquiry, was given. In the middle of an empty stage Morris

FIGURE 1.3 Gerard Byrne, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, 2010 (Film stills). © Gerard Byrne; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

24

24

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

positioned a two-feet square plywood column that totaled eight feet in height. After three and a half minutes of nothing happening, the column suddenly fell over. A further three and a half minutes elapsed before the performance ended.59 Notwithstanding claims that have been made to the effect that Column was the first fully fledged work of Minimalist sculpture, the structure evinces its susceptibility to the vicissitudes of chance  – something that, at the very least, acknowledged Minimalism’s interest in Dada and the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, a figure who also produced several works that were equally reliant upon the aleatory potential of modernist production.60 Moreover, rather than being construed as a static, three-dimensional structure, Column introduced the conditions of possibility for the idiom of sculpture to encompass both a live and a sonic dimension by way of the object, as it were, being ‘performed’. The corollary of the object and event functioning as mutually inclusive components that contributed to its production (i.e. the object cannot be separated from what occurred to it) was that the coordinates of time, given through the object-performance having both a before and an after, was necessarily brought into play. Understood on these terms, Column was further evidence of the fact that the Minimalist object did not attempt to dissemble the temporality of which it became susceptible to, if not delimited by. To the two films that go to make up A thing is a hole in a thing it is not it will perhaps be helpful for our purposes to acknowledge a third. Based on a radio interview with the artists Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin in New York in February 1964 and conducted by Bruce Glaser, the interview was originally titled ‘New Nihilism or New Art?’ and was published the following year in Artnews. It was then edited by Lucy Lippard and republished in Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art in 1968 as ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’. As James Meyer notes, ‘Flavin, who rarely intervened [in the interview] asked to have his comments removed from the final manuscript.’61 On a basic level, and as Enrique Juncosa has noted, several of Byrne’s works deal with ‘how an account is given, presented, shaped or questioned’.62 For example, the artist’s photo and video installation 1984 and Beyond was organized around a series of interviews published in 1963 in Playboy which entailed a number of science fiction writers reflecting on the future and the possibilities held therein.

25

MODERNISM IN RUINS

25

However, with respect to A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, perhaps we should also add ‘translated’ to Juncosa’s list. For as much as the work shows, following Muhle’s observation, ‘how a certain truth is constructed in a specific historical moment’, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not is also characterized by what we might describe as the passage of discourse from one context to another.63 For example, and with respect to the film that restages the 1964 Public Radio broadcast ‘New Nihilism or New Art?’, the work entails a shift from what was, in the first instance the spoken word to its subsequent form as an audio recording.64 From that point, the next ‘account’ or version would be its published (and, it should be noted, edited) form.65 And it is within this iterative process that the conditions of possibility are such that the discourses function, albeit by proxy, as an adjunct to, if not extension of, the work, formulating in the process, either tendentiously or not, particular historiographies through which the work has been given and in theory, understood.66 Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not’s meditation on time generally and the historical moments in particular that it works to reinscribe remain susceptible to the potential slippage or revision that occurs as a result of this movement between and across successive iterations. What our consideration of A thing is a hole in a thing it is not has thus far educed is that, broadly speaking, retroactivity entails and can be understood through the means by which Byrne seeks to revisit and furthermore reposition within the present tense of the work aspects or indeed ‘ruins’ derived from a particular set of artistic and intellectual histories. However, we should perhaps note that the work’s relationship with time is also evident with respect to its viewing conditions. To this end, in addition to construing time as a series of historical moments within the work, the time of which Byrne’s installation is oriented towards and seeks to gather itself within is the time of the viewing experience itself. This is something the artist has acknowledged and that, given the historical basis of the work, results in a so-called double temporality. As the artist observes in an interview with Simon Grant: That’s also part of the rationale for why I’m interested in making video based work which is shown in a gallery space as opposed to

26

26

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

in a cinema or on a TV. Showing video in a gallery space involves a double temporality – the temporality that’s constructed alongside the temporal experience of you walking into the space, experiencing it, and then deciding to walk away from it.67 Certainly the significance of ‘Art and Objecthood’ with respect to how temporality was bestowed upon the work and indeed was contested is something that Byrne is aware of. As he notes elsewhere within the interview: For me what really matters in the Fried text is the way that it articulates a transitional moment in contemporary art towards an awareness that art is increasingly grounded in temporality. Whereas, the irony of modernism (e.g. the work of Henry Moore/Jackson Pollock) is that it seems contingent on an idea of time that’s somehow held in abeyance, or that’s somehow frozen . . . as if sometimes to transcend temporality is to actually be fully modernist.68 Noting the tension between two mutually exclusive ‘presents’, the present within which the actors inhabit and the much earlier present of, in the case of New Sexual Lifestyles, a work Byrne made in 2003, the original dialogue, Izabella Scott proposes that Byrne’s films arguably function as a ‘set of citations from different moments in time’.69 According to the artist, and by way of a response, Byrne makes the following series of observations: The dissonance you describe ties in with the distinction between reenactment and recovery. I appropriated a lot of the working methods of film production or TV production – working with small film crews, with journeyman actors – but I didn’t necessarily sign up for all the rules and value judgments that went along with those genres. So that’s why you get a dissonance between what you think should happen and what actually occurs, and it’s why you get that awkwardness. There are moments where the staginess becomes very explicit – in another work, an actress screws up her line, but she’s a professional so she just continues, expecting that I’ll edit it out. I guess I’m more interested in actors in a conceptual way.70

27

MODERNISM IN RUINS

27

As we have already seen, Michael Fried’s countenance of modernist painting was partly given through the temporality he sought to invest it with (or equally, divest it of). In diametrical opposition to the Minimalist artwork’s ontology of duration, modernist painting was premised upon the conditions of possibility for it to be experienced as ‘a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it’.71 By excluding all but the purported repleteness of the present moment, the conditions of possibility were such that the object could be determined and determinable within a set of terms that were singular. As such, and as Fried’s statement denotes, it was understood that with respect to the object of late modernist production it was time, or a particular account therein, that valorized this interpretation. As Krauss notes: If the Renaissance had diagrammed the punctuality of this viewing point, it was modernism that insisted on it, underscored it, made the issue of this indivisible instant of seeing serve as a fundamental principle in the doctrine of aesthetic truth. Modernism was to absolutize this ‘now’ to insist that painting exist within the indivisible present of the extremist possible perceptual intensity.72 Such a process enacted by modernism was one wherein the artwork sought to reflexively position itself with respect to its singularity. According to Yves-Alain Bois:  ‘Formalist immanence, which dissimulated its constant reference to the teleological linearity of history, seems replaced here by another form of immanence based on the hic and nunc, on the unicity of experience and the naïve evaluation of the event as what happens only once, excludes repetition.’73 However, and as Jacques Ranciere has more recently observed, the ‘same surface must perform a dual task . . . it must only be of itself and it must be the demonstration of the fact that it is only itself’.74 In so doing, at the very moment the object attests to its singularity, it simultaneously relinquishes any claims therein. In other words, as much as the modernist work attempts to reflexively refer to itself,

28

28

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

to absolutize its now, it divides itself from within and in so doing, exceeds itself as such. If this is indeed the case, and if more broadly we are to persist with the idea that the account of modernism that the work aligns itself with is somehow ‘in ruins’, then there is the potential to read A thing is a hole in a thing it is not in relation to its ostensible precarity. Rather than be drawn to the past due to the fact that it provides a measure of certainty or reassurance, it would appear to be the case that Byrne chooses to work with historical forms due to their inherent uncertainty. This is perhaps why when asked, Byrne appears resistant to the potential to read his practice as being in any way nostalgic: ‘No. Nostalgia is something that I really try to avoid in my own approach . . . I’m much more interested in the Walter Benjamin notion of idea of looking at the recent past and realising how, at that moment, the present that we live in was not inevitable.’75 Notwithstanding the fact that this in itself foregrounds and to a certain extent implies an inherent measure of precarity, the conditions of possibility for the work to entail such wallowing is short-circuited, on one level, due to the fact that A thing is a hole in a thing it is not never cedes to a proximity sufficient enough so as to mobilize such sentiments nostalgia is associated with. That is, one way Byrne manages to ward off the more circumspect aspects of nostalgia is through the means by which the vignettes have been filmed. In the first instance, and with respect to the work’s attempt at restaging the interview with Stella et  al., the camera pans over recording equipment that seems entirely in keeping with the year within which the interview took place. However, in addition to certain passages of the film being cropped, the camera appears to float in a series of arcs around and within the space while also drifting in and out of focus. This has the effect of creating an arguably more discursive filmic space. With regard to this particular aspect of the work, the artist has noted that the ‘camerawork renders a materiality to the situation – it doesn’t draw any distinctions between bodies and other elements in the space and it seems to float in a way that marks a strange, ethereal character that might somehow be symmetrical with a radio broadcast’76 (Figure 1.4). And it is this ‘strange, ethereal character’ that forms, on one level, the experiential basis of Byrne’s installation. In so doing, the potential

29

MODERNISM IN RUINS

29

FIGURE 1.4 Gerard Byrne, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, 2010 (Film stills). © Gerard Byrne; Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

veracity of historical truth is displaced by a series of fragmented and to a certain extent dispersed moments or ‘ruins’ that, depending upon the audience’s position in relation to the work, temporarily come into view and coalesce.77 Cast adrift from the contexts from whence they came, ‘modernism’ is now in ruins, the ontological endlessness of the Minimalist object now replaced by the fragmentary, episodic nature of the five projected films within the gallery space.78 As it is then, the films that collectively go to make up A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, like ruins, stand for and are characterized by both ‘ambivalence and amorphousness’.79 Moreover, and as Julia Hell and Andrea Schonle point out, the ruin is one of the ‘master tropes of modern reflexivity, precisely because it encapsulates vacuity and loss as underlying constituents of the modern identity. It is the reflexivity of a culture that interrogates its own becoming’.80 Rather than see these vignettes as Helena Reckitt does, namely, as ready-mades, it is perhaps more appropriate to read them as ruins or fragments of a moment that remains historically remote.81 Moreover, and as such, like ruins they retain an ‘unstable semantic potential’.82 With respect to the historical moments that Byrne draws on, both in A thing is a hole in a thing it is not and in other comparable works, Kirsty Ogg in an interview with the artist contends that they’re not

30

30

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

necessarily either seminal nor canonical. In response, Byrne has observed the following:  ‘I’m working from the premise that what constitutes the “historical” is constantly shifting, from one present to the next. Equally, the material I  reference in the works that we are discussing doesn’t have a fixed value or significance. It reads differently at different moments.’83 In this sense the shifting nature of the ‘historical’ within the context of Byrne’s work echoes James Meyer’s formulation of the functional site to the extent wherein as ‘a palimpsest of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places, and things [it is] a chain of meanings and imbricated histories’.84 Moreover, as much as the ‘site’ of A thing is a hole in a thing it is not is, for example, an audio recording, a re-performed object or a section of the New Jersey Turnpike, all are given retroactively, through the precarity of time and as Meyer’s statement suggests, through the imbrication of their histories.

31

PART TWO

32

33

2 Index (tracing)

As an index, every image is an emanation of a body from the past that, disappearing and no longer here, nonetheless has left behind a fragment of itself.1

A

rguably one of the more salient aspects that characterized Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of representation as a whole was the icon-index-symbol trichotomy. First set out within the context of his paper ‘On the Algebra of Logic:  A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation’, and presented at the October 1884 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Newport, Rhode Island, the American philosopher and semiotician sought to articulate the operative function of each of the three respective sign-types with respect to how, and indeed where, they might be construed.2 In accordance with Peirce’s semiotic framework, symbols, or what Peirce classed as ‘tokens’, are those signs that are dependent upon habit and are conventional or arbitrary. In contrast, the iconic signtype is determined by a ‘relationship of resemblance it necessarily has with its object’.3 With respect to representational painting, which Peirce deems to be consonant with the latter, he observes the following: ‘So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream – not any particular existence, and yet not general.’4

34

34

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

For Peirce, the final sign-type that completes the trichotomy of signs is the index. These signify the object through direct connection and to this end the examples proffered within his paper include ‘all natural signs, “physical symptoms”, and “a pointing finger” ’.5 As such, the ‘index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops’.6 While the operative mode of the icon was deemed appropriate with regard to the construal of painting, Peirce would subsequently seek to liken the indexical sign-type to that of photography. Writing ten years after he had presented his paper to the National Academy of Sciences, he observes the following: Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection.7 Without wanting to necessarily rehearse the complexities of Peircian theory with respect to the indexical sign-type, it is perhaps sufficient to note that for one commentator at least, the index as a term ‘has been a pervasive, if not preeminent, model for photography for over thirty years’.8 The provenance of such debates with regard to photography’s indexicality, following Peirce’s assertion that as a sign-type it forcibly directs our attention towards a particular something, would have been beholden to an existential set of ends. As Mary Ann Doane suggests:  ‘But they are limited to the assurance of an existence; they provide no insight into the nature of their objects; they have no cognitive value but simply indicate that something is “there”. The index is reduced to its own singularity; it appears as a brute and opaque fact, wedded to contingency – pure indication, pure assurance of existence.’9 However, the idea that the photograph could function as an objective certificate of the appearance of things, ‘a graft off of natural space’ so to speak, increasingly became

35

INDEX ( TRACING)

35

supplanted by a somewhat different idea.10 That is, as much as the image was a register of an outward reality, it was equally a register of an inward one, namely, that of the author’s subjectivity. As Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson note: ‘In this deeply utopian moment, artists strove to recognize the dialectical possibilities of photography’s split indexicality. The polarity of bourgeois science and bourgeois art, of photograph as objective record and photograph as subjective expression.’11 In one sense, the fact that the index today is a ‘fiercely contested’ term stems from the collapse of certain guarantees that photography, with respect to the medium’s status and condition, had initially been bound up with and founded upon.12 One such set of guarantees, namely, the idea that the photographic image posited a veridical account of reality, a guarantee furthermore that modernism did much to underwrite, eventually became prone to and problematized by the relativist critiques of postmodernism. More recently, the rapid proliferation of image production and dissemination, in addition to the image’s unprecedented susceptibility to manipulation, has meant that on one level ‘the great modern indexical promises of photography continue to disperse’.13 As it is then, or at the very least as it would appear to be, while according to James Elkins the ‘indexical theory of photography’s nature was helpful for some criticism in the moment of minimalism, when it was important to stress photography’s material nature and its independence of ideation’, today its status, for some at least, remains notably circumspect.14 Against the backdrop of the continuance of its problematization, the possibility that the ‘appeal to the index [gives] the photograph some kind of purchase, beyond the simulacrum’, will be the implicit horizon against which this chapter and the subsequent discussion around the index will work critically outwards from.15 With regard to the indexical theory of photography acting as an interpretive framework by which the retroactive impulse may initially be discerned, the task will be one of somehow making this intelligible. Once the index in this context has been mapped out, our analysis will be directed towards how the index engenders or, at the very least, is consonant with a related set of understandings as given through the interpretive figure of the ‘trace’. Therefore, our initial focus, following

36

36

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Sabine T. Kriebel, is not ‘photography’s referential nature, but its temporal nature’.16 According to Kriebel, the temporal determination of photography’s ontology is evident within Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’s meditation on the photographic image wherein he states that its ‘testimony bears not on the object but on time’.17 Marking the beginning, according to one writer, ‘of a long and flourishing literature of trauma, pathos, confession, and affect in art’, Camera Lucida functions, on one level, as a meditation on photography.18 Although Barthes’s argument centrifugally works outwards – to this end the images discussed encompass a certain chronological breadth and, to borrow a term out of the essay’s lexicon, elicit a certain ‘studium’  – the text remains pulled autobiographically towards a single photograph, not reproduced, of his mother as young child. Indeed, the fact that it had been written shortly after his mother had died arguably accounts for, at least in part, the essay’s somewhat elegiac tone.19 While not reproduced in the book, Barthes’s description provides sufficient detail for the reader to imagine what it depicts. Taken in 1898, the photograph is comprised of his then 5-year-old mother standing next to her brother, 2 years her elder, ‘at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory’, or what was more commonly known as a ‘Winter Garden’.20 Although Barthes does not marshal the index as a critical term, his exposition nevertheless does acknowledge the photographic image’s propensity to ‘point’.21 As such, historically, what the photographic image was understood as pointing towards was, somewhat paradoxically, ‘a visually replete trace’.22 The ‘pointing’ to which we refer here, and of which Barthes specifically sought to instantiate was, as Peter Wollen notes, comparable with the photographic icon’s ‘natural being-there [original emphasis] of the object’.23 Indeed, we could develop Wollen’s claim by way of noting that for Barthes, the important thing was that the insistence of the photograph as such was given through its ‘evidential force’.24 An insistence, notwithstanding Peirce’s claim, that the relationship between reality and inscription is one of physical correspondence, that nevertheless is in accordance with the fact that for Barthes the photograph is literally an ‘emanation of the referent’. Moreover,

37

INDEX ( TRACING)

37

‘[f]rom a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, so Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star’.25 It is perhaps for this reason that what Camera Lucida works to reveal is the fact that unlike representational painting, which, as an iconic sign-type can ‘feign reality without having seen it’, with respect to photography, ‘there can be no pretence: Contrary to the imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there’.26 And what, on one level the index testifies to or least towards, are the bodies of which, at a certain point, it was contiguous with. As Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca note: ‘Indexicality is not linked to truth or testimony, but to the body. As an index, the photograph bears, according to Barthes, a material relation to the body of the photographed, which is why he can suggest that in photography the presence of that body within a unique moment in the past can never be metaphorical.’27 Moreover, this material relation educes the fact of the index’s reliance upon and ‘privileged relation to contact, to touch, the assurance of its physical link’.28 However, in proclaiming, or at the very least, not wanting to deny that a reality, a thing has been there is, at the same moment, to confer a past onto that reality. As Barthes notes, ‘[S]ince this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography.’29 As it is then, the photographic image, after orienting towards its subject, necessarily withdraws or absconds.30 And it is at this precise moment that the photograph, dissolved through and across time, both figures and becomes inscribed within, or perhaps more truthfully becomes resigned to, a past, to what is now a that-has-been.31 In one sense, the inscription of what has passed, given the fact that the iconic content of the photograph frequently entails people, of lives in the throes of being lived, inevitably invokes feelings of loss. According to Laura Mulvey, because Camera Lucida foregrounds the fact of the author’s recently deceased mother as the means by which the photographic image might be considered, if not understood, its emotional core is gradually revealed. In this respect, the ‘themes of time, the photograph and then death become clearer or, rather, more closely interwoven’.32

38

38

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

With respect to the indexical sign-type, it is perhaps because there is, according to Peirce, a so-called natural relation between the signifier and the signified that the photographic image has repeatedly become conflated with the index.33 Perhaps a second reason, directly related to and borne out of the first, is due to the fact that historically at least, the process necessarily entailed the momentary exposure of light onto a sensitized surface. However, and as David Bate notes:  ‘Although the photograph is commonly defined semiotically as indexical, it is nevertheless wrong to confuse the mimetic verisimilitude of [photographic] “realism” with indexicality. Photographic realism of the sort we encounter daily in various types of photographs is predominantly iconic.’34 But how might we begin to approach an understanding of the index that exceeds the interpretive prism of photography? That is, what happens when, while remaining in accordance with the visuality of the index, we nevertheless move beyond the photographic? Perhaps in the first instance we would do well, following Klaus Wehner, to identify and hence draw a distinction that nestles within the indexical sign-type itself. This would necessarily entail acknowledging that whereas there are instances that are more readily in accordance with it as a concept, there are other instances that foreground a materiality, albeit a materiality that is residual. To this end, according to Wehner, whereas, for example, the ‘emergency exit sign is a sign that points at its object by deliberately employing the concept of indexicality . . . [phenomena such as] a footprint or a bullet hole is a residue or a trace and it is a natural sign that carries a proof that it refers to was there and is now absent’.35 The corollary that follows, as Wehner notes, is that the index has ‘one very crucial attribute and that is the element of time. A trace or an imprint always refers to a specific singular moment of being, which must by default be in the past, and therefore it is always “historic” ’.36 What Wehner’s statement educes then is twofold: first, there are indeed instances of the index that exceed the realm of photographic visuality. Second, the indexical sign-type instantiates a particular relationship to time, or more specifically, to tense. But the temporality accorded is never just history per se; the indexical sign, the imprint never merely consigns the work of art, its visuality, to the past but rather to a past, a past that is as specific as the moment of being to which the imprint refers and to which it indexically registers.

39

INDEX ( TRACING)

39

In the first instance, and remaining within the purview of photography, clearly Barthes’s meditations upon the Winter Garden photograph attempts to speak of the particularities of the past. Moreover, Barthes’s text also encompasses or is suggestive of the idea of the photograph-as-trace. As Mulvey notes, the ‘emphasis on the index, on the “physical connection”, and on the trace and its inscription, lives at the heart of Roland Barthes’s essay Camera Lucida’.37 This is not to say that it was Camera Lucida that first ushered in this particular notion; arguably from its historical inception the photographic image was understood as functioning, in effect, as an objective trace. As Kelsey and Stimson point out, photography worked to reveal and was to a certain extent premised upon ‘a self-affirming double truth about the world: the accuracy of the photograph confirmed that it was an objective trace, while the understanding that the photograph was an objective trace confirmed its accuracy’.38 However, and as Margaret Olin has noted, the trace in relation to the idea of the index extended beyond the purview of the photographic image: ‘We should also note that indexicality was used to do a lot more than merely differentiate photography from other media. It was part of the discourse of the trace, which had no necessary connection to photography; it was about wanting to have a trace of the real to stand for the real.’39 Sophie Ristelhueber, whose work we will now go on to consider, arguably foregrounds, in certain instances at least, the understanding of the trace with respect to the construction of a particular set of spatial histories it is both organized around and is the manifestation of.40 By her own admission, the artist is ‘obsessed by traces, fractures, and disappearances’.41 This particular point of fascination that the artist has consistently exerted on her work is evident in the first book of her photographs that was published in 1984. Training the camera lens on the pock-marked, semi-derelict remains of Beirut and by way of an excerpt from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), the artist ‘traced the collective violence from the 1970s to the siege of Beirut and its aftermath as indexical signs marked upon the cityscape by broken masonry, the lapidary reliefs of disassociated fact’.42 Ristelhueber’s proclivity to gravitate towards battle-scarred topographies is also evident within a subsequent body of images she produced that sought to document the post-war landscape of Kuwait following the First Gulf War. Fait, which translates from the French

40

40

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

for ‘what was done’ but can also mean ‘fact’, consists of seventyone colour and black-and-white aerial and close-up photographs that were taken by Ristelhueber during her brief sojourn in the Kuwait desert. The provenance of these images was an aerial photograph that she had seen reproduced in the 25 February 1991 edition of Time magazine. Taken from a Jaguar aircraft, the image showed a number of black areas that marked the various points of impact caused by bombs. As the artist noted: ‘I wanted to track down these traces, as well as those of the trenches and fortifications the Iraqis had made in the desert.’43 Shot over a four-week period seven months after the First Gulf War had ended, of the seventy-one photographs that the project is comprised of, distinctions between scale and proximity become blurred and, to a certain extent, rendered indeterminate. So, for example, Fait #48 depicts a folded blanket that has partly fallen into a crevice on the ground where the photograph was taken. Due to the effects of weathering and time, the blanket has also begun to dissolve into the desert’s surface. Diagonally bisecting the image, this aspect of the photograph’s composition is arguably the most explicit way in which one can determine that it was taken in close proximity. However, if we direct our attention towards the right-hand side of the image and look beyond the blanket, the visual proximity to the ground dissipates and we are left instead with the possibility that we could be looking at an aerial view of the desert’s topography. In this respect the image, or at least this part of the image, is comparable to the aerial view of the desert that Fait #20 is comprised of. Even then, due to the proclivity for Fait #20 to be resistant to any straightforward reading, what detail there is points towards, indeed indexes, its contingency upon a larger whole that, initially at least, remains uncertain. As the photographs that collectively go to make up Fait educe, to approach the vestiges of military activity and human intervention within these contested topographical spaces is, on one level, to speak to and indeed reflect upon ideas of both construction and destruction, a thematic that is arguably key when it comes to understanding Ristelhueber’s practice.44 In this respect, and as Fait #20 (Figure  2.1) denotes, one by-product of the First Gulf War was the traces that it left behind, traces, which, on one level, more broadly

41

INDEX ( TRACING)

41

reflected the ‘constant action throughout history [that] creates overlapping layers’.45 The re-making, if not re-marking of Kuwait that Fait attests to, oriented as it is towards an ‘engagement with affective aspects of space and geography’, bears certain affinities with Simon Norfolk’s project Afghanistan Chronotopia.46 Appearing, in one sense, to be a continuation of Western visual culture’s seemingly inexhaustible predilection for ruins, the images that comprise Afghanistan Chronotopia were made by Norfolk during two visits to the country between 2001 and 2002. Divested of utility and often devoid of human presence, many of the structures and spaces that Norfolk photographed resemble somewhat makeshift-looking mise-en-scenes, both susceptible to but momentarily arrested from what appears to be a process of inexorable decay. For example, the outdoor cinema at the Palace of Culture in the Karte Char district of Kabul bears the staccato-like scars of repeated military fire that

FIGURE 2.1 Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait #20, 1992. Chromogenic print, 100 × 127 cm. © sophie ristelhueber/ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2016.

42

42

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

has been sprayed not only across the white, rectangular projection screen but also extend outwards across the entirety of the building’s surface. The history of Afghanistan in one sense has entailed the repeated and dubitable exertion of political will, if not military force by particular countries for arguably imperialist ends. As a result, the ruinous structures, along with what one might call the detritus of war, for example, and with respect to Norfolk’s images, cannon casings, heavy munitions and in one particular instance, a vertebrae-like section of the track from a destroyed tank, all become complicit with and ciphers for this history. So, for example, Norfolk’s photograph of a Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier functioning as a makeshift bridge in the Salang Pass denotes a point in Afghanistan’s history when the country, following the political machinations of the Cold War, was invaded, in December 1979, by Moscow. With regard to the sedimentation of time that these images denote, Norfolk has observed that the sheer length of the war in Afghanistan, now in its 24th year, means that the ruins have a bizarre layering; different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other. A  parallel is the story of Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the remains of the classical city of Troy in the 1870s. Digging down, he found nine cities deposited upon each other, each one in its turn rebuilt upon the rubble of its predecessor and later destroyed.47 As a means to both acknowledge and critically frame what the images themselves denote and give form to, Norfolk has sought recourse to the chronotype, a term originally derived from the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Aligning the chronotype ‘to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’, for Bakhtin it functioned as the site wherein time ‘thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’.48 As the French translation of Fait implies, the images that collectively go to make up Ristelhueber’s series denote both a past and what has passed, or ‘what was done’. In this respect, they are

43

INDEX ( TRACING)

43

premised upon and become structured around what we might call the ‘condition of afterness’.49 Writing in Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics, Gerhard Richter has deemed this condition to be representative of ‘a particular figure of modernity’, aligning the term, in the first instance, with ‘that of following, coming after, having survived, outlived, or succeeded something or someone’.50 By his own admission, what Richter seeks to advance is a multifarious concept to the extent wherein ‘related notions, such as the psychoanalytic concept of retroactivity or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), for all their undisputed relevance to a thinking of afterness, cannot do justice to the full scope of the afterness phenomenon’.51 In one sense, and with respect to the work of both Ristelhueber and Norfolk, Richter’s neologism opens out and becomes, with respect to the visual arts, particularized through the term ‘aftermath photography’. According to Veronica Tello, aftermath photography, or as it is also known, ‘late’ or ‘after the fact’ photography, seeks to capture ‘the aftermath of war, terrorism and other forms of human suffering [and entails] photographs [that] are distinguished through their imaging of vacant and/or ruined buildings and landscapes’.52 With regard to what historically prefaced subsequent and more recent iterations of this approach, Tello cites Roger Fenton’s mid-nineteenthcentury images of the Crimean War.53 Following the War Department’s unsuccessful attempt to acquire visual documentation of the conflict in Crimea, the print publishers Thomas Agnew and Sons commissioned Fenton, an artist who had contributed to the founding of the Photographic Society, to visit the site and take images with the view that they would subsequently be published.54 While there, Fenton took in excess of 300 glass plate negatives. Choosing not to document corpses, Fenton instead, according to John Stauffer, adhered to standards of taste that left out so-called unpleasant details.55 Arguably the most well-known image to have emerged from this series and the one that from the point of having been taken has subsequently engendered the most debate is entitled The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855). This image, along with a not dissimilar second image, were taken in a ravine that previously had been the site where on 25 October 1854 a British cavalry brigade had come

44

44

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

under heavy fire from Russian artillery. In The Valley of the Shadow of Death, cannonballs are scattered across the ravine (Figure 2.2). In the second of the two images, taken ostensibly from the same vantage point, no cannonballs litter the site. The point of conjecture, if not contestation, rests upon the question of the order within which these photographs were taken and by extension, whether or not Fenton sought to, as it were, ‘stage-manage’ the scene in any way. If Fenton had intervened, the so-called truth-value of the photographic image was merely a bluff that was waiting to be called. Stauffer, for his part, claims that Fenton photographed the site as it would have initially appeared to him, namely, with cannonballs strewn across the road. As such, and following an image being taken of what he had quite naturally happened upon, Fenton would have then proceeded to take a second exposure that no longer included the cannonballs.56 The somewhat pragmatic explanation Stauffer provides as a means to justify his account of the images’ chronology is the fact that the road would have been cleared either to avoid an accident with Fenton’s van on the way back ‘or else troops who were at the scene removed the balls’.57 This then brings us to the question with regard to the veracity or not of the photographic images. By way of a response to this, Stauffer rather straightforwardly points out that the historical context within which these images were both produced and would have been circulated was such that ‘[j]ournalistic standards of objectivity had not yet been established . . . Moreover, viewers understood that photographers arranged their scenes and posed their sitters for portraits’.58 Be that as it may, like Ristelhueber’s photographs of the Kuwaiti desert, Fenton’s symbolic portrayal of death, as opposed to its literal representation, is achieved by way of the fact that the images were taken at some indeterminate point after the event had taken place.59 Returning to the practice of so-called aftermath photography, for his part David Mellor has claimed that it is somewhat of a misnomer to label Ristelhueber’s body of photographs as being representative of such an approach. To this end, he sees this genre of photography as being more readily bound up with a form of ‘post-conflict reportage’.60 Indeed, it might well be due to the fact that, as has been noted already, Ristelhueber’s images militate against any straightforward

45

INDEX ( TRACING)

45

FIGURE 2.2 Roger Fenton (English, 1819–69), Valley of the Shadow of Death, 23 April 1855. Salted paper print, 27.6 × 34.9 cm (10 7/8 × 13 3/4 in.), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. reading or interpretation that they fall beyond the purview of traditional war reportage and the various pictorial and iconographic codes that this approach to image-making is usually premised upon and legitimized by. Rather than aligning the photographs that collectively fall under the heading Fait with an ostensibly straightforward set of references, among which might be other photojournalists who have sought to document the effects of war, Ristelhueber has cited Man Ray’s Dust Breeding (1920) as a salient reference that both prefigured her own project and worked to critically frame the project as a whole.61 A friend and close ally of Marcel Duchamp within the context of Dada’s avant-gardist ambitions in New York, Man Ray’s Dust Breeding is a 2-hour-long exposure of Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23) (Figure 2.3).

46

46

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

FIGURE 2.3 Man Ray (1890–1976): Dust Breeding, 1920. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gelatin silver print, 23.9 × 30.4 cm (9 7/16 × 12 in.). Purchase, Photography in the Fine Arts Gift, 1969 (69.521). © 2017. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2016/© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2016. The Large Glass  – unfinished at the point at which Man Ray’s photograph was taken, the work was notable for the dust that had accumulated on its surface.62 Likened by Mellor to an ‘incommensurable vista  – an artefact but also a map of a chaotic world  – of scalelessness’, like several of Ristelhueber’s images. Dust Breeding plays spatial ambiguities off of indeterminate proximities that could be either imagined or real.63 However, while it clearly exceeds its role of that as being ‘a purely documentary image of a work-in-progress’, in addition to a set of visual affinities it evidently has with Fait and the images that constitute that particular body of work, thematically Man Ray’s abstraction, like Ristelhueber’s, is put to ostensibly the same ends.64 In this respect, and as David Hopkins notes, ‘Man Ray’s

47

INDEX ( TRACING)

47

photograph was, of course, taken just two years after the end of the First World War, and offers striking parallels with reconnaissance photographs of battlefields’.65 Moreover, according to Hopkins, given its battlefield connotations, ‘there can be little doubt that the image, as understood by the Paris Dadaists, alludes, at some level, to the mass slaughter of French men in the battlefields of Europe’.66 Be that as it may, while both Man Ray and Ristelhueber have sought to abstract an indeterminate image of reality, both remain foregrounded by, to paraphrase Bakhtin, the potential delay in comprehension and in meaning caused as a result of time’s so-called thickening.67 There is the sense, with respect to Fait but arguably in relation to other bodies of work that she has produced, that the images foreground and seek to dialectically engage with the various ‘traces and rhythms of time’.68 In this respect, dust and its gradual accumulation seem an appropriate means by which time’s inexorable passage, if not its literal manifestation, can be broached. Certainly, and with respect to Dust Breeding, this is the interpretation Rosalind Krauss seeks to draw out.69 Writing in her 1977 essay ‘Notes on the Index: Part 1’, in addition to Man Ray’s Dust Breeding, Krauss also cites the artist’s utilization of the Rayograph, ‘the subspecies of photo which forces the issue of photography’s existence as an index’.70 However, beyond Krauss’s interpretation of Dust Breeding, very little is said with respect to how the index necessitates specific temporalities.71 The second part of Krauss’s text works outwards from the conditions of possibility for photography, at least at the historical moment the essay was written, to function as the pre-eminent model for abstraction. As such, it more readily foregrounds the index through understandings of time or again, more specifically, tense.72 To this end, and with respect to the approaches of the artists who are under consideration, Krauss frames their respective endeavours by way of the following admission: ‘Yet even as the presence surfaces, it fills the work with an extraordinary sense of time-past. Though they are produced by a physical cause, the trace, the impression, the clue, are vestiges of the cause which is itself no longer present in the given sign.’73 Writing seventeen years later in The Optical Unconscious, Krauss in effect revisits the phenomena of the index and its proclivity to furnish

48

48

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

traces with respect, by way of Barthes, to ‘the having been there’.74 Interestingly, Krauss’s determination of the index as that of being in accordance with, if not allied to, a retroactive impulse is given by way of the interpretive figure of the graffitist. The critical point of departure for this construal entails Krauss identifying a shift in the working methods of the artist Cy Twombly, a shift that entailed relinquishing the brush and hence the painterly mark in favour of the sharpened tip of the pencil. This allowed the artist, according to Krauss, to ‘maul and ravage the creamy stuccoed surface of his canvases instead’.75 In addition to the physical violence inherent within the production of the graffitist’s mark, violence is also construed within Krauss’s interpretive framework with regard to how time itself is severed. With the graffito, the expressive mark has a substance made up by the physical residue left by the marker’s incursion: the smear of graphite, the stain of ink, the welt thrown up by the penknife’s slash. But the form of the mark – at this level of ‘expression’ – is itself peculiar; for it inhabits the realm of the clue, the trace, the index. Which is to say the operations of form are those of marking an event – by forming it in terms of its remains, or its precipitate – and so in marking it, of cutting the event off from temporality of its making.76 As it is then, violence here becomes enacted as a result of the various acts that graffiti is associated with, namely, ‘dirtying, smearing, scarring, jabbing’.77 However, and as the interpretive figure of graffiti implies, violence is also committed by the very fact that there is a temporal division that cuts squarely along the line of the mark’s production. As Krauss notes:  ‘Insofar as his declaration is a mark, it is inevitably structured by the moment after its making that even now infects the time of its making, the future moment that makes of its making nothing else than a past, a past that reads “I was here”, “Kilroy was here”.’78 Evidently then, and with respect to the index, seen here as being somehow conflated with both the ‘clue’ and the ‘trace’, the graffitist’s mark necessarily functions as the residue of an event.79 In one respect, and notwithstanding the severing of the mark’s tenses and its relegation to the past, like the photographic image, the residue can be seen as corroborating existence.80 In other words,

49

INDEX ( TRACING)

49

and as we have already noted with regard to Wehner, whereas the ‘emergency exit sign is a sign that points at its object by deliberately employing the concept of indexicality . . . [phenomena such as] a footprint or a bullet hole is a residue or a trace . . . that carries a proof that it refers to was there and is now absent’.81 The Red House in Sulaymaniyah in Kurdish northern Iraq functioned as both the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist party and as the site where Kurdish prisoners would be tortured and summarily executed. As a building, it is reluctant, although not entirely unwilling, to relinquish its complicity with a past comprised of atrocities that were committed in the name of Hussein’s regime. According to David Campany, ‘[T]he site is still thick with evidence. There are the remains of Ba’athist torture cells, lined with wood to muffle all sound. There is evidence of mass rape. There are hooks in the ceilings for securing prisoners. And beneath great concrete slabs, there are mass graves.’82 In 2006, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin visited the building and took a series of twenty-seven photographs of the graffiti that had been inscribed on the prison’s walls. Photographed directly, and without any additional information that might provide some indication with regard to their context, the images range from a snake, a threequarter-view line drawing of a face and Mickey Mouse (Figure 2.4). Graffiti, it could be said, is often borne out of and is a response to a particular state of mind or prevailing set of conditions. Moreover, it is the visual manifestation of one’s response to those conditions that might simply be banal; for example, a malaise brought about through idleness, if not indifference.83 Conversely, political hegemony might equally be the catalyst for a more combative and more charged series of graphic marks, images or inscriptions. Broomberg and Chanarin’s photographs are representative of neither of these two impulses. In addition to not having the luxury of idleness, the prisoners would be entirely bereft of any agency wherein Hussein’s regime could be responded to, if not openly challenged. Instead, the graffiti in this context functions as provisional, semi-improvised attempts to arrest, puncture or somehow circumvent, albeit momentarily, what for the prisoners would have constituted lived reality. In one sense, this body of work arguably becomes aligned with what we have already discussed, namely, the recent phenomenon

50

50

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

FIGURE 2.4 Broomberg and Chanarin, Red House #2, 2006. C-type print. Framed: 114 × 90 cm/profile 2 × 6 cm. © Broomberg & Chanarin; Courtesy Lisson Gallery. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2016.

of so-called late or aftermath photography whereby the ‘event is passed over for its trace’.84 To this end, Broomberg and Chanarin have acknowledged this critical approach to image-making that ‘examine[s] conflict by assessing the damage after the fact, or by avoiding the epicentre of the war and the inevitable pitfalls that come with operating in that terrain’.85 This approach, or interpretation, also extends and is applicable to a work the artists made while they were briefly embedded with the British Army in Helmand Province in Afghanistan in 2008.

51

INDEX ( TRACING)

51

Having persuaded the British Army that they were fully bona fide journalists, they brought with them on their sojourn a 50-metre-long roll of photographic paper that was contained within a lightproof cardboard box.86 Deemed by the artists as a ‘performance’, The Day Nobody Died was organized around the fundamental act of exposing a series of 6-metre sections of the paper to the sun for a period of 20 seconds, having removed it from the back of an armoured vehicle that the artists were using as an ad hoc darkroom.87 Read horizontally from left to right, some of the individual works that go to make up this series broadly entail a movement from passages of black to passages that are for all intents and purposes, bleached out and entirely white. Although the gradation from dark to light across the photographic paper is by no means entirely smooth or consistent, the lighter sections, along with areas that run along the top and bottom edge and that bleed into and across the paper’s surface, at the very least denote the fact that something has occurred. Interestingly, and by their own admission, aftermath photography ‘is work that engages with art history and its various aesthetic strategies’.88 Given the fact that The Day Nobody Died entails the exposure of a section of photographic paper to light, the images themselves ostensibly function as photographs. However, from the outset it’s perhaps worth remarking that these images are representative of a particular approach to and categorization of photography. To this end, and with respect to the works considered thus far within the study, The Day Nobody Died is perhaps closest to and has the greatest affinity with Leighton-Boyce’s East Wing 1939–2011. For one, and in terms of aesthetic strategy, both works adopt a method of production that entails an analogue exposure. For Broomberg and Chanarin this is 20 seconds, for Leighton-Boyce, this is a period of approximately seventy years. More broadly, both images, although loosely falling within the category of photography, or at the very least, the ‘photographic’, do so without the aid of a camera. With regard to art historical precedent, photography’s development as a visually communicative medium incorporated the production of images that were cameraless. For example, in 1842 Anna Atkins began work on an inventory of plant specimens using the cyanotype process. As Weston Naef explains:

52

52

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Her pictures were made by coating a sheet of high-quality writing paper with a solution of iron and potassium, drying the paper in the dark, and arranging a specimen on the dry paper along with an identifying label handwritten on transparent paper. The assemblage would then have been exposed to direct sunlight for several minutes. After removing the plant specimen, she would have washed the paper in water to develop the image and then allowed it to dry.89 However, it was perhaps during the twentieth century that artists sought to fully exploit this aesthetic strategy. In addition to Man Ray in the 1920s developing a series of images called ‘rayographs’ which, like those early progenitors of the so-called cameraless technique, entailed the artist placing a series of objects on photosensitive paper and exposing it to light, between 1950 and 1951 Robert Rauschenberg produced a number of blueprint photograms which essentially worked on the same premise.90 With respect to a point which was made in the introduction to this chapter by Margaret Iversen, this could be an example wherein photography’s appeal to the index provides it with some form of purchase which is beyond the simulacrum and the structures, codes and conventions of representation.91 Unlike the work of Ristelhueber, whereby the artist provides a series of images that index military conflict by way of the traces that are left upon the terrain’s surface, The Day Nobody Died and East Wing 1939–2011 are photographic objects that have been arrived at not through human intervention but through the vicissitudes of time. Unfettered and unmediated, time is distilled within the material conditions of the work itself. In this respect, both works hold time and are bound by a process whereby the index, and by extension time itself time is physicalized rather than represented. Beyond the intriguing connections Broomberg and Chanarin’s work have with particular art historical moments and the aesthetic strategies therein, it is perhaps worth remarking that while eschewing any attempt to picture the event of war itself, the imagery that falls within the purview of so-called aftermath photography is usually representational in scope and purpose. This is not arguably the case with The Day Nobody Died and it is perhaps at this point that

53

INDEX ( TRACING)

53

the project differentiates itself from both historical precedent as represented by the likes of Man Ray and the interpretive framework offered more recently by so-called aftermath photography. On one level, such an eschewal means that while The Day Nobody Died is still foregrounded by a particular event’s aftermath, the ‘event’ itself is not represented in any conventionally representational sense.92 In this respect, the work arguably can’t be seen as a piece of reportage as it has nothing to report, no image or detail, however incidental, to disclose. As a result, and as the artists have observed, the ‘results deny the viewer the cathartic effect offered up by the conventional language of photographic responses to conflict and suffering; raising questions about authenticity as opposed to reproducibility’.93 In this respect, we could claim that the work is ostensibly about failure.94 Nevertheless, while we can’t say that The Day Nobody Died directly represents the event of which, via the work’s title, it is framed by, each of the works from this series are nevertheless somehow conflated with a specific moment, occurrence or context. To this end, the (non)image remains on one level directly coincident with and indexically connected to the context, if not the circumstances within which it was made, even if it does not seek to reproduce it in any legible or measurable way. That said, and as Charles Merewether notes, following Paul Ricouer, a tension nevertheless becomes inscribed between the ‘thing [which] has passed [as opposed to] the trace [that] exists and remains’.95 However, the question that follows is this:  ‘Is what is materially present, visible or legible adequate to an event that has passed out of present time?’96 Arguably not. In the end, we need to and should acknowledge these are and indeed can only ever remain photographs and for that reason will always remain, ontologically, in deficit with regard to what they are beholden to, if not coincident with. Moreover, and as was the case with Ristelhueber’s abstracted landscapes, these traces remain partial, indeterminate and, in certain respects, wholly inadequate. However, and notwithstanding the index’s fraught status as such, the issue that these images appear to force is that of trust. To this end, and as Kelsey and Stimson observe, ‘trust in photography, once vested in indexicality, must now be lodged in its ability to facilitate social commitments that recognise the traffic between the burgeoning image world and the social and political

54

54

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

realities in which it is materialized’.97 Given this, and with respect to both Ristelhueber and Broomberg and Chanarin, while photographs ‘may always already be facts enlisted as evidence . . . we need their evidence and, even more, the principle of evidence they uniquely represent’.98

55

3 The reality of ends

Of all these children, among which I found myself and, very likely, my girlfriend whom I loved, I don’t remember the names of any of them, I don’t remember anything more than the faces on the photograph. It could be said that they disappeared from my memory, that this period of time was dead. Because now these children have become adults, about whom I know nothing. It’s for this reason that I felt the need to pay homage to these ‘dead’, who in this image more or less resemble each other, like all cadavers. This is why I made the Monuments out of pieces of coloured photographs, on which, however, the children’s faces are on black and white, to show that time has passed, that they no longer live.1

A

s the first chapter has shown, to approach modernism with respect to its teleology is to acknowledge that this equally implied a future that it was seen in relation to and could be defined against. With respect to the visual arts, the means by which this could, in part, be forged was through the novel artistic strategies it adopted and subsequently worked to deploy. In formal terms, these strategies included, but were by no means limited to, exaggeration, distortion and a greater emphasis, in the case of painting

56

56

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

at least, of the artwork’s facture. Taken collectively, such strategies resulted in abstraction having a legitimate claim within the development of artistic modernism during the twentieth century. Moreover, given the preponderance of these strategies and their adaptation and assimilation by artists as the century progressed, it is perhaps of little surprise that this aspect of modernism’s development is a consistent feature within the intellectual histories that have been penned in its name. However, in addition to the various artistic gambits that fell under the auspices of formal experimentation, artists emboldened by the rhetoric of modernism sought to galvanize an entirely new network of social relations that were equally novel in both scope and import. In this respect, we might reasonably conceive both impulses as being bound up with modernism’s over-arching pursuit of radicalism. Broadly speaking, it may well be the case that the application of radicalism as a term within the context of art, as opposed to its prior political usages and connotations, maintains some connection to its etymology. From the Latin radix meaning root, radicalism in this context can be understood as meaning that which is fundamental, deep or extreme. More specifically, and with respect to the first of the two determinations of the word, this would entail approaches to making that were deemed to be technically radical in both scope and import. Approaching modernism within this interpretive context, technical radicalism has as its counterpart social radicalism, an approach and understanding that provided not only the critical exegesis for artistic production, but more broadly for being in the world. In one sense, while one was broadly centripetal to the extent wherein it focused upon the technical means of production, the other was centrifugal and worked progressively outwards, both into society and, as has already been noted, towards a projected future moment that modernism’s teleology was both premised upon and that it claimed to have a mandate for. While such revolutionary zeal can be discerned within specific artworks that were produced within this febrile period of activity, it was perhaps expressed most cogently within the context of the artists’ manifesto. For example, in the Futurist manifesto of 1910, Umberto Boccioni et al. appeal to the young artists of Italy to ‘support and glory

57

THE REALITY OF ENDS

57

in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science’.2 With respect to actual artworks, the belief in societal progress, together with the rejection of the past and by extension tradition is given concrete form within the context of Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio:  A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1854–55). Comparable in scale to the genre of history painting as sanctioned by the French Academy, within Courbet’s Studio the artist depicts a total of thirty life-size figures. Bookended by two outer sections wherein the majority of the figures reside, the centre of the composition is comprised of a young boy, his gaze fixed squarely on the artist as he works at his easel. At the same moment, and positioned directly behind the artist, a nude model looks on. In a letter written by Courbet to his friend Champfleury while the work was still being made, the artist accounted for the painting’s organization as follows: ‘The painting is divided into two parts. I am in the middle, painting. To the right are all the shareholders, that is to say, friends, fellow workers and amateurs from the art world. To the left is the other world of the trivial life, the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited, the exploiters, people who live on death.’3 Seen in relation to an aesthetic credo that was essentially didactic in intent, Courbet’s painting in this respect is to be read longitudinally from left to right. As the letter makes evidently clear, while the lefthand side of the composition is comprised of those who symbolized the old social order, among which included a ‘self-satisfied curé with a red face’, the ostensibly more progressive figures to the right of the composition ranged from the poet Charles Baudelaire through to the social thinker and politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.4 The spatialization of time within this painting is thus given through the implied movement away from the perceived obsolescence of the past and towards a future moment that would be populated by those figures who were united in their commitment to and belief in social progress. As The Artist’s Studio suggests, in order to ensure such progress could happen, the past and more specifically a perceived set of artistic traditions that collectively went to make up that past would need to be repudiated. Again, within the context of the Futurist manifesto of 1910, adherence to this early European artistic

58

58

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

movement required the whole field of art to be swept ‘clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past’.5 Thus it was understood that by purging the present of the contaminants of the past, modernist artists would be able to engender a set of living conditions that were unfettered by social, artistic and political dogma. In one sense, such an ambition readily squares with the proclivity to closely identify modernism with ideas of ‘freshness’. Indeed, the qualities that were often foregrounded within the works of art produced during this period, for example, vigour, spontaneity and directness, are also those that are often associated with the purportedly unfettered freedoms afforded by childhood. To this end, and writing in The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire, one of Courbet’s ‘shareholders’ makes the following claim:  ‘Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will – a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.’6 One outcome of associating modernism with qualities of freshness and candour was the tendency for artists to mythologize the provenance of their endeavours. By disavowing tradition, an artistic year zero, it was believed, had been forged in its place and became the point from which artists could work progressively outwards. According to Rosalind Krauss, ‘More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth. Marinetti, thrown from his automobile one evening in 1909 into a factory ditch filled with water, emerges as if from amniotic fluid to be born – without ancestors – a futurist.’7 Beyond Futurism’s tendentious attempts to wipe the historical slate clean, the attempt to align modernism with a certain rhetoric of beginnings could also be discerned within various other artistic factions and alliances across Europe at that time. To this end, what the Russian Contructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International attests to is that a public monument, as much as an abstract painting, could equally be put to the service of these ideas. As Christina Lodder notes, Tatlin’s Monument ‘was inspired by the desire . . . to create a genuinely revolutionary monument for the new revolutionary society’.8 While it was never actually built, Tatlin’s intentions for the 400-metre tall structure involved it being comprised of

59

THE REALITY OF ENDS

59

three corresponding sections that would rotate at different revolutions. According to the art critic Nikolai Punin, the lower storey, which is in the form of a cube, rotates on its axis at the speed of one revolution per year. This is intended for legislative assemblies. The next storey, which is in the form of a pyramid, rotates on its axis at the rate of one revolution per month. Here the executive bodies are to meet (the International Executive Committee, the Secretariat and other administrative bodies). Finally, the uppermost cylinder, which rotates at speed of one revolution per day, is reserved for information services.9 By becoming aligned with the new Socialist order, Tatlin’s tower sought to reiterate those qualities of freshness, of beginnings and of novel perspectives that were organized around a future moment that beckoned the modernist project. Be that as it may, implicit within the tower’s beginnings was not only its own obsolescence due, in part, to the fact that it was never actually built, but more broadly the dissolution of the social project it was both going to serve and work to symbolize. As Svetlana Boym notes, the ‘Tower could have embodied the moment when there was still hope that artistic and social revolutions could overlap, but it ended up commemorating its opposite: the collapse of utopian aspiration’.10 To this end, while, like other monuments that had gone before, it had sought to ‘embody the myths of beginnings’, in truth, and conversely, the tower worked only to ‘mark the reality of ends’.11 Because it ‘ritualises remembrance’, rather than functioning as a monument, it is perhaps closer in scope and purpose, albeit inadvertently, to a memorial.12 In this respect, it is comparable to a publicly sited work such as Sol LeWitt’s Black Form Dedicated to the Missing Jews (1989). Devoid of any inscription or insignia, the dimensions of its base measure 18 feet in length and 6.5 feet in width. Standing at a height that is also 6.5 feet and painted a uniform black, its scale significantly exceeds the more diminutive presence of those who stand directly adjacent to it. It’s heft, together with its lack of detail and ornamentation, meant that it would become directly antagonistic towards the site where

60

60

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

it had been positioned. This, it would seem, was exactly the intention LeWitt had for the concrete structure. As the artist would later recount:  ‘I wanted to make a piece that was completely different from the lacy architecture behind it . . . I made a sort of ungainly block. I wanted it to be hard to swallow in terms of form and completely antithetical to its site.’13 In terms of the memorial’s genesis, LeWitt’s structure was first built in Münster, Germany, in 1987 with the intention of being included in Germany’s Skulptur Projekte 87. Demolished the following year in response to the outcry of local residents, the form was re-sited and rebuilt in Altona, Hamburg, following an invitation from the city’s Kulturbehörde (Cultural Authority).14 Black Form Dedicated to the Missing Jews is representative of a form of memorial that eschews the more overtly patriotic and often literal public statement in favour of a more ambivalent and equivocal presence that interrupts, as such memorials often do, the conditions of possibility for even a vestigial form of triumphalism.15 According to Henry W. Pickford, such opposition is between figurative representation on the one hand, characteristic of memorials in the 1950s and 1960s and dating back to memorials commemorating fallen soldiers of World War 1, and abstract or minimalist, nonrepresentational memorials on the other hand, whose justification often draws on the unrepresentability thesis by thinkers like Jean-Francois Lyotard, Claude Lanzman, or Dan Diner, who hold that the Holocaust has no narrative structure, only statistics.16 Moreover, while the more overtly figurative memorials are often broadly functional in scope and purpose, the latter, non-representational memorial defers and indefinitely suspends any straightforward reading. Indeed, Black Form Dedicated to the Missing Jews deliberately works to defer the possibility for any ascribed function, role or purpose to be readily identified. Instead, and as with art generally that eschews the representational, it presents to its viewing public a measure of difficulty with regard to the possibility of a particular set of meanings being established. Instead, the obdurate, monolithic form appears resistant to the type of ‘message’ that more traditional

61

THE REALITY OF ENDS

61

approaches to this category of public sculpture usually proffers. The corollary that follows is a tension that marks any attempt to deal directly, in this particular instance, with the legacy of the Holocaust. For although the Holocaust has been deemed as ‘ineffable’, as somehow being beyond any form of representation, including that of language, as Kayrn Ball notes, removing ‘the Holocaust from the possibility of representation implies an attendant desire to freeze the traumatic meaning of the Final Solution as a transcendent moral crisis’.17 Although the artist had considered the form to be a ‘black hole’, Henry W.  Pickford has warned against reading the structure in this way.18 As Pickford maintains, we should be, at the very least, vigilant of Holocaust accounts, including artworks and more specifically memorials that ‘fall into theological transcendence (the Holocaust is unique, unrepresentable) or, even worse, an aesthetic myth’. As he points out: Such ‘black holes’, while they do not provide the convenient closure of universal reconciliation, do provide another kind of closure, that of historical causality and agency. The memorials mark a limitevent that in its absolute otherness implies that the Holocaust was itself extraterritorial to its historical genesis. If the first strategy collapses the crimes into an undifferentiated universal mourning, the second strategy hypostatizes them into a sublime negativity; in both case what is missing is the historical differentiation that, especially in the land of the perpetrators, might actually make a difference to Auschwitz not happening again.19 So how might historical agency, if not differentiation, be given? Perhaps the beginnings of a response, at least in the case of Black Form Dedicated to the Missing Jews, would entail considering its own memorializing function with respect to the act of indirect looking. To this end, LeWitt’s monolithic and ostensibly ‘silent’ form remains dependent upon representation, albeit a particular understanding therein. According to H. A. Sedgewick, whereas direct perception is ‘without intermediary agents . . . it is looking directly at the scene itself rather than looking at a representation of it . . . [i]ndirect perception refers to looking at a virtual scene through the intermediary of a

62

62

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

representation’.20 In this sense, LeWitt’s Black Form parenthesises rather than transcends a historical event through the act of indirect looking. That is, it takes the immeasurable, the ineffable and attempts to qualify such absolutist terms, terms that are themselves representations, through a basic admission that as with the act of memory itself, to memorialize is to call forth an account of the event, if not an image, rather than the event itself. At this juncture, one could attempt to claim that the structures of Tatlin and LeWitt delineate a set of cultural or more specifically aesthetic differences between that which was deemed to be modern as opposed to that which is ostensibly postmodern. To this end, the belief in progress that Tatlin’s monument symbolized is countered by LeWitt’s memorial that more soberly works to acknowledge a set of problematics that both art and more broadly visual culture have had to more recently contend with. If Tatlin’s monument signifies social advancement and the inexorable movement towards a predetermined end point, then LeWitt’s Black Form is a caesura, with both the sense of stasis and rupture that the term implies. However, the secondment of LeWitt to the services of postmodernism, at least in respect of Black Form Dedicated to the Missing Jews, results in a strained relationship at best. Admittedly, postmodernism’s attempts to short-circuit the intelligibility of the modernist artwork’s form, to cast asunder the continuity of its inner-logic and to purge the work of its ostensible repleteness are traits that may well be discerned within LeWitt’s structure as well. But as has been educed, Black Form doesn’t entirely relinquish the possibility for meaning. While LeWitt’s Form becomes aligned with the public memorial, and to this end acknowledges the passing of a historical event, what this chapter will primarily be concerned with are instances wherein artists have sought to foreground particular works by what will be construed as a memorializing impulse. As will become evident, the focus is not on contemporary artists who make memorials as such, but is rather directed towards particular examples that, by harnessing this impulse, might nevertheless engender certain points of affinity and overlap with the memorial as it has been historically understood. Putatively centering upon the artist’s own childhood, Boltanski’s early work directly anticipates the issues that his subsequent installations would seek, albeit often obliquely, to address.21 By working with

63

THE REALITY OF ENDS

63

materials and modes of display that are characteristic of shrines and reliquary, Boltanski’s installations, like memorials themselves, function as ‘special precincts’ wherein the past or aspects therein can be invoked.22 For example, consisting of 246 metal boxes with cloth, photographs and electric lamps, Reliquary (1989) functions as an ad hoc shrine, one assumes, to those nine individuals (children?) whose blurred faces hesitantly look out from beyond the electric lamps that are trained on them. Reliquary follows on from a series of works entitled Monuments, many of which incorporated anonymous and in some instances, due to the effects of photographic blurring, anonymized photographs of children. Accordingly to Lynn Gumpert, while these were ‘[d]eceptively modest [they] pointedly invoked both funerary sculptures and public memorials’.23 The capacity for the photographic image, like the memorial to plaintively stand in for something which has passed can also be discerned

FIGURE 3.1 Christian Boltanski, Children of North Westminster Community School, 1992. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London, 2016. Courtesy Christian Boltanski and Marian Goodman Gallery.

64

64

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

in a work the artist made in 1992 wherein he assumed the role of school photographer for a school in north London. For the purposes of Children of North Westminster Community School, the artist took photographs of 144 students aged 11–12 years (Figure 3.1). These portraits were then exhibited both at the Lisson Gallery in London and in the foyer of the school wherein parents and carers could purchase a copy of their child’s photograph. Fastened down, as Barthes remarked with respect to the photographic image, ‘like butterflies’, the children’s individual faces can’t avoid the viewer’s gaze, something that is made all the more deliberate due to the fact that as images they are both in full colour and focus.24 According to Adam Gopnik, Boltanski has simply discovered something latent in ordinary photographs that can make them, in special circumstances, elegiac. Part of his discovery involves a fact about photography: we can look at peoples’ faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states – for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.25 As with a number of works that formed part of the previous Monuments series, one inevitably reads Children of North Westminster School as a meditation upon the inexorable passage of time. By rehearsing an imagined future for these children, the moment within which these portraits were taken now becomes relegated to the past, their past and is replaced by a basic admission that proclaims this is how they were.26 What the North Westminster School project reveals is more than the simple fact that memory is inherently fallible; momentarily forced together due to the requirements of the conventional school photograph, what is implicit within this set of portraits is the inevitability that the group from that moment on will be cast asunder.27 The use of the photographic image in both Reliquary and Children of North Westminster School works outwards from a basic admission, namely, that the present tense, the time of the work inevitably segues into a past tense that it is and has always been coincident with, whether that past tense is imagined or necessarily real. Either way,

65

THE REALITY OF ENDS

65

the past is mobilized through the immobilization or ‘inert stability’ of the image.28 However, what arguably undergirds Boltanski’s practice is a memorializing impulse that engenders the affective means by which the inexorable passage of time might be felt, if not fully understood. A work such as Children of North Westminster School, akin to what Barthes has described as a ‘kind of primitive theater’, memorializes those individuals by way of invoking the past with which they are now indelibly bound.29 On one level, the question that Boltanski’s work raises is whether and by what means an artwork is cognisant of a past it is somehow complicit with. One of the first instances wherein the possibility for an artwork to somehow ‘think’ was remarked upon was by Charles Baudelaire in his review of the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris. To this end, Baudelaire proffered the provocative suggestion that Delacroix’s colour was capable of thought.30 If it is indeed the case that the colour of an artwork is capable of thinking, then the implicit horizon against which the following section of this chapter will work outwards from is that the materiality of an artwork is capable of remembering. Specifically, if to memorialize is, on one level, to practice memory, then Cornelia Parker’s work can be approached with the understanding that the past, or an aspect therein, is practiced through the objects and artefacts she selects to work with. On one level, the materiality of the objects that Parker chooses to work with is sometimes incipient, sometimes vestigial. With regard to the former, there are instances wherein the artist will present an object in what is an initial or inchoate state. For example, by presenting a ten pence piece or a Colt 45 gun in its elemental state, the possibility for the object to be read according to its received set of functions becomes temporarily suspended, if not indefinitely postponed. In this respect, a work such as Embryo Money (1996), which is comprised of a series of ten pence pieces in the earliest stage of their production presents the object as mutable, indeterminate and susceptible to arguably what is a more discursive set of readings.31 This sense of the artwork foregrounding its equivocality is something the artist has acknowledged with respect to Cold Dark Matter:  An Exploded View (1991). Consisting of fragments from a garden shed that was blown up by the British Army, Parker has noted

66

66

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

that with respect to this work, ‘it becomes very obvious what has happened to the objects, but somehow the work is also very quiet and reflective. Despite the fact that something very violent has happened to it, the work is in stasis . . . The work is in repose, literally and metaphorically. It is something that is not fixed’.32 In addition to a work such as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View having an equivocal presence, a stated intention of the artist is to challenge sculpture’s historical affiliations with the monument: Sculpture was always about making these permanent, solid things. For a long time my work has been about trying to erode monuments, to wear them away and to digest them, and then create a moment, a fleeting thing. I had monuments falling. Instead of being huge edifices that go upwards towards the sky, they were falling down towards the centre of the earth. It was about suspending, having the pedestal as a kind of rain of wires instead of a solid base. Nothing was solid, nothing was fixed, everything had a potential to change, so it was the opposite of the monument; it was the moment.33 Evidently then, by foregrounding the ephemeral as well as the equivocal, Parker’s enquiry can be thought of in terms of how time is written into the work. In this respect, to acknowledge the fact that certain works are organized around a moment is equally to accept that self-same moment as having passed. It is perhaps for this reason that a number of works produced by Parker are comprised, retroactively, of the material remnants of an action, an incident or event that has previously occurred. This aspect of the artist’s practice loosely falls into two related bodies of work, the first of which entail the artist manufacturing a history for the object. In addition to Cold Dark Matter, within this category we would also place Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988–89), a similarly orchestrated work that entailed approximately a thousand silver objects being flattened by a steamroller. In contrast, the second set of works, as the artist has noted, are those wherein ‘the history the object ha[s] been conferred by someone else’.34 With regard to the latter, both Mass: Colder Darker Matter (1997), an installation comprised of the charred remains of a church in Lytle, Texas, that was struck by

67

THE REALITY OF ENDS

67

lightning and a related, subsequent work Anti-Mass (2005), which is also comprised of an American church’s charred remains, seem apposite examples. The attempt to render materially presents a pre-existing history that inheres within the object (as opposed to manufacture one that doesn’t) and is also evident within The Maybe, an exhibition the artist curated in 1995 at the Serpentine Gallery. In addition to ‘exhibiting’ the actor Tilda Swinton who spent the duration of the exhibition laying motionless in a glass vitrine, The Maybe also displayed a number of objects that were imbued with historical resonance. These included Turner’s watercolour box and Sigmund Freud’s blanket. According to Lisa Tickner, these objects ‘became eloquent stand-ins for figures and moments from the past’.35 Moreover, ‘as long as the viewer did the necessary imaginative work, they were ripe for projection’.36 Room for Margins, a work that was made three years after the artist curated The Maybe, encompasses both the proclivity for Parker to gravitate towards historically resonant objects and a way of making that re-presents what has been left behind or what has, in this particular case, been cast off at some point during the object’s history (Figure 3.2). Room for Margins consists of six canvas liners and what are five sets of canvas tacking edges that were originally used by the artist J.  M. W.  Turner.37 The original function of a canvas liner worked, in effect, as a protective barrier between the painting’s stretcher frame and the primed layer of canvas (a canvas liner was unprimed). The tacking edges would originally have comprised the part of the canvas that would have been folded around the back of the stretcher. The artist first came across the liners and edges when they were being kept by Tate conservation in February 1998. Given the fact that their classification at the time was support material as opposed to actual works by Turner, they hadn’t been accessioned into the Tate’s permanent collection. What this meant was that they could be accessioned in Parker’s name with the artist being ascribed as the ‘author’ of the work. As with the case of From ‘Seascape with Distant Coast’ circa 1840, JMW Turner, NO5516, Tate Collection (1998), the works that together constitute Room for Margins have not undergone the sudden and often violent transformation nor been subject to the

68

68

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

FIGURE 3.2 Cornelia Parker (born 1956), from Room for Margins, From ‘Seascape with Distant Coast’, circa 1840, JMW Turner, N05516, Tate Collection, 1998. Presented by the artist 2000. © Cornelia Parker. Photo Credit: © Tate, London 2016.

deliberate destruction that other works by Parker have been subject to during their production. Instead, their gradual transformation, if we can call it that, has been through their deterioration that has spanned approximately a century and a half. Like several of Parker’s works, Room for Margins becomes animated partly through its connections with art history. To this end, the works have been likened, among other things, to the canvases of Mark Rothko.38 This is due in part to the fact that at least one of the works has a ghost-like imprint of the stretcher frame’s crossbar that, by horizontally bisecting the centre of the lining, creates two adjacent, slightly darker rectangles. Stylistically at least, these rectangles are reminiscent of the painterly lozenges that the Abstract Expressionist

69

THE REALITY OF ENDS

69

repeatedly used as a compositional device within his later, large-scale paintings. However, while this visual comparison holds, and, moreover, acquires further significance when one considers those claims, made on Turner’s behalf, that his paintings predated the various artistic gambits of twentieth-century abstraction, the canvas linings also have certain visual affinities with the Turin Shroud. Both are comprised of linen that carries a ghosted imprint of something that it was once, presumably, coincident with. In this respect, while the comparison with Rothko holds stylistically, the affinity these works have with the Turin Shroud extends to encompass the idea of touch and its subsequent withdrawal. At some point, the canvas liners have abutted the surface of another object only to then renounce or relinquish that self-same object.39 To this end, the work operates within the interstitial space between what is concealed and what is revealed. Between latency (from the Latin latent – hiding) and a state of disclosure. The very properties that are constructed and remain latent, but within the visual schema of the works under consideration now become apparent, serve as a critical point of departure from which the operation of the object in relation to its past can be both approached and materially remembered.40 In this respect, the internal shift or rupture in the object’s continuity with itself is given in part from its inability or, in the case of Parker’s enquiry, unwillingness to fully exhaust or dissemble some prior aspect of its existence. Instead, by the object’s negotiation with this aspect, the capacity for ‘recollection’ or anamnesis is invoked, on the part of the object and, with respect to Tickner’s notion of ‘imaginative work’, on the part of the viewer as well. In the strictly Platonic sense, anamnesis is conceived primarily as a theory of learning that is dependent upon a drawing back of an inchoate (i.e. prenatal) state of knowledge. This process is undertaken so that it becomes consonant with the sensible, temporally present phenomena that worked to elicit that process. Plato, writing in the Phaedo, describes it thus: Whenever we recognise or describe some sensible object as having a certain property, we are comparing it, albeit unconsciously, with a prenatally known form of that property. Just as we could not recognise or assess a portrait of Simmias as a likeness of him unless we had seen Simmias himself, so we could not recognise

70

70

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

equal logs or stones as such, or assess their equality, unless we had a prior (and prenatal) acquaintance with ‘the equal itself’.41 Understood in relation to anamnesis, Room for Margins works to reconstruct some knowledge of its past through the process of it being ‘regained’, or remembered.42 On one level, Parker’s assertion that her work is ‘not fixed’ somewhat straightforwardly denotes the fact that the various material configurations that go to make up the work appear to have been dismantled, deconstructed or even, as we have already seen, partially destroyed.43 However, for the purposes of what is under consideration, this lack of fixity can more pointedly be understood with respect to the fact that the work’s status or condition exists in a state of flux. Indeed, one might reasonably claim that the state of repose that Parker identifies as being at play within her practice is something that more broadly works to characterize commemorative sculpture as well.44 Certainly an intriguing tension becomes inscribed with respect to and by way of Parker’s memorializing impulse between the work somehow being, in the words of the artist, a ‘movable thing’ in contrast with a quality of repose that the artwork is equally determined by.45 Perhaps one way of thinking about this would entail acknowledging that what is contained within the work has somehow been temporarily and indeed temporally suspended, rather than being necessarily fixed. Understood in this way, the work inhabits an interstitial space between that which it once was and that which it is in the process of becoming; while there is a sense of departure, its arrival remains ongoing. Arguably such an interstitial and equivocal state that spatializes time is what the author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry recognized when he reflected on the proclivity for families to still keep a place at the table for someone after they have died. Saint-Exupéry’s meditations upon loss and the pretense of normalcy that on occasion and in certain circumstances the loss of a loved one engenders was given within the context of his experiences of Portugal in December 1940: I have known, you also may have known, some of those particular families who reserved at their tables the seat of a dead relative.

71

THE REALITY OF ENDS

71

They denied the irreparable. But I did not think that challenge could be of any consolation. The dead must be thought of as dead. Then they acquire in their role of death another kind of presence. But those families hindered their return. They made them absent for ever, late guests for eternity. They swapped their mourning for a vain hope. And those homes seemed to be plunged into an uneasiness far more overwhelming than grief.46 While Saint-Exupéry’s example, as he states himself, works to deny or dissemble the irreparable, the final artist that will be considered within the context of this chapter seeks to acknowledge the irreparable, if not, to allow it to exist and to endure. To this end, although the conditions of the visible that her practice engenders are often vestigial, they nevertheless work to memorialize the often anonymous individuals Teresa Margolles has borne witness to and, at the point of death, has had direct experience of. Having been awarded a degree in forensic medicine and science of communication from the Universidad Nacional in Mexico, Margolles’s subsequent role as a forensic technician in the mortuary in Mexico City meant that this space, given the nature of her enquiry, functioned in one sense as a ‘production site’.47 Seeking to engage with the consequences of the Mesoamerican war, Margolles has made a number of provocative works whose prima materia or primary materials are the various residues that have been abjected from a dead and often murdered body.48 Initially, Margolles was part of the artist’s collective SEMEFO (Sevicio Médico Forense, or Forensic Medical Service) that she founded in 1989 and which ‘drew on forensic medical materials to comment on social violence and anonymity’.49 For example, in Dermis/Derm (1996), SEMEFO produced a work that consisted of a series of bedsheets taken from the city hospital that had been used to wrap corpses.50 In one sense, a work such as Dermis/Derm becomes aligned with those instances wherein art foregrounds the body not as image but rather as trace or imprint. So, for example, in 1970, having smeared his body with margarine, David Hammons produced the life-size monoprint Injustice Case, a work made by Hammons pressing his body against the paper and then covering the bodily imprint that resulted with powdered pigment. Based

72

72

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

on the trial of Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panthers who in 1969 was charged with inciting a riot in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, Injustice Case explicitly refers to the fact that during the court proceedings Seale was tied to a chair and gagged. In terms of this particular artwork’s genealogy, one could perhaps recall Pliny the Elder’s anecdote with regard to the Corinthian potter Butades. As Butades’s daughter was in love with a man whose departure was imminent and whose leave of absence was indeterminate, the potter traced the profile of the man’s face by way of his shadow that had been thrown onto the adjacent wall. Moreover, and as the Roman encyclopaedist recounts, Butades then proceeded to press clay onto this outline allowing a relief to be made. Although historically remote, and beyond the fact that as in the case of the Corinthian potter, Injustice Case entails ‘the material trace of a fugitive body’, both examples are reliant upon an understanding whereby one surface is temporarily applied to and rests upon another, with the intention of removing one of the two surfaces, but not the vestigial information that has become inscribed as a result.51 Furthermore, while the nascent image is temporally obscured by the body, it is shortly thereafter made visible by the body’s withdrawal from the site of its making. Writing in Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricouer speaks with regard to the ‘question of inscription’.52 In seeking to move beyond the two types of ‘trace’ that he has previously identified within his study, namely, the documentary and the cortical trace, Ricouer’s third category of inscription ‘consists in the passive persistence of first impressions: an event has struck us, touched us, affected us, and the affective mark remains in our mind’.53 From this point, Ricouer goes on to develop this category: For one thing, and this is the major presupposition, I contend that it is a primordial attribute of affectations to survive, to persist, to remain, to endure, while keeping the mark of absence and of distance, the principle of which was sought in vain on the level of cortical traces. In this sense, these inscription-affectations would contain the secret of the enigma of the mnemonic trace:  they would be the depository of the most hidden but most original meaning of the verb ‘to remain’, synonym of ‘to endure’.54

73

THE REALITY OF ENDS

73

Such endurance, when applied to the examples thus given by both Hammons and the Corinthian potter are suggestive of the fact that the process of imprinting is durational to the extent wherein a prior body, an absented body, is present that somehow withstands the effects of time and that of passing. And although the process differs (to that end, while Injustice Case works through the felt contiguity of touch, the tale of the Corinthian potter works through the tracing of an outline), these and moreover Dermis/Derm work to inscribe an anterior presence that persists, that endures. As has already been claimed, due to the artist’s role as a forensic technician, the city morgue functions as a production site. A material deriving from this site that Margolles has used for several works is water that has originally been used to wash the morgue’s corpses, usually before autopsy. One work in which this material is used to compelling effect is Aire (Air) (2003) (Figure  3.3). For this installation, two air conditioning units are positioned against two of the three walls within what is an enclosed space. Entrance into the space is through a set of PVC strip curtains that are more commonly found in coldrooms and walk-in refrigerator units. By paring the work back to such an extent, Aire (Air) is reminiscent of other artists, arguably beginning with Yves Klein in 1958, that have produced works which in effect consist of an empty gallery space. However, unlike The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility (Klein’s title for this particular work), Aire (Air) isn’t entirely an empty gallery space. In addition to the two air conditioning units, there is their insistent hum. Moreover, and beyond the sonic dimension of the work, the room feels noticeably colder, an aspect that is felt as one imagines the vaporous air slowly settling upon and within one’s own body. As a dematerialized body, a body, so to speak, without a body, Aire (Air) functions vestigially as a trace that becomes attached to and transposed onto and within the corporeality of an/other body. To this end, and as Steinberg notes: ‘Perhaps the spectator, only now realizing that the vapour she has drawn into her lungs has touched the bodies of the dead, desires the only solution our present would seem to offer:  freeze this water, force its entry into another, less mobile state. Our spectator’s body becomes, involuntarily, the site of

74

74

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

FIGURE 3.3 Teresa Margolles, Aire (Air), 2003. Installation consisting of two cooling systems and one container filled with twenty litres of water that was used to wash the bodies of murder victims before the autopsy. Exhibition view: ‘Muerte sin Fin’, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2004. Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

an artistic collaboration.’55 The viewer’s body in this sense becomes both the site of the work, its witness and arguably its final resting place. In so doing, Margolles ensures that we are somehow complicit with or beholden to the bodies that usually go unnoticed and un/ remarked. If the ‘fundamental immateriality’ of this trace becomes dispersed, relinquishing in the process any boundaries, borders or indeed bodies that would once have worked to contain it, there nevertheless remains a point of origin for such immateriality.56 To this end, the work indexes a provenance that, as Steinberg notes, ‘suggests a history, demands to be read historically’.57 And it is this transition

75

THE REALITY OF ENDS

75

from corporeality to immateriality that echoes Maurice Blanchot’s reflections upon the role and function of the image. For Blanchot, writing in an essay entitled ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, the image ‘is secondary to the object. It is what follows. We see, then we imagine. After the object comes the image’.58 Moreover, and with respect to the proximity wherein the object is cast:  ‘Here the distance is in the heart of the thing. The thing was there . . . and lo, having become image, instantly it has become that which no one can grasp, the unreal, the impossible.’59 Likewise, if we are to approach Aire (Air) as image, it remains ungraspable to the extent wherein it forestalls not only the physical body but also the visual sense. Gerhard Richter, who we have already seen, has sought to determine the condition of ‘afterness’ as ‘that of following, coming after, having survived, outlived, or succeeded something or someone’, and has sought to interpret this aspect of Blanchot’s writing with respect to the aftermath it invokes.60 Accordingly, If the image ‘becomes the object’s aftermath . . . ’, the aftermath must always be traversed by a simultaneous withdrawal and refusal in which the image insists on its own non-self-identity and on its prismatic refraction and programmatic dispersal of any concept of unified sense. What remains of our encounter with the withdrawal and dispersal that are lodged at the heart of the image is what [Walter] Benjamin refers to as the moment of the beingno-longer and what Blanchot, as if echoing Benjamin, names the image’s ‘sordid basis upon which it continues to confirm things in their disappearance’.61 In this respect although as an image Aire (Air) remains ungraspable as such, it nevertheless works to memorialize, if not reinstate through its non-presence, the bodies of the disappeared and of the being-no-longer.

76

77

PART THREE

78

79

4 When, even if

The short-circuiting of the present with the past makes it possible to experience the past in the present – actually, an impossible view of history. This is an attempt to feel sympathy for the subjects of bygone events by imagining oneself in their position. By eliminating the safe distance between abstract knowledge and personal experience, between then and now, between the others and oneself, re-enactments make personal experience of abstract history possible.1

I

n most respects, Friday, 1 July 2016 began like any other day. People filed through train barriers on their daily commute to work, creaking metal shutters concealing shopfronts were slowly lifted and the perennial optimism of the weather forecast showed no signs of abating. What was different was the fact that within the various public spaces that go to make up these towns and cities, soldiers in First World War garb had gathered. Some sat motionless, some wandered, some marched. Except for the points during the day when they sang the words ‘we’re here because we’re here’ to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, all remained silent.2 The only information as to who they were was given in the small white memorial cards that the soldiers handed out, when approached, to members of the public. In addition to stating their name and the regiment or battalion that they

80

80

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

belonged to, each of the cards also stated that the soldier had died at the Somme on 1 July 1916. Commissioned by 14–18 Now, an organization responsible for devising a programme of events and artworks that collectively marks the centenary of the First World War, we’re here because we’re here was devised by the artist Jeremy Deller in collaboration with Rufus Norris, presently the artistic director of London’s National Theatre (Figure  4.1). In plain terms, each ‘soldier’ represented one of the 19,240 who were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. In this respect, and due to the fact that the authenticity of their uniforms meant that they were entirely in keeping with the period, the event bears certain hallmarks of what is ‘a highly popular mode of public history’, namely, re-enactment.3 Such an interpretation gains further credence when we consider the fact that in 2001, Deller made The Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of the confrontation between

FIGURE 4.1 we’re here because we’re here in Newcastle with permission from 14–18 Now. we’re here because we’re here was a UK-wide event commissioned by 14–18 NOW, by Jeremy Deller with Rufus Norris. Produced by Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the National Theatre, in collaboration with twenty-three theatres

81

WHEN, EVEN IF

81

striking members of the National Union of Mineworkers and the police that took place at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. Commissioned and produced by Artangel and filmed by Mike Figgis, The Battle of Orgreave was orchestrated by Howard Giles, a historical re-enactment expert and former director of English Heritage’s event programme.4 However, unlike The Battle of Orgreave, Deller is reluctant to confer onto we’re here because we’re here the same role or status. As the artist notes:  ‘If they speak they become re-enactors, living history . . . They’d have to assume a character for a day. We didn’t want that – we wanted them to have a detached quality to them. There is no narrative. They are not playing or acting the men who fought. They are a presence.’5 Be that as it may, while Deller seeks to distance or short-circuit we’re here because we’re here’s potential to engender a ‘unique historiography by the experiential nature of living history’, it nevertheless, like a re-enactment, sought to mobilize the affective dimension of a particular event within European military history.6 Moreover, while we’re here because we’re here evidently maintains a somewhat ambivalent relationship with historical re-enactment per se, it remains more broadly aligned with and is but one instance of the proclivity for contemporary art to explore the potential offered by re-enactment as a means by which history, or a particular moment therein, might be revisited and subsequently reconsidered, if not reimagined. According to Ruth Erickson, re-enactment is ‘rooted in histories of artistic appropriation and performance [and] has emerged as a key cultural form of the twenty-first century’.7 Moreover, ‘artists deploy the reenactment for two common critical purposes: to “rewrite” history by offering a forum for other viewpoints traditionally kept outside the “grand narratives” and to deconstruct the images and accounts that have composed these narratives’.8 To this end, The Eternal Frame (1975), by the two California-based art collectives T. R. Uthco and Ant Farm, is representative of one of the first instances whereby a reenactment work sought to posit an unofficial version of events, albeit closely bound up with the original historical moment, into the public sphere.9 The Eternal Frame takes as its starting point the 26 seconds of 8-mm footage taken on 22 November 1963 by Abraham Zapruder

82

82

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

of the assassination of John F. Kennedy while he was on the parade route. In this respect, and due to the fact that it eschews first-hand testimony, The Eternal Frame functions as a version of events that is based on a version of events, or, put another way, as a representation of what already was a representation. Filmed in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the same location wherein the assassination took place, Doug Hall, the founder of the T. R. Uthco collective, impersonated the president while Doug Michels from Ant Farm took on the role of the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. According to Bill Nichols, The Eternal Frame documents the reenactment process, including the behind-thescenes preparations, far more than it purports to be a documentary about the assassination itself . . . By exaggerating the separation between then and now, before and after, the video functions to bare the device of re-enactment itself rather than rely upon this peculiar form to present any final answer to the question of what really happened or generate a mise-en-scene in which the desire for a lost object might find gratification.10 And it is arguably through The Eternal Frame’s proclivity to forestall the conditions of possibility for verisimilitude to take effect that such desire remains wholly unrequited. Without wanting to necessarily further rehearse the idea that Kennedy’s assassination sounded the death knell for the American dream, it remains nevertheless difficult, given the period in question, not to interpret the event as marking a shift away from the progressive teleology of modernism and towards the more sceptical endgames and enclosures that collectively went to make up postmodernism or, at the very least, one account therein. By utilizing re-enactment, albeit for somewhat parodic ends, what The Eternal Frame shares with postmodernism is that both worked to foreground and were complicit with repetition as the means by which the conditions of the visible were given.11 And it is perhaps for this reason that the possibility for meaning, separate and in addition to those meanings that were originally ascribed but nevertheless still manage to seep into the present tense exists. Accordingly, ‘re-enactment aims to turn the shapeless continuity of our chaotic past into a discrete and

83

WHEN, EVEN IF

83

well-defined experience, for which only repetition and a new reading can provide a possible meaning’.12 While evidently repetition in this context can function as the means wherein specific meanings are engendered, repetition, or rather reiteration within the context of re-enactment, can also function, according to Antonio Caronia et  al., as a form of critique.13 To this end, what unites many re-enactment projects, according to Pil and Galia Kollectiv is the ‘need to re-examine and question passive consumption of ideas and historical narratives’.14 In the case of The Eternal Frame, by re-enacting Kennedy’s assassination through the interpretive lens of the Zapruder home movie, Ant Farm and T.  R. Uthco were able to explore and indeed exploit the increasing attenuation of reality by the mass media. According to Doug Hall, the founder member of the T.  R. Uthco collective:  ‘The event  – the tragic assassination of an American president and the aftermath – became convoluted as it unfolded over time, its original meaning mutating as it was filtered through the media. As the event became popularized, it lost its relationship to its source and spread out into the culture, as an evolving narrative that sort of folded back on itself like a mobius strip.’15 Understood in this context, The Eternal Frame was arguably one of the first artworks to posit re-enactment as ‘the art form par excellence in a society where mediation has triumphed completely over direct experience, and has stealthily taken over everyday life’.16 While evidently such ‘folding back’ sought to critique the purported veracity of the media, The Eternal Frame also worked to question an ontology that historically had pertained to performance art. According to Amelia Jones, writing in Body Art:  Performing the Subject, most early accounts of body art as performance ‘made heroic claims for body art’s status as the only art form to guarantee the presence of the artist’.17 By Jones providing ample evidence to the contrary, body art’s guarantee is replaced by the recognition of its inherently ‘representational status’.18 While the artist Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror, made in the same year as The Eternal Frame, was arguably separate in scope and import (for one it was not a re-enactment), it nevertheless also documented a live performance. Perhaps more pointedly, and with respect to Jones’s claims around performance art’s mythologizing of ontological presence, Performer/Audience/Mirror in one

84

84

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

respect ‘surfaces . . . its inability to deliver itself fully (whether to the subject-in-performance herself or himself or to the one who engages with this body)’.19 Perhaps most closely affiliated with Conceptual Art and those artists who, like Graham, were seeking to forge ‘new alliances between word and image, word and thing’,20 by his own admission, the artist was not interested in becoming a performance artist; rather, and as he states in a text written in 1989, his performances ‘were a way out of my earlier Minimalist and Structuralist assumptions based on a phenomenology of presence’.21 In this respect, Graham was seeking to interrogate modernism’s assertion that the work of art (and, by extension, the artist’s body), by being temporally bound to the present tense, was necessarily visually replete. In other words, and as has already been noted, ‘[f]ormalist immanence, which dissimulated its constant reference to the teleological linearity of history, seems replaced here by another form of immanence based on the hic and nunc, on the unicity of experience and the naïve evaluation of the event as what happens only once, excludes repetition’.22 In terms of how the work was structured, Performance/Audience/ Mirror was organized around four interrelated stages. During the first, the performer looks in the general direction of the audience with the intention of continuously describing ‘his external movements and the attitudes he believes are signified by this behaviour for about five minutes’.23 The next stage is comprised of the performer attempting to continuously describe the audience’s behaviour. With his back now turned to the audience, during the third stage the performer faces the mirror and ‘describes his front body’s gestures and the attitudes it may signify’.24 During the final stage, the artist proceeds to observe and again continuously describe the audience. Ostensibly a re-enactment of Graham’s work Performer. Audience. Fuck Off (2009) by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard develops the original performance into what is a somewhat awkward, improvised stand-up comedy routine (Figure 4.2).25 First presented at the Site Gallery in Sheffield in 2009, Performer. Audience. Fuck Off is a 23-minute film that sees the performer Iain Lee reprise Graham’s role, albeit to more caustic and ostensibly comedic ends. Largely working within the parameters of the second stage of Graham’s original performance,

85

WHEN, EVEN IF

85

FIGURE 4.2 Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Performer. Audience. Fuck Off, 2009. Courtesy of the artists and Kate MacGarry, London. the film sees Lee deadpanning, at certain points, off of the audience’s self-consciousness. With respect to re-enactment and as we have already considered, its relationship to and utilization of repetition, Forsyth and Pollard have observed that its rarely the event or action being repeated that we’re interested in reconsidering. Repetition works like a catalyst, and it’s our relationship to the imitation and the act of creating and witnessing the ‘copy’ where something interesting happens . . . Copying anything, the copy never reproduces the original completely. And this shortfall is where the real emerges, where understanding can begin.26 Like Performer. Audience. Fuck Off, another work by Forsyth and Pollard titled Kiss My Nauman (2007) takes as its basis an artwork that was aligned with a perfomative set of practices that had begun

86

86

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

to emerge from the latter half the 1960s in America. To this end, Forsyth and Pollard’s work takes as its starting point a series of short films the artist Bruce Nauman made between 1967 and 1968. Originally intended to be shown as a series of loops, Art Make-Up consists of four 10-minute 16-mm films that show the artist applying coloured make-up onto his face and torso.27 Moving forward some forty years, Kiss My Nauman transposes this work and in effect the same set of actions of which Art Make-Up is comprised onto the present-day context of the world’s longest-running Kiss tribute band, Dressed to Kill.28 Commissioned by Jarvis Cocker as part of the Meltdown music festival at the Southbank Centre in London in 2007, Kiss My Nauman consists of four 47-minute films, each of which shows an individual member of the tribute band as they apply their character’s stage make-up. Although not strictly speaking a re-enactment as such  – the work’s relationship to Art Make-Up is perhaps more of a creative alignment  – there remains nevertheless within Kiss My Nauman the proclivity, following Inke Arms’s description of re-enactment, for abstract history to be experienced personally.29 When asked what Art Make-Up was about, among other things Nauman said that he liked the ‘play on the words “making up art” ’.30 In one sense, and as this statement suggests, implicit within the work is the idea that art is something that is fabricated, ‘made up’, imagined and then re-imagined, regardless of whatever basis in fact it may or may not have. In one sense, the resonance of Nauman’s statement is that it reflects the interpretation of re-enactment as being necessarily one of what Rod Dickinson has called ‘a play of interpretation’.31 Certainly, a work that we have already considered, The Eternal Frame is foregrounded by the ceding of art’s obligations to maintain any straightforward fidelity with historical truth.32 In light of this unmooring of obligation, it is perhaps significant that it is not the original members of Kiss ‘re-enacting’ Nauman’s original work, but rather members from a tribute band. To this end, what the four individuals are ‘re-enacting’ is not a work that derives from a historical moment that occurred approximately forty years ago, but rather the specific routines and pre-show rituals that the original band members habitually undertake.33 In this respect, the work oscillates

87

WHEN, EVEN IF

87

between, but never fully settles upon either of the two contexts it is most immediately connected with. Kiss My Nauman then, irrespective of the extent to which it structures meaning through either Art Make-Up or the pre-gig rituals of a 1970s American glam rock band, remains discursively positioned.34 Whether based on a historical event or an artist’s performance, reenactment in both cases, according to Nichols, works to vivify the sense of the lived experience, the vécu, of others. They take past time and make it present. They take present time and fold it over onto what has already come to pass. They resurrect a sense of a previous moment that is now seen through a fold that incorporates the embodied perspective of the filmmaker and the emotional investment of the viewer. In this way reenactments effect a temporal vivification in which past and present coexist in the impossible space of a fantasmatic.35 That such a reimaging can occur is reliant upon an understanding that as a discipline, history remains necessarily distinct from the past. Such an understanding has arguably been given most cogently by Keith Jenkins wherein as he notes in Re-thinking History, while the past is singular, history is necessarily plural.36 Moreover, as history is, on one level, premised upon a set of questions that are epistemological in both scope and import, the fact that there are ‘many histories’ and therefore numerous historical readings results in what Jenkins calls an ‘epistemological fragility’.37 Given this, it could be said that re-enactment also cedes to this fragility as the means by which, retroactively, historical material might be recovered and made anew. According to Jenkins, the interpretive framework for how he has approached the theorization of history and, moreover, its uncoupling from the past is given through Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism. To this end, Jenkins concurs with Lyotard’s description of the world as being ‘a social formation where under the impact of secularizing, democratizing, computerizing and consumerizing pressures the map and statuses of knowledge are being redrawn and redescribed’.38 More specifically, the bearing Lyotard’s definition has on Jenkins’s theorization of history is given through an acknowledgement that ‘those old organising frameworks that

88

88

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

presupposed the privileging of various centres (things that are, for example, Anglo-centric . . . ) are no longer regarded as legitimate and natural frameworks . . . but as temporary fictions which were useful for the articulation not of universal but of very particular interests’.39 In one sense, the perceived collapse of such frameworks that arguably postmodernism brought about found its parallel within the realm of aesthetic relations. A year after Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition:  A Report on Knowledge was first published, ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’, written by the art critic Douglas Crimp, was published in the American art journal October. In it, Crimp sought to account for the work that was being produced by a group of who were then relatively young artists living and working in America. In one respect, the work of Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, like many others during this period, shared Crimp’s fundamental preoccupation with ‘the question of representation’.40 This question was approached, at least by some of the artists Crimp had identified, ‘through photographic modes, particularly all those aspects that have to do with reproduction, with copies, and with copies of copies’.41 Moreover, the negation of an artwork’s purported originality extended to encompass those artists whose work was ‘selfconsciously composed, manipulated, fictionalised’.42 Echoing Susan Sontag’s assertion that ‘photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are’, by artists adopting the socalled directorial mode, the photographic image was no longer necessarily ‘taken’ but constructed.43 Rather than being premised on or understood through what Henri Cartier-Bresson had deemed to be its so-called decisive moment, a photographic image could instead emerge over time.44 As a result, for some of those artists whose respective practices fell within the purview of Crimp’s directorial mode, the intrinsic nature of their praxis meant that their work folded the immediacy and instantaneity of the photographic moment into a denser and often more ambiguous series of mise-en-scènes. By being supplanted, the proclivity for the snapshot to arrest in perpetuity a fleeting moment was replaced by a more durational staging of reality evident, for example, within the work of Cindy Sherman, an artist Crimp discusses in his text.45

89

WHEN, EVEN IF

89

Evidently then, and at least on the basis of Crimp’s text, by relinquishing or using ‘the apparent veracity of photography against itself’, artists were now free, according to Crimp, to create their own ‘fictions’.46 The artists whose respective practices fell within the purview of Crimp’s directorial mode in one sense directly anticipated a subsequent set of photographic practices that worked to extend and further develop the fictive dimension of the medium. To this end, artists like Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, although in certain respects markedly different, both staged photographic mise-en-scènes that further militated against the particular truth-values and capacity to arrest time that photography had once been accorded with. On one level, the practice of Wall echoed Jenkins’s own assertion that ‘the world/the past comes to us always already as stories and . . . we cannot get out of these stories (narratives) to check if they correspond to the real world/past, because these “always already” narratives constitute “reality” ’.47 To this end, according to one commentator, as well as being enmeshed with film, Wall’s practice is ‘irradiated by the richness of the Western pictorial tradition from which he has taken two “precious gifts”: an idea of the size and scale proper to traditional easel painting, and a love of pictures’.48 Coincident with the practices of Crewdson and Wall, a related group of artists further developed the fictive dimension of the photographic image by way of incorporating a form of sculptural practice. As Jasmine Benyamin notes: The so-called ‘constructed’ photography of [Thomas] Demand, James Casebere, Edwin Zwackman and Bernard Voita, among others, creates miniaturized environments that deploy models not only as an enquiry into a particular technique of making, but also as a way to dramatize the material and metaphoric complexities of fabrication in its broadest sense: in architecture, in the mediation of architecture, in the re-presentation of a collective history.49 For a number of years now the artist Thomas Demand has been engaged in ‘elaborate practices of restaging, reenactment, and reconstruction’.50 Specifically, this has entailed the production of lifesize models, constructed entirely out of paper and card and based on a particular photograph the artist has sourced.51 Once Demand has

90

90

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

arrived at an image to work with, he meticulously works to recreate the image in three dimensions. Scaled up to life-size and in many (but not all) respects, a paper facsimile of the photographic image (as opposed to what the photographic image is of – the difference is significant), the (re)constructed maquette is then photographed with a Swiss-made Sinar, a large format camera with a telescopic lens.52 Once a large-scale image has been taken of the sculpture, the photograph is then laminated behind plexiglass and displayed without a frame. The paper model, on the other hand, is usually discarded.53 Significantly, the preservation of these images as illusions or simulacra is temporary. Given the limitations of Demand’s working methods, the device, at a certain point, is bared. As Roxana Marcoci observes: ‘Yet, despite their illusionism, Demand’s staged tableaux reveal the mechanisms of their making. Minute imperfections  – a pencil mark here, an exposed edge there, a wrinkle in the paper – are deliberately left visible.’54 However, in relation to how the image has been manufactured, it should be noted that while these flaws are not deliberate, the decision as to whether to leave them visible is. As the artist notes:  ‘I don’t cut out paper on purpose so that you can see how it was cut. But it is true that at every stage I can choose whether or not to leave these visible flaws. Over time I have developed a more acute sense of this kind of subtlety.’55 As we have already discerned, the implicit horizon against which Demand’s enquiry works outwards from entails a set of practices that respectively sought to critique photography by way of deconstructing what it historically had worked to legitimize, namely, representation. To this end, rather than rehearse and in so doing foreground the purported veracity of the photographic image, an artist such as Cindy Sherman worked to expose and in so doing exploit photography’s complicity with the fictive. With this in mind, the context of Demand’s practice and specifically its organization around a point of disclosure that appears to have been built in has certain affinities with the so-called fictionalizing acts as they were set out by the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser. Writing in The Anthropological Turn in the Theory of Fiction, Iser devised what were three sequential ‘acts’. The first, ‘selection’, was contained within every literary text and derived ‘from a variety of social, historical, cultural, and literary systems that exist as referential

91

WHEN, EVEN IF

91

fields outside the text’.56 Having been selected, these systems then become ‘combined within the text range from words and their meanings through encapsulated extratextual items to the patterns in which characters and actions . . . are organized’.57 The final fictionalizing act, and the one that is analogous to how Demand’s images reveal ‘mechanisms of their making’, is that of self-disclosure: ‘In the selfdisclosure of its fictionality, an important feature of the fictional text comes to the fore: it turns the whole of the world organized in the text into an “as if” construction.’58 Evidently then, Iser’s writings on fictionality establishes a measure of purchase upon Demand’s own constructed realities and the act of disclosure that they are, in part, premised on. However, the complexities of Demand’s practice are clearly not reducible to either Iser’s so-called fictionalizing acts or more broadly the proclivity for photography to be read with regard to its fictitiousness. Moreover, and as Régis Durand notes, ‘if their activity went no further than this, it might well be tautological and unrewarding, whereas those who go beyond this stage will experience the suggestive power that lies hidden in these images’.59 For Durand, the work’s ‘suggestive power’ is, namely, its ‘historical and political allusions’.60 The allusive relationship to the past within the context of Demand’s work has, on at least one particular occasion, entailed a salient event in Germany’s history.61 Indeed, given the manifold and often traumatic events that the country witnessed during the twentieth century, it is almost inevitable that the artist would feel compelled to broach this topic. Raum/Room (1994) is based on a 1944 photograph of what was, prior to a failed assassination attempt, Adolf Hitler’s headquarters (Figure 4.3). The attempt on Hitler’s life took place on 20 July 1944. Oberst Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, a colonel in the General Staff, planted a bomb at a briefing scheduled for that afternoon at the Fuhrer’s headquarters in east Prussia. Although the bomb was successfully detonated, Hitler only suffered minor injuries.62 Demand, for his part, remembers this image and the events it represented as being an indelible part of his childhood: I grew up in history class with the image of 20 July 1944, when officers of the Wehrmacht staged a coup against Hitler by

92

92

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

FIGURE 4.3 Thomas Demand, Raum/Room, 1994. Chromogenic print on photographic paper and Diasec 183.5 × 270 cm, 72 1/4 × 106 1/4 in. © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Courtesy Sprüth Magers. © DACS 2016.

detonating a bomb in the wooden hut where he was holding a meeting, and the whole structure blew apart. I  think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only person to be completely absorbed by that image of resistance to Hitler. It’s an image of my childhood and I’m, as it were, the living proof of the validity of the educational ideals of that time.63 Broadly speaking, Demand’s image functions as a reconstruction for the most part in keeping with the original 1944 photograph; it presents the scene from the same position that it was originally photographed from and the main architectural features of Hitler’s headquarters find their visual equivalent within the image Demand has constructed. However, given the inherent complexity of the chaotic scene, Demand omits certain details to the extent wherein the image functions as a schematic approximation, rather than a faithful

93

WHEN, EVEN IF

93

reproduction.64 Nevertheless, Room, like Demand’s other photographs of architecture, although often banal or, in the words of Beatriz Colomina, ‘completely unspectacular’, remain silent witnesses, albeit twice-removed, to the deeds and actions that occurred in close proximity to it.65 We can construe the role of re-enactment within the context of Demand’s practice as enabling the ‘reassessment of the political narratives of the twentieth century and of those ways in which those narratives [have] been constructed’.66 In order to do this, Demand, like Jenkins, approaches an understanding of history wherein it is ‘plainly and palpably  – a narrative representation’.67 Nonetheless, Demand, like some of his German counterparts, seems willing, following Pepe Karmel’s observation, to ‘lead the viewer into a troubling confrontation with history, both German and international’.68 Moreover, we could arguably claim that as well as being an artist, Demand also functions as an historian to the extent wherein as Jenkins has claimed, the past ‘can only be brought back again . . . in very different media, for example in books, articles, documentaries, etc., not as actual events’.69 In an interview with François Quinton, Demand observes that artists ‘work with the material given by the media as much as with real experience because the material is superimposed on reality’.70 Evidently then, while Demand’s work rehearses a certain idée fixe of Western art, namely, how reality as it is known, felt or indeed even imagined might be given in its image or corresponding inscription, the artist’s photographs short circuit the possibility for reality to be fully substantiated through its image. Moreover, and this is something that is apposite with regard to those works that are based on a photograph that is in some way historically resonant, the image invariably fails to be folded back onto the reality it, in most cases, indexically stems from. As Andreas Ruby notes: ‘These synchronous levels of reality lend Thomas Demand’s pictures an ambiguity . . . [s]ince the effect of the pictures thus endures, doubts about their ontological status are never fully allayed. We are buffeted back and forth between interpretations. What if they’re actually real after all?’71 In his work then, the attenuation of reality in the face of subsequent iterations engenders the same epistemological fragility that history or more particularly historiography, as a term and as a methodology,

94

94

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

is marked by and symptomatic of. Moreover, for Jenkins, this fragility, a fragility that remains equally applicable to the practice of Demand, stems from the fact that ‘[a]s the past has gone, no account can ever be checked against it but only against other accounts’.72 On some basic level, and although the images at times militate against this, Demand’s photographs of (re)constructed reality function as silent witnesses to an event or series of events that have at some point in the past occurred. In this sense, we could say that the images, although they remain and become even as we speak even more historically separate from the event they are attempting to represent, nevertheless present the viewer with some form of testimony. Accordingly, ‘[t]hrough the “reconstruction” of this “photographic evidence” in large-scale models made of paper and cardboard, the photographic impetus of “testifying” spills over into Demand’s pictures – the ca˛ a été (that happened), declared by Roland Barthes to be the fundamental message of any photograph’.73 Equally organized around Barthes’s idea of the ca˛ a été, the work of Omer Fast, the final artist that we will consider in this chapter, has, in certain instances, also sought recourse to re-enactment. To this end, and as Maria Muhle notes, the artist’s ‘documentation of reality through re-enactment’ is necessarily a process of fictionalization.74 Part of this fictionalization, given the fact that it nevertheless seeks to retroactively attest to that which has now passed, is given through the testimony that works such as Spielberg’s List (2003) and The Casting (2007) are partly comprised of. Notwithstanding its conflation with historical suffering, testimony ‘is widely regarded as an unaesthetic form of written or oral attestation’.75 In this respect, what relinquishes testimony of its aesthetic is the fact that conventionally it has been seen quite simply as a record of observations.76 These observations, or what a historian might call ‘discrete facts’, are then reassembled into some form of a coherent whole that becomes representative of what is being testified to.77 However, Fast seeks to problematize this assumption to the extent wherein the veracity of the eyewitness account, its neutrality and ability to ‘represent the past as it has been witnessed’ are fundamentally called into question.78 The disarticulation of what once occurred from its subsequent interpretation, a distinction that works to rehearse Jenkins’s own separation of the past from history, becomes all the

95

WHEN, EVEN IF

95

more compelling by way of the fact that Spielberg’s List is based on the experiences of a number of Polish film extras who worked on the set of and starred in Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Schindler’s List (1993). Based on Thomas Keneally’s book that was originally published in 1982, the film on which Fast’s work is organized around starred the actor Liam Neeson as the enigmatic Oskar Schindler, a businessman and member of the Nazi Party who saved over 1,000 Jewish people that worked under him. Shot mainly in black and white and with a running time of 3 hours and 15 minutes, what appealed to Spielberg was that fact ‘that it was so factual, so detached’.79 Spielberg’s List entailed Fast visiting the locations where sections of Schindler’s List was filmed and speaking to some of the film’s extras who had small walk-on roles as both Jews and Nazis. In so doing, and as Elisabeth Lebovici notes, their testimony brings ‘about the coincidence of two temporalities  – that of the early 1940s, and that of the early 90s and the shooting of Spielberg’s film . . . Remembrance of the event becomes overlaid by that of its reconstruction fifty years later’.80 Stemming from the context of a fictionalized account of a historical event,  – their so-called authentic experience of a representation together with their own first-hand experiences of the German occupation means that, for a time at least, one remains not entirely sure what is being referred to and what is being remembered.81 As a result, ‘Fast subverts the logic of the witnessing itself’.82 It is perhaps for this reason that, as Muhle notes, ‘Spielberg’s List, rather than being about the Shoah, is about the social and political impact of a fictional narrative – Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993)  – and the private lives of those who took part in its filming’.83 If this is indeed the case, then as a fictional narrative its impact is given by way of the artist foregrounding the problematic of representation. As the artist observed in an interview in 2008 with Joanna Fiduccia: ‘But even then, immediately after the tragic event, its survivors, its witnesses and even its perpetrators start mutating into dramatic personae, into authors and actors, tasked with making sense of their own experience for themselves and for others. Given this transformation, the problem of representation gains urgency, both ethically and aesthetically. It also becomes pretty gnarly and complicated.’84

96

96

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Interestingly, within this statement Fast claims that the survivor and hence witness becomes determinable as such by way of the mutation into ‘authors and actors’. To this we might also add historian, given the fact that, as Jenkins notes, ‘history remains inevitably a personal construct, a manifestation of the historians’ perspective as a “narrator” ’.85 Indeed, while Jenkins’s claim that ‘the same object of enquiry is capable of being read differently by different discourses’ works outwards from the basic admission that history and the past are mutually exclusive, it is equally applicable to how we might approach thinking about the role of ‘testimony’ within the context of Spielberg’s List.86 What a more recent work by Fast, 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) shares with Spielberg’s List is that both works place under scrutiny the role, reliability and value that we ascribe to witness accounts and their subsequent iterations. As Tina Wasserman observes: The strength of his work is the degree to which he dramatizes how we now live in a hall of mirrors filled with duplicates and doubles – and constantly must question what is real, replicated, and invented. What value can we assign to an eyewitness account, a secondhand witnessing, a reenactment? Should we place a greater value on ‘authentic’ experience or is replication just an extension of its expression?87 Comprised of a series of vignettes that move in and out of the ostensible subject of the work, namely, the experiences of a Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator, 5,000 Feet is the Best is a 30-minute film based on conversations the artist had with the drone operator, now a security guard, in a Las Vegas hotel in 2010 (Figure 4.4).88 In addition to scenes wherein an actor playing the drone operator is interviewed, 5,000 Feet is the Best also includes three sequences that restage particular scenarios he describes over the course of his interview. So, the first scene centres upon someone whose childhood obsession with trains is taken to its logical conclusion; the protagonist, stealing a uniform from the driver’s lounge at the local station, proceeds to board and drive a train full of commuters for the remainder of the day. In the second of the three vignettes, a man and woman run a scam out of a Las Vegas hotel room. In the throes of the sting taking

97

WHEN, EVEN IF

97

place within the setting of a hotel room, the woman goes to the bathroom and finds a pair of trousers that matches those of the unsuspecting victim. Upon her return, she discreetly switches the trousers, which is the cue for her partner who is also in on the scam to walk in on the pair en flagrante. In a fit of rage, the man proceeds to throw the victim, now semi-naked, out into the hotel corridor followed by his trousers, ‘after the relevant details are copied off their credit card’. The final of the three scenarios that the fictional drone operator recounts concerns a family trip. Although the family are suburban Americans, the story quite quickly segues into a level of unreality – they encounter a checkpoint where documents are presented to what appear to be occupying forces. After then confronting some men who are digging into the ground with a shovel, a Hellfire missile explodes, killing all of the men who were by the roadside. The family, although carrying minor injuries, get out of their car and continue on their journey. The film also incorporates a recording of an interview with someone whose face is pixelated and who we assume to be the actual drone operator. At certain points audio from this interview becomes

FIGURE 4.4 Omer Fast, 5,000 Feet is the Best, 2011. Single channel HD video, 30 minutes, Edition of 6 + 2AP. © Omer Fast. Courtesy James Cohan, New York.

98

98

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

overlaid onto aerial footage of Las Vegas at night and of a town in New England. While for Peter M.  Asoro, the three vignettes of which the film is loosely organized around ‘unfolds multiple layers of the traditional conceptions of the subjectivity of pilots’, examining in the process dimensions such as ‘physical location, personal safety, and social prestige’, all three are equally concerned with and are premised upon how truth is dissembled and illusions maintained through the pretence of normalcy.89 Certainly, in contrast with the purportedly veridical imaging of reality the drone relays – as the pilot notes at one point ‘seeing the world from above doesn’t just flatten things, it sharpens them’ – the more distorted and somewhat tangential scenes narrated by the fictional drone operator seem to relinquish plausibility. Either way, on one level 5,000 Feet is the Best foregrounds a series of questions with respect to the conditions of the visible, be they imagined or necessarily real.90 Moreover, and with respect to the work being premised on what ostensibly has taken place, by asking ‘what kind of medium the image is, and what happens to the image once it is transferred from one dispositif to another . . . ’ 5,000 Feet is the Best exposes the contingent nature of testimony due, in part, to the vicissitudes of time.91 Given this, re-enactment within the context of Fast’s work, as Muhle notes, entails the ‘reproduction of the meaning of an action or event and its translation into the present: its re- actualization’.92 In so doing, and by retroactively organizing that which has gone before, 5,000 Feet is the Best works to reveal one of the fundamental tenets of Jenkins’s view of history, namely, that it will always remain less than the past.93

99

5 Still there, waiting (retracing)

[N]ot suddenly, nor with fright, but certainly with no line crossing, no beginning, there has been a change in the air, a crisis passed for sleep; for now, that in the same instant it seems was so enchanted still, there is a nearly noiseless trembling of every leaf of the vegetation of all this part of the world, so delicate a turning in fright of sleep as that needle which records a minute disturbance on the far side of the thick planet, and so nearly noiseless, yet so unanimous, it is the indistinguishable and whispered sigh of all the generations of the dead, the crumbling of a world-long wave so distant, that one yard more removed, could not be audible.1

A

ccording to Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W.  Brannan, writing in the introduction to Documenting America 1935–1943, by the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s rural poverty in the United States had reached ‘crisis proportions’.2 As a means to alleviate the effects felt by the nation’s economic downturn, and against the backdrop of President Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933, ‘the newly formed Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Farm Credit

100

100

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Administration, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration made loans, tried to affect the market for farm commodities, resettled farmers on better land, and offered assistance under the rubric “rehabilitation” ’.3 Two years later, on 30 April 1935, the Resettlement Administration (RA) gained formation as an independent agency. Like the previous government agencies, the RA’s overarching aim was ‘to alleviate rural poverty and assist people dislocated by such forces as farm mechanization and the Dust Bowl’.4 During the same year, the Historical Section was also formed. In addition to garnering support for the RA, the purpose of the Historical Section, as James R.  Swensen notes, was ‘to generate positive support, that is, propaganda, for its controversial programs’.5 Based within the Information Division of the Resettlement Administration and under the guidance of its chief, Roy Stryker, a number of photographers would go on to document America and, with respect to the photographs Walker Evans took during the summer of 1936, the plight of tenant farming communities in Hale County, Alabama.6 Accompanying Evans was James Agee. As a staff writer for Fortune, Agee had been commissioned by the magazine to write a report that documented the lives of the poor white farmers living and working in the Deep South.7 During their sojourn in Alabama, Evans, who at this point was at the RA, produced in total 107 gelatin prints of three sharecropper families, the Burroughses, the Fieldses and the Tingles. In addition, he also took a series of images of the places where the families lived and worked (Figure 5.1). Taken collectively, the authenticity of Walker’s images was sufficient enough to ward off accusations, in the first instance at least, that the images were somehow posed or stage-managed.8 Writing with respect to Evans, who he claims was both ‘an excellent art photographer and a great documentary photographer’, James Guimond draws an interesting distinction between documentary and so-called modernist art photography. To this end, ‘modernists apply the documentary impulse to the world of nature, objects, and architecture by finding fresh visions of things that have been ignored, devalued, or taken for granted just as documentary photographers present new insights about people who have been ignored, devalued, or taken for granted’.9 Of course, in one respect, the decision to fasten on the socalled ignored, devalued or taken-for-granted means that the recipient

101

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

101

FIGURE 5.1 Walker Evans (American, 1903–75), Corrugated Tin Facade/Tin Building, Moundville, Alabama, 1936, Gelatin silver print, 17 × 23.2 cm (6 11/16 × 9 1/8 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

of such attention was potentially susceptible to, at the very least, misrepresentation and, at worst, exploitation. This was something that Agee was certainly aware of. Writing in his introduction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the writer observes the following: It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’.10 Be that as it may, and in spite of the proclivity for some to read the project as being synonymous with the ‘honest journalism’ to which

102

102

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Agee refers, in many respects his written response challenges this understanding. At the very least, Agee’s lyrical and at times overwrought approach, which, according to one commentator, entailed ‘juxtaposing a range of texts and [in so doing] opening an interpretive space that encourages the reader to engage with the processes of composition’, foregrounds an authorial voice that is highly subjective.11 To this end, and according to Robert F. Sayre: ‘What Agee had done was to break the rule of documentary journalism, which held that the author must be a rigorously objective spectator.’12 By way of illustrating the extent at which Agee’s writing diverged from this rule, Sayre marshals an instance within his text wherein ‘thinking of himself alone in the Gudger house [Agee] recalled how as a boy left alone in his grandfather’s house he had pryed into forbidden drawers and closets and masturbated on other people’s beds’.13 Although what Agee recollects stems from but is not directly tied to the Gudger dwelling, what it nevertheless works to reveal is the propensity for place to function mnemonically. Such an understanding is certainly apposite with regard to the photographs William Christenberry took that were attached, if not directly to the Gudger’s abode, then to certain other locations that Evans had previously trained his camera on. In this respect, Christenberry, like Agee before him, is drawn to the layers of time that determinations of place are indelibly bound up with and, as such, can somehow work to retroactively elicit. Born during the same year that Evans and Agee visited Hale County with the intention of documenting the sharecroppers’ lives, the photographs that were subsequently published in 1941 within the volume Let Us Now Praise Famous Men would hold particular significance for Christenberry. Moreover, and as we will shortly go on to consider, the means by which he sought to creatively respond towards Evans’s photographs marked an approach that he would adopt with regard to subsequent bodies of work.14 The provenance of Christenberry’s response stemmed from his serendipitous discovery of a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in a bookstore in 1960 in Birmingham, Alabama.15 As he recounts:  ‘I was particularly taken by Agee’s words, but some of the photographs were astounding to me because I knew people in

103

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

103

them . . . I became completely fascinated by this book and started to re-trace Agee’s and Evans’ steps, photographing again what subjects of them I could find.’16 Between 1960 and 1962, Christenberry made a series of black-and-white photographs at sites where Evans had originally been and had taken photographs.17 In addition to images of the Tingle’s house in Mill’s Hill that, as Yoland Romer notes, saw Christenberry adopt the same or almost the same viewpoint as that of Evans, in one particular instance he rephotographed Elisabeth Tingle in the kitchen of the house at Mill’s Hill some twenty-six years after Evans had photographed her in the same kitchen.18 The proclivity within Christenberry’s practice to return to a particular site in order to rephotograph it also forms the basis of his approach with regard to the succession of images he has produced of the Palmist building. Beginning in 1961, he has rephotographed the building over a period of thirty-four years.19 Indeed, even after the building had collapsed, Christenberry continued to photograph ‘the site where it had been’20 (Figure  5.2). As Justo Navarro points out, Christenberry’s images of the building at that time documented ‘how its plank structure gradually fell apart . . . overgrown by a vegetation that proved more persistent than the works of mankind, coming apart and falling to pieces, until only the floor, the site remained, and then it disappeared completely’.21 In the first instance then, it is perhaps through the various iterations of the Palmist building as they work to relay the inexorable passage of time that the mnemonic dimensions of place, for Christenberry, becomes evident. In one sense, the act of returning to a particular site is analogous with Agee’s own desire, as we have seen, to return to the primal scene which he described. Within this particular context, Agee’s ‘recollected being’ is read through and premised on a primal scene of his childhood.22 This idea, and the pull it exerts on an individual also appears as a narrative trope within the novels of Toni Morrison, an author who, like Christenberry, focuses on what is in one respect the historical consciousness of America’s rural south. To this end, and as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy points out: ‘the primal scene need not be sexual, it need only be of such significance that an individual would recollect that episode, and not another, at the crucial moment when driven

104

104

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

FIGURE 5.2 William Christenberry, Site of Palmist Building, Havana Junction, Alabama, 1988. © William Christenberry; courtesy Pace/ MacGill Gallery, New York.

to re-evaluate her or his life. A primal scene is, then, an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory and through what Morrison felicitously calls “rememory.” ’23 More pointedly, and what the instances of rememory within Beloved, Morrison’s novel of 1987, suggests is that memories can manifest themselves physically within the world.24 So, for example, a particular exchange within Beloved between two of the novel’s main characters, Denver and Sethe is premised upon the acknowledgement that ‘places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world’.25 Moreover, and as their exchange works to evince, the ‘thought picture’ of what Sethe describes is in fact somebody else’s rememory. And it is the fact that even if, in Sethe’s case, the farm from where he has come burns down, the picture of the farm ‘is still there and what’s more, if you go there – you who never was there – if you go

105

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

105

there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you’.26 In one respect, what this passage from Beloved is suggestive of, as Ashraf H.  A. Rushdy points out, is that ‘remembering the past is exactly like perceiving the external world’.27 Arguably, it is also the means by which, on one level at least, Christenberry’s prolonged engagement with and interest in the Palmist building can be approached, if not understood. According to Rebekah Modrak and Bill Anthes, rephotography ‘usually refers to the act of retaking a historical photograph: locating the original vantage point, under the original lighting conditions in the present day, and taking a second photograph that reproduces the earlier shot’.28 Christenberry’s photographic studies of the Palmist building, and more broadly rephotography as an artistic as opposed to a strictly ethnographic strategy can evidently render visible such alterations. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, through the process of rephotography, with its overarching impulse to revisit or, in Christenberry’s words, ‘retrace’ a site wherein either a structure existed or, in other cases, an event occurred necessarily exposes its contiguity with and indeed proximity to the past, or some aspect therein.29 However, and as Romer acknowledges, ‘in reality, Christenberry’s photographs go beyond the merely documentary function that seems intrinsic to photography in order to establish links to more complex issues, such as memory, identity, autobiography, decline, loss, aging, death and transmutation’.30 Echoing this sentiment, Justo Navarro has observed the following: ‘Fixed in the photographic image, these living spaces, stores, stopping off or meeting places still retain the sense of the beings that at one point occupied them . . . He returns to photograph the same buildings year after year, as if he were looking at the continuity of time or recounting a story about what does not change: time as it passes.’31 Navarro’s reading of Christenberry’s photographs, and specifically his claim that they ‘retain the sense of the beings that at one point occupied them’ evidently do so by regaining, or, as we have seen, by retracing some sense or semblance of the histories to which they remain indelibly connected. In so doing, we return once again to a

106

106

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

basic admission that frames this chapter as a whole  – namely, the potential for sites or places to function mnemonically. According to the philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, this can be understood within the context of how people and the places they once occupied ‘have received the imprint of the other’.32 While it is not necessary to rehearse Halbwachs’s writings on collective memory here, the following statement seems, with respect to both Christenberry and the artist that we shall now consider, entirely apposite: ‘It is to space – the space we occupy, traverse, have continual access to, or can at any time reconstruct in thought and imagination  – that we must turn our attention. Our thought must focus on it if this or that category of remembrances is to reappear.’33 In March 1990, Jaballa Matar, a Libyan dissident and opponent of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime, was seized by the Egyptian secret police and taken from his apartment in Cairo to Abu Salim Prison in Tripoli, Libya. He remains unaccounted for to this day. It is this basic, yet troubling premise that forms the basis of a body of photographic work and a subsequent publication that his daughter-in-law, Diana Matar, made in response to his enforced disappearance. Following Gaddafi’s death in 2011, Matar visited Libya in 2012 and documented the sites of political violence as a means, perhaps, to retrace, if not partially recover the felt or tangible presence of her absent father-in-law. Although the project began the day the artist’s father-in-law was forcibly disappeared, Matar’s project, as it is set out in her book entitled Evidence, commences in March 2005, with the first of what is a series of brief written statements that are included within the publication. This is a man’s house, even though your wife has lived alone here for the past 20 years. She has the custom of rearranging the living and dining areas each few months, and every time I visit the configuration is decidedly different. Yet with each of these moves there remains a chair, a place setting, ready for you at the head of the table.34 As this statement suggests, somewhat inevitably, Jaballa Matar, although entirely absent, is everywhere in Matar’s project and the

107

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

107

ghosting of his presence, or intimations therein can be felt and readily discerned both, as the aforementioned statement evinces, within the accompanying texts that punctuate the publication, but also within the images themselves. With regard to the former, the interspersed texts provide a form of ongoing commentary with observations that, in the first instance at least, appear to be broadly factual in scope and import. For example, at one point the artist notes that the ‘[s]treets are full of protestors in Benghazi’.35 However, the typed statements often relate to or carry a connection with her father-in-law in some way, whether it’s a hotel that he had previously stayed at, the opposition group that he was part of, or the city (Rome) where he would spend each summer. While this aspect of the project ranges over a number of different contexts, from the personal to the more broadly political, the photographs are perhaps more forensic to the extent wherein each functions, retroactively, as a clue or visual cipher that pertain to a much larger and arguably more complex whole. As Matar herself has noted:  ‘The body of the book [i.e. the black and white images] is looking towards the past as a kind of evidence to what happened.’36 Time is written into the project not only with respect to the possibility for the photographs to somehow brush up against some evidentiary aspect of the past, but also with regard to the photographic processes she adopted. And as the following statement by the artist educes, the particular approach to image-making that she adopts is allied to the overarching nature of her enquiry: The exposures are all more than 30 minutes long – some are more than an hour – so I’m standing in these places for a very long time. I think obviously there’s a resonance to that and a feeling that you get when you’re in a place where these things have happened. Standing in these places I felt a lot and I wanted to utilise a language that communicated what I felt and not what I saw. 37 Recalling both Morrison’s idea of rememory and the reciprocal imprinting between place and group that Halbwach sought to articulate, albeit within the context of collective as opposed to individual memory, Matar is keen to insist that somehow the past, or aspects therein endure, in spite of those forces that collectively

108

108

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

work to militate against it: ‘I have this strong intuition that the past remains and that history’s traces are somehow imprinted on buildings, landscapes and even faces, by events that have taken place in the past.’38 While for Matar the past remains, the question of how the artist seeks to engage with it warrants further reflection, if for no other reason than the fact that she is inexorably bound up with the project due to her familial bonds. Indeed, it is because of these bonds, rather than in spite of them that a body of photographs were produced. With respect to what Paul Ricouer has written on memory, this might be construed as an implicatedness. As Paul Ricouer notes, writing in Memory, History, Forgetting: At the end of our investigation, and in spite of the traps that imagination lays for memory, it can be affirmed that a specific search for truth is implied in the intending of the past ‘thing’, of what was formerly seen, heard, experienced, learned. More precisely, in the moment of recognition, in which the effort of recollection is completed, this search for truth declares itself. We then feel and indeed know that something has happened, something has taken place, which implicated us as agents, as patients, as witnesses. Let us call this search for truth, faithfulness.39 Alongside the implicatedness of which Ricouer speaks, and that is to be understood with regard to a particular relationship that becomes ascribed, in this particular instance, between the artist and her subject matter, we might also discern that Ricouer speaks of a faithfulness by which the search for truth, that is, the search for the intending of the past thing, is given. Understood within the purview of Matar’s photographs, and as the following statement by the artist suggests, there is a desire for fidelity with some aspect of what occurred. In an interview with Amelia Smith that was conducted in 2014, the artist makes what is a telling observation: ‘It’s a very difficult time in Libya right now and it’s very easy to look back and say oh, maybe it was better before. I just think that to have a document which shows the atrocities under the regime – whether that makes any difference right at this moment – in the long term, I think it’s very important for history to show that.’40

109

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

109

Of course, interwoven with the memories Matar has of her fatherin-law is the reality of his continued absence. It is perhaps the former that is the catalyst for her to address the manifold ways in which the latter becomes intimated, if not inscribed and in so doing, made present once more. In this respect, the project is organized around a fundamental question, namely, ‘how can one connect with another who is no longer among us?’41 This fundamental question, applicable to Matar’s project through the traumatic experience of her father-inlaw’s enforced disappearance, can arguably be developed and opened up somewhat to the extent wherein, and to paraphrase, we could ask how does one connect with that which is no longer among us? Although thematically the focus is markedly different, the rephotography project of Cindy Bernard, as well as being foregrounded by this very question also entails the return or ‘retracing’ of a number of sites that hold collective significance. Between 1989 and 1992, Bernard produced a series of twenty-one photographs that were of locations of films that were all produced between a twenty-year period, 1954–74.42 As Martin Lefebvre notes, although ‘there are at times slight formal discrepancies between the photograph and the intertextual source image . . . the overall effect is nevertheless one of “fidelity” ’.43 However, given the fact that each of the twenty-one images, as Mark Durden notes, ‘begins with representation but returns us to the “real” of specific locations’, one might reasonably ask, fidelity to what?44 For they are, in one respect, composite images that are comprised of several layers of reality, some of which are directly seen (although what is ‘directly seen’ can in itself be illusory), some known and, in some cases, partially remembered, or indeed, even imagined. This is evident if we note that the twentyone images that comprise the Ask the Dust series originally stem from twenty-one separate spaces that at some point, both historically and within the context of a particular scene, formed the film’s location. This then becomes both a filmic ‘space’ and subsequently, for some of those who have seen the film, a mnemonic image. From here, Bernard then revisits the actual location or site wherein the scene took place and, by taking a photograph, returns it once again into an image. In this respect, Bernard’s project carries certain affinities with the photographs of Thomas Demand; both are premised upon and seek to explore the inevitable attenuation of reality through

110

110

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

its subsequent iteration and mediation as image or corresponding inscription. And as such, and with respect to Bernard’s project, her images represent landscapes that have somehow been dislocated from both their original context and function.45 Indeed, this dislocation from both is equally the result of the fact that as photographic images they are significantly scaled down from their cinematic origins. As a result of her attempts to short circuit the connections the images have with their original sites, whether this is a film set or the projection screen of a cinema, one might assume that the images now depict sites or spaces that are neutral in scope and import. However, and as Colin Gardner points out, ‘landscape isn’t a neutral site; it’s a constructed representation. We read into it all sorts of mediated, cultural and ideological connotations, reflecting various frames of historical discourse as well as those of art and popular culture’.46 Read in this way, although the images no longer work to conceal or dissemble the means by which narrative cinema ‘constructs’ reality or a version therein, what they inadvertently work to reveal is the way in which landscape is always a version or representation of both itself and the values, meanings and ideologies that it has become invested with. Perhaps this is what the artist means when she claims that ‘the images become lures waiting for a new fiction’.47 That is, perhaps the so-called new fiction is merely that of landscape itself with its cultural, political and historical variegations and contingencies. As Jenkins notes, ‘[T]here is no fundamentally correct “text” of which other interpretations are just variations; variations are all there are.’48 And as there is no fundamentally correct text through which the past may be interpreted, so there is no neutral account of space; terms such as ‘landscape’ gain credence by being contingent upon particular affinities, associations and for that matter exclusions, be they historical, cultural, artistic or otherwise for their legitimization. This, it would appear, is a basic admission that Ask the Dust works to reveal.49 More broadly, this presents the conditions of possibility to approach the landscape as text, a construal that, as John Wylie points out, first emerged through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Accordingly: Instead of being a historical record, the landscape-text  – here composed of both the material landscape ‘itself’ and its representation in art, maps, texts and other imagery  – is understood as

111

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

111

being organised around questions of power and authority. In consequence, the task of the critical reader centres upon uncovering the hidden codes and meanings, and unquestioned assumptions, which in actuality structure how the text of landscape is read.50 As Wylie notes, determining the landscape through such interpretive methods remains deeply indebted to the semiotics and structuralist interpretations of Roland Barthes.51 Indeed, Wylie’s statement and more broadly the idea of the landscape as text echoes Barthes’s own and often-repeated comment that the ‘text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’.52 Construing the landscape as ‘text’ and as something to be interpreted through the act of being ‘read’ was an idea shared with the artist Robert Smithson. In ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’, first published in Artforum in 1968, Smithson considered the ‘strata of the earth [to be] a jumbled museum’, of which ‘[e]mbedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art’.53 ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ was written by Smithson at a historical moment wherein Michael Fried had deemed artists such as Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella as being representative of the most advanced approach to late modernist practice. Be that as it may, a broader range of approaches to artistic production that fell outside of the narrowly circumscribed purview as determined by Fried had, by the latter half of the 1960s, established a measure of critical and artistic purchase. One such emergent approach was that of Land Art, a movement that Smithson’s name has almost become synonymous with. Published in 1967, the same year that Artforum published ‘Art and Objecthood’, Smithson’s ‘A Tour of Passaic, New Jersey’ is a meditation on the industrial landscape of the city. The last monument was a sand box or a model desert. Under the dead light of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness. This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleakly glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans – no longer were there green forests and high mountains – all that

112

112

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and stones pulverized into dust.54 Notwithstanding the foregrounding of entropy, an idée fixe that would remain a persistent aspect of his practice up until his untimely death in 1973, the description is given to both a perceived set of ruins the artist finds himself in the midst of and the twofold effect of obsolescence and atomization it appears to engender.55 Today, the ‘deposit of bones and dust’ that for Smithson constituted the ruinous landscape of Passaic, New Jersey, is replaced, perhaps, by the likes of Bernard’s images to the extent wherein the sedimentation is cultural as much as it is geological.56 Without wanting to rehearse again the idea of the ruin and its place within the context of contemporary art, the series of photographs entitled No More Stars (Star Wars) that Rä di Martino made in 2010 seems, with respect to the ideas of Smithson and the photographs of Bernard, notably apposite. The images that go to make up No More Stars (Star Wars) derive from a visit to an abandoned film set of Star Wars the artist undertook thirty-seven years after it had served its original purpose (Figure 5.3). Constructed on the salt plains of Chott el Djerid in Tunisia, the images are of the remains of Luke Skywalker’s home on the planet of Tatooine. During her visit, the artist took a series of photographs of the various now dilapidated structures that once collectively worked to represent the moisture farm where, along with his aunt and uncle, he lived and worked. Although not ruins per se, for all intents and purposes they nevertheless take on their appearance as they have been conceived within culture and more broadly the popular imagination. Moreover, reading the photographs that collectively go to make up No More Stars (Star Wars) as ruins brings into focus the various layers of time and of memory, both collective and individual, they appear to be bound up with. As the artist points out: [L]ike many people, I saw Star Wars when I was young, so it felt very nostalgic . . . The sand was brown-red and the speckles of salt sparkled in the sun. These are not real ruins, of course. They are just rubbish that has been left by a richer country in a poor

113

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

113

FIGURE 5.3 Rä di Martino, No More Stars (Star Wars), 2010. Photographic series, archival pigment print, 30 × 30 cm.

country. But at the same time, they have a monumentality about them because they resonate with our childhood memories.57 As Amelia Barikin points out, it is the so-called temporal permeability of ruins that allows for the past to be revisited, if not recovered and for the future to be imagined.58 If not entirely ruinous, the future that was originally imagined and represented through the aesthetic of Star Wars incorporated aspects that were downgraded, tarnished and appeared to be in the throes of decay or obsolescence.59 Given the images’ ‘temporal permeability’, they syncopate a contrasting array of times and tenses, both imagined and real. To this end, a series of photographs that were taken in 2010 represent a series of structures that are from a film that was made forty years ago. This film, as in keeping with the genre of science fiction, sought to present a

114

114

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

vision of an imagined, technologically advanced future. However, and in turn, the representation of this futurity was scuffed, outworn and appeared susceptible to breaking down or collapsing at any given point. Finally, the cinematic intention to represent technology as in a state of decay and obsolescence is given in relation to and contrasted with the very real entropic forces of the Tunisian desert.60 In one respect, and given the work’s complicity with the past, It is perhaps for this reason that ‘[i]nstead of a “story” ’, di Martino’s work ‘exposes an archive of mnemonic fragments, each part of a landscape purpose built for representation’.61 Moreover, like Bernard’s own photographs, di Martino’s images function as ‘material traces of a decaying cinematic environment [offering] a tangible exposition of cinematic memory’.62 What has been recurrent within the context of this chapter is the understanding wherein the past, or an aspect thereof continues to mark particular sites, spaces and locations as they are subsequently encountered. Indeed, we could say that such sites maintain or are unwilling to relinquish their connections to the past and a particular historical moment therein. Certainly such retroactivity is also the case with regard to Bernard and di Martino’s photographs wherein the scene, the film, the narrative that was originally constructed and played out continues to mark the photographic images that inhabit the present tense.63 The final body of work that we will consider within the context of this chapter is also premised upon the fundamental act of revisiting and thus seeking to retrace a site’s connections with the past. However, one salient difference with respect to the photographs of Chloe Dewe Mathews is that the sites that she has revisited are historically more remote. To this end, Dewe Mathews has photographed a number of sites where, approximately one hundred years ago, soldiers serving in the British, French and Belgian armies were executed, usually either for cowardice or for desertion. Taken from twenty-three separate locations, the photographs are either of sites where individual soldiers were held prior to their execution, or denote the actual site of the execution itself. Aiming, in effect, to produce a series of images that on some level maintain temporal continuity with the historical moment which they both derive from and somehow remain indelibly connected with, and echoing the fact

115

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

115

that the execution of soldiers usually occurred at dawn, the photographs were also taken or ‘shot’ at this time of the day.64 The works’ historical continuity also extends to the fact that the photographs were all taken at what was approximately the same time of year.65 According to Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes, writing in their study Shot at Dawn, the rationale ‘generally assumed to lie behind the army’s use of capital punishment, related to the deterrent effect that the victims’ fate had on their fellow soldiers’.66 However, while the adherence to the dictum pour encourager les autres (to encourage others) was noble, ‘it presupposed that the structure and process of military discipline was universally consistent and predictable’.67 In effect there were in four types of courts martial, Regimental, District, General and Field General, with only the latter potentially resulting in a sentence of death.68 As the authors of Shot at Dawn note: ‘Prior to trial a soldier would be offered the assistance of an officer to act as “prisoner’s friend”. In essence the officer acted as defending counsel, although little is heard of legally qualified officers appearing. Foolishly some men declined this assistance, although more often than not the officer was unskilled in advocacy.’69 By being premised upon the relationship between landscape, military conflict and memory, Dewe Mathews’s project carries certain affinities with Ristelhueber’s photographs of battle-scarred topographies. Likewise, John Huddleston’s photographs of various battlefields of the American Civil War is in part premised not only on the ‘resonance of history in the landscape’ but also the possibility that ‘physical and spiritual traces of the great slaughter [could still be] present in these places’.70 On one level, Huddleston’s Killing Ground is comparable to Shot at Dawn in that both projects entail a certain historical remoteness or distance from the event they are seeking to refer to. However, it is perhaps due to the fact that Dewe Mathews’s project focuses on the stories of particular soldiers that Shot at Dawn differs from Huddleston’s; wholesale carnage and the fate that befell the many is replaced by the singular, and often harrowing plight of the individual. As Geoff Dyer notes, writing in the publication that accompanied Shot at Dawn:  ‘Each is a place where something happened, enormous and terrible in itself, but easily, perhaps deliberately, overlooked in the context of the larger cataclysms of the first world war.’71

116

116

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

In the first instance, Le Domaine des Cordeliers, Mailly-Maillet, Picardie, time 07:05/date 27.02.1916 Private James Crozier eschews visual cognizance of what took place in the field that it depicts approximately a century ago (Figure  5.4). To this end, unlike other photographs within the series that are characterized by more explicit markers, for example, with Sint-Sixtusabdij, Westvleteren, WestVlaanderen time 04:30/date 11.06 1915 Private Herbert Chase, the St Sixtus Monastery wall in Proven still carries the pock marks from the bullets that were fired on the day of Private Chase’s execution, the landscape gives no indication of the execution, in this particular instance, of Private James Crozier.72 Having previously worked as an apprentice in a shipyard in Belfast, Private James Crozier was 16 years old when he enlisted in September 1914.73 In October 1915 he went, with his battalion, the 9th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles who were part of the 36 Ulster Division, to the Western Front. It was in the February of 1916 that Private Crozier deserted his unit

FIGURE 5.4 Chloe Dewe Mathews, Private James Crozier, 07:05/ 27.2.1916, Le Domaine des Cordeliers, Mailly-Maillet, Picardie, 2013.

117

STILL THERE, WAITING (RETRACING)

117

where, having walked some distance, he was eventually admitted to a Royal Army Medical Corps field hospital.74 Following a medical examination where he was declared to be sound in both mind and body, on 14 February the young private was court martialled for desertion. Found to be guilty, Crozier was placed under house arrest and during the night before the execution was to take place, plied with drink.75 At dawn the next morning, Private Crozier was carried out, unconscious due to the excesses of alcohol and, having been blindfolded, was tied to an execution post that had been prepared the day before and which was in the back garden of a villa in Mailly-Maillet, a small village behind the Somme front.76 Although the firing squad proceeded to carry out their orders, the shots fired at Private Crozier did not prove to be fatal. The bullet that did was from a revolver belonging to the officer who was commanding the execution, which was fired directly into Private Crozier’s head.77 Beginning with a ‘will to remember’, Nora’s idea of the lieux de mémoire encompasses both memory and history.78 Rather than being seen as mutually inclusive, the terms are seemingly antithetical in both scope and import: Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.79 It is perhaps because, as Nora notes, memory ‘takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects’ that the sites considered within this chapter all somehow function mnemonically.80 In this respect, and with regard to Matar, Bernard and as we have now seen Dewe Mathews (although the possibility has already been broached in our consideration of the photographs of Christenberry), memory is given within the lieux towards which the artists direct their respective enquiries. Indeed, the retracing of the past through the particularities

118

118

RETROACTIVITY AND CONTEMPORARY ART

of place is embodied in the examples that we have now had the opportunity to consider. Furthermore, Nora’s assertion that memory ‘is absolute’ has as its equivalence with the veridicality of the sites from which the artists have respectively chosen to work from.81 According to Nora, due to the dissolution of milieux de mémoire, or real environments of memory, lieux de mémoire or sites of memory become inscribed.82 As spontaneous memory is now obsolete, lieux de mémoire are a response to the fact ‘that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally’.83 It is perhaps in this respect that the practices of Matar and Dewe Mathews acknowledge the felt need to provide some form of response, however indeterminate, equivocal and illdefined. It is also for this reason that the images of both Matar and Dewe Mathews function as lieux de mémoire due to the fact that as ‘moments of history’ they are necessarily ‘torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded’.84 And like the lieux of which Nora speaks, the works that have been considered within this chapter are ‘mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Möbius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile’.85 Moreover, if, as Nora proclaims, ‘[o]ur relation to the past is now formed in a subtle play between its intractability and its disappearance’, then it is within the interstitial space that is opened up as a result that contemporary art retroactively operates within.86

119

119

Notes Introduction

1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2004), 180. 2 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35:65 in Jas Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 125. 3 As the artist explains: ‘I’d just read the story of a mother who’d come to the school to make blackout curtains during the war. The next day, as I walked into a room, I noticed a pair of curtains in the bin. When I opened them out, I could see they’d faded over the year and the light had created an incredible analogue record of the passage of time. There was a real sense of them having hung quietly as silent witnesses throughout all those years, capturing an image of themselves.’ June Hill, ‘Watching, Waiting, Making’, Embroidery (March/April 2016): 38. 4 For many, ‘contemporary art’ remains a contested term and to this end has recently been subject to a degree of critical attention. For example, Hal Foster, writing in the online journal e-flux in 2010, foregrounds his contributors’ reflections by noting the following: ‘The category of “contemporary art” is not a new one. What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. Such paradigms as “the neo-avant-garde” and “postmodernism”, which once oriented some art and theory, have run into the sand, and, arguably, no models of much explanatory reach or intellectual force have risen in their stead.’ Hal Foster, ‘Contemporary Extracts’, e-flux, no. 12 (January 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/12/61333/contemporaryextracts/ (accessed 2 January 2017). Although the study is very much cognizant of these debates, in the first instance and for the purposes of what follows the term brackets a period of time that refers to a period of production encompassing approximately the past two decades.

120

120

NOTES

5 Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 14. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Coincident with this understanding as what Mikon Kwon describes, writing about the category of contemporary art history, is the ‘contemporaneity of histories from around the world [which] must be confronted simultaneously as a disjunctive yet continuous intellectual horizon’. Foster, ‘Contemporary Extracts’. To this end, ‘[c]ontemporary art history . . . marks both a temporal bracketing and a spatial encompassing, a site of a deep tension between very different formations of knowledge and traditions, and thus a challenging pressure point for the field of art history in general’. Ibid. 11 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 15. 12 ‘At first glance, the assertion that “modernity is our antiquity” (as out of the guiding rubrics of Documenta 12 had it) allows for a potentially endless poring over the rubble, and the discovery time and again of our melancholy distance from the formal ambition or political charge of the modern . . . There is a lot to be said for wallowing, after all. But an attitude of mourning, or downright depressive longing, for the lost object of Modernism, is not the avowed aim of much of this work. Rather, so the curatorial language has it, what is called for is a re-animation (or maybe occult conjuring) of the corpse of Modernism – or, better, of the latent and so far unfulfilled life embodied in its ruins.’ Brian Dillon, ‘Decline and Fall’, Frieze, Issue 130 (1 April 2010), https://frieze.com/article/ decline-and-fall (accessed 22 December 2016). 13 ‘Interview: Gerard Byrne’, Tate Etc., Issue 19 (Summer 2010), http:// www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/interview-gerard-byrne (accessed 23 December 2016). 14 ‘As comprehensive as it may have wished to be, in practice such a resurrection implied a hierarchy of memory, ordering the perspective of the past beneath the gaze of a static present by the skilful manipulation of light and shadow. But the loss of a single explanatory principle, while casting us into a fragmented universe, has promoted every object – even the most humble, the most improbable, the most inaccessible – to the dignity of a historical mystery. Since no one knows what the past will be made of next, anxiety turns everything into a trace, a possible indication, a hint of history that contaminates the innocence of all things.’ Pierre

121

NOTES

121

Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, Representations, 26:1 (1989): 17. 15 According to Jonathan Friday, ‘[I]n their simplest form, indices are signs that are directly connected to their causes. Causes point to their effects; effects point to their causes.’ Jonathan Friday, ‘The Art Seminar’, in James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2007), 138. 16 According to Elkins, ‘[T]he model of indexicality, which has been a pervasive, if not preeminent, model for photography for over thirty years.’ Ibid., 130. 17 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 259. 18 ‘Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic – responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again.’ Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 8–9. 19 Arthur Danto, ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’, in The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), 152. This understanding, according to Danto, is in contrast to monuments that, conversely, ‘commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings’. Ibid. 20 Ruth Erickson, ‘The Real Movie: Reenactment, Spectacle, and Recovery in Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 50:1, 2 (Spring and Fall 2009): 108. 21 Ibid. 22 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 13. 23 ‘A common problematic, in fact, flows through the phenomenology of memory, the epistemology of history, and the hermeneutics of the historical condition: the problematic of the representation of the past. The question is posed in its radicality as early as the investigation of the object-side of memory: what is there to say of the enigma of an image, of an eikoˉ  n – to speak Greek with Plato and Aristotle – that offers itself as the presence of an absent thing stamped with the deal of the anterior?’ Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), 2004, xvi. 24 Geoff Dyer, ‘Dead Time’, in Chloe Dewe Mathews, Shot at Dawn (Madrid: Ivory Press, 2014), unpaginated.

122

122

NOTES

25 ‘In Conversation: Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow’, in Jenkins, Rethinking History, xx.

Chapter 1 1 Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (ed.), Ruins of Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 6. 2 Brian Dillon, ‘Decline and Fall’, Frieze, issue 130, April 2010, https:// frieze.com/article/decline-and-fall accessed 10th September 2017. 3 Ibid. 4 According to Thomas Crow: ‘When he began to write about art, he was nearing the end of the exhausting long project of the Encyclopédie. Orchestrating the labors of a small army of gifted, volatile contributors, writing a large sheaf of articles himself, and fighting the censors all the way, he had sought to provide a newly enlightened age with a systematic map of secular knowledge.’ Thomas Crow, ‘Diderot’s Salons: Public Art and the Mind of the Private Critic’, in John Goodman (ed.) and (trans.), Diderot on Art, Vol. 1 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), ix. 5 Begun in September of 1767, Diderot didn’t complete this particular ‘salon’ until the end of the following year (ibid., xv). Moreover, as Crow notes, the Salon of that year was equivalent in size to a normal annual volume of the Correspondence (ibid., xiii). 6 Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, Vol. 2, ed. and trans. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 196. 7 Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was first published in 1757. It is perhaps of note that Diderot’s understanding of the sublime had shifted somewhat over the course of writing his Salons to the extent wherein by 1767, the ruinous landscapes of Roberts were analogous to the ineffability of the Sublime and its proclivity to resist both clear exposition and logical thought. As Gillian B. Pearce notes, previous to his Salon of 1767 Diderot ‘had used the term “sublime” to convey a sense of purity and simplicity [whereas it is subsequently used by means of an attempt] to come to terms with the difficulties of representation and with the relationship of language as its object, as the sublime is associated with precisely this kind of incommensurability and challenge to the rational faculties’. Gillian B. Pearce, Scapeland: Writing the Landscape

123

NOTES

123

from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2012), 66–7. 8 According to Anne Eriksen, Diderot’s ‘perspective turns the painting of ruins into a reflection upon basic conditions of human existence and not least on the temporal dimension’. Anne Eriksen, From Antiques to Heritage: Transformations of Cultural Memory (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 71. 9 Denis Diderot, Ruines et paysages: Salons de 1767, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl et al. (Hermann: Paris, 1995), 336–8, reproduced in Sophie Thomas, ‘Seeing Past Rome’, in Richard Wrigley (ed.), Regarding Romantic Rome (Oxford; Bern; Berlin; Bruxelles; Frankfurt am Main; New York; Wien: Peter Lang, 2007), 155. Accordingly, and as Thomas notes, ‘instead of passing the past, the viewer is compelled to linger, caught in a contresens, which suggestively means not just the wrong direction but the wrong meaning as well. The viewer is caught here in a perilous zone, a lieu-péril, where the very adequacy of seeing is at issue’ (ibid.). 10 ‘Just look at the wonderful possibilities open to ruin painters if only they would venture to have ideas, to sense the connection between their genre and the knowledge of history.’ Diderot quoted in Goodman, Diderot on Art II The Salon of 1767, 214. 11 Ibid., 217. 12 Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 186–7. 13 Denis Diderot in Salon de 1767, Oeuvres completes, ed. H. Dieckman, J. Proust and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1975), Vol. 16, 213, in Paul Mattick Jr. (ed.), Eighteenth Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 155. 14 Mattick Jr., Eighteenth Century Aesthetics, 155. 15 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in John O’ Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 For example, Marcia Brennan, writing in Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School and Post-Painterly Abstraction and with respect to the Abstract Expressionist Willem

124

NOTES

124

de Kooning, notes the following: ‘While de Kooning invoked the precedent of Renaissance art to explicate and justify “the vulgarity and fleshy part” of his painting, another contemporary writer evoked the traditions of the Renaissance and baroque Old Masters in order to situate de Kooning’s painted flesh even more securely within a formalist teleology. The writer was Cement Greenberg.’ Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Shapes: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 72. 20 Elena Filipovic, ‘This Is Tomorrow (and Other Modernist Myths)’, in Amelia Groom (ed.), Time (London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2013), 42. 21 Rosalind Krauss, ‘A View of Modernism’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd edition (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 979. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 978. 24 See Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (USA: Arno Press, 1966), unpaginated. 25 Ibid., 19. 26 Ibid. 27 Sheldon Cheney, ‘The Story of Modern Art’, in Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood (eds), Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader (New Haven; London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2003), 19. Complicit with such a view was the means by which modern art had been displayed so as to further concretize the understanding of history as a series of fully informed and successively unfolding moments. To this end, and as Christoph Grunenberg has noted, ‘In place of the display of works of art by national school typical of nineteenth-century museums, MoMA substituted an installation illustrating Barr’s conception of modern art as a sequence of movements developing out of each other.’ Christoph Grunenberg, ‘The Modern Art Museum’, in Emma Barker (ed.), Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven; London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1999), 34. 28 Although the focus for our purposes here are the proscriptions of certain post-war critics, modernism’s complicity with certain modalities of time arguably predates this particular historical moment. To this end, and as Espen Hammer notes with respect to the Baudelairian modernity as it became manifest towards the latter half of the nineteenth century in Paris: ‘Considered as

125

NOTES

125

a category of social being, modernity makes essential reference to the present, not only as a simple portion of time, but as what passes, the contingent and the circumstantial, that which breaks with the past and throws us mercilessly into the future.’ Espen Hammer, Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37. 29 Suffice to say that at the historical moment wherein Fried deemed Olitski, Noland and Stella as being representative of the most advanced approach to late modernist practice, a broader range of approaches to artistic production that fell outside of the narrowly circumscribed purview as determined by Fried had established a measure of critical and artistic purchase. One such emergent approach that developed at the point at which ‘Art and Objecthood’ was published was Land Art. To this end, one artist who gave credence to this movement and the ideas that would work to underpin it was Robert Smithson. Published in 1967, the same year that Artforum published ‘Art and Objecthood’, Smithson’s ‘A Tour of Passaic, New Jersey’, a meditation on the industrial landscape of the city, was also published. Towards the end of the text, Smithson provides the reader with the following commentary: ‘The last monument was a sand box or a model desert. Under the dead light of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness. This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleakly glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans – no longer were there green forests and high mountains – all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and stones pulverized into dust.’ Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967)’, reproduced in Jack D. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996), 74. Notwithstanding the foregrounding of entropy, a preoccupation that would remain a consistent aspect of his practice up until his untimely death in 1973, the description is given to both a perceived set of ruins the artist finds himself in the midst of and the twofold effect of obsolescence and atomization it appears to engender. 30 See Michael Fried, ‘New York Letter: Olitski, Jenkins, Thiebaud, Twombly’, in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 316–23. 31 Michael Fried, Three American Painters, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella. Catalogue to exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum, 21 April–30 May 1965 (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1971), 23.

126

126

NOTES

32 Michael Fried, ‘Three American Painters’, in Fried, Art and Objecthood, 259. 33 Ibid. 34 Fried was not alone in his repudiation of Minimalism. As John O’Brian notes, the ‘art that most opposed Greenberg’s teleology was Pop and Minimalism. Pop art and Minimal art represented practices that dissented from the narrative Greenberg had latterly fashioned for modernism’. John O’Brian, ‘Introduction’, in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, John O’ Brian (ed.) (London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xxxii. 35 Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 1900-2000, 824. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 825. 38 Ibid. 39 Dan Flavin, ‘ “in daylight or cool white” an autobiographical sketch’, in Dan Flavin, ‘It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else’ (Birmingham: Ikon, 2016), 25. The essay from which this quotation is taken was originally the first half of a lecture the artist gave at the Brooklyn Museum Art School on 18 December 1964. It was subsequently revised prior to being delivered at the Ohio State University Law School Auditorium on 26 April 1965. It was then edited again prior to its publication in the December 1965 issue of Artforum, following which, it was subject to a final re-editing before it was then published in fluorescent light etc. from Dan Flavin/ lumière flourescente, etc. par Dan Flavin in 1969 by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. 40 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and Non Sequiturs’, in Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 23. Originally published in Artforum, vol. 5, no. 16, June 1967. 41 Ibid., 25. 42 Ibid., 26 43 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture Part 1’, reproduced in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1995), 234. 44 Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 41. 45 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 151.

127

NOTES

127

46 Ibid., 166. 47 Fried, ‘Larry Poon’s New Paintings’, in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 197. Notwithstanding the fact that for Michael Fried the proclivity for Minimalism to foreground a durational reading of the object was, at the very least, antagonistic, modernism’s dialectical engagement with time became given primarily through the interpretive lens of painting. This was no doubt in part due to the fact that the medium of painting, for formalist critics like Fried, had accrued an arguably more privileged status than other disciplines and modes of material enquiry such as sculpture or the emergent intermedial practices that Fluxus had become emblematic of. 48 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’; emphasis in the original. Within the following quotation by Stanley Cavell, we see him grappling with the same possibility: ‘There may be any number of ways of acknowledging the condition of painting as total thereness . . . For example, a painting may acknowledge its frontedness, or its finitude, or its specific thereness – that is, its presentness; and your accepting it will accordingly mean acknowledging your frontedness, or directionality, or verticality towards its world, or any world – or your presentness, in its aspect of absolute hereness and nowness.’ Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (London; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 110. 49 ‘It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness, as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.’ Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 167; emphasis in the original. As Rosalind Krauss would subsequently note with regard to Fried’s original argument, such ‘presentness’ entailed ‘an experience of intense, abstract presence in relation to the work – an experience which is allegorized as one of pure cognition, a tremendously instantaneous moment in which one gets the point of the work both instantaneously and forever so that this explosion of “getting it” is supposed to lift one out of the temporal altogether’. Rosalind Krauss, ‘1967/1987: Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 90–1. 50 Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone, 1997), 25. 51 For this reason, and as Brian Dillon notes, the ‘scope of significance of the ruin, or the idea of ruination, in contemporary art is broached

128

128

NOTES

first, then, by the problem of modernism – or more accurately the afterlife of modernism’. Brian Dillon, ‘Introduction: A Short History of Decay’, in Brian Dillon (ed.), Ruins (London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2011), 17. Elsewhere in the same text Dillon notes that ‘[i]t is not really until the renaissance – that is, until the advent of a modernity that conceives itself in relation to the remains of the past – that the ruin becomes an essential aesthetic concept and recurrent image in Western art’ (ibid., 12). The ruin, as a recurrent image, if not idée fixe, then emerges from and becomes enjoined with modernism, with that which is deemed to be or to what was once modern. 52 ‘Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Bradford Junior College, Bradford, Mass., February 4-March 2, 1968. Organized by Seth Siegelaub. Symposium with the artists and the organizer on February 8. Some excerpts from the unpublished tape-recording.’ Lucy Lippard (ed.), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1997), 40. 53 ‘A Thing Is a Hole in a Thing It Is Not’, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996), 95–6. 54 Although as the fourth chapter will educe, the term ‘re-enactment’ has a measure of currency within the context of contemporary art, Byrne appears reluctant for his works to be interpreted through this interpretive framework. To this end, and in an interview with Izabella Scott, the artist draws the following distinction: ‘To talk about New Sexual Lifestyles, which takes as its starting point a conversation from the 1970s, you used the word “re-enactment”, but on some level there’s an attempt at a kind of recovery rather than re-enactment. Re-enactment suggests ideas around restoration – the ability to go back to a proper order, which I find really tricky. Whereas “reconstruction” implies that we’ll never go back to that moment. We can recover things we didn’t take the first time, maybe – but we can’t go back.’ Izabella Scott, ‘Interview with Gerard Byrne’, The White Review, February 2016, http://www. thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-gerard-byrne/. 55 Originally published as an interview with Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., ‘Talking with Tony Smith’, Artforum 5 (December 1966): 14–19; reprinted in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), 181–6. 56 Tony Smith, ‘Conversations with Samuel Wagstaff Jr.’ (1966), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Seltz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, 2nd ed.

129

NOTES

129

(Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2010), 150. 57 With regard to Smith’s text being construed as ‘epiphanic’, see, for example, Peter Sneddon and David Green (eds), History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 91. 58 That Fried knew this and that he also sought to counter Smith’s analogy is evident in the tendentious inclusion of Smith’s text in ‘Art and Objecthood’. Indeed, and as Miguel de Baca observes, ‘Fried’s multiple and insistent citations of Tony Smith’s nighttime drive on the unfinished New Jersey turnpike suggest one way in which “experience” displaces and distances the viewer from the object that purports to be art.’ Miguel de Baca, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 59. 59 According to Nena Tsouti-Schillinger, Morris had originally intended to make the column fall over by force of pressure while standing inside it. However, due to incurring an injury on the day of the rehearsal, Morris decided to use a section of string as the means by which the column could be forced to topple over during the performance. See Nena Tsouti-Schillinger (ed.), Robert Morris: Have I Reasons: Work and Writings, 1993–2007 (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2008), 13. 60 See Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 263. 61 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001), 87. Flavin’s reticence to be included might have been down to the fact that, as Caroline A. Jones notes, ‘he does not come off as either integral to the discussion or integral within it’. Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 415. Moreover, as Meyer notes: ‘The Lippard manuscript . . . was comprised of two taped sessions: the one that was broadcast, and a later conversation that occurred at Judd’s studio, to which Glaser returned for points of clarification.’ Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 87. 62 Enrique Juncosa, ‘On the Subject of the Existence of Monsters, in Gerard Byrne Images or Shadows, 142. 63 ‘Byrne’s reenactments are part of a larger ‘archival paradigm’ that constructs representations, be they historical or artistic, that do not aim at discovering a hidden truth beyond the images, but rather show how a certain truth is constructed in a specific

130

130

NOTES

historical moment.’ Maria Muhle, ‘Re-enacting Art History’, in Volker Pantenburg, Gerard Byrne Images or Shadows (Dublin: IMMA, 2011), 184. 64 As Sven Lütticken notes, ‘Minimal art melts into thin air, spoken words.’ Sven Lütticken, ‘Gerard Byrne’s Talking Pictures: Different Repetitions in New Sexual Lifestyles and 1984 and Beyond’, in Gerard Byrne Images or Shadows, 14. 65 As Meyer notes: ‘Entitled “New Nihilism or New Art?,” the interview, republished in Artnews and then in Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art anthology in 1968, became one of the most famous documents of minimal discourse. Edited by Lippard, it was renamed “questions to Stella and Judd”, for during the interview Stella and Judd tended to dominate. [Dan] Flavin, who rarely intervened, asked to have his comments removed from the final manuscript. The Lippard manuscript, moreover, was comprised of two taped sessions: the one that was broadcast, and a later conversation that occurred at Judd’s studio, to which Glaser returned for points of clarification.’ Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 87. Moreover, according to Caroline A. Jones, the ‘divergence between the interview a conducted and the interview as published is considerable. In the two years that passed between the radio interview and the published interview, Don Judd added one and a half pages of text that were inserted in dialogue form’. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, 415. 66 Or, to put it another way, and as David Carrier writes, ‘[T]he capacity to construct alternative genealogies suggests that they are ultimately arbitrary ways of describing artworks . . . the history of modernism may be told many ways, and even while I admire Greenberg’s brilliant telling of the story, I recognise that the story may be told differently.’ David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 54. The function of historiography, and more specifically the epistemological differentiation between the past and history, will be developed within the context of the fourth chapter. 67 Simon Grant, Interview: Gerard Byrne, Tate Etc., Issue 18 (Summer 2010), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/ interview-gerard-byrne. Elsewhere in the interview, Byrne also notes that ‘[t]he installation format was important in this respect too. I designed the surfaces onto which the images are projected in such a way that they’re all free-standing; none of them actually touch the walls of the gallery. It was very important to me that you could walk around them’ (ibid.).

131

NOTES

131

68 Ibid. 69 Scott, ‘Interview with Gerard Byrne’. 70 Ibid. 71 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 167. 72 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 213–14. On the basis of his review of Lionel Venturi’s Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture: From Giotto to Chagall Greenberg, for his part appears to concur with such an understanding. Countering Venturi’s methodological approach through the admission that the ‘process of looking at a picture is infinitely more complex in scheme’ than what Venturi had proposed in his study, namely, that the ‘first impression of a picture is quite vague’, Greenberg makes the following remark: ‘Doesn’t one find so many times that the “full meaning” of a picture – i.e., its aesthetic fact – is, at any given visit to it, most fully revealed at the first fresh glance?’ Clement Greenberg, ‘On Looking at Pictures: Review of Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture: From Giotto to Chagall by Lionel Venturi’, in John O’Brian (ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–9 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 34–5. As if to further preface Fried’s subsequent pronouncements on time in relation to the work of art, Greenberg then goes on to note the following: ‘With many paintings and pieces of sculpture it is as if you had to catch them by surprise in order to grasp them as wholes – their maximum being packed into the instantaneousness shock of sight’ (ibid.). 73 Yves-Alain Bois, ‘The Sculptural Opaque’, Sub-stance, no. 31 (1981): 48. 74 Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (London; New York: Verso, 2009), 71. 75 Grant, ‘Interview: Gerard Byrne’. 76 Gerard Byrne, This Is Tomorrow This Is Live: Gerard Byrne, broadcast live on 26 November from the Royal College of Art, London, part of the Visual Cultures Lecture Series, 26 November 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXnLZ1U5kBs&nohtml5 =False. 77 An additional series of scenes of which the work is comprised was filmed in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland, and features works derived from the institution’s permanent collection. To this end, this vignette encompasses various forms of responses and behaviours engendered by specific Minimalist works during the course of their unpacking, installation and subsequently viewing. This aspect of A thing is a hole in a thing it is not also encompasses

132

NOTES

132

a man reciting from translated reviews of Judd’s 1970 exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum. 78 According to Muhle: ‘What Byrne ultimately suggests is that art is a historical reality, and that in order to understand this fact – not art – it is necessary to accept its fragmentary character.’ Muhle, ‘Reenacting Art History’, 187. 79 Hell and Schonle, Ruins of Modernity, 6–7. 80 Ibid. 81 Helena Reckitt, ‘Like a Man’, in Gerard Byrne: A State of Natural Pleasure (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013), 48. 82 Hell and Schonle, Ruins of Modernity, 6. 83 ‘Interview between Gerard Byrne and Kirsty Ogg’, in Gerard Byrne: A State of Natural Pleasure, 9. 84 ‘The primary distinction I wish to make concerns two notions of site: a literal site and a functional site. The literal site is, as Joseph Kosuth would say, in situ; it is an actual location . . . a singular place . . . In contrast, the functional site may or may not incorporate a physical place. It certainly does not privilege this place. Instead, it is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them . . . [i]t is an informational site, a palimpsest of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places, and things; an allegorical site . . . [i]t is a temporary thing, a movement a chain of meanings and imbricated histories; a place marked and swiftly abandoned.’ James Meyer, ‘The Functional Site; or, the Transformation of Site Specificity’, in Erika Suderberg (ed.), Spaces, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of’ Minnesota Press, 2000), 24–5.

Chapter 2 1 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca, ‘Notes on Love and Photography’, in Geoffrey Batchen (ed.), Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (London; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 121. 2 Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, The Essential Peirce Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867–1893) (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 225. 3 Ibid., 226. These particular sign-types that work by way of convention are today more commonly known as ‘symbols’.

133

NOTES

133

4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, in Justus Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 106. This particular quotation by Peirce would re-emerge approximately eight decades later within the context of Rosalind Krauss’s text ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (Autumn 1977): 58–67. 8 James Elkins, ‘The Art Seminar’, in James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory (Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2007), 130. Within the same passage, Elkins quite rightly points out that the index ‘hardly appears as a simple concept in Peirce’s texts’. To this end, he provides the reader with one example: ‘The familiar triad icon, index, symbol, are signs in relation to objects, as opposed to signs in relation to themselves (qualisign, sinsign, legisign), or signs in relation to the interpretant (which he calls rheme, proposition, and argument)’ (ibid.). 9 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 5. 10 Thierry de Duve, ‘Time, Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph a Paradox’, October, 5 (Summer 1978): 118. 11 Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index (A Short History in Three Parts)’, in Kelsey and Blake The Meaning of Photography, xviii. In addition, within the context of early modernism, the ‘extremes to which the late nineteenth century pushed the dream of photography – to a seemingly unconditional inner revelation, on the other – spoke to the desperate predicament and centrifugal madness of modernity but also to the expansive ambitions vested in photography as a means of reconciling those extremes, and in so doing reconstituting human meaning’ (ibid.). 12 Sabine T. Kriebel, ‘Theories of Photography: A Short History’, in Elkins Photography Theory, 4. According to Kelsey and Stimson, ‘By the final decades of the nineteenth century, photography had become entrusted with powerful social responsibilities resulting from its particular mechanical capacity to register the physical world. Its promise to fulfil these responsibilities took the form of a guarantee that the photograph, as an apparently accurate image of objects that was also at the same time a direct trace of light

134

NOTES

134

reflecting off them.’ Kelsey and Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index’, xi. 13 As Kelsey and Stimson note: ‘According to this critique [of photography’s ideological ends] the photograph, instead of pointing back to an expressively rich (artistic) or ethically withheld (scientific) subjectivity, increasingly pointed back to the suspect institutions, ideologies, and discourses that produced, selected, or contextualized it’ (Kelsey and Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index’, xxi). 14 James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York; London: Routledge, 2011), 23. While close attention has thus far been paid to the index’s existential investment in the photographic image, the application of Peirce’s sign-system to the medium of photography works outwards from a basic admission, namely, that the two other signtypes as determined by Peirce, – the icon and the symbol – are equally at work within how the image functions and, by extension, how it is read. To this end, and as Liz Wells notes, ‘chemically produced photographs incorporate all three constituents: images resemble the person or place or object re-presented; they are indexical in that the subject had to be present for the photograph to be made, which means that the image is essentially a “trace”; and images circulate in specific cultural contexts within which differing symbolic meanings and values may adhere’. Liz Wells (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction, 4th ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 46. 15 Margaret Iversen, ‘The Art Seminar’, in Elkins, Photography Theory, 132. 16 Sabine T. Kriebel, ‘Theories of Photography: A Short History’, 22. 17 Ibid., p. 89. 18 Elkins, What Photography Is, 217. 19 The studium was ostensibly bound up with one’s interest in or inclination towards a photograph’s ostensible subject matter. To this end, one’s participation with the photographic image’s iconography, following what the studium connotes, is cultural. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 2000), 26. 20 Ibid., 67. 21 See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Obtuse’, in Elkins, Photography Theory, 339. 22 Kelsey and Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index’, xi. With respect to the analogy that deems the photograph as a particular type of ‘pointing’, Barthes refers to tat which, meaning ‘that’ in Sanskrit,

135

NOTES

135

‘suggests the gesture of the child pointing his finger at something and saying: that, there it is, but says nothing else’. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 5. 23 ‘Among European writers on semiology Roland Barthes reaches somewhat similar conclusions, though he does not use the category “indexical” but sees the photographic print as “iconic”. However, he describes how the photographic icon represents ‘a kind of natural being-there of the object’. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), 84. Laura Mulvey, in response to Barthes’s particular response to the photographic image, suggests that its ‘beauty and emotion lies in its “thereness”, the fleeting presence of a shadow, which is captured and saved’. Laura Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny’, in Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.), Time and the Image (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 142. In addition to Camera Lucida, Mulvey’s text also seeks to read Camera Lucida through an additional essay, namely, Andre Bazin’s ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, first published in 1945. 24 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 88–9. 25 Ibid., 80–1. Elsewhere Barthes writes that ‘[t]he photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed’ (ibid., 82). 26 Ibid., 76–7; emphasis in the original. 27 Cadava and Cortés-Rocca, ‘Notes on Love and Photography’, 119–20. 28 Doane, ‘Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, 6. Elkins has also noted that although the ‘indexical sign might not be a good fit for photography . . . in another sense photographs are all about touching. When I hand someone a photograph, I am touching its surface. If the print was made in a darkroom, my fingers slide or grip the water-resistant coating, and I can feel the paper base that holds the layers of dyes and silver calcite molecules. If the photo is onscreen, I may touch the glass to point out something, smearing it a little with the grease on my fingertip’. Elkins, What Photography Is, 24. 29 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 76–7. 30 I would say that this ‘comportment’ differs from the understanding arrived at by Kelsey and Stimson wherein photography indicates ‘a comportment, a registering sensibility or sensitivity, a point of view’. Kelsey and Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index (A Short

136

136

NOTES

History in Three Parts’, xi. Unlike comportment here which broadly means disposition to a perceived subject, my application of the term is more readily bound up with certain behaviours of the body that the photographic image elicits. 31 ‘The name of Photography noeme will therefore be: “Thathas-been,” or again: the Intractable.’ Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 77. 32 Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny’, 143–4. According to James Elkins, ‘Although photography’s material base is a mechanical and chemical process, the medium offers a melancholy poetics – traces of things and places that-have-been, a capturing of time lost, a spectre of our imminent death – imparting an element of romantic mourning to this very banal object.’ Elkins, Photography Theory, 20. 33 Chantelle Warner, The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony: Authenticity Effects in German Social Autobiographies (London: Routledge, 2013), 65. 34 David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 24. 35 Klaus Wehner, ‘Photography – Museum. On Posing, Imageness and the Punctum’, in Sandra Dudley et al. (eds), The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation (London: Routledge, 2012), 88; emphasis in the original. 36 Ibid.; emphasis in the original. 37 Mulvey, ‘The Index and the Uncanny’, 141. With respect to Olin’s claim, the Winter Garden photograph, while being an instance of the former, with its attempt to somehow ‘recover’ his recently deceased mother, functioned as the latter. In this respect, ‘the only photograph which assuredly existed’ for Barthes functions not as trace that is, following Kelsey and Stimson, necessarily replete, but is given vestigially. Nevertheless, the Winter Garden photograph remains both of a particular past and, as the author notes, of a particular day: ‘Hence the Winter Garden Photograph, however pale, is for me the treasury of rays which emanated from my mother as a child, from her hair, her skin, her dress, her gaze on that day’. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 82; emphasis in the original. 38 Kelsey and Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index’, xi–xii. 39 Margaret Olin, ‘The Art Seminar’, in Elkins, Photography Theory, 146. 40 David Mellor, ‘Rents in the Fabric of Reality: Contexts for Sophie Ristelhueber’, in Sophie Ristelhueber: Operations (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 213.

137

NOTES

137

41 Sophie Ristelhueber, ‘Every One’, in Sophie Ristelhueber: Operations (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 290. 42 Mellor, ‘Rents in the Fabric of Reality, 213. 43 Ibid., 226. 44 As the artist has claimed, [C]construction and destruction is an obsessive theme within my work’ (ibid., 213). 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 215. 47 Afghanistan: Simon Norfolk (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2005), unpaginated. According to Griselda Pollock: ‘The recovery of a possible site for a real historical Troy entered popular knowledge through German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann’s widely reported excavations at Hisarluk in Asia Minor in the 1870s. Schliemann (1822–1890) not only claimed to have found what he mistakenly took for the Bronze Age civilization of the Homeric epic, and later the culture of Mycenae in the Greek Peloponnese, both of which discoveries pushed back the time-line of Western history. Schliemann’s digs also brought to light eight further strata, indicating even older civilizations preceding what had been up to that date not even prehistory but the world of myth and legend.’ Griselda Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychanalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 13. 48 Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics, Michael Holquist (ed.) and Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 84. More pointedly, and as Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian note, ‘seeing Afghanistan as a chronotype can reconnect the evidence in the landscape to the story of human disaster’. Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian (eds), Conflict Time Photography (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 13. 49 Aftermath: Kuwait 1991 was the title originally given to Fait. 50 Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2. 51 Ibid., 9. 52 Veronica Tello, ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Aftermath Photography: Rosemary Laing’s Welcome to Australia (2004)’, Third Text, 28:6 (2014): 555. 53 Ibid.

138

138

NOTES

54 Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 4th ed. (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014), 98. 55 John Stauffer, ‘The “Terrible Reality” of the First Living-Room Wars’, in Anne Wilkes Tucher et al., Way/Photography Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath (London; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 82. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. Critics who have claimed that the reverse order was in actual fact the case, that is, that the exposure of the ravine with the cannonballs was taken second, possibly for what Stauffer claims was ‘dramatic effect’, include Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2003), 49–52. 58 Stauffer, ‘The “Terrible Reality” ’, 83. This wasn’t the only instance wherein the historically received understanding that photography proffered an unalloyed veridicality was challenged. It is generally accepted that of the 100 photographs that Alexander Gardner took of the American Civil War and that were collectively published in his Photographic Sketchbook of the War (1865), certain images had been staged. To this end, and as Eleanor Jones Harvey points out, close inspection of Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (1865) reveals the edges of a blanket that Gardner, along with Timothy O’Sullivan would have used to move the body from one location to another. In addition, the photographers would probably have supplied the rifle, as dead bodies invariably would have been stripped of these and of other essential items, including shoes. See Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 85. 59 Stauffer, ‘The “Terrible Reality” ’, 83. Fenton was in the Crimea from March to June 1855, several months after the incident that The Valley of the Shadow of Death refers to. 60 Mellor, ‘Rents in the Fabric of Reality’, 213. 61 Ibid., 225. 62 Marcel Duchamp commenced work on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) shortly after he had arrived in New York. Consisting of two panes of glass that function as the support for an array of materials, symbols and ostensible meanings, the over-arching intention was to diagrammatically represent an encounter between the ‘Bride’ and the ‘Bachelors’ of the work’s title. Indeed, the fact that the glass panels were shattered while in transit in 1927 following an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York added to the fact that the numerous references to previous works perhaps only further develops what

139

NOTES

139

is already a very rich but nevertheless complex iconography. As Dalia Judowitz notes: ‘Despite its more traditional monumental and aesthetic character, The Large Glass announces Duchamp’s abandonment of pictorial conventions and his elaboration of the notion of reproduction as an objectification of artistic traditions. The meaning of The Large Glass relies less on its ostensible subject matter, alluded to by the title The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, than on the manner in which it stages the notions of representation as a literal transposition and reproduction of his previous works.’ Dalia Judowitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1998), 72. 63 Mellor, ‘Rents in the Fabric of Reality’, 225. 64 David Hopkins, ‘Male Poetics’, in Jennifer Mundy (ed.), Duchamp Man Ray Picabia (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 85. 65 Ibid., 87. To support this reading of Man Ray’s image, Hopkins cites the artist’s statement wherein he claimed that it resembled ‘some strange landscape seen from a bird’s eye view’. See Man Ray, Self Portrait (London, [1963] 1968). 66 Hopkins, ‘Male Poetics’, 87. 67 Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel, 84. 68 Mellor, ‘Rents in the Fabric of Reality’, 219. This engagement is also evident within her project Every One (1994), a series of photographs that documented the bodies of post-operative patients following a visit to Yugoslavia in July 1991, a point historically when the civil war had recently begun. The photographs document the scars and incisions caused by injuries sustained by non-combatants who were caught up in this particular conflict. As Mellor points out, these images were exhibited in Sarajevo in 1994 as ‘ “Posljedice” at the Galeira Bosnia-Herzegovina – Posljedice means “consequences” or “aftermath” ’ (ibid., 225). 69 ‘The accumulation of dust is a kind of physical index for the passage of time. Dust Breeding (Elevage de poussière) Duchamp calls it, in the photograph of the work’s surface that Man Ray took and Duchamp included in the notes for the Large Glass.’ Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’, October, 3 (spring 1977): 74–5. 70 Ibid., 75. Margaret Iversen, in relation to this statement notes that the artist called the rayograph ‘a residue of an experience . . . recalling the event more or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames’. Margaret Iversen, ‘Following Pieces: On Performative Photography’, in Elkins, Photography

140

NOTES

140

Theory, 93. What is interesting is that although Krauss remains beholden to the operation of the index, her argument marshals examples that extend beyond the disciplinary boundaries of photography. As Sabine T. Kriebel notes: ‘Krauss uses the notion of the index – she also uses the terms trace, imprint, transfer, and clue to indicate the multiple ways of getting at this relation between photographic image and referent – to point out that photographs are first and foremost bound to the world itself rather than to cultural systems.’ Sabine T. Kriebel, ‘Theories of Photography: A Short History’, 27; emphases in the original. 71 Writing towards the end of the essay, Krauss marshals the term ‘perishable traces’ as a means of referring to the seventy-five artists who contributed to work at Project Studios One (PS1) in Long Island. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (Autumn 1977): 81. 72 Ibid., 58. 73 Ibid., 65. Specifically, and with respect to the work by Lucio Pozzi, ‘the act of taking an impression submits to the logic of effacement. The painted wall is signified by the work as something which was there but has now been covered over’ (ibid.). 74 Ibid., 66. 75 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 259. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 259–60; emphasis in the original. 79 Ibid., 260. 80 Doane, ‘Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, 3. 81 Wehner, ‘Photography – Museum. On Posing, Imageness and the Punctum’, 88. Accordingly, the index has ‘one very crucial attribute and that is the element of time. A trace or an imprint always refers to a specific singular moment of being, which must by default be in the past, and therefore it is always “historic” ’ (ibid.; original emphasis). 82 David Campany, ‘The Red House’, Aperture, issue 185 (November 2006): unpaginated 83 Roland Barthes, in an essay on Cy Twombly, likened his approach to mark making as scratching ‘out from idleness, as if it were a matter of making time itself visible, the tremor of time’. Roland Barthes, ‘Cy Twombly Works on Paper’, in Roland Barthes, The Responsibility

141

NOTES

141

of Forms (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 164. 84 ‘Quick reactions give way to slow deliberation. The jittery snapshot is replaced by a cool and sober stare. Lateness replaces timeliness. The event is passed over for its traces.’ Campany, ‘The Red House’, unpaginated. 85 ‘Much of our past work, has been grouped together with imagemakers producing, what has become known as “Aftermath Photography”. This is a loose term that describes projects that examine conflict by assessing the damage after the fact, or by avoiding the epicentre of the war and the inevitable pitfalls that come with operating in that terrain. It is work that allows, through these choices, for a slower, more critical analysis. It is work that engages with art history and its various aesthetic strategies.’ THE DAY NOBODY DIED by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Presented at the Barbican Art Gallery, 4 December 2008, http:// www.broombergchanarin.com/barbican-gallery-presentation/ (accessed 15 January 2017). 86 As they describe in an interview with Sabine Mirlesse, it ‘was during a time when they were still embedding photojournalists. We were very intrigued by this process, so we contacted them and said we were journalists and wanted to be embedded. We lied to them, but we had a letter from The Guardian or The Observer, because we knew people who worked there’. Sabine Mirlesse, ‘Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’, Bomb 130 (Autumn 2014): 36. 87 With respect to construing this particular work as a ‘performance, see, for example, ibid. 88 THE DAY NOBODY DIED by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. 89 For example, in 1842 Anna Atkins began work on an inventory of plant specimens using the cameraless cyanotype process of producing images. As Weston Naef explains: ‘Her pictures were made by coating a sheet of high-quality writing paper with a solution of iron and potassium, drying the paper in the dark, and arranging a specimen on the dry paper along with an identifying label handwritten on transparent paper. The assemblage would then have been exposed to direct sunlight for several minutes. After removing the pnt specimen, she would have washed the paper in water to develop the image and then allowed it to dry.’ Weston Naef, Photographers of Genius at the Getty (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004), 24. 90 By utilizing a seemingly random series of juxtapositions and the operation of chance for its visual effects, Man Ray’s rayographs are

142

142

NOTES

more broadly representative of the artistic strategies that became virtually synonymous with certain factions of the European avantgarde. To this end, both Dada and Surrealism sought to stagemanage through a series of visual effects the bizarre, the novel and the unexpected. Writing in the preface to les Champs délicieux (The Delicious Fields), 1922, a publication containing reproductions of various rayographs, Tristan Tzara remarked that ‘photographic practice might be turned on its head’. Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2006), 254. For his series, Rauschenberg collaborated with his then wife Susan Weil and several of the works incorporated her image. Speaking of these works, Rosalind Krauss has noted that Rauschenberg’s blueprint ‘like the latter two works [Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953; Automobile Tire Print, 1953] signal (or maybe initiated) Rauschenberg’s pursuit of the index as a way of marking’. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory’, October, 88 (spring 1999): 95. 91 Iversen, ‘The Art Seminar’, in Elkins, Photography Theory, 132. 92 In this respect, and with regard to the work’s affinities with art historical precedent, visually The Day Nobody Died is closely bound up with certain legacies of abstraction. More recently, it perhaps has some connection to the more recent phenomenon of abstract photography, represented by the likes of Uta Barth. 93 Broomberg and Chanarin on The Day That Nobody Died, Tate Etc. 32 (2008): 73. 94 Chanarin elaborates on this aspect of the work in an interview with Rachel Somerstein. To this end, and as he notes The Day Nobody Died ‘has failure built into it from the start. Obviously we failed to represent the news in any figurative sense. We also failed the soldiers who were escorting us through the theater of war, as they call it by subverting the embedding system [and not making the expected kinds of images]. We failed the viewer who came to the work with a whole range of expectations about what we, their witness or proxy, might bring back from the front lines to show them’. Rachel Somerstein, ‘Image, Author, Failure, Chance: A Conversation with Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’, Afterimage, 41:6 (May/June 2014): 416. 95 ‘The document functions therefore as a trace left by the past. Collected and organised, this body of material becomes the theoretical premise and material basis for the construction of the archive and the writing of history. From this perspective, therefore, traces are not simply residual remains, signs and clues, but the material evidence, the stuff of history, the archive. Pointing to the

143

NOTES

143

link of passing and pastness whereby what passes by leaves a trace of what has past [Paul] Ricouer remarks on the apparent paradox. The thing has passed or the passage is no longer, while the trace exists and remains.’ Charles Merewether, ‘A Language to Come: Japanese Photography after the Event’, in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive (London; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 121–2. 96 Merewether, The Archive, 12. 97 Kelsey and Stimson, ‘Photography’s Double Index’, xxiv. 98 Ibid.

Chapter 3 1 Lynn Gumpert, ‘The Life and Death of Christian Boltanksi’, in Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness (Chicago; Los Angeles; New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), 67. 2 ‘Umberto Boccioni and Others, Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910’, in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 184. 3 Ibid., 14. 4 Benedict Nicolson, Courbet: The Studio of the Painter (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 14. The transcript of Courbet’s letter as it has been published in Nicolson’s text is in part based on Gerstle Mack’s English translation in Gustave Courbet, London, 1955, and Alan Bowness’s English version, ‘Courbet’s Atelier du Peintre’, Charlton Lecture, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1970 (ibid., 84). 5 ‘Umberto Boccioni and Others, Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910’, 184. 6 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painting of Modern Life’, in P. E. Charvet (trans.), Baudelaire Selected Writings on Art and Artists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 398; emphasis in the original. 7 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (London; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 157. 8 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1983), 55. 9 Nikolai Punin, ‘Tour de Tatline’, Veshch’, No. ½ (1922); ibid., p. 61.

144

144

NOTES

10 Svetlana Boym, ‘Ruins of the Avant-Garde: From Tatlin’s Tower to Paper Architecture’, in Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2010), 70. 11 Arthur Danto, The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), 152. 12 Ibid. 13 Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000), 57. 14 James E. Young, ‘The German Counter-Monument’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 49–50. 15 Arguably a comparable piece to Sol LeWitt’s monument is Jenny Holzer’s Black Garden which was originally created in 1994. Following a memorial erected in the German city of Nordhorn in 1929 which commemorated soldiers that were killed during the First World War, Holzer used its site as the basis wherein not only the dead of that war could be honoured, but those that had fallen during both the Second World War and the Franco-Prussian War could somehow also be remembered. As well as entailing twelve concentric red-gravel paths, Black Garden is comprised of a range of nearly black plants and vegetation, including tulips, lilies and an apple tree from which is borne black fruit. In fact, as Peter Herbstreuth notes, the garden is comprised of thirty-six dark-leafed plant species. See Peter Herbstreuth, ‘Permament Gardens’, in Barbara Nemitz et al., Trans/Plant: Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art (Ostfildern; New York: Hatze Cantz Publishers, 2000), 152. 16 Henry W. Pickford, The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 116. The artist has commented that: ‘For some time . . . I had felt that I wanted to make a statement concerning the lack of Jews in the art life of Germany due to the Holocaust. When I saw the black form, it seemed the perfect vehicle for that kind of statement. Overt figurative subject matter did not seem adequate to the subject.’ Sol LeWitt quoted in Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 96. 17 Kayrn Ball, ‘Ex/propriating Survivor Experience, or Auschwitz “after” Lyotard’, in Ana Douglas and Thomas A. Vogler, Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma (Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2003), 265. With regard to the ineffable determination of the Holocaust, see Thomas Trezise, ‘Unspeakable’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 1:1 (Spring 2001): 39–66.

145

NOTES

145

18 ‘[T]hat the artist calls a “black hole” or “perceptual barrier” meant metaphorically to denote the absent Jewish population.’ Pickford, The Sense of Semblance, 116. 19 Ibid., 116–17. 20 H. A. Sedgwick, ‘Relating Direct and Indirect Perception of Spatial Layout’, in Heiko Hecht et al. (ed.), Looking into Pictures: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Pictorial Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 61–2. 21 In an interview with Tamar Garb in 1996, Boltanski asserts the following: ‘In my early work I pretended to speak about my childhood, yet my real childhood had disappeared. I have lied about it so often that I no longer have a real memory of this time, and my childhood has become, for me, some kind of universal childhood, not a real one. Everything you do is a pretence. My life is about making stories.’ Tamar Garb, ‘Christian Boltanski, Tamar Garb in Conversation October 1996, Paris’, in PressPLAY (New York: Phaidon, 2005), 37. 22 ‘The memorial is a special precinct, extruded from life, a segregated enclave where we honor the dead.’ Danto, The State of the Art, 152. 23 Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 83. 24 ‘When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.’ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 2000), 57. 25 Adam Gopnik, ‘The Art World: Lost and Found’, The New Yorker (20 February 1989), 109. 26 This aspect of the work is arguably the basis upon which Boltanski’s practice has been likened to a Memento Mori. Certainly the plaintive admission of the fact that the moment represented by the photographic portraits has now irrevocably been relegated to the past echoes a work such as Masaccio’s Trinity (c. 1425). Beneath the artists’ treatment of the mystical union between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and notwithstanding the innovative use of perspectival space, within the lower section of the fresco’s composition an inscription in Latin reads, ‘I once was what you are and what I am you will also be.’ 27 Working in collaboration with Faisal Abdu’Allah, Boltanski would subsequently revisit this work fourteen years later. Arranging 144 rectangular panels, the same dimensions of the original 144 photographs and displayed in the same grid formation that the

146

146

NOTES

original photographs were displayed on the opposing wall of the school, inscribed across each of the 144 panels was the student’s forename. Over the course of the production of this work, 14 Years in Between (2006) the original sitters of Boltanski’s photographs were traced. New portraits were taken, and by being reinstated into the space, both photographic and communal, of their original year group the work functioned as ‘a memorial of the school’s 26year history’. Dis-Assembly (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006), unpaginated. 28 ‘The lure of the indexical is linked to its intimate collusion with what [Georges] Didi-Huberman calls the “fantasy of referentiality”, with the inert stability of the real, most fully realized in death.’ Mary Ann Doane, ‘Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, in The Meaning of Photography, edited by Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 3. The reference to Didi-Huberman can be found in Georges DidiHuberman and Thomas Repensek, ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’, October, 29 (Summer 1984): 63–81. 29 ‘Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.’ Barthes, Camera Lucida, 32. 30 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Universal Exhibition of 1855: The Fine Arts’, in P. E. Charvet (trans.), Baudelaire Selected Writings on Art and Artists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 137. For his part, Octavio Paz has used Baudelaire’s assertion as the means by which a particular tension, with respect to modern painting, might be figured: ‘In the West we went from the painting of presence to painting as presence. I mean that painting ceased to represent this thing or that – gods, ideas, naked young women, mountains, or bottles – in order to simply present itself: painting does not seek to be representation but presence. Baudelaire was the first to note this change and also the first to note the contradiction. Color, he said, thinks for itself. Now if color really thinks, it destroys itself as presence; it transforms itself into a sign. Language, signs, are not presence but what points to presence, what signifies it. Modern painting lives within this contradiction between language and presence; more exactly, it lives thanks to it.’ Octavio Paz, Convergences, Helen Lane (trans.) (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), 275–6; emphasis in the original. 31 On one level, Parker’s practice is riven with questions of purpose, function, obsolesce and renewal. 32 ‘Cornelia Parker in conversation with Kerstin Mey’, in Kerstin Mey, Sculpsit: Contemporary Artists on Sculpture and Beyond

147

NOTES

147

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 9. Lisa Saltzman, writing about this particular work has noted that ‘[w]hat remains is a kind of monument, a form of memorial, all the more powerful for its unanticipated presence in the space of the gallery in the arena of contemporary art’. Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 99. 33 Lisa Tickner, ‘A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker’, Art History, 26:3 (June 2003): 370. 34 ‘Previously I’d place a history on the object. I’d steam-rollered it or thrown it off a cliff. In The Maybe the history of the object had been conferred by someone else, and my role was to isolate these objects and put them together like sculptural material’ (ibid., 384). 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 The six canvas liners were used for the following paintings: Mountain Scene with Lake and Hut, c. 1840–45, Venetian Scene, c. 1840–45, Mountain Landscape, c. 1840–45, Scene in Venice, c. 1840–45, Seascape with Distant Coast, c. 1840, A River Seen from a Hill, c. 1840. Turner used the five sets of canvas tacking edges for the following works: Rough Sea, c. 1840–45, Rough Sea with Wreckage, c. 1830–35, Chichester Canal, c. 1828, Margate, 1808, The Tenth Plague of Egypt, 1802. 38 Tickner for one views Room for Margins as being more broadly emblematic of the artist’s ‘self-conscious reprise of twentiethcentury modernism. To this end, in addition to the connection between Room for Margins and the paintings of Rothko, Tickner has claimed that ‘Cold Dark Matter can look like an abstract expressionist drawing – Hartung, say . . . Mammoth Hair Drawing or Exhaled Blanket look a bit like Cy Twombly or Jackson Pollock – that common metaphorical reference to Pollock’s “skeins of paint” collapsed and literalized in threads’. Tickner, ‘A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker’, 385. 39 Jean-Luc Nancy, in a text that concerns an encounter with the paintings of Susanna Fritscher, discusses the work’s relation to ‘consent to the division which deposes and exposes the thing’. Moreover, ‘[i]t is the double movement of losing itself in itself and of opening itself to the outside: of losing itself in opening itself, of opening that which loses itself to its very loss. Its loss is its opening: it is not a loss, because nothing was gained or possessed. But to lose itself in itself is the opening. And it opens this: the thing itself to self, layer upon staggered layer, interwoven in such a way

148

NOTES

148

that nothing is left but that presence which, in making a surface, thereby steals itself away.’ Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Il y a blanc de titre’, Art and Design, 1:5/6 (May–June 1996): 31. 40 As Norman Bryson notes: ‘The individual history of the oil painting is therefore largely irretrievable, for although the visible surface has been worked, and worked as a total expanse, the viewer cannot ascertain the degree to which other surfaces lie concealed beneath the planar display: the image that suppresses deixis has no interest in its own genesis or past, except to bury it in a palimpsest of which only the final version shows through, above an indeterminable debris of revisions.’ Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (London: Macmillan, 1983), 90. 41 Plato, Phaedo, David Gallop (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xix. 42 Ibid., xviii. One legitimate locus of confluence whereby the trace and anamnesis both become marked by their respective parity to one another would be within a critical exposition of the monument. However, to claim that monuments become erected out of an exigency to ‘commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings’, for Gianni Vattimo would involve qualifying this statement by adding that a monument ‘cannot help but be anamnetic . . . since [a] monument is by definition an object that is aiming to become a trace for memory: a trace, that is, which is aere perennius, longer enduring than bronze’. Gianni Vattimo, ‘Postmodernity and New Monumentality’, Res, 28 (Autumn 1995): 45.‘Cornelia Parker in conversation with Kerstin Mey’, 9. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 ‘What I like about the destruction is the fact that it unfixes things. It breaks the skin of what it was before and you have to redefine it. The object becomes much more transparent or porous, a much more movable thing’ (ibid.). 46 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Letter to a Hostage, Jacqueline Gerst (trans.) (London: Pushkin Press, 1999), 15. The poignant transformation of a domestic space that was once inhabited by the living being transformed into an ad hoc memorial for the deceased can also be discerned within the photographs of Ashley Gilbertson. Within Bedrooms of the Fallen, a series of black-and-white wideformat images depict the bedrooms of forty soldiers who have been killed while on active service. Like other recent approaches to documentary photography, specifically with regard to how the aftermath of war is represented, the images are notable for

149

NOTES

149

the complete absence of people. Instead, the bedrooms are read as makeshift and for that matter inadvertent shrines to the dead. Frozen in time, these spaces memorialize the passing of an individual and function, museologically, and as Richter notes, as ‘a concretized space in which the after is staged in particular and ever-shifting relations to social, historical, and aesthetic-political force fields of associations, expectations, and imbrications?’ Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 11. 47 Claire Doherty (ed.), Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place (London: Art Books, 2015), 45. 48 According to Samuel Steinberg, the term Mesoamerican war describes the ‘devastating forms of an organised violence that extend from the US-Mexico border to parts of Central America’. Samuel Steinberg, ‘Touching the Common’, Third Text 27:5 (2013): 609. 49 Rebecca Scott Bray, ‘En piel ajena: The Work of Teresa Margolles’, Law Text Culture, Article 2, 11 (2007): 17. 50 According to Anthony Downey, the stains of which Dermis is partially comprised ‘are not drawings or representations of the dead. They are the re-presentation of death itself, the actual mark of the dead impressed by the pressure exerted by the weight of the body’. Anthony Downey, ‘127 Cuerpos: Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Commemoration’, in Tony Godfrey, Understanding Art Objects: Thinking through the Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 2009), 110. 51 Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3. 52 Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (trans.) (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 427. 53 Ibid. ‘As early as the commentary on the texts of Plato and Aristotle that invoked the metaphor of the wax imprint, I proposed distinguishing three sorts of traces: the written trace, which has become the documentary trace on the plane of the historiographical operation; the psychical trace, which can be termed impression rather than imprint, impression in the sense of an affectation left in us by a marking – or as we say, striking-event; finally, the cerebral, cortical trace which the neurosciences deal with’ (415). 54 Ibid.

150

150

NOTES

55 Steinberg, ‘Touching the Common’, 607. Although Steinberg’s quotation here is given in reference to an earlier work by the artist, namely, the installation Vaporización of 2000, as Julia Banwell notes, the ‘effect of Aire is similar to that of Vaporización in that the humidified air is inhaled and absorbed by the spectator, causing a confrontation with the death of the body as it is lived by the individual, and therefore with the abject. The difference is that with Aire the water is not visible as a mist, rather the spectator becomes aware of its presence through other senses – smell (the water emits a feint antiseptic odour) and touch (the increased humidity against the skin).’ Julia Banwell, Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), 136. 56 ‘[A] kind of fundamental immateriality, a tracing of death, and the peculiar convocation of a public around that death, in a play of engagement and disgust, dashed hopes and thwarted expectations.’ Steinberg, ‘Touching the Common’, 608. 57 Ibid., 607. 58 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, in Ann Smock (trans.), The Space of Literature (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 255. 59 Ibid. 60 Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics, 2. 61 Ibid., 151.

Chapter 4 1 Inke Arns, History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2007), 61. 2 The felt sense that the ‘cast’ of that day’s events appear, for all intents and purposes, as ghosts reflects a common sentiment held at the time. Certainly it’s an interpretation that Geoff Dyer marshals within his study of the Somme and, moreover, one that is echoed in a newspaper report at the time. Writing within the context of the official unveiling of the Cenotaph on 11 November 1920 and with respect to a photograph that was taken on that day, Dyer notes that the soldiers ‘seem like dead themselves, marching back to receive the tribute of the living. “The dead lived again”, wrote a reporter in The Times’. Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme

151

NOTES

151

(New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 22–4. Moreover, and with respect to the soldiers’ listless gaze’, Dyer recounts the following: ‘Before going over the top, an officer said that his men “seemed more or less in a trance”. Charles Bean, the official Australian historian of the war, noted that after action “the men appeared to be walking in a dream and their eyes looked glassy and starey” . . . David Jones noted of combat-weary soldiers that “they come as sleepwalkers whose bodies go unbidden of the mind, without malevolence, seeking only rest” ’ (ibid, 58). 3 Katherine M. Johnson, ‘Rethinking (Re)doing: Historical Reenactment and/as Historiography’, Rethinking History, 19:2 (2015): 193. 4 Claire Doherty (ed.), From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004), 92. According to Robert Blackson, ‘Specific to a discussion of Deller’s reenactment is the emancipatory role it may have played in the community life of the northern English villages involved. The end of the miners’ strike was typified by a vilification of the miners by the media. The miners and their unions were blamed not only for disorderly conduct toward the police force sent by the Thatcher government to quell “the enemy within”, but also for crippling the energy economy of Britain by refusing to work . . . By allowing the miners’ memories to control the course of the reeneactment, Deller’s performance provided languishing mining communities a way to act outside the historical script determined for them by the government and the media.’ Robert Blackson, ‘Once More . . . with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture’, Art Journal, 66:1 (Spring 2007): 32–3. 5 Charlotte Higgins, ‘#Wearehere: Somme Tribute Revealed as Jeremy Deller Work’, The Guardian, Friday, 1 July 2016, https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/wearehere-battle-sommetribute-acted-out-across-britain (accessed 3 February 2017). 6 Johnson, ‘Rethinking (Re)doing’, 194. With respect to reenactment’s somewhat maligned status, Johnson observes the following: ‘Chief amongst the criticisms (and there have been many) are those regarding re-enactment’s most intrinsic notion – that experience can function epistemologically and that it can, in some way, connect the present with the past. How can reenactment invoke a collective, authentic experience of the past, when we understand experience to be individual, subjective and contextually specific? How can re-enactors claim to be practicing a legitimate, educative methodology when the techniques through which they represent the past are overtly theatrical, somatic and affective?’ (ibid.).

152

152

NOTES

7 Ruth Erickson, ‘The Real Movie: Reenactment, Spectacle, and Recovery in Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 50:1 & 2 (Spring and Fall 2009): 108. 8 Ibid. 9 ‘In exhuming these raw data corpses, reordering and staging them as actors in new old plays, contemporary art is writing its own genealogy in which private, individualized, unofficial versions compete for cultural space in the public sphere.’ Pil and Galia Kollectiv, ‘Recto/Necto: From beyond the Grave of the Politics of Reenactment’, Art Papers (November/December 2007): 51. 10 Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 87. 11 According to Nichols: ‘The indexical bond, which can guarantee evidentiary status – but not the meaning or interpretation of images taken as evidence – no longer joins the reenactment to that for which it stands. Instead this indexical bond joins the image to the production of the reenactment; it is evidence of an iterative gesture but not evidence of that for which the reenactment stands.’ Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, 88. 12 Antonio Caronia, Janez Janša and Domenico Quaranta (eds), RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2014), 10. 13 Pil and Galia Kollectiv, ‘Recto/Necto: From beyond the Grave of the Politics of Reenactment’, 47. 14 Ibid. 15 Glenn Phillips, interview with Doug Hall and Chip Lord, 11 February 2007, in California Video: Artists and Histories (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2008), 235. 16 Caronia et al., RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, 62. 17 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (London; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 33; emphasis in the original. 18 According to Jones: ‘Kathy O’Dell has trenchantly argued, to this end, that, precisely by using their bodies as primary material, body and performance artists highlight the “representational status” of such work rather than confirming its ontological priority.’ Kathy O’Dell, ‘Toward a Theory of Performance Art: An Investigation of Its Sites’, PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1992, 43. 19 ‘Body art, through its very performativity and its unveiling of the body of the artist, surfaces the insufficiency and incoherence of the

153

NOTES

153

body/self (or body-as-subject) and its inability to deliver itself fully (whether to the subject-in-performance herself or himself or to the one who engages with this body)’ (ibid., 34). 20 Jeff Wall, ‘Introduction: Partially Reflective Mirror Writing’, in Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press in association with the Marian Goodman Gallery, 1999), x. 21 Dan Graham, ‘Performance: End of the ‘60s’, in Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power, 142. 22 Yves-Alain Bois, ‘The Sculptural Opaque’, Sub-stance, no. 31 (1981): 48. As Graham writes elsewhere in the text: ‘A premise of 1960s “Modernist” art was to present the present as immediacy – as pure phenomenological consciousness without the contamination of historical or other a priori meaning. The world could be experienced as pure presence, self-sufficient and without memory. Each privileged present-time situation was to be totally unique or new.’ Graham, ‘Performance: End of the ‘60s’, 143–4. 23 Graham, ‘Performance: End of the ‘60s’, 124. 24 Ibid. 25 This is not to say that Performer/Audience/Mirror is entirely bereft of humour. Based on the transcript of the second performance at P. S. 1 in December 1977, the fourth stage does contain a measure of humour, with Graham at one point remarking that the people sat at the back are ‘dead’, provoking, according to the transcript, ‘much laughter’ (ibid., 129). In the second iteration of stage four during this performance the transcript reads: ‘Now the audience is . . . uh, is actually laughing, uh, pretty loudly . . . uh, horsey laughs, and, as I say that, everyone kind of lets their laughs and their heads go’ (ibid., 133). 26 Pil and Galia Kollectiv, ‘Recto/Necto: From beyond the Grave of the Politics of Reenactment’, 47. 27 As the artist noted in an interview with Jan Butterfield in 1975: ‘In fact, the “Art Make-Up” films . . . were originally made to be loops. There were four of them – one would be on one wall of a square room and the other three would be on the remaining walls. They were all made for the San Francisco Museum of Art. Then Gerry Nordland [the museum’s director] found out that they were films and not sculpture (they were made for a “sculpture” show) and he wouldn’t allow them in the exhibition.’ Jan Butterfield, ‘Bruce Nauman: The Center of Yourself, 1975’, in Janet Kraynak (ed.), Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words. Writings and Interviews (London; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 174. It’s perhaps

154

154

NOTES

useful to note that Art Make-Up is part of a number of works that were bound up with a series of fundamental questions around what an artist does. To this end, several works sought to explore, often by way of a series of actions that were either banal or seemingly incidental, the conditions of possibility for artistic production. In this respect any ostensible meanings that were engendered stemmed from what Constance M. Lewallen has described was the artist’s abiding leitmotif, namely, ‘what the artist does in the studio’. Constance M. Lewallen, ‘A Rose Has No Teeth’, in Constance M. Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2007), 82. 28 According to the biography on their website, in January 2015 the band celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary. http://www. dressedtokill.org.uk/ (accessed 21 January 2017). 29 Arns, History Will Repeat Itself, 61. 30 ‘In the film there were four different colors, there was white, I put on white make-up, then green, and then purple, and then black. From the waist up, I think, is what the film showed. And I think in the tape it was just two colors, black and white, because it was black and white tape. And I suppose it had whatever social connections it had with skin color and things like that. Also the play on the words “making up art” ’. Michele de Angelus, ‘Interview with Bruce Nauman, May 27 and 30, 1980’, in Janet Kraynak (ed.) Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words. Writings and Interviews (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2003), 265. 31 ‘[T]he specific historical point of origin of [works that use reenactment as an artistic strategy] is important, but primarily because it can offer a play of interpretation and create a discourse around the idea of historical representation.’ Rod Dickinson, quoted in an email to the authors Pil and Galia Kollectiv, September 2007, in Pil and Galia Kollectiv, ‘Recto/Necto: From beyond the Grave of the Politics of Re-enactment’, 49. 32 As Inke Arns notes: ‘In this situation artistic re-enactments do not ask the naïve question about what really happened outside of the history represented by the media – the “authenticity” beyond the images – instead, they ask what the images we see might mean concretely to us, if we were to experience these situations personally.’ Arns, History Will Repeat Itself, 43. 33 Although the role of tense, if not time, functions primarily with respect to how Forsyth and Pollard have sought to reinstate, if not reimagine, a work rooted within a particular historical moment, that is, at the juncture of modernism’s dissolution

155

NOTES

155

and the inception of proto-postmodernism, there is something quite peculiar to Kiss My Nauman in that rather than depict the performance itself, the preparation for the subsequent performance becomes in effect the performance, or it is viewed ostensibly as such. As Nauman noted in an interview in 1988 and with respect to Art Make-Up: ‘Of course, you put on makeup before you film in the movies. In my case, putting on the makeup becomes the activity.’ Joan Simon, ‘Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman, 1988 (January, 1987)’, in Kraynak, Please Pay Attention Please, 326. 34 Aligned with this oscillation is the tension, as Nauman highlighted, with respect to make-up in its proclivity to dissemble visibility as much as it works to functions as an exaggerated or distorted form of display or of visibility: ‘Make up is not necessarily anonymous but it’s distorted in some way, it’s something to hide behind. It’s not quite giving, not quite exposing. The tension in the work is often about that. You’re not going to get what you’re not getting.’ Bruce Nauman in an interview with Coosje van Bruggen, in Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 196. 35 Nichols, ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’, 88. 36 Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 13. The relevance of Keith Jenkins’s theorization of history to practices of re-enactment is also discussed by Robert Blackson, in ‘Once More . . . with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture’, 28–40. 37 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 13. 38 Ibid., 71. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 39 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 71. 40 Douglas Crimp, ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’, October, 15 (Winter 1980): 92. 41 Ibid., 94. 42 Ibid., 99. 43 Ibid. ‘Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.’ Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 6–7. 44 ‘Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever-attentive eye, which captures the moment and its eternity.’

156

156

NOTES

Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Photography and Drawing: A Parallel’, in Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers (New York: Aperture, 1999), 45. 45 This extension of photographic time perhaps in part accounts for Sherman’s gravitation towards and appropriation of historical aspects of visual culture. To this end, the identities she assumed within her Film Stills series, a suite of seventy black-and-white photographs that the artist made towards the tail end of the 1970s, were based on certain stock types found in the vernacular of, among other things, 1950s B movies. 46 ‘The strategy of this mode is to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself, creating one’s fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension.’ Crimp, ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’, 99. While what was deemed to be fictive for Jenkins was to be treated with a degree of suspicion, with regard to Crimp’s photographic fictions these, in and of themselves, were not necessarily to be considered circumspect. Rather the term functioned by way of an acknowledgement that the pretentions to veridicality that various figures historically had sought to confer onto the photographic image were merely that, pretensions. A photograph could be no more or no less truthful with regard to being coincident with reality than any other form of representation. 47 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 11. 48 Sheena Wagstaff, ‘The Labouring Eye’, in Sheena Wagstaff, Jeff Wall: Photographs 1978–2004 (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 7. 49 Jasmine Benyamin, ‘Analog Dreams’, Models 306090 Vol. 11, Emily Abruzzo et al. (ed.) (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 90. 50 Lisa Saltzman, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (London; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 44. 51 This is not to say that this approach is entirely without precedent. At certain historical moments, artists have sought recourse to what might be construed as models in order to facilitate their creative endeavours. So, for example, it was while in Bath that Thomas Gainsborough availed himself of working from miniature dioramas, of which he kept a small folding table for this express purpose. Rica Jones and Martin Postle, ‘Gainsborough in his Painting Room’, in Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone (eds), Gainsborough (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), 36. According to one observer, the artist would order the table ‘to be brought to his parlour, and

157

NOTES

157

thereupon compose his designs. He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds: make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli’. W. Whitley, Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700–1799, 2 vols, vol. 1 (London 1928), 369, reproduced in ibid. 52 Roxana Marcoci, ‘Paper Moon’, in Roxana Marcoci, Thomas Demand (New York: MoMA, 2005), 9. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 10. 55 Thomas Demand quoted in François Quinton, ‘There Is No Innocent Room’, in Thomas Demand (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, 2000), 52. In an attempt to account for what these flaws, upon recognition, elicit within the viewer, Andreas Ruby observes the following: ‘Oddly jumbled feelings ensue: a mixture of incomprehension (why this hide-and-seek?), disenchantment (because we’ve been tricked), and also admiration (for the superbly executed artifice).’ Andreas Ruby, ‘Memoryscapes’, Parkett 62 (2001): 126. 56 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore; London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 4. 57 Ibid., 7. 58 Ibid., 13. 59 Francesco Bonami, Régis Durand and François Quinton, Thomas Demand (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 90. 60 Ibid. 61 Marcoci, ‘Paper Moon’, 13. 62 Jay Lockenour notes that the ‘effects of the coup reverberated for the remaining nine months of the Third Reich. Several conspirators – Stauffenberg and a number of others captured at the Bendlers-trasse headquarters in Berlin – were summarily executed [and] at least 150 people committed suicide or were executed’. Jay Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1955 (Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 155. 63 ‘A Conversation between Alexander Kluge and Thomas Demand’, Beatriz Colomina, Thomas Demand (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006), 71. 64 This is not to say that Demand’s practice works to elide detail. As we have already noted, it is the telling detail that usually discloses the image’s status as a fiction. Moreover, and as the

158

NOTES

158

artist has observed himself, the artist brings to his practice a bank of so-called details that work to further historically position the work: ‘Each detail is important. I always refer to a personal museum. I always have an index of references in mind. This may just be the way light falls in Car Park, which refers to a painting by Magritte, or the sense of depth and perspective, as in Room, where I was influenced by the paintings of Ucello.’ Quinton, ‘There Is No Innocent Room’, 52. 65 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Media as Modern Architecture’, in Colomina, Thomas Demand, 19. 66 Marcoci, ‘Paper Moon’, 17. 67 Alun Munslow, ‘Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition’, in Jenkins, Re-thinking History, xi. In one sense, we could arguably claim that as well as being an artist, Demand also functions, following Jenkins, as an historian to the extent wherein as with historians, the past ‘can only be brought back again . . . in very different media, for example in books, articles, documentaries, etc., not as actual events’ (ibid., 8). 68 Pepe Karmel, ‘The Real Simulations of Thomas Demand’, in Art in America (June–July 2005), 147. To this end, and as she notes, ‘Demand’s use of architectural symbolism recalls Anselm Kiefer’s 1981 canvas, The Painter’s Studio: Inner Room, which reproduces the “Mosaic Room” from Speer’s 1937–38 Reichs Chancellery. But where Kiefer loads his imagery with angst and impasto, Demand maintains a sense of clinical detachment’ (ibid., 147). 69 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 8. 70 Quinton, ‘There Is No Innocent Room’, in Francesco Bonami et al., Thomas Demand (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 53. 71 Ruby, ‘Memoryscapes’, 126–7. 72 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 14. As Durand opines: ‘Rather, what these photographs tells us is that we are living in an era of undifferentiated proliferation and generalised epigonism, and have been for quite some time.’ Durand, ‘Tracings’, in Bonami et al., Thomas Demand, 80. 73 Ruby, ‘Memoryscapes’, 127. 74 Maria Muhle, ‘Omer Fast: When Images Lie . . . About the Fictionality of Documents’, Afterall, 20 (Spring 2009): 2. 75 Antony Rowland, Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-Century Poems (London; New York: Routledge, 2014), 1. As Fast notes: ‘Needless to say, the problem of traumatic events and their representation is an old one, running the gamut from

159

NOTES

159

Aristotle to Brecht and beyond.’ Joanna Fiduccia, ‘Omer Fast: A Multiple “I” ’, Uovo (17 April 2008): 157. 76 ‘The representations produced by the arts and sciences can each contribute to knowledge of some matter in two ways. That is, the representations these modes of enquiry produced have two cognitive functions. They may provide testimony about objects and they may interpret objects. Testimony is simply a record of observations. Interpretation is the attempt to understand this record.’ James D. Young, Art and Knowledge (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 66. 77 ‘For historians are not too concerned about discrete facts (facts as individual facts), for such a concern only touches that part of historical discourse called its chronicle.’ Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 40. 78 With regard to the function of testimony in relation to historical suffering, Alexandre Dauge-Roth observes the following: ‘By refusing to remain silent or silenced, survivors aim not only to keep the memory of those who died alive, but to also gain social recognition and legitimacy within the ongoing dialogues through which social memory and belonging are shaped. Their testimony, then, aims not only to represent the past as it has been witnessed, but at the same time symbolises a social performance of the survivors’ agency within their community.’ Alexandre Dauge-Roth, ‘Testimonial Encounter’, French Cultural Studies, 20:2 (2009): 166. 79 Bernard Weinraub, ‘Steven Spielberg Faces the Holocaust’, The New York Times, 12 December 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/ packages/html/movies/bestpictures/schindler-ar1.html (accessed 29 November 2016). 80 Elisabeth Lebovici, ‘From Homer to Omer Fast’, Afterall, 20 (Spring 2009): 2. 81 Ibid., 1. 82 Muhle, ‘Omer Fast: When Images Lie . . . About the Fictionality of Documents’, 307. 83 Ibid. 84 Fiduccia, ‘Omer Fast: A Multiple “I” ’, 157. 85 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 14. 86 Ibid., 10. Perhaps more broadly the question of testimony is bound up with the question of representation and specifically how the Holocaust will be represented as it increasingly becomes historically remote. As Arns points out, ‘Fast’s project does not aim to relativise or question authentic reports about the Holocaust.

160

NOTES

160

Rather, he raises questions about a very pressing and complex theme: When the last eye-witnesses of the Holocaust have gone, who can tell us about what happened, how will our relationship to this part of history change? Will something change in this relationship when, aside from documentaries and history books, the Holocaust is only recounted in feature films like Schindler’s List?’ Arns, History Will Repeat Itself, 55. 87 Tina Wasserman, ‘Duplicated Replications: The Interventions of Omer Fast’, Afterimage, 37:5 (March/April 2010): 9. 88 The title derives from the optimum flight altitude of a US Air Force MQ-1 Predator Drone. 89 Peter M. Asoro, ‘The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators’, Social Semiotics, 23:2 (2013): 204. 90 According to Marie Muhle, ‘[H]is work doesn’t so much address a specific historical situation, its internal tensions and its mediation by images, but instead tackles the moral issue of what images can or cannot make visible.’ Muhle, ‘Omer Fast: When Images Lie . . . About the Fictionality of Documents’, 1. 91 Ibid., 2. 92 ‘Re-enactment is thus not the arbitrary combination of images, things and significations in a “constellation like a flash of lightning”, neither is it the pure imitation of reality in (living) images. It is the reproduction of the meaning of an action or event and its translation into the present: its re-actualization’ (ibid.). 93 Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 15.

Chapter 5 1 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (London: Panther Books, 1969), 80. 2 Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan (eds), Documenting America 1935–1943 (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1988), 2. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. As Fleischhauer and Brannan note, the Resettlement Administration’s ‘mission was to assist the poorest farmers. It resettled them, helped establish rural cooperative enterprises, constructed three model suburban communities called greenbelt

161

NOTES

161

towns, and carried out rehabilitation programs that offered grants and loans to tenants ad small farmers’ (ibid.). 5 James R. Swensen, Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 20. 6 Fleischhauer and Brannan, Documenting America 1935–1943, 1. 7 Evans had been hired in October 1935 as an information specialist by the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration. Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection (Malibu, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 130. 8 For a recent discussion with regard to the veridicality of Walkers’s images, see Errol Morris, ‘The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 3)’, The New York Times, 20 October2009, http://morris. blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarmclock-part-3/ (accessed 10 January 2017). 9 James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill; London: The University of North California Press, 1991), 9. In relation to the distinction between, on the one hand, the images’ function as art in contrast with, on the other hand, their documentary impulse, Margaret Olin notes the following: ‘Today, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is known as a classic of an indefinable genre, the collision, in fact, of two modernist genres, the “documentary” and the artistic photographic text. As a documentary, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men exhorts the reader to participate in, so as to ameliorate, the conditions it describes, while as a work of art it steps back to allow itself to be contemplated.’ Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 21. 10 Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 6. 11 Ian Aitken, The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 23. 12 Robert F. Sayre (ed.), American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 565. 13 Ibid. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (London: Penguin, 2006), 119–21. Gudger, along with Ricketts and Woods, were pseudonyms used in place of the three sharecropper families’ actual names. 14 As Blake Morrison points out in the introduction to an edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that was published in 2006, the book has had a chequered history: ‘The journalistic feature that began it was never published in Fortune magazine, because of a change

162

162

NOTES

of editor. The first publishing house to take it on demanded cuts, so Agee withdrew the manuscript. And when the book was finally published in a form he approved, in 1941, the American public – on the verge of the Second World war – wasn’t much interested in learning about the social conditions of the rural South, nor in wrestling with a difficult, hubristic Modernist text.’ Blake Morrison, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., xi–xii. 15 As Jeff L. Rosenheim points out, the title ‘comes from Ecclesiasticus, an apocryphal book of the Bible. By this choice Agee reminds the reader that his work is likewise non-canonical and perhaps heretical. Ecclesiasticus is a commentary on the inheritance of children and the passing of blood from one generation to another. “Three Tenant Families”, originally Agee’s working title, ultimately became the book’s subtitle’. Jeff L. Rosenheim, ‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is: Walker Evans and the South’, in Maria Morris Hambourg et al., Walker Evans (New York; Princeton: Princeton University Press and Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 103. 16 ‘William Christenberry: Working from Memory’ (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 14, quoted in William Christenberry (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2013), 56. 17 In addition to his practice as a photographer, Christenberry for a number of years now has made scale models of the buildings he has photographed. As Yolanda Romer notes, it was in ‘1973, coinciding with his first major exhibition of photography – held at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC – and encouraged by his friend Walter Hopps, Christenberry decided to add a sculptural dimension to his photographic work in the form of what he calls “building constructions” ’. Yolanda Romer, ‘William Christenberry: Not Photographs but Stories’, in William Christenberry, 42. 18 Ibid., 16. Handwritten on the reverse of this latter photograph (Elisabeth Tingle at Tingle House on Mill’s Hill, near Moundville, Alabama, 1962) are the words, ‘Elisabeth Tingle took me to this house on the Mill’s Hill, Moundville. She posed for this picture in the same kitchen as in Walker Evans’ photograph in 1936’ (ibid., 281). While Christenberry’s project clearly has some affinities with Sherrie Levine’s own subsequent responses to and appropriations of Evans’s photographs, the differences between Levine’s images compared to those of Christenberry’s remains, for the purposes of this chapter, instructive. Beyond the historical distance that separates the two artists, which in itself is significant, given the almost seismic shifts in attitude towards art that occurred during

163

NOTES

163

these two decades, how these works have been authored and, moreover, the possible readings they evince are almost antithetical in both scope and import. On a purely technical level, while Christenberry returned to the actual location wherein Evans’s photographs were originally taken, what Levine photographed were photographs that Evans had taken for the purposes of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. However, unlike Levine’s tactic, which, on one level critiqued those structures that valorized modernist authorship while at the same moment sought to expose or at the very least divest Evans’s images of the ideological contingencies upon which representation had been constructed, Christenberry’s ‘returning to photograph’, according to Romer, allowed him to ‘return to his origins, and to explore them from a different viewpoint to that of Evans and Agee: from his own sentiment of belonging to a place and from the certainty of photography something that only affects him, which is his memory’ (ibid., 17). 19 William Christenberry: Working from Memory (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 50–5, quoted in William Christenberry, 80. As Romer notes, it ‘was economic changes, as well as the passing of time and the hand of nature, that ultimately transformed the landscape of Alabama’. Romer, ‘William Christenberry: Not Photographs but Stories’, 18. 20 William Christenberry: Working from Memory, 14, quoted in William Christenberry, 56. Within several of the images Christenberry took during the period when the structure was still standing, the ostensible function of the building can be discerned by the Palmist’s sign, in this case an open hand painted red and accompanied by the word ‘palmist’ being used as an ad hoc blind for one of the windows. (Its function as a sign is further diminished by the fact that it is upside down.) 21 Justo Navarro, ‘What Remains of Time: The Present and Ex-Votos’, in William Christenberry, 47. 22 ‘The question [Toni] Morrison poses in her narratives concerns the role of recollected being in present activity, the question of “primal” scenes.’ Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, ‘“Rememory”: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison’s Novels’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn 1990): 302. 23 Ibid., 303. 24 ‘In rememory, things of the mind – psychic experiences – are really out there in the world.’ Kathleen Marks, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 52.

164

164

NOTES

25 Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 2005), 43–4. 26 Ibid. 27 Rushdy, ‘ “Rememory”: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison’s Novels’, 321. 28 Rebekah Modrak and Bill Anthes, Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2011), 204. Within Modrak and Anthes’s description of rephotography, the example of Mark Klett’s rephotography project is cited. Rephotographic Survey Project (1977–79) entailed Klett, Joann Verburg, Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus working from nineteenth-century photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. By identifying the location where the original image was shot, they were, according to Modrak and Anthes, able to ‘show changes in land formation and cultural variance’ (ibid., 204–205). 29 It is perhaps for this reason, for the fact that the pentimento persists and, moreover, insists on the potential stability or at the very least, visibility of the past that Margot Singer, echoing a comparable set of sentiments to those that we have already seen Denver utter in Beloved, makes the following observation: ‘I want to believe we don’t forget, that memory is inscribed on these long-lasting cerebral cortex cells of ours like a palimpsest, traces of a painting covered by a more recent artist’s paint. I want to believe the hidden pigments remain there, shadowy as ghosts, waiting for the conservator’s xray to bring them back.’ Margot Singer, ‘Afterimage’, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2008): 74. 30 Romer, ‘William Christenberry: Not Photographs but Stories’, 8. 31 Navarro, ‘What Remains of Time: The Present and Ex-Votos’, 41. In this respect they are closer to Rainer Maria Rilke’s own meditations as they are set out in his only prose work, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, first published in 1910. ‘[T]he stubborn life of these rooms had not yet let itself be trampled out, it was still there; it clung to the nails that had been left, it stood on the remaining handsbreadth of flooring, it crouched under the joints where there was still a bit of interior . . . And from these walls once blue and green and yellow, which were framed by the fracture-tracks of the demolished partitions, the breath of these lives stood out . . . which no wind had yet scattered.’ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, M. D. Herter Norton (trans.) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), 46–7. 32 ‘Thus we understand why spatial images play so important a role in the collective memory. The place a group occupies is not like a blackboard, where one may write and erase figures at will. No

165

NOTES

165

image of a blackboard can recall what was once written there. The board could not care less what has been written on it before, and new figures may be freely added. But place and group have each received the imprint of the other. Therefore every phase of the group can be translated into spatial terms, and its residence is but the juncture of all these terms. Each aspect, each detail, of this place has a meaning intelligent only to members of the group, for each portion of its space corresponds to various and different aspects of the structure and life of their society, at least of what is most stable in it.’ Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (London: Harper & Row, 1980), 130. 33 Ibid., 140. 34 Diana Matar, Evidence (Amsterdam: Schilt Publishing, 2014), unpaginated. 35 Ibid. 36 Amelia Smith, ‘Photographer Diana Matar on Libya, Her Father-inLaw’s Disappearance and Portraying Absence in Her Work’, Middle East Monitor, 22 October 2014, https://www.middleeastmonitor. com/20141022-photographer-diana-matar-on-libya-her-father-in-lawsdisappearance-and-portraying-absence-in-her-work/ (accessed 22 November 2016). 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (trans.) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 55. 40 Smith, ‘Photographer Diana Matar on Libya.’ 41 Diana Matar, Evidence, Lens Culture, https://www.lensculture.com/ articles/diana-matar-evidence (accessed 22 November 2016). 42 The films included The Godfather (1972), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). 43 Martin Lefebvre, ‘On Landscape in Narrative Cinema’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 2011): 66–7. Such fidelity extends to the fact that each photograph was the result of the artist diligently undertaking research into their exact provenance; for example, Bernard accessed the production records at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverley Hills. Moreover, and as Mark Durden notes, formally the dimensions of each photograph maintains the aspect ratio of the original film. Mark Durden, Screen Memories, James Hockey Gallery/Viewpoint Gallery (1995), unpaginated.

166

166

NOTES

44 Durden, Screen Memories, unpaginated. 45 Such dislocation Lefebvre interprets as the proclivity for the images to embody ‘the process whereby the spectator can mentally “extract” and “arrest” landscape from the flow of narrative films to further investigate the relation of landscape to narrative in film’. Lefebvre, ‘On Landscape in Narrative Cinema’, 68–9. Here Lefebvre is endowing the images with a heuristic capacity function to the extent whereby they operate as tools for thought (ibid., 69). 46 Colin Gardner, ‘Cindy Bernard Richard Kuhlenschmidt’, Artforum (December 1990): 147. 47 ‘I am above all interested in the way the landscape has absorbed its cinematographic description, in the familiar resonance one feels when seeing it. Stripped of their narrative context, the images become lures waiting for a new fiction. Isolated in this way the landscape appears inoffensive, while in reality the vacant spaces have been the sites of violent behaviours, like a bunch of deadly postcards.’ ‘Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust’ 3e Biennale de lyon d’art contemporain: installation, cinema, video, informatique (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995), 313. 48 Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 14. 49 As W. J. T. Mitchell notes: ‘Landscape is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other. As such, it is like money: good for nothing in itself, but expressive of a potentially limitless reserve of value.’ W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 50 John Wylie, Landscape (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 71. 51 Ibid., 72. 52 ‘We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning) the “message” of the AuthorGod) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.’ Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author ’ (1967), in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, Stephen Heath (trans.) (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 146. In the passage that directly precedes this statement, Barthes writes that ‘the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), trace a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins’ (ibid.).

167

NOTES

167

53 Robert Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996), 110. 54 Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ (1967), in Flam, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 74. 55 Smithson began his interview with Alison Sky in 1973 by claiming that entropy was ‘a subject that’s preoccupied me for some time. On the whole I would say entropy contradicts the usual notion of a mechanistic world view. In other words, it’s a condition that’s irreversible, it’s a condition that’s moving towards a gradual equilibrium and it’s suggested in many ways’. Robert Smithson, ‘Entropy Made Visible. Interview with Alison Sky’ (1973), in Flam, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 301. As is pointed out in an adjacent note in this publication, this interview took place about two months before Smithson’s death (ibid.). 56 According to Smithson, one must ‘become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the Earth’s crust’. Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’, 110. 57 Rä di Martino, interview with Sarah Phillips, ‘Luke Skywalker’s House: Rä di Martino’s Best Photograph’, The Guardian, 7 March 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/mar/06/lukeskywalker-house-ra-di-martino# (accessed 6 January 2017). 58 ‘As both Ballard and Smithson well knew, ruins encourage a kind of conceptual time travel. They are structures that offer both glimpses of potential futures (with time, this will happen), while prompting he re-imagining of the past (what happened here?). It is this temporal permeability that lends the ruin its science fictional qualities, as numerous contemporary artists including Tacita Dean, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and The Otolith Group might attest.’ Amelia Barikin, ‘no more stars (star wars): Rä di Martino’, Contemporary Visual Art and Culture Broadsheet, 43:1 (2014): 33; 35. 59 This aesthetic, which as Will Brooker notes, was the aesthetic of the Rebels, extended to the ‘desert- desert-battered surface of Luke’s landspeeder, and the worn, washed-out fabric of his farmer’s clothes, bound and belted against the sand [in addition to] Han Solo’s outfit . . . and his customised “piece of junk” pirate ship’. Will Brooker, Star Wars (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23. Indeed, Brooker goes so far as to claim that a ‘character’s attitude towards trash, dirt and junk defines their place on either side of the

168

168

NOTES

film’s key opposition between rough, improvisational energy and cold, clean formality’ (ibid.). 60 A further dimension to di Martino’s project, and one that arguably more directly conflates some of the images with the practice of Smithson is the latter’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and its subsequent reimaging by the artist Mike Nelson within the context of his exhibition Triple Bluff Canyon at Modern Art Oxford in 2004. Smithson’s work was made on the grounds of Kent State University in Ohio during his brief spell as an artist in residence there. Consisting of what was already a partially dilapidated woodshed, the structure had a total of twenty truckloads of earth tipped on top which, among other things, resulted in the central roof beam cracking under the weight. Some thirty-four years later as part of his one-person exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, the artist Mike Nelson sought to recreate this work using for the purposes not soil but sand. 61 Barikin, ‘no more stars (star wars): Rä di Martino’, 35. 62 Ibid. Or, to place this within the interpretive prism of the textual, when Jacques Derrida claimed that ‘Il n’y a pas de hors texte’ (There is nothing outside the text), what this implies is that ‘every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this “real” except in an interpretive experience’. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 148. As Gary Gutting notes, the point of Derrida’s assertion that there is nothing outside of the text ‘is not that there are no things, only words. It is rather meant to convey that at every level – both that of reality itself and that of our language and thought about reality – there are no simply present facts or meanings but only the unending play of differences that Saussure has shown to characterize language’. Gary Gutting, French Philosophy of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 305. 63 Bernard shares the title of the project with John Fante’s novel, written in 1939. Set in Los Angeles during the Depression era, Fante’s novel is a tale of ambition and desire that is seen through the eyes of the novel’s protagonist, Arturo Bandini. In addition to the significance of the novel’s location to Bernard’s images, Fante describes a scene within the final chapter wherein the young Bandini goes on a fruitless search of Camilla. Resigned to the fact that she is missing, the novel’s protagonist utters the following: ‘Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing

169

NOTES

169

of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.’ John Fante, Ask the Dust (Edinburgh; London: Canongate, 2012), 193–4. 64 According to Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes, ‘Although by far the vast majority of offenders were shot for desertion (268), a number of other crimes attracted the severest of sentences. Leaving aside murder (for which at least 37 sentences were carried out) the next most prevalent crime was cowardice, 18 shootings taking place for this offence.’ Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes, Shot at Dawn, 6th ed. (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), 18. As Teresa Iacobelli notes, first published in 1989, Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act ‘was a popular history meant to arouse the sentiments of a wide audience rather than provide an objective and thoroughly research accounting of the facts. The work was highly polemical and sought not only to tell the stories of the executed men of the British and dominion forces but also to call for their exoneration’. Teresa Iacobelli, Death or Deliverance: Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War (Vancouver; Toronto: UBC Press, 2013), 5. 65 One exception within the series is of an image that the artist took in Verbranden-Molen in West Flanders, wherein four French soldier of the 10e Compagnie of 8 Battalion of the Régiment Mixte de Tirailleurs Algériens were executed on 15 December 1914. By refusing to engage in battle, a decimation (from the Latin decem meaning ten) was ordered. This entailed every tenth soldier being killed. In so doing, as well as making an example of these soldiers, any mutinous feelings that were still stirring within the unit would be stemmed. See Piet Chielens and Julian Putkowski, Unquiet Graves: Execution Sites of the First World War in Flanders (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2000), 6–7. 66 Putkowski and Sykes, Shot at Dawn, 13. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 12. As the authors note, ‘[T]he powers of sentencing under the Army Act were wide . . . [the] ultimate sanction was of course the death penalty, which in all but an odd case was specified as being death by shooting’ (ibid., 16). 69 Ibid., 14–15. The discernable lack of rigour and due probity with respect to the court martial process arguably extends to the court martial process as a whole: ‘After the evidence of each prosecution witness the soldier, or his representative might then cross-examine that individual. Seemingly this was rarely done, and even less often effectively. At the conclusion of the prosecution case the defendant

170

NOTES

170

might call his own witnesses or give evidence himself. Undoubtedly unjust inference was drawn if a prisoner chose to remain silent, and those who elected to speak must surely have been subjected to an awesome ideal. Little imagination is required to envisage the scenario of the ill-educated soldier on trial for his life, being led into making unfortunate admissions when questioned by his superiors, in their respective roles as prosecutor and judges’ (ibid., 15). 70 John Huddleston, ‘Killing Ground; the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape’, http://www.johnhuddlestonphoto.com/index. php/kg/text/ (accessed 10 January 2016). 71 Geoff Dyer, ‘Dead Time’, in Chloe Dewe Mathews, Shot at Dawn (Madrid: Ivory Press, 2014), unpaginated. 72 Following his three-year sentence for desertion being suspended in May 1915, Private Herbert Chase was sent back to his battalion wherein after spending less than three weeks with his unit, he complained of feeling unwell. According to Putkowski and Sykes, ‘At 2.45 am the next day the Germans launched a gas attack, following which Chase could not be found. A short while later the private was discovered a few miles behind the lines in a dazed and exhausted condition, lying by the side of the road.’ Putkowski and Sykes, Shot at Dawn, 44. After being declared fit on medical grounds a court martial was convened on 29 May and, after his trial, Private Chase was executed on 12 June at the St Sixtus Monastery, Proven (ibid.). 73 Private Crozier’s age is more broadly indicative of the fact that most of the soldiers that fought during the First World War were relatively young: ‘The average age of the soldiers who were shot for all types of offences, was just under twenty-five-and-a-half years . . . The average age of those shot for desertion was just over twenty-five years [while] the average age of those shot for cowardice was just under twenty-six’ (ibid., 20). 74 Ibid., 67. 75 Ibid., 68. 76 Ibid. 77 There is a further poignant layer to Private Crozier’s story in that the battalion’s commanding officer was Lieutenant-Colonel Frank P. Crozier. Although not related to Private Crozier, the then Major F. P. Crozier had personally recruited the young Private Crozier. Moreover, at the time ‘J Crozier’s mother was present at the recruiting office and had tried to dissuade her son from enlisting. She was unsuccessful but the major had told her that she need not worry because he personally would look after her son’ (ibid.). However, and as Putkowski and Sykes note, when it came to

171

NOTES

171

Private Crozier’s court martial for desertion and the question as to whether the sentence should be commuted or not, ‘Frank Crozier, apparently without hesitation, stated that he recommended the death sentence be carried out’ (ibid.). 78 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, Representations, Vol. 26 (Spring 1989): 19. 79 Ibid., 8. 80 Ibid., 9. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 7. They are also somehow symptomatic of a certain obsolescence of, among other things, ‘societies that had long assured the transmission and conservation of collectively remembered values, whether through churches or schools, the family or the state’ (ibid.). 83 Ibid., 12. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 19. 86 Ibid., 17.

172

Bibliography Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. London: Panther Books, 1969. Aitken, Ian. The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. Arns, Inke. History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance. Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2007. Asoro, Peter M. ‘The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators’. Social Semiotics, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2013): 196–224. de Baca, Miguel. Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Baigell, Matthew. Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Baker, Simon, and Shoair Mavlian (eds). Conflict Time Photography. London: Tate Publishing, 2014. Bakhtin, Mickhail. Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics. Edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Ball, Kayrn. ‘Ex/propriating Survivor Experience, or Auschwitz “after” Lyotard’. In Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, edited by Ana Douglas and Thomas A. Vogler, 249–74. Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2003. Banwell, Julia. Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Barikin, Amelia. no more stars (star wars): Rä di Martino’. Contemporary Visual Art and Culture Broadsheet, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2014): 33–5. Barker, Emma (ed.). Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Haven; London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1999. Barr, Jr., Alfred H. Cubism and Abstract Art. USA: Arno Press, 1966. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage, 2000. Barthes, Roland. ‘Cy Twombly Works on Paper’. In Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 157–76. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

173

BIBLIOGRAPHY

173

Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author (1967)’. In Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–8. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Bate, David. Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. Battcock, Gregory (ed.). Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1995. Benyamin, Jasmine. ‘Analog Dreams’. Models 306090, Vol. 11, edited by Emily Abruzzo et al., 90–2. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. Blackson, Robert. ‘Once More . . . With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture’. Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring 2007): 28–40. Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Boccioni, Umberto. ‘Umberto Boccioni and Others, Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910’. In Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws, 182–4. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Bois, Yves-Alain. ‘The Sculptural Opaque’. SubStance, Vol. 10, No. 2, issue 31 (1981): 23–48. Bois, Yves-Alain, and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone, 1997. Bonami, Francesco, Régis Durand and François Quintin. Thomas Demand. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Brennan, M. Modernism’s Masculine Shapes: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Brewer, D. The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth Century Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Brooker, Will. Star Wars. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. van Bruggen, Coosje. Bruce Nauman. New York: Rizzoli, 1988. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan, 1983. Buchler, Justus (ed.). Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Byrne, Gerard. This Is Tomorrow This Is Live: Gerard Byrne, broadcast live 26 November from the Royal College of Art, London, part of the Visual Cultures Lecture Series, 26 November 2013, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=RXnLZ1U5kBs&nohtml5=False. Cadava, Eduardo, and Paola Cortés-Rocca. ‘Notes on Love and Photography’. In Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, edited by Geoffrey Batchen, 105–39. London; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Campany, David. ‘The Red House’. Aperture, Vol. 185 (November 2006).

174

174

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Bradford Junior College, Bradford, Mass., February 4–March 2, 1968. Organized by Seth Siegelaub. Symposium with the artists and the organizer on February 8. Some excerpts from the unpublished tape-recording’. In Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, edited by Lucy Lippard, 40. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1997. Caronia, Antonio, Janez Janša and Domenico Quaranta. RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting. Brescia: LINK Editions, 2014. Carrier, David. Artwriting. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. New York: Aperture, 1999. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. London; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Charvet, P. E. Baudelaire Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Cheney, Sheldon. ‘The Story of Modern Art’. In Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader, edited by Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood, 18–20. New Haven; London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2003. Chielens, Piet, and Julian Putkowski. Unquiet Graves: Execution Sites of the First World War in Flanders. London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2000. ‘Cindy Bernard, Ask the Dust’. In 3e Biennale de lyon d’art contemporain: installation, cinema, video, informatique, 310–13. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. Colomina, Beatriz. Thomas Demand. London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006. Crimp, Douglas. ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’. October, Vol. 15 (Winter 1980): 91–101. Crow, Thomas. ‘Diderot’s Salons: Public Art and the Mind of the Private Critic’. In Diderot on Art II The Salon of 1767, translated by John Goodman, ix–xxvii. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Danto, Arthur. The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987. Dauge-Roth, Alexandre. ‘Testimonial Encounter’. French Cultural Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2009): 165–80. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc.. Translated by Elizabeth Weber. Paris: Galilée. Dewe Mathews, Chloe. Shot at Dawn. Madrid: Ivory Press, 2013. Didi-Huberman, Georges, and Thomas Repensek. ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’. October, Vol. 29 (Summer 1984): 63–81.

175

BIBLIOGRAPHY

175

Dillon, Brian. ‘Decline and Fall’. Frieze, issue 130, 1 April 2010, https:// frieze.com/article/decline-and-fall \. Dillon, Brian. ‘Introduction: A Short History of Decay’. In Ruins, edited by Brian Dillon, 10–19. London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2011. Doane, Mary Ann. ‘Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity’. In The Meaning of Photography, edited by Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, 3–14. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Doherty, Claire (ed.). From Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004. Doherty, Claire (ed.). Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place. London: Art Books, 2015. Downey, Anthony. ‘27 Cuerpos: Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Commemoration’. In Understanding Art Objects: Thinking through the Eye, edited by Tony Godfrey, 105–13. London: Lund Humphries, 2009. Durden, Mark. ‘Screen Memories’. In Cindy Bernard, unpaginated. London: James Hockey Gallery/Viewpoint Gallery, 1995. de Duve, Thierry. ‘Time, Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph a Paradox’. October, Vol. 5, Photography (Summer 1978): 113–25. Dyer, Geoff. The Missing of the Somme. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Elkins, James (ed.). Photography Theory. Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2007. Elkins, James. What Photography Is. New York; London: Routledge, 2011. Elsner, Jan. Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Erickson, Ruth. ‘The Real Movie: Reenactment, Spectacle, and Recovery in Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory’. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 50, Nos 1 & 2 (Spring and Fall 2009): 107–24. Eriksen, Anne. From Antiques to Heritage: Transformations of Cultural Memory. New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2016. Fante, John. Ask the Dust. Edinburgh; London: Cananongate, 2012. Fiduccia, Joanna. ‘Omer Fast: A Multiple “I”’. Uovo (17 April 2008): 156–76. Filipovic, Elena. ‘This Is Tomorrow (and Other Modernist Myths)’. In Time, edited by Amelia Groom, 42–4. London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2013. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Flam, Jack (ed.). Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996.

176

176

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flavin, Dan ‘ “. . . in daylight or cool white”: An Autobiographical Sketch’. In Dan Flavin, It Is What It Is and It Ain’t Nothing Else, 21–5. Birmingham: Ikon, 2016. Fleischhauer, Carl, and Beverly W. Brannan (eds). Documenting America 1935–1943. Berkeley; Los Angleles; London: University of California Press, 1988. Foster, Hal. ‘Contemporary Extracts’. e-flux, no. 12, January 2010, http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/12/61333/contemporary-extracts/. Foster, Hal (ed.). Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 1. Seattle: Bay Press, 1987. Fried, Michael. ‘Art and Objecthood’. In Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 148–72. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Fried, Michael. ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’. In Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 1–74. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Fried, Michael. ‘Larry Poon’s New Paintings’. In Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 197–201. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Fried, Michael. ‘New York Letter: Olitski, Jenkins, Thiebaud, Twombly’. In Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 316–23. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Fried, Michael. Three American Painters, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1971. Gardner, Colin. ‘Cindy Bernard Richard Kuhlenschmidt’. Artforum (December 1990): 147. Goodman, John (trans.). Diderot on Art II The Salon of 1767. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Gopnik, Adam. ‘The Art World: Lost and Found’. The New Yorker, 20 February 1989, 107–11. Graham, Dan. Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press in association with the Marian Goodman Gallery, 1999. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944. Edited by John O’ Brian. London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949. Edited by John O’ Brian. London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956. Edited by John O’ Brian. London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969. Edited by John O’ Brian. London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

177

BIBLIOGRAPHY

177

Grunenberg, Christoph. ‘The Modern Art Museum’. In Contemporary Cultures of Display, edited by Emma Barker, 26–49. New Haven; London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1999. Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream. Chapel Hill; London: The University of North California Press, 1991. Gumpert, Lynn. Christian Boltanski. Paris: Flammarion, 1994. Gumpert, Lynn. ‘The Life and Death of Christian Boltanksi’. In Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 49–86. Chicago: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988. Exhibition catalogue, Chicago, 1988, 67. Gutting, Gary. French Philosophy of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. London: Harper & Row, 1980. Hammer, E. Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Hell, Julia, and Andreas Schonle (eds). Ruins of Modernity. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2010. Higgins, Charlotte. ‘#Wearehere: Somme Tribute Revealed as Jeremy Deller Work’. The Guardian, Friday, 1 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/ wearehere-battle-somme-tribute-acted-out-across-britain. Hill, June. ‘Watching, Waiting, Making’. Embroidery (March/April 2016): 36–40. Hopkins, David. ‘Male Poetics’. In Duchamp Man Ray Picabia, edited by Jennifer Mundy, 77–87. London: Tate Publishing, 2008. Houser, Nathan, and Christian Kloesel. The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (1867–93). Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Huddleston, John. ‘Killing Ground; The Civil War and the Changing American Landscape’. http://www.johnhuddlestonphoto.com/index. php/kg/text/. Iacobelli, Terersa. Death or Deliverance: Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War. Vancouver; Toronto: UBC Press, 2013. ‘Interview: Gerard Byrne’. Tate Etc., issue 19, Summer 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/ interview-gerard-byrne. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore; London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Iversen, Margaret. ‘The Art Seminar’. In Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins, 129–203. Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2007.

178

178

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Iversen, Margaret. ‘Following Pieces: On Performative Photography’. In Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins, 91–108. Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2007. Jenkins, Keith. Re-thinking History. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. Johnson, Katherine M. ‘Rethinking (Re)doing: Historical Re-enactment and/as Historiography’. Rethinking History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2015): 193–206. Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. London; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Jones, Caroline A. Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. London; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Jones Harvey, Eleanor. The Civil War and American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Judd, Donald. ‘Specific Objects’. In Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd ed, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 824–8. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Karmel, Pepe. ‘The Real Simulations of Thomas Demand’. Art in America, Vol. 93, No. 6 (June–July 2005): 146–9. Keller, Judith. Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection. Malibu, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995. Kelsey, Robin, and Blake Stimson. ‘Photography’s Double Index (A Short History in Three Parts’. In The Meaning of Photography, edited by Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, vii–xxxi. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008. Kollectiv, Galia, and Pil. ‘Recto/Necto: From beyond the Grave of the Politics of Reenactment’. Art Papers (November/December 2007): 44–51. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’. October, Vol. 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’. October, Vol. 4 (Autumn 1977): 58–67. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Notes on the Obtuse’. In Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins, 339–42. Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2007. Krauss, Rosalind. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. London; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘A View of Modernism’. In Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd ed., edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 976–9. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Kraynak, Janet (ed.). Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words. Writings and Interviews. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2003.

179

BIBLIOGRAPHY

179

Kriebel, Sabine T. ‘Theories of Photography: A Short History’. In Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins, 3–49. Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2007. Lafuente, Pablo. Gerard Byrne Images or Shadows. Dublin: IMMA, 2011. Lange, Susanne. William Christenberry: Working from Memory: Collected Stories. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. Lebovici, Elisabeth. ‘From Homer to Omer Fast’. Afterall, Vol. 20 (Spring 2009): http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.20/homer.omer.fast. Lefebvre, Martin. ‘On Landscape in Narrative Cinema’. Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 2011): 61–78. Lewallen, Constance M. A Rose Has No Teeth. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2007. Lewis-Krauss, Gideaon. ‘The Reanimator’. Tablet Visual Art & Design, 30 April 2008, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/735/ the-reanimator. Lockenour, Jay. Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1955. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Lodder, Christina. Russian Constructivism. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1983. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Marcoci, Roxana. Thomas Demand. New York: MoMA, 2005. Marks, Kathleen. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Matar, Diana. Evidence. Amsterdam: Schilt Publishing, 2014. Matar, Diana. ‘Evidence’. Lens Culture, https://www.lensculture.com/ articles/diana-matar-evidence. Mattick Jr, Paul (ed.). Eighteenth Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Mellor, David. ‘Rents in the Fabric of Reality: Contexts for Sophie Ristelhueber’. In Sophie Ristelhueber: Operations, 212–31. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009. Merewether, Charles. ‘Art and the Archive’. In The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether, 10–17. London: Whitchapel and MIT Press, 2006. Merewether, Charles. ‘A Language to Come: Japanese Photography after the Event’. In The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether, 121– 38. London; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Meyer, James. ‘The Functional Site; or, the Transformation of Site Specificity’. In Spaces, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, edited by Erika Suderberg, 23–37. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

180

180

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001. Mitchell, W. J. T. Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Modrak, Rebekah, and Bill Anthes. Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2011. Morris, Errol. ‘The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 3)’. The New York Times, 20 October 2009, http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/10/20/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-3/. Morris, Robert. ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and Non Sequiturs’. In Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily, 23–9. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Morris Hambourg, Maria. Walker Evans. New York; Princeton: Princeton University Press and Museum of Modern Art, 2000. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage, 2005. Muhle, Maria. ‘Omer Fast: When Images Lie . . . About the Fictionality of Documents’. Afterall, Vol. 20 (Spring 2009), http://www.afterall. org/journal/issue.20/omer.fast.when.images.lie.about.fictionality. docum. Mulvey, Laura. ‘The Index and the Uncanny’. In Time and the Image, edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill, 139–48. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Nancy, Jean Luc. ‘Il y a blanc de titre’. Art and Design, Vol. 1, No. 5/6 (May–June 1996): 28–33. Nichols, Bill. ‘Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject’. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35 (Autumn 2008): 72–89. Nicolson, Benedict. Courbet: The Studio of the Painter. London: Allen Lane, 1973. Nora, Pierre. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’. Representations, Vol. 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. Norfolk, Simon. Afghanistan: Simon Norfolk. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2005. Obrist, Hans-Ulrich, et al. Dis-Assembly: Faisal Abdu’Allah, Christian Boltanski, Yona Friedman, Runa Islam. London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006. O’Dell, Kathy. ‘Toward a Theory of Performance Art: An Investigation of its Sites’. PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1992. Ogg, Kirsty. ‘Interview between Gerard Byrne and Kirsty Ogg’. In Gerard Byrne: A State of Natural Pleasure, 8–28. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013. Olin, Margaret. ‘The Art Seminar’. In Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins, 129–203. Oxford; New York: Routledge, 2007. Olin, Margaret. Touching Photographs. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

181

BIBLIOGRAPHY

181

Parker, Cornelia. ‘Parker in Conversation with Kerstin Mey’. In Sculpsit: Contemporary Artists on Sculpture and Beyond, edited by Kerstin Mey, 8–18. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Paz, Octavio. Convergences. Translated by Helen Lane. London: Bloomsbury, 1990. Pearce, Gillian B. Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot’s Salons to the Postmodern Museum. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2012. Phillips, Glen (ed.). California Video: Artists and Histories. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. Phillips, Sarah. ‘Rä di Martino, interview with Sarah Phillips’, ‘Luke Skywalker’s House: Rä di Martino’s Best Photograph’. The Guardian, 7 March 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/mar/ 06/luke- skywalker-house-ra-di-martino#. Pickford, Henry W. The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Plato. Phaedo. Translated by David Gallop. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pollock, Griselda. Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. PressPLAY. New York: Phaidon, 2005. Putkowski, Julian, and Julian Sykes. Shot at Dawn, 6th ed. London: Leo Cooper, 1996. Ranciere, Jacques. The Future of the Image. London; New York: Verso, 2009. Reckitt, Helena. ‘Like a Man’. In Gerard Byrne: A State of Natural Pleasure, 37–51. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013. Richter, Gerhard. Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Ricouer, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Translated by M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1949. Ristelhueber, Sophie. Operations. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009. Rosenthal, Michael, and Martin Myrone (eds). Gainsborough. London: Tate Publishing, 2002. Ruby, Andreas. ‘Memoryscapes’. Parkett, Vol. 62 (2001): 126–33. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. ‘ “Rememory”: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison’s Novels’. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn 1990): 300–23. Rowland, Anthony. Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-Century Poems. London; New York: Routledge, 2014.

182

182

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Letter to a Hostage. Translated by Jacqueline Gerst. London: Pushkin Press, 1999. Saltzman, Lisa. Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects. London; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Saltzman, Lisa. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sayre, Robert F. (ed.). American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Scott, Izabella. ‘Interview with Gerard Byrne’. The White Review, February 2016, http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interviewwith-gerard-byrne/. Scott Bray, Rebecca. ‘En piel ajena: The Work of Teresa Margolles’. Law Text Culture, Vol. 11 (2007): 13–50. Sedgwick, H. A. ‘Relating Direct and Indirect Perception of Spatial Layout’. In Looking into Pictures: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Pictorial Space, edited by Heiko Hecht et al., 61–75. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Singer, Margot. ‘Afterimage’. River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2008): 65–76. Smith, Amelia. ‘Photographer Diana Matar on Libya, Her Father-inLaw’s Disappearance and Portraying Absence in His Work’. Middle East Monitor, 22 October 2014, https://www.middleeastmonitor. com/20141022-photographer-diana-matar-on-libya-her-father-in-lawsdisappearance-and-portraying-absence-in-her-work/. Smithson, Robert. ‘A Thing Is a Hole in a Thing It Is Not’. In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 95–6. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996. Smithson, Robert. ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’. In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, 68–74. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996. Sneddon, Peter, and David Green (eds). History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1979. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2003. Stauffer, John. ‘The “Terrible Reality” of the First Living-Room Wars’. In War/Photography Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath, edited by Anne Wilkes Tucher et al., 80–91. London; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Steinberg, Samuel. ‘Touching the Common’. Third Text, Vol. 27, Issue 5 (2013): 607–19.

183

BIBLIOGRAPHY

183

Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. Swensen, James R. Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Tello, Veronica. ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Aftermath Photography: Rosemary Laing’s Welcome to Australia (2004)’. Third Text, Vol. 28, No. 6 (2014): 555–62. Tickner, Lisa. ‘A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker’. Art History, Vol. 26, No. 3 (June 2003): 364–491. Trezise, Thomas. ‘Unspeakable’. The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2001): 39–66. Tsouti-Schillinger, Nena (ed.). Robert Morris: Have I Reasons: Work and Writings, 1993–2007. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2008. Vattimo, Gianni. ‘Postmodernity and New Monumentality’. Res, Vol. 28 (Autumn 1995): 39–46. Wagstaff, Sheena. Jeff Wall: Photographs 1978–2004. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Wagstaff Jr, Samuel. ‘An interview with Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith”’. In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock, 381–6. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1995. Warner, Chantelle. The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony: Authenticity Effects in German Social Autobiographies. London: Routledge, 2013. Warner Marien, Mary. Photography: A Cultural History, 4th ed. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2014. Wasserman, Tina. ‘Duplicated Replications: The Interventions of Omer Fast’. Afterimage, Vol. 37, Issue 5 (March/April 2010): 6–9. Wehner, Klaus. ‘Photography – Museum. On Posing, Imageness and the Punctum’. In The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation, edited by Sandra Dudley, Amy Jane Barnes, Jennifer Binnie, Julia Petrov and Jennifer Walklate Sandra Dudley, 79–94. London: Routledge, 2012. Weinraub, Bernard. ‘Steven Spielberg Faces the Holocaust’. The New York Times, 12 December 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/ packages/html/movies/bestpictures/schindler-ar1.html. Wells, Liz (ed.). Photography: A Critical Introduction, 4th ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. William Christenberry. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2013. Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 1998. Wrigley, Richard (ed.). Regarding Romantic Rome. Oxford; Bern; Berlin; Bruxelles; Frankfurt am Main; New York; Wien: Peter Lang, 2007. Wylie, John. Landscape. London; New York: Routledge, 2007.

184

184

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Young, James D. Art and Knowledge. London; New York: Routledge, 2001. Young, James E. ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’. In Art and the Public Sphere, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 49–78. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

185

185

Index

Abstract Expressionism 18 aftermath photography 43, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53 Agee, James 100, 101–2, 103 anamnesis 69–70 Andre, Carl 12, 22 Atkins, Anna 51–2 Bakhtin, Mikhail 42, 47 Barr, Jr., Alfred H. 16–17 Dust jacket with chart and annotations by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., of the exhibition catalogue ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’, New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (1936) 17 Barthes, Roland 48, 64, 65, 94, 111 Camera Lucida 36–7, 39 Baudelaire, Charles 57, 58, 65 Benjamin, Walter 28, 75 Bernard, Cindy 109–10, 112, 114, 117 Blanchot, Maurice 75 Boccioni, Umberto 56 Bois, Yves-Alain 21, 27 Boltanski, Christian 62–3 Children of North Westminster Community School (1992) 63–4, 65 Broomberg, Adam and Oliver Chanarin 5, 50–1, 52–3, 54 Red House #2 (2006) 49–50 Burke, Edmund 13

Byrne, Gerard 26 A thing is a hole in a thing it is not (2010) 4, 11–12, 21–4, 25, 28–9, 30 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 88 Cheney, Sheldon 17 Christenberry, William 6, 102–3, 105, 117 Site of Palmist Building, Havana Junction, Alabama (1988) 103, 104 Courbet, Gustave 57, 58 Crewdson, Gregory 89 Crimp, Douglas 88–9 Dada 18, 24, 45 Deller, Jeremy 80–1 we’re here because we’re here (2016) 79–80 Demand, Thomas 89–90, 91, 93–4, 109 Raum/Room (1994) 3, 91–3 Dewe Mathews, Chloe 6–7, 114–17, 118 Private James Crozier, 07:05/ 27.2.1916, Le Domaine des Cordeliers, Mailly-Maillet, Picardie (2013) 116 di Martino, Rä 114 No More Stars (Star Wars) (2010) 112–13 Diderot, Denis 12, 13–14 Dillon, Brian 4, 12 Duchamp, Marcel 24, 45

186

186

INDEX

Elkins, James 35 Evans, Walker 6, 100, 102, 103 see also William Christenberry Corrugated Tin Facade/ Tin Building, Moundville, Alabama (1936) 100, 101

Jenkins, Keith 3, 4, 6, 7, 87–8, 89, 93, 94, 96, 98, 110 Judd, Donald 11, 19, 24

Fast, Omer 94–5 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) 6, 96–8 Fenton, Roger 43 The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) 44, 45 First World War 47 see also Chloe Dewe Mathews Flavin, Dan 11, 20, 24 Forsyth, Iain and Jane Pollard 6, 86–7 Performer. Audience. Fuck Off (2009) 84–5 Frampton, Hollis 12 Fried, Michael 18–19, 20–1, 27, 111 Futurism 58

Leighton-Boyce, Hannah  East Wing 1939–2011 (2012) 1, 2–3, 51 Levine, Sherrie 88 LeWitt, Sol 59–60, 61, 62 Lyotard, Jean-François 60, 87, 88

Graham, Dan 83–4 Great Depression 6, 99–100 Greenberg, Clement 14–15 Halbwachs, Maurice 106 Hammons, David 71–2, 73 Hitler, Adolf 3, 91, 92 see also Thomas Demand, Raum/ Room (1994) Holocaust 60, 61 see also Sol LeWitt Huddleston, John 115 index 35, 36 see also Charles Sanders Pierce as trace 5, 35, 36, 38, 39 and photography 34, 35, 37, 38, 39 indirect looking 61–2 Iser, Wolfgang 90–1

Klein, Yves 73 Krauss, Rosalind 5, 15, 16, 27, 47–8, 58

Man Ray 52, 53 Dust Breeding (1920) 45–7 Margolles, Teresa 71 Aire (Air) (2003) 73–5 Matar, Diana 106–9, 117, 118 Minimalism 4, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 35 modernism 2, 12, 18, 19, 22, 28, 29, 35, 56 and temporality 4, 15, 16, 17, 21, 26, 27, 55, 82, 84 Morris, Robert 11, 20, 23 Morrison, Toni 103–5, 107 Mulvey, Laura 37, 39 Nauman, Bruce 86 Noland, Kenneth 18, 111 Nora, Pierre 5, 117, 118 Norfolk, Simon 41–2, 43 Olitski, Jules 18, 111 Parker, Cornelia 65–7 Room for Margins, From ‘Seascape with Distant Coast’, circa 1840, JMW Turner, N05516, Tate Collection (1998) 67–9, 70 Peirce, Charles Sanders 33–4, 36, 38

187

INDEX

Pliny the Elder 2, 72 Pollock, Jackson 18, 26 Postmodernism 35, 62, 82, 87, 88 Prince, Richard 88 Rancière, Jacques 27 re-enactment 6, 22, 79, 80–2, 82–3, 84, 85, 86, 87, 93, 94, 98 rephotography 105 Richter, Gerhard 43, 75 Ricouer, Paul 6, 53, 72, 108 Ristelhueber, Sophie 5, 39–41, 42–3, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54 Fait #20 (1992) 40, 41 Robert, Hubert 12 Landscape with Ruins (1772) 13 Rothko, Mark 68, 69

187

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 70–1 Second World War 1 Sherman, Cindy 88, 90 Smith, Tony 11, 22–3 Smithson, Robert 22, 111–12 Sontag, Susan 37, 88 Stella, Frank 11, 18, 24, 28, 111 Tatlin, Vladimir 58–9, 62 text 91, 110–11 Twombly, Cy 5, 48 Uthco, T. R. and Ant Farm 6, 81–2, 83 Wall, Jeff 89 Warhol, Andy 1